When alone, however, she still fed her fancy with the cheap, ill-printed, trashy, and mischievous books that were to the Irish girlhood in her day what the penny novelette and the sixpenny shocker have, since her time, become to readers of her age, sex, and condition on both sides of St. George’s Channel. While Feemy’s town sisters might have been in raptures over the broadsheets wherein an earthly paradise was promised by writers who addressed with equal skill the romantic taste of the kitchen and the political passions of the mob, Feemy was giving her eyes, her heart and soul to _The Mysterious Assassin_, as her only refuge from Thady Macdermot’s everlasting talk about potatoes, oats, pigs, and from the dread, darkening the household like a cloud, that, impatient for principal as well as interest, Mr. Joe Flannelly of Carrick-on-Shannon might come down upon Ballycloran, to make himself master of the place and all within it.
Well would it have been for the Macdermots had their fair representative sought no further distraction from her dulness than the trivial and vulgar reading that, whatever its faults, was not calculated to do more lasting harm to the reader than was received by town labourers and rural peasants from the tawdry sedition mongers of Gavan Duffy’s literary staff. Writing in the earlier forties, Trollope economised his approval of most English measures for reforming Irish abuses. Even when not bad in themselves, those expedients might be corrupted by the human agents to which they were entrusted. The establishment of an Irish constabulary force dates from Liverpool’s administration and Wellington’s Lord-Lieutenancy in 1823. Changes in that body continued to be made till the consolidation of the various Acts connected with the subject had for its sequel Sir Robert Peel’s establishment in 1836 of the Irish Constabulary. Just a generation later, at Queen Victoria’s command, this body became known by its present name, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The duties of this imperial force, from the first, included certain civil services not imposed upon policemen of the United Kingdom. Such are the yearly collection of agricultural statistics, the management of the decennial census, the conduct by auction sales of goods taken under distress warrants, the inspection of weights and measures, the practical administration of the Food, Drugs, and Explosives Acts. The Irish Constabulary, too, are charged with the prevention of smuggling and of illicit distillation. The officers of this force are now chosen by Civil Service examinations. Vacancies for district inspectors are filled, one half by cadets, and one half by selected constables of exceptional merit.