IRELAND, 1840-1880. 85 



CHAPTEE X. 



IRELAND, 1840-1880. 

 APRIL 1880 (Macmillan's Magazine). 



HAVING been at work for over forty years improving 

 an estate in Ireland, on the old-fashioned, downright 

 way common sense suggests, it has been urged upon 

 me that it might do good at the present time to give 

 an account of what has been done. I have had no 

 new plans of improvement, but began simply with a 

 very neglected estate in the extreme South, having one 

 advantage only, that the subdivision of farms had not 

 yet gone so far as elsewhere (most being still twenty 

 or thirty acres in extent). I have nothing to boast 

 of, except that the work has succeeded. The plan 

 pursued has been gradually, with some reasonable 

 consideration, to get rid of the bad tenants, and give 

 their land to the good ones who remained, thus 

 enabling them to do better still. It was nothing 

 else but a process of Natural Selection, in which the 

 tenant's own qualities, good or bad, were made the 

 cause of the Survival of the Fittest. 



It was clearly seen from the first that the Irish 



