“But putting aside the fourth commandment and all the theories, you will come to Ireland?” said Phineas.

“I shall be delighted.”

“I don’t live in a castle, you know.”

“I thought everybody did live in a castle in Ireland,” said Mr. Monk.  “They seemed to do when I was there twenty years ago.  But for myself, I prefer a cottage.”

This trip to Ireland had been proposed in consequence of certain ideas respecting tenant-right which Mr. Monk was beginning to adopt, and as to which the minds of politicians were becoming moved.  It had been all very well to put down Fenianism, and Ribandmen, and Repeal,—­and everything that had been put down in Ireland in the way of rebellion for the last seventy-five years.  England and Ireland had been apparently joined together by laws of nature so fixed, that even politicians liberal as was Mr. Monk,—­liberal as was Mr. Turnbull,—­could not trust themselves to think that disunion could be for the good of the Irish.  They had taught themselves that it certainly could not be good for the English.  But if it was incumbent on England to force upon Ireland the maintenance of the Union for her own sake, and for England’s sake, because England could not afford independence established so close against her own ribs,—­it was at any rate necessary to England’s character that the bride thus bound in a compulsory wedlock should be endowed with all the best privileges that a wife can enjoy.  Let her at least not be a kept mistress.  Let it be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, if we are to live together in the married state.  Between husband and wife a warm word now and then matters but little, if there be a thoroughly good understanding at bottom.  But let there be that good understanding at bottom.  What about this Protestant Church; and what about this tenant-right?  Mr. Monk had been asking himself these questions for some time past.  In regard to the Church, he had long made up his mind that the Establishment in Ireland was a crying sin.  A man had married a woman whom he knew to be of a religion different from his own, and then insisted that his wife should say that she believed those things which he knew very well that she did not believe.  But, as Mr. Monk well knew, the subject of the Protestant Endowments in Ireland was so difficult that it would require almost more than human wisdom to adjust it.  It was one of those matters which almost seemed to require the interposition of some higher power,—­the coming of some apparently chance event,—­to clear away the evil; as a fire comes, and pestilential alleys are removed; as a famine comes, and men are driven from want and ignorance and dirt to seek new homes and new thoughts across the broad waters; as a war comes, and slavery is banished from the face of the earth.  But in regard to tenant-right, to some arrangement by which a tenant in Ireland might be at least encouraged to lay out what little capital he might have in labour or money without being at once