The history of the Manor of Geashill in the King's County furnishes
another instructive illustration of the land question and of the
effect upon the people of the system of management, under the new
school of agents, of which Mr. Steuart Trench may be regarded as the
brightest ornament, if not the apostle. The epoch was favourable for
his mission, and he was the man for the epoch; he had been quietly
training himself for the restoration of disordered estates, and the
critical emergencies of the times thrust him into the front rank of
social reformers. When he describes the wonderful revolutions wrought
by his instrumentality, the whirlwinds on which he rode, the storms
which he directed and quelled, the chaos out of which he evoked order,
he assumes that the hurricane and the chaos were the normal state of
things. A mysterious pestilence had blighted the principal food of
the people for two or three years, and brought on a desolating famine.
Millions perished by that visitation chiefly because the legislature
had persistently refused up to that period to make any provision for
the Irish poor such as it had made centuries before for the English
poor, and because no care had been taken to distribute the population
over the waste lands which their labour would have reclaimed and
fertilized; or to improve their position, so that they might not be
wholly dependent on one sort of food, and that the most precarious and
perishable. Mr. Sadler, in his work on Population, had proved that,
even in the case of Ireland before the famine, there was really no
'surplus population;' that if the resources of the country had been
developed by a wise Government, sympathising with the people, the text
which he adopted would have been applicable there: 'Dwell in the land,
and verily ye shall be fed.' There was hasty legislation to meet the
emergency, but in all the haste, the heartless economists found time
to devise clauses and provisions, by means of which, when the small
farmers had consumed all their stock to keep their families alive,