I must dwell for a moment on the conduct and the position of the classes connected with the land during this appalling trial. The attitude of the landed gentry was much the same as it had been at an infinitely less disastrous crisis; but, on the whole, it was marked by nobler and more attractive features. The charity of the great landlords of Ireland was most praiseworthy; many devoted large sums for the support of the poor on their lands by instituting fine works of enclosure and drainage; some, I know, even mortgaged their estates for this very purpose. Hundreds of the lesser gentry, stricken down as they were, imitated their superiors as well as they could; old divisions were forgotten in the common misfortune; spite of the interested lies of a calumnious faction, as an order of men they acted extremely well. One of their bitterest enemies, who wrote at the time, has placed it on record, 'that the resident landlords and their families did, in many cases, devote themselves to the task of saving these poor people alive. Many remitted their rents or half their rents; and ladies kept their servants busy and their kitchens smoking with continual preparation of food for the poor.'[47] Many, however, of the Irish landlords, as was to be expected, looked hopelessly on at the misery around them; this was the case with feeble and incapable men, and the sight has always been seen in grave social crises; it was but in conformity with our frail and imperfect nature. A certain number, moreover, of the class had recourse to severe measures to remove from their lands the masses of wretchedness crowded upon them; the process of eviction became too frequent; hundreds of families were in this way dispossessed of their holdings. These acts of harshness were certainly to be deplored; but it was almost universally believed that the cottar in Ireland could not live from the land after the failure of almost his only means of subsistence; it must be added that, in this very matter, the conduct of Parliament and the Government was by many degrees more severe. A strict test of destitution had to be applied; a law was passed that, as a condition of obtaining relief, no person possessing more than a quarter of an acre of land should be entitled to support from the State; thousands of families abandoned their homes, through the effects of this measure; for one evicted by a landlord, fifty perhaps were practically evicted by this stern policy. The law was possibly required in the terrible circumstances of the time; but it was condemned by the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Bessborough, a great Irish peer, and an able man; at all events, it justified, to a considerable extent, all that could be laid to the charge of a few Irish landlords whose acts were most unfairly denounced by many writers, and were falsely described as common to the great body of the class. For the rest, as I have said, the land system was broken up in many districts; and not only the owners but the occupiers of the soil suffered cruelly from the highest to the lowest grade.