The Press.
London, England, 1853-08-27 00:00:00

THE " MAN FOR GALWAY."

THE Lord Chief Justice has been enjoying an
agreeable episode to the dull routine of his
dry judicial duties. By some process or other
—which, in charity, we will assume not to
have been voluntary—Lord CAMPBELL has be-
come the possessor of property in Galway.
If one is surprised at the apparition of the
Lord Chief Justice of England in the capacity
of a landlord in a district where but a few
years since a writ could not have been served
on one of the lords of the soil, that surprise
will not extend to the Noble and Learned Lord's
• naïve announcement some time since in the
House of Lords, that from the property in
question he has never received one shilling of
rent. Whether to satisfy his judicial mind of
the causes of this very common event, or to
lead to a better balance-sheet in future, Lord
CAMPBELL has within these few days paid a
visit to the scene of his unprofitable pro-
prietorship, and held personal communion
with his unresponding tenantry. There is
something dramatic, and even pathetic, in
the manner of the visit. As if he were pro-
ceeding on some desperate pilgrimage, Lord
CAMPBELL fortified himself with his household
gods. The patriarchal cortege comprised, be-
sides himself, his son, his daughter, and his
legal agent. It seems as if the Learned Lord
had so far studied the Irish character as to
know, that in the peril he was about to brave
it was best to throw himself in this domestic
guise upon their sympathy, and trust to the
loyal instincts of impulsive natures for protec-
tion against the traditionary dangers of a land-
lord's visit—that landlord a Seotehman, and
the embodied spirit of the laws. In this Lord
CAMPBELL, as the result shows. has proved
himself to have understood the difficulty.
His tenantry, with a lively sense of arrears
and prospective remissions, received him with
enthusiastic acclamations ; and the Roman
Catholic priest of the place took the lead in set-
ting forth the virtues of the functionary who
gave the tone to the RUSSELL agitation against
Cardinal WisEmAN's aggression." We notice
this visit chiefly for the purpose of praising

SATURDAY,

the very sensible and well-timed speech made
by Lord CAMPBELL, on the occasion of a grand
banquet given on Monday to the tenantry of
his Nloycullen estate. Introduced by the
Rev. Mr. KENNY, " P.P.," with sympathetic
eulogy, Lord CAMPBELL unfolded his own view
of his future duties, and at the same time
provided a model for imitation by those Irish
landlords who may wish to promote harmony
between themselves and their tenants. Lord
CAMPBELL frankly confesses that he prefers,
like all sound agriculturists, large farms to petty
holdings, and that he thinks good wages, re-
gularly paid, are better for the peasantry than
poverty on a potato-patch. But he recognises
in the common sympathies of humanity some-
thing superior to the most logical deductions
of political economy or agricultural science ;
and he therefore proclaims that he will never
seek the desired end by means of evictions ;
of course provided (and here the Scotchman and
the Judge come out in strong relief)—of course
provided the said not-to-be-evicted tenants pay
their rent, a practice with which they are inno-
cently unfamiliar. It is something, however,
to have arrived at a middle point between mer
ciless systematising and the hopeless unpro.
ductiveness of the Irish cottier system; and
Lord CAMPBELL will have done good service to
society in Ireland in thus enforcing a valuable
example by his high authority. It is worthy
of special praise that neither the enthusiastic
blau, icy of the parish priest, nor the hurricane
cheering of the grateful tenantry, could disturb
the magnet of this judicial mind from point-
ing to the pole of truth. Reminding them of
their steadfastness to their faith, he also pro.
claimed his firm adherence to his own. A
warm advocate, in times gone by, of Catholic
emancipation, he was now equally a stern
opponent of ultramontanism ; but he appealed
to his own belief in the liberality and tolerance
of the Roman Catholic laity, as his warrant for
hoping that Protestant and Roman Catholic
might live together in amity, priestly assump-
tion and intolerance notwithstanding. It is
cheering to find a man holding so high a
moral and social position thus standing forth
at once as a mediator and as a champion; and
that in a double character so new to the dis-
trict he should have been received with so
much hearty enthusiasm. Unless the normal
state of repulsion succeeds the withdrawal of
the temporary attraction, Lord CAMPBELL will
indeed have proved himself the " Man for
" Galway."