BOOKS.

AN IRISH LANDLORD.* MR. BENCE JONES has written an instructive and oppor- tune work. He relates his experience as a " thorough " John Bull in Ireland, and it is not the less 'valuable that the lessons we learn from it have a wider bearing than those he would intentionally inculcate. His agricultural teaching is practical and sound, and he has been unusually successful in his forty years' effort to make his dependants conscious of the British standard of comfort and crops, decency and dairy- farming. His devotion to the agriculturist's great first cause, manure, has not been in vain, and we doubt not that his pastures and his cattle are the better for his system. Yet his book, written in the good-faith of a cocksure man, sufficiently explains, though it does not excuse, the revolt of his tenantry, which occurred even before the accumulated force of the present terror was at the command of the Land League.

It is difficult to put in any plea for people guilty of Boycotting so useful an agriculturist as the lord of Lisselan. When well-wishers are hoping for some delta en machincl to drain and fertilise Irish waste lands, it is inopportune to disable so effective an instrument for that purpose as is Mr. Bence Jones ; but what- ever the future of his estate, ho will have done good work in his generation, of which he may be bucolically proud. Whatever the lacklands of the League may say to the contrary, the south- western provinces of Ireland will, by the common-sense of mankind—even the mankind of Munster—be used almost certainly for dairy purposes, and Mr. Bence Jones has deserved well of his neighbours by proving that they can, if they choose, compete with Normandy in the London butter trade. However uncertain her cereal crops, the Gulf Stream gives Ireland pre- eminence in grass and in most green crops :—" Our grass privileges," says Mr. Bence Jones, " are very great. In three years the natural grasses are established, and a close and excellent sward is the result, equal to good old grass in the west of England, and such as in Norfolk could not be got in thirty years, hardly in twice thirty." Mr. Jones speaks with authority, and we accept his report the more readily that he did not spend any extraordinary capital, nor were the farming operations which he describes impracticable by any of his neighbours.

But his estate lay in the county Cork, he had to deal with Irish tenants, and though the four thousand acres he owns are doubtless enriched, he has not achieved any solution of the Hibernian riddle. He is a rectangular man, plunged in a many- sided hole, and however he has laboured to fill up its crevices, the moment was sure to come in which it should be discovered that he did not fit. If we could explain why he does not fit, we should go far to explain how difficult it is for Englishmen to benefit Ireland. We readily acknowledge how useful Mr. Bence Jones was as a Suffolk Justice in Suffolk, bred to the law, and therefore inclined to take a legal estimate of affairs ; but we can equally conceive the dismay, suspicion, and revolt, mostly of the silent sort, with which his hard-and-fast judgments, his contempt for the shifty logic of the Celtic mind, and his enforce- ment of statutes which have never been really accepted as laws to be obeyed, were endured. Sufferance is the badge of Munster men, as is also a secretive fidelity to one another, and of course this "elephant in a rice-field " remained ignorant of how unstable was his popularity. Nor was the people's dis-

• Tho Lilo's Work in Ireland of a Landlord who tried to do his Duly. By W. Beim Tones, of Lleselam London : Macmillan and Co. 1880. approval marked, but rather latent, for the folk of Southern Ireland are capable of a nice discrimination, and appraised their well-meaning reformer at no very undue value; and no doubt they rendered him and his family the meed which, in Irish opinion, is earned by such—to them—superficial merits as good husbandry and temporal prosperity. Irishmen are not ungrateful, and we• readily believe that most of his neighbours are at this moment attached to Mr. Bence Jones, so far as his qualities have in them the power of attaching the people he lives among. The stories of his weeping coachman and of his labourers' sorrow when dis-. missed are not the less likely to be true, although their employer never comprehended the leading traits of a Munster man's nature. His book suggests that Mr. Bence Jones has little imaginatiVe• power, or insight into any other than his own view of things.. But in dealing with the alienated, suspicious, and very artificial Irish, who, more than any other European race, are the• children of disorder and heirs of social and political strife,. imagination is a necessary element of success. Impatient as we may be of the study, we must judge of them by endeavour-. ing to picture their past, and from its very stains we may gather a robust hope for their future. Englishmen have been trained since Tudor times to habitual prosperity, while, miser- able as he may have been before, the Irishman has since then• had little but visionary hope to feed on, and few except ever- receding joys to reward his craving for happiness. The axis on which his thought revolves has been shifted. from solid earth,. and life has been to him altogether unstable. His struggles for existence have been like nightmares, without coherent reason or result. Hunted like a wild beast for conscience' sake for so, long, the antagonisms of creed are now to him the most real off antagonisms. Within the last forty years he has been ordered to walk in step with the sturdy and confident Englishman ; but can we wonder if he jibs and moves uneasily in shoos that are made by John Bull on his own last

We do not see much of the patience that these facts. should suggest in Mr. Bence Jones's tone when he dis- cusses his tenantry. To the English reader, most of his work would. seem well suited to cure Irish trouble. Legislation that will secure decent dwellings, remunerative employment and a good worldly outlook to working-men—and. most Irish tenants are little more than labourers—ought, as we are apt to think, to salve the wounds of the past, however deep. Tolerance, teaching, turnips,—what more can any reasonable people want P Why should. these large-mouthed clamourers. love rags, and discomfort, and beggary P. Why, as Mr. Bence Jones hints, should they remain cowardly, cruel, and untruth- ful P Why, to crown Irish paradoxes, should a sincerely Catholic population rise to revolutionary baits so greedily ?

would be hard to answer these questions, if we were not ready to face the truth, and acknowledge that the fabric of Irish society has been ill-built from the beginning. The work of reform and improvement, however generously desired by England of late years, has no basis, and deserving individuals, such as Mr.. Bence Jones, can do but little, even by the best farming and sturdiest rebukes, to establish in Ireland those principles at once of law and liberty, of respect and of good-faith, which underlie the civilisation of what was once Christendom.

