This is no Government office of the ordinary type, the dwelling of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland is a regular stronghold, encircled with ramparts, bristling with towers, shut up with portcullis, draw-bridge and iron bars. In the inner Castle yard are situated the apartments of the pro-consul, the lodgings of his dependants of all degrees, the offices where decrees are engrossed, the pigeon-holes where they are heaped, all forming a sort of separate city entrenched within its fortifications. A very gem is the Royal Chapel, with its marvellous oak wainscoting, which twenty generations of carvers have concurred to elaborate. The reception-rooms, the hall of the Order of St. Patrick, where _drawing-rooms_ are held, form the kernel of the fortress. The barracks of the English soldiers and of those giant constables whom you see about the town are also fortified with walls, and form a line of detached forts round the central stronghold. England is encamped at Dublin, with loaded guns and levelled rifles, even as she is encamped at Gibraltar, in Egypt, and in India. CHAPTER II. DUBLIN LIFE. As there is little aristocracy in Dublin there are few lordly dwellings besides the Vice-regal castle. This is very striking in this country of lords and serfs. The masters of the land, mostly of English origin, do not care at all to live in the capital of Ireland; all the time that they do not spend on their property they prefer to beguile away in London, Paris, Naples or elsewhere. Few of their tradesmen are Irish; and the greatest part of the rents they raise on their lands merely accumulate in the banks of Dublin to be afterwards spent on the foreign markets. Thence this consequence, which explains many things:—The clearest of the nett product of the country’s one industry—agricultural industry,—is poured outside it every year, without having circulated in Ireland, without having strengthened the local commerce or even invigorated agriculture itself, without having contributed to the well-being of a single Irishman. Let us set down this nett product, the Irish aggregate rental, at its lowest estimate, £8,000,000 per annum, a sum much inferior to the nominal one, and admit that one-half of it is sent abroad to absentee landlords. There we have £4,000,000 leaving the island every year without conferring the slightest benefit to any one of its inhabitants. In ten years’ time that represents 40 millions sterling; in fifty years, 200 millions sterling, or five milliards francs, that Ireland has, so to speak, thrown into the sea, for that is to her the precise equivalent of such a continuous deperdition of capital.... And this has lasted for three centuries!...[1] What country would not be worn threadbare by such usage? What nation could resist it? Which individual, submitting to such periodical blood-lettings, would not succumb to anæmia?