the compulsion is the weak point of the plan. Yet it interferes far less with the rights of property, than do many parts of the Bill. At this

moment the Board of Works has 75,000l. to be lent for draining, and is in despair because no one will borrow it, the distrust that order will be preserved and law be enforced, has become so thorough and universal !

We often hear blind talk both in and out of Parliament about doing something for Irish labourers, who are as numerous as the small tenants, and more deserving; yet, beyond talk, no one has any practical suggestions` how to help them. Some say build them better houses. What would be the state of repair of such men's houses in ten years, unless somebody else was compelled to keep them in repair gratis? Draining I believe to be the only way of helping them. It will occupy two generations or more in every district; and if for any cause it is not working well, it can be stopped with no loss in a week.

The whole improvement that has gone on in Ireland since the Famine has, in my opinion, had only one cause; there has been more employment and higher wages. Thus production has increased, which M. de Molinari most truly says is the sine quâ non of more prosperity in Ireland. Draining often gives the small farmer very valuable land, because its soul has not been dragged out of it by bad farming without manure.

Common farmers, with farms

as

large as 200 acres, give no employment worth considering. The size of farms in my part is far above the average; my own farms are still larger. A servant boy fed in the house, or an inferior labourer at very low wages, 58. or 6s. per week, is the utmost. Rent for the cabin and potato garden is always stopped out of this. All know grass pays best, and so the farmer only cultivates so much as his own family (his own help, as they call it) can till. The servant boy or inferior labourer minds and drives cattle, cuts furze, and sticks, earths, and digs out potatoes, which the weakest can do. How the poor labourers live is a

mystery. The

very light work and idleness are the inducements to engage with farmers.

The other means of doing good to all is emigration. Connaught, with an excessive population on poor land, must profit greatly by it. The returns show, that after 1846 there was no such diminution of population there as in Munster. I saw the effect myself in the south of Munster. We were as much eaten up by a poor population then, as Connaught is now, and they still more eat up each other. All intelligent men saw long before that emigration was our only hope. Then as now the Roman Catholic priests opposed it. Suddenly the poor people took it up, and in two or three years, with no pressure from any one, they emigrated. Potatoes would not grow, and they had no wages to live on. There were the same groans about the good going and the bad staying, but the popula tion in my part was lessened by more than half. We have since been one of the most flourishing districts in the county, because not over-peopled. I am convinced, if the matter were properly looked into, it would be found that the most prosperous parts of Ireland now, are those where the population lessened most after the Famine.

Wages of course rose, and instead of 3s. or 48. per week 8s. to 12s. are now paid. If they had not money enough

to pay the passage of the whole family, the father and some left, and the rest went to the workhouse till the money came back for them. One saw plainly, that any doings of the Government, however well meant, might easily hinder this voluntary emigration.

In 1880, 96,000 persons emigrated from Ireland. Except during two years after 1846 this is the largest number that ever left; no doubt some of them had been in America before, and had come back from the bad times there. The emigration is going on largely too in 1881. At Queenstown lately emigrants were camping out in the streets. The lodging-houses could not hold them.

The Land League dislikes emigration because emigration lessens poverty, which is its mainstay. The Roman Catholic priests dislike it because it lessens their power and their income. Some good men and women no doubt emigrate and are a loss, but a great many bad and indifferent ones also go. Everybody who misbehaves him or herself in any way, whether socially or criminally, is sure to go. Their misconduct puts them at a disadvantage for getting work at home, so they go where work is more plentiful and they are unknown. This will happen with the Land Leaguers as soon as the money they have gathered has been spent. They will find it harder than before to support themselves, and this in a short time will force them to emigrate. I saw this occur after the Smith O'Brien and the Fenian troubles, to the great comfort of quiet people.

The result is thoroughly healthy. Whoever goes is sure to leave a smaller or larger gap for the employment of some one else at home, and so wages rise and all gain more or less. Little money need be spent by Government in emigration. But the arrangements ought to be improved. Emigrants are often sadly plundered by sharks at the ports, who rob and overcharge them in all ways. There ought to be proper provision for honest and cheap lodging, and for feeding them when

waiting for the ship. There are excellent arrangements of this kind for them on their arrival in the States. It is a discredit to us to neglect such ways of helping our own people.

Then all openings in the colonies, like those at Manitoba, should be fully made known in Ireland, and easy arrangements made to enable the most advantage to be taken of them.

