all hands to be one of the very best
landlords in Ireland--in fact, just such a character as the Irish
would admire--he comes to reside and spend his eighty thousand a-year
in the country, and how is he treated? He gets up a splendid sporting
establishment in Tipperary; _his hounds and horses were twice
poisoned_; and this not being found sufficient to drive him from the
neighbourhood, in which he was affording amusement and spending money,
_his offices were fired_, and his servants with difficulty saved their
lives. Compelled to abandon Tipperary, he betakes himself to his
family mansion in Waterford; and how is he received there? Why, in his
own town and within his hearing, we find the "meek and Christian
priest" addressing his tenants and labourers, the men whom he employs
and supports, after the following fashion:--"Men of Portlan! you were
the leading men who put down the Beresford in '26, (_the marquis's
father_.) I call on you now, having put down one set of tyrants, to
put down another set of tyrants," (_the marquis himself_.)[10] Does
such conduct (and this is but one instance of many which we could
adduce) evince a desire, on the part of the "pastors of the people,"
to encourage the residence of the gentry, or a wish to procure for the
peasantry those blessings which they paint in such glowing terms as
sure to ensue from their landlords living and spending their incomes
amongst them? Much as the priests and agitators declaim against
absenteeism, nothing would be more contrary to their wishes than that
the absentees should return. They have no desire to share their
influence with others; and hence it is that an excuse is always made
for quarrelling with every resident who cannot be made subservient to
their wishes; and while they steadily persevere in their system of
annoyance and offence, they as lustily reiterate their lamentations on
a state of things which their own conduct tends to produce.

That we are justified in attributing the poverty, the misery, and the
crimes of the Roman Catholic peasantry to the constant state of
agitation and excitement in which they are kept by their leaders, and
the bad example set them by their religious instructors, and not to
any pecuniary burdens (legislative or local) imposed upon them, we can
easily prove, by a reference to the condition of that portion of the
Irish people who are not subject to their control or corrupted by
their influence. It is well known that in the