Meantime, as no man can be given a pedigree by Act of Parliament, so no money can purchase the feudal rights that have unhappily been passed from hand to hand as marketable goods. It is, perhaps, because they still retain memories oft the old ties that bound chief and kerue, lord and vassal, that the Irish tenants object to their travesty, and ask by what right they are assumed by Mr. Bence Jones, or other new- comer. The mass of Irish landowners are contract, not feudal lords, and they have played dangerously with paternal government ; yet the landed property of the country has little' influence in its representation or control. For reasons that date from before the Union, political power has slipped from their hand ; and the people passionately worship political power.

They are in a false position, most unhappily for the interests' of the highly-artificial society which has been evolved by the Irish past, and which demands of them weight which they do•

not possess. There follows a more dangerous strain on law. and order, where property is thus divorced from government.

and yet where low franchises, trial by unanimous jury, and other.

customs, the product of lengthy English development, are imposed by way of relief. Startling as is the lawless folly of many leaders in the Irish revolt, it may do good if it convince. us that Bence-Jonesism is no remedy for the contradictions., and radical disorder of their condition which drive the Irish into occasional epidemic insanity.

Reconstruction, but not any new creation, of a healthier society, is the large but pressing problem to be solved ; and it should be attempted on principles that have proved themselves able to secure social stability, rather than by recourse to nine- teenth-century novelties. Religion is still a living force in Ireland, and if Acts of Parliament can be shown to be not inharmonious with the Decalogne, they will be received with a more generous obedience in Ireland than perhaps elsewhere, where they are considered but as links of a temporal " social contract." Meantime, nothing has done more to neutralise the efforts of superficially practical men like Mr. Bence Jones, than the conjuring tricks played with principles to suit pnrty ends. He speaks with but too much reason of the " thorough untruth that prevails in Ireland, especially among politicians." The cure for it would be uncom- promising application of the highest justice by the authorities in Ireland. A reforming but not revolutionary administrator, stern, but capable of comprehending the noble qualities that are dormant or warped in Irishmen, would certainly secure the homage almost too readily given to pre-eminence in Ireland.

No one can doubt Mr. Bence Jones's pluck, and that he offers a far better solution of Irish difficulties than do the scheming popular favourites of the day. Yet he is so incapable of rightly estimating the complex character of the dependants he has pater- nally bullied, that rule such as his must be, sooner or later, a failure. Good specimen of an energetic landlord as he is, he suggests the question now in men's mouths whether much irresponsible power can be entrusted to average landlords, under the sanction of an agrarian code tinkered by any Westminster witan P What is really wanted is that good customs might overgrow statute law, so as to supplement its weaknesses. For the urgent problem is, how to give social stability to every class in its due order. Well managed property in Ireland gives already hope of fair progress in prosperity, if it he only left alone. The wrack and slime of Irish cataclysms turn to fertile soil in good hands, wherever there is stability of tenure, but stability of tenure would have been best en- sured, had it been possible, rather by custom than by legislation. Meantime, we cannot but recognise the extraordinary vitality of the Irish race, which in itself will secure for it a large part in the general "progression by antagonism" of our spiritual and material world, and, therefore, we note Mr. Bence Jones's evidence in favour of that better distribution of land which, we believe, can be made gradually the chief means towards Irish prosperity :—

" Peasant.proprietorship," he says, "is no panacea. Carefully worked, it may be made to do some good, as it might, too, I think, in Englund and Scotland. I have long believed that by a system of Land Banks, more or less on the model of the Prussian Land Banks, advances might be made without risk to help any one in the Three Kingdoms who wishes to buy a limited portion of land, and thus the number of landed proprietors be fairly increased, and those appeased who suffer in any degree ander land-hanger. Such advances, if made gradually, and with a firm resolution to enforce repayment, would be quite safe. In Ireland, the curious readiness to place money on deposit in banks, and the great sums so deposited, enable a Laud Bank to be set up with great advantage. Depositors now only receive usually 1 per cent. fur this money ; the offer of 2 per cent. -would procure a great sum. By arrangement with the Bank of Ireland, which now has many branches in country places, the Government, by offering 2 per cent., could probably get any sum wanted for advances to enable occupiers to buy their farms. I would suggest that only a definite sum yearly should be advanood—any, £100,000—no that by the time a really large sum-total was reached, a substantial part of the first ad- vances would have been repaid. With firmness, there need be no loss, as there has not been a shilling of loss on the, millions advanced to landlords for drainage, who, ex hypothesi, are so bad, while tenants are so good."

Again, from so thorough an expert it is satisfactory to know that,- " In the past year, tenants have awakened to the value of draining, and the loans at 1 per cont. from the Government did great good.

In my Union, forty-four loans for draining were taken. I believe half of them were taken by tenants for small sums,--£100, and such like."

This is practical advice and good news, and goes far to con- tradict most of those short, sharp phrases of abuse which dis- figure Mr. Bence Jones's book, and have largely contributed to his unpopularity. Though not, perhaps, capable of gaining "peace with honour" in ruling an Irish tenantry, he is a valu- able factor towards their welfare, by his example as a farmer. His "life's work," however, leaves us with renewed conviction

that Paddy is not undeveloped John, but diverse ; more logical, if less reasonable ; subtler, but less sensible ; unallured by solid' prospects of prosperity, yet always discounting a Utopian future ; just now in sore " disgrace with fortune and men's. eyes," yet possessing the germs of what may yet serve our world, should the darkness of sceptical pessimism close upon us. The Irish race needs but a wise sympathy and unshrink- leg application of the Decalogue, to he yet a precious agent in, the imperial advance of England.