Boards of Guardians have now power to help emigration in some cases. This power wants to be systematised and enlarged. Paupers in Irish workhouses cost 61. to 77. per annum, and as the passage to America costs but 47. to 57. it is well worth while for guardians to help the emigration of fit, ablebodied poor, especially the young. In country unions boys and girls are quickly taken out of workhouses for service in farmhouses. But the workhouses in great towns, especially Cork and Dublin, are the most discreditable nests of pauperism that have ever existed in the kingdom since the days of the old Poor Law in England. In Cork the workhouse contains nearly 3,000 paupers, besides numbers on out-door relief. They are born there, they live there, they marry, and they die there. And this with the full knowledge of the Local Government Board, who make no real effort to grapple with this huge evil! It is a great wen of pauperism, terribly discreditable to the Board, and a scandal and shame to the country.

I end by saying that the Irish question is really social and moral, and the poverty of the country only its sure and natural result. So vast a change to remedy so small an evil, I believe, was never attempted before in Europe or the world. It upsets all

the principles upon which property has hitherto been held in the kingdom, and must hereafter lead to still larger and more hurtful changes amongst us in England and Scotland, no less than Ireland. And it can never promote the prosperity or contentment of Ireland. The Act of 1870, in making tenant-right customs

legal wherever they existed, gave Ulster everything that was asked for ; and yet ten years after, the unsound principle having begun to bear its necessary fruit, the cry of the horseleech, Give! Give! is again louder than ever, as always will be the case when the Government takes away from some to give gratis to others. Could a clearer proof be given of the nature of the present agitation? The principle of the Bill is thoroughly unsound, and therefore must hinder the prosperity of the country. exaggerates a local custom, of which the circumstances of the district conceal the badness, and uses it to give a great bonus to tenants elsewhere, who have no just claim to it, and thereby will often grievously injure the landowners.

It

If it is resolved to force such a Bill on the country, the best hope is to make it as little hurtful as possible. (1) By limiting its operation to small tenants, say of 30l. rent and under, who are a great majority. Tenants over 30l. are as well able to protect themselves as the like class in England and Scotland. (2) All estates where sale of occupancy has been definitely excluded, and large sums spent on improvements by owners should be omitted, and the injustice of the Bill be thereby lessened. (3) Definite written contracts (leases), past or future, should be treated as by the Act of 1870. To meddle with them is of the very worst example. (4) Litigation on the proposed scale must be a sad mischief. It might be limited, as it was under the Tithe Acts, to cases where the value had altered by 10 (or even 5) per cent. (5) The lines of the Act of 1870 should be kept to in the amount of compensation, and in ejectments for non-payment of rent, so as not to

add to the difficulty with bad tenants. Such changes are very demoralising. By keeping to one course the business of land-hiring would hereafter fall into its natural lines, clear of any unsound principles. (6) The exclusion of estates bought under the Landed Estates Courts is indispensable in common honesty. (7) It is right, too, that just compensation should be given to those landowners who suffer loss under the Bill. This should be decided by independent judges, like those who are to decide on the compensation to tenants. The good name of England should not be tarnished by the use of two weights and two measures applied to different classes of one people. An honest price can be paid for all that is taken, by a longer annuity from the land, without pres

sure on any.

The statements lately adduced in the House of Commons about the improvements made by tenants being very large in value were grievous exaggerations, and untrue except in single cases.

Let it be considered what must be the moral effect to a country in the condition of Ireland of its being established that by means of a lawless agitation a large money gain can be secured to a poorer class at the cost of richer men. The mischief that must follow in all business dealings cannot but be grievous and hurtful to all industry.

Modern enlightenment is doubtless a very fine thing. But it is quite certain that the old principles of the Ten Commandments, many of which are wholly set at naught in Ireland, will yield a hundred times more prosperity and happiness to the people.

May 14, 1881.

W. BENCE JONES.

DEATH is the gate of criticism: the grave is, by a strange law of natural compensation, essentially memorial. Once let it close over an eminent person, and the justice of perspective is restored: we remember much that we have forgotten; we forget much that we have remembered. More especially is this the case on the decease of an author whose life implies eloquence before a prejudiced or preoccupied audience. His words seem to return in a sequence, connecting and characterising his work, and the man revives in the manner. Above all, however, do these remarks concern Lord Beaconsfield. His individuality was so emphatic that impartial criticism has been hitherto impossible. On the one hand, there have been those who could not believe that a brilliant statesman might also be a great author, just as many argue from a woman's beauty against her ability; on the other, those who believed that rare literary promise had been blighted by rarer political success.

To estimate Lord Beaconsfield's position in the empire of letters is a task far beyond our present space. We might have chosen the marvellous consistency of his sentiments, or the remarkable method of their development in his romances, or the invention by him (for such it is) of the political novel as our theme. But all these are not his most peculiar features, nor will they perpetuate him most. His wit and his humour are his style, and he himself has declared that it is on style that fiction most depends.

