He could scarcely have quitted the turf that day without a pang. He had become the lord paramount of that strange world, so difficult to sway, and which requires for its government both a stern resolve and a courtly breeding. He had them both; and though the blackleg might quail before the awful scrutiny of his piercing eye, there never was a man so scrupulously polite to his inferiors as Lord George Bentinck. The turf too was not merely the scene of the triumphs of his stud and his betting-book. He had purified its practice and had elevated its character, and he was prouder of this achievement than of any other connected with his sporting life. Notwithstanding his mighty stakes and the keenness with which he backed his opinion, no one perhaps ever cared less for money. His habits were severely simple and he was the most generous of men. He valued the acquisition of money on the turf, because there it was the test of success. He counted his thousands after a great race as a victorious general counts his cannon and his prisoners.

CHAPTER XX.

THE new year ('47) opened under circumstances of gloom, Two bad harvests had precipitated and aggravated the consequences of the reckless commercial speculations which had prevailed since '45. The state of Ireland however was not one merely of deficient harvest, it was one of absolute dearth. Three fourths of the potato crop the food of the millions had failed while no less than onethird of the oat crop which they exported was deficient. The estimated loss of produce on these two crops, for the year '46, was £16,000,000; that is to say, calculated by weight and measure, eight millions and a half tons of potatoes, and more than five million two hundred thousand quarters of oats, There is no population however prosperous their ordinary circumstances that would not have felt such a visitation acutely. But the ordinary circumstances

poor

of the Irish population were not prosperous. It appears by the report of the commissioners of law inquiry made in '35, that there were then between eleven and twelve hundred thousand agricultural labourers in Ireland whose average earnings did not exceed from two shillings to half-acrown a week; that one half of that number were destitute of work during thirty weeks in the year; and that these with their families made a total of nearly two millions and a half of human beings out of work and in distress thirty weeks in the year. One of the witnesses before that commission said, "that the county of Mayo alone could furnish beggars for all England."

It was said by the royal commission over which Lord Devon presided, that these people were the worst housed, the worst fed, and the worst clothed of any in Europe. They live in mud cabins littered upon straw; their food consists of dry potatoes of which they are often obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal; sometimes a herring or a little milk may afford them a pleasing variety, but sometimes also they are driven to sea-weed and to wild herbs. Dwelling in hovels and feeding upon roots they are clothed in rags.

Those were the ordinary circumstances of Ireland, and to such a state of affairs famine was now added with all its attendant horrors, pestilence and death.

In the southern and western parts of the country the population was decimated: ten thousand persons at the meeting of parliament had died in the union of Skibbereen, which numbered one hundred thousand souls. Scenes were enacted worthy of the page of Josephus or Thucydides. It was truly and tersely said by Lord John Russell, that it was a famine of the thirteenth century with a population of the nineteenth.

That under such circumstances, and especially in such a country, crime should have increased is not remarkable; but it is strange, and it is interesting, that the character of that crime should have altered. The increase in offences was entirely in offences against property. Burglaries abounded, and highway robbery was almost for the first time introduced. Agrarian outrage greatly diminished: the influence of the secret societies died away; the spirit of combination ceased, and although the offences were numerous there was no difficulty in obtaining convictions or in enforcing the law. All of which shows that the difficulty of vindicating the law in cases where the tenure or occupation of land is concerned does not arise from any inherent repugnance to order and justice in the hearts of the Irish multitude.

The social machinery which was to cope with these dreadful perplexities was very feeble. Most of

the great proprietors were absentees; the number of the smaller gentry resident was in no part considerable; the clergy of the various creeds had long been prevented from co-operation by sectarian animosities; generally speaking the capitalist farmer and the substantial tradesman were two characters unknown; indeed one striking feature of Ireland was the total absence of the machinery of retail trade; the farmer paid his servants with the roots which were produced by their labour, and receiving no money wages they required no village shop to supply their wants. There were very few towns, in fact, of trade sufficient to create a responsible class of shopkeepers. It might almost be said that in Ireland parochial authority did not exist. Over this land patrolled an armed constabulary whose iron discipline rather avenged outrage than secured order.

The famine which was apprehended by Sir Robert Peel in '45-6, was averted by a variety of circumstances, but one of the principal causes of its not happening was the abundant crop of potatoes in '44-5, so that the quantity of food in Ireland when parliament met in '46, was much more considerable than the ministry supposed or led parliament to believe, and in the first five months of that year can scarcely be said to have been deficient. The government of Sir Robert Peel took at once two precautionary measures against the apprehended scarcity,