spare him, and he died, broken-hearted, forty-three years ago, at the
beginning of a struggle which is not ended yet. It is well worth while
to consider the circumstances of that stormy career.

First a brilliant schoolboy, then an idle law student, George Henry
Moore was driven to travel by the complications of a passionate love
affair, and he travelled adventurously, being a pioneer of exploration
in the Caucasus and Syria. Sketches reproduced in the book show that he
could draw no less well than he wrote. Returning to Ireland at the age
of twenty-seven, he devoted himself entirely to hunting and racing, and
few men were better known on the turf, nor were there even in the West
of Ireland more desperate riders than his brother and himself. George
Henry was carried off the field at Cahir in 1843 to all appearance dead;
he was alive enough to hear discussion as to his burial. Augustus, less
lucky, died of a fall he took riding Mickey Free in the Grand National
two years later. The brothers were closely bound to each other in
affection, and this was a heavy blow to the survivor; but George Moore
continued to race, and in 1846 made the coup of his life, winning
L10,000 on "Coranna" for the Chester Cup. He sent L1,000 of it home for
distribution among his tenants, and there was soon sore need of the
money, for that year saw the second and disastrous failure of the potato
crop. The Irish Famine made the turning-point in Moore's history, as in
that of his class. The catastrophe which brought him into public life
and into the service of his country demonstrated, cruelly enough--though
this was the least of its cruelties--the futility of the Irish gentry as
a whole.

By the shock of his brother's death in 1845 Moore's mind had been turned
to serious thoughts. Matter was not lacking. The report of the Devon
Commission upon Irish land, joined to the first failure of the potato
crop--with its accompaniment of distress and widespread agrarian
crime--gave any Irish landlord food for reflection, and in March, 1846,
when a vacancy occurred in the representation of Mayo, Moore came
forward as a Whig candidate. The whole landlord interest was at his
back, but a Repealer opposed him, and O'Connell's influence carried the
day. There were fierce encounters, the landlords marching their tenants
to the poll under guards of soldiers, the popular side falling upon
these escorts and sometimes carrying off the voters--or enabling them to
escap