We ought first, however, to distinguish aright between wit and humour, for these terms indicate qualities and results by no means identical, and seldom co-existent. We remember to

have heard an acute thinker sum up the difference between them by terming wit a point, and humour a straight line; but this epigram is inadequate. Wit is no resumé of humour; the two qualities differ in kind. Wit is a department of style; it is the faculty of combining dissimilars, abstract and concrete alike, by the language of illustration, suggestion, and surprise. Like misery, it "yokes strange bed-fellows," but with the link of words alone. It is best when intellectually true, but its requisite is fancy.

Humour, on the other hand, is an exercise, by whatever means, of perception; it is the faculty of discerning the incongruities of the concrete alone, particularly of human nature; it "looks on this picture and on that; it is most excellent when ethically sound, but its essence is analysis!

Wit works by comparison, humour by contrast. The sphere of wit is narrower than that of humour; the subject-matter of humour more limited than that of wit. We laugh at humour, at wit we smile. Talent is capable of the former; the perfection of the latter is reserved for genius. Wit is, as it were, Yorick, with cap and bells; but humour unmasks him with a moral. To define wit and humour one ought to be both humorous and witty, but we may epitomise by saying that wit is mirth turned philosopher-humour, philosophy at

play.

If this account be correct, it is clear that humour is at once the more real and the more dramatic agency of the two. Yet wit has been infinitely the least frequent, particularly among the Western races. They, like their Gothic architecture, delight in rough, grotesque, exuberant animalities; but,

if we except the Celtic race, it is to the East that we must turn for proverb and simile. The "Haggadah contains more absolute wit than even Aristophanes, the prince of humourists, sprung too as he was from an Asian civilisation. The wisdom of the Koran is wittily formulated. Holy Writ itself contains many examples of wit, though none of humour; while the Moorish and Jewish schools of mediæval Spain furnish wit as subtle and supple as the flashing and fantastic arabesques of their Alhambra. If, we repeat, the Celts, who are both humorous and witty, be excepted, wit is of the Eastern, humour of the Western temperament, while the conjunction of both, the existence of what might be called Westorientalism, is extremely uncommon.

Almost the sole examples of wit pure and simple in post-Shakespearian times have been Voltaire, Molière, Rochefoucauld, Sheridan, and Heine: four were Celts, and the last a Hebrew, and in their company is to be enrolled Lord Beaconsfield. But Molière, Sheridan, and Heine were also humourists, and humourists again typically different. The humour of Molière and of Sheridan is, like that of Dickens or of Hogarth, direct and mainly didactic, pointing to the follies and foibles of mankind, the first chiefly by situation, the latter chiefly by speech; the humour of Heine, like that of Sterne, and often of Thackeray, indirect and inclined to the sentimental, insinuating with all the machinery of playful surprise the inconsistencies that enlist feeling or awaken thought. The former is the broadsword of Coeur de Lion, the latter the scimitar of Saladin. It is of this latter species that Lord Beaconsfield's finest humour must be reckoned.

Let us begin with an instance from Tancred. He is describing the Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles :

"Picture to yourself the child of Israel in the dingy suburb or the stolid quarter of some bleak northern town, where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes; yet he

must celebrate the vintage of purple Palestine. He rises in the morning ; goes early to some Whitechapel market, purchases some willow-boughs for which he has previously given a commission, and which are brought probably from one of the neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his miserable tenements, builds his bower, decks it even profusely with the finest flowers and fruit he can procure, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the service of his Synagogue he sups late with his wife and children in the open air as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee beneath its sweet and starry sky. Perhaps, as he is offering up the peculiar thanksgiving of the feast of Tabernacles, praising Jehovah for the vintage which his children may no longer cull, but also for his promise that they may some day again enjoy it, and his wife and his children are joining in a pious Hosanna,' that is 'Save us,' a party of Anglo-Saxons, very respectable men, ten-pounders, a little elevated it may be, though certainly not in honour of the vintage, pass the house, and words like these are heard I say, Buggins, what's that row? 'Oh

·

it's those cursed Jews! we've a lot of them. It is one of their horrible feasts. The Lord Mayor ought to interfere. However, things are not so bad as they used to be. They used always to crucify little boys at their hullabaloos, but now they only eat sausages made of stinking pork.'To be sure,' replies his com panion, we all make progress.''

་

And once more Barizy of the Tower, a Jew, one of the life-like group of Jerusalem gossips, is made to say to Consul Pasqualizo—

"I don't think I can deal in crucifixes.' 'I tell you what, if you won't your cousin Barizy of the Gate will. I know he has given a great order to Bethlehem.' 'The traitor,' exclaimed Barizy of the Tower. 'Well, if people will purchase crucifixes, and nothing else, they must be supplied. Commerce civilises man.'