showed the integrity of O'Hagan was what is called Meade's Minors. In this case an attempt was made by Catholic relatives to interfere with the parental rights of the father, who happened to be a Protestant. O'Hagan said, and every lawyer must agree with him, that the father alone was responsible for the religious education of his children.
We have now to record a very sad event in the Lord Chancellor's life. He had married in 1836, immediately after being called to the bar, Mary, the daughter of Charles Hamilton Teeling of Belfast. One child by this marriage is still living, having married in 1865 Mr. John O'Hagan, Q. C., afterwards Mr. Justice O'Hagan, who died in 1900. The widow now lives abroad. Soon after his elevation to the Chancellor ship, Mrs. O'Hagan died, and for some years the Chancellor was a widower. In 1870 he was promoted to the Peerage of the United Kingdom, as Lord O'Hagan of Tullahogue. This was what is often called "the golden age of Liberalism." A bill of the utmost consequence to Ireland, the Irish Church Disestablishment Bill, had been already passed in 1869. The immediate business for which Lord O'Hagan's services were required was doubtless the Irish Land Bill. It was thought that a man of such well-known eloquence would give great assistance when the bill came to the House of Lords. Accordingly on the 8th of June, 1870, it was announced in the Daily News, then the premier English Liberal newspaper, that it was Her Majesty's pleasure to raise the Chancellor to the Peerage of the United Kingdom, as Lord O'Hagan of Tullahogue. Probably this does not convey much to the ordinary reader, but to some it meant a great deal. Tullahogue was celebrated as the seat of the O'Hagans in remote times, when the O'Neills were kings and the O'Hagan acted as Chief Brehon. All this came to an end at the "Flight of the Earls," early in the time of James the First, and Tullahogue passed into the hands of a patentee. We learn with some amusement that a letter of remonstrance was sent by the descendant of this patentee against an O'Hagan taking his title from Tullahogue, considering that the confiscated territories of the O'Hagans were granted by patent to his predecessor as far back as the time of James the First. Of course, however, Lord O'Hagan was allowed to vindicate the rights of his clan, athough he had no desire and no possibility of getting back their lands. On the 23rd of June, fifteen days afterwards, Lord O'Hagan was in his place in the House of Lords, speaking on the Irish Land Bill, which he described as "a happy reversal of the policy of the past, a great attempt at reparation for wrongs inflicted and endured, and a bright augury for a better future for that country to which he was bound by every tie." The Land Act passed, and Lord O'Hagan's opinion on it was thus expressed to the Statistical Society on the 17th of November of the same year: "This Act gives the tenant farmer protection not in Ulster only, but throughout the country, more ample than in times gone by he ever dreamed of possessing. The Irish tenant who, by toil and thrift, has accumulated a little money, may look forward with fair anticipation of bettering his social position and lifting his family to a higher station in the world. The good landlord will not really feel the measure hard upon him, for it requires him to do very much as he had done hitherto, and as his own kindly instinct and sound judgment would have led him always to do without legal pressure." In 1871 Lord O'Hagan was instrumental in the passing of the celebrated Jury Act, 34-35 Vic. Cap. 65. The main object of this Act was to prevent partiality; but by altering the qualification it admitted a class hardly suitable. The Lunacy Act, the Local Government Act, and the Charitable Donations Act were passed in the session of 1871. In connection with all these Acts Lord O'Hagan
