SINCE THE REVOLUTION. WITH NOTICES OF ANCIENT AND MODERN LAND TENURES In Various Countries. BY THE REV. PATRICK LAVELLE, P.P., CONG. BODI DUBLIN: W. B. KELLY, 8, GRAFTON-STREET. 226. j. 163. DEDICATION. TO GEORGE HENRY MOORE, ESQ., M.P. MY DEAR MR. MOORE, To you as a dear personal friend, an incorruptible politician, a sterling patriot, and especially as a true and constant advocate of the Irish tenants' rights, and a practical tenant-righter yourself, I, with your kind permission, feel proud to dedicate the following pages. As an accomplished scholar, a brilliant writer, and a finished orator, your preeminence is admitted by all; and if I refer to it here, it is because you ever make your intellectual gifts and attainments subsidiary to the cause of creed and country. A hundred cares, labours, and distractions, must plead my apology for the many shortcomings of this little Work. Indeed, I can safely say that I hardly ever sat down to its production without many interruptions-a very long one even, since, a few minutes ago, I began to write these dedicatory words. Hoping, with almost every true lover of his country, on both sides of the Channel, that such a land measure as wiil secure to the Irish tenant a sure foothold in the land of his birth and love, without interfering with any one right of the landlord, except the long possessed and long exercised right to do wrong, will become the law of the land, I am, my dear Friend, Very truly yours, PATRICK LAVELLE. INTRODUCTION. THE following pages are one of the results of the late celebrated action for libel-" M'Culloch versus Knox," tried in the Court of Queen's Bench, Dublin, in the month of June last, and the report of which will be found in the Appendix. My original intention was merely to address a letter, through the Press, to the present Prime Minister of England, calling his special attention both to that case and the case of Mrs. Lavelle, as also furnished in the Appendix; but, in proceeding with the letter, I found it impossible to deal with the subject in a manner any way satisfactory in the columns of a newspaper. Thus, what was first meant to be an affair of a couple of columns in a journal, has resulted, like Locke's Essay on Man, in what may be called a book. Since I wrote its first page, the great Irish Land Question has obtained a prominence in the public mind, such as those most interested in its settlement hardly hoped for so soon. The London Times has deemed it of sufficient importance to merit a Special Commission from Printinghouse-square itself to report on the entire subject; and hitherto the Commissioner has returned several reports-all admitting the absolute necessity of a final adjustment of the great social difficulty, but all carefully |