Ulster, industrial as
well as agricultural, more than is generally perceived. It gave in some
degree recognition to efficiency. Tenure was there less precarious, less
dependent on the landlord's pleasure; men were freer, work had more
rights. There was less room for impulse, perhaps less appeal to
affection; but when a business relation is based on impulse and
affection, where rights are not solid and defined, the sense of
obligation easily leads men astray. That which is given out of loyalty
and affection comes to be taken as a due. Martin Ross--"Miss Violet,"
whom the people of Ross called "the gentle lady," as beautiful a name as
was ever earned by mortal--inherited with little qualification the
landlord standpoint. She recalls the story of an election in 1872, when
her father, going to vote in Oughterard, saw "a company of infantry
keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness (afterwards Lord Ardilaun) as he
conveyed to the poll a handful of his tenants to vote for Captain
Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm."
She does not ask if the tenants desired to be so conveyed. She merely
describes how her father "ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking
for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him."
When he came home, "even the youngest child of the house could see how
great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as
that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable."

Looking back through all those years, the "gentle lady" can see nothing
in that episode but a case of priestly intimidation. "One need not blame
the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another."
Yet friends of mine in Galway look back on it in a very different
spirit; they remember the Nolan-Trench election and Captain Nolan's
victory as a triumph of the poor, a first instalment of freedom; it
brought with it an exultation very different from the mere outburst of
hatred that these pages suggest. What is more, having been privileged to
sit in the most widely representative assembly of Irishmen that modern
Ireland has known, I can testify that to-day peer and peasant, clergy
and laymen, those who opposed it, and those others who fought for it,
alike admit that the change which such a victory fore-shadowed was
necessary and was beneficent. But it was a revolution. Ireland of
yesterday was Ireland before the revolution. The Ireland that Miss
Somerville and