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under distinct heads or articles, the conditions of the Federation that had been established, the spheres of the authority of the separate States, and the sphere of the authority of the Imperial Council. Is it possible to suppose that the Parliament of the United Kingdom would ever break up this ancient and undivided Monarchy; would tamely surrender its sovereign rights, and would substitute a new-fangled fabric of this kind for the venerable and unwritten constitution of these realms--a majestic temple that has grown up in silence; and that the British people, at all events, would not rise up in wrath at the very thought of such a change? For Federalism 'amounts to a proposal for changing the whole constitution of the United Kingdom. It is, in fact, the most "revolutionary" proposal, if the word "revolutionary" be used in its strict sense, which has ever been submitted to an English Parliament. The abolition of the House of Lords, the disestablishment of the Church, the abolition of the Monarchy, might leave the English Constitution far less essentially changed than would the adoption of Federalism.'

It should be observed, too, with respect to this subject, that the conditions, under which Federalism would have a chance of success, would be absolutely wanting in the present instance. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales have long been moulded into a single sovereign State, and united under a supreme Monarchy; no Federation, I venture to assert, has been formed out of communities that have had a government of this kind. Federations, in fact, have almost always grown out of an association of existing States, which desire to remain separate, and yet to be a nation for some purposes; they have not been evolved out of the fragments of one State artificially rent asunder. Again, Federalism requires that no single State should be enormously more powerful than the other partners; there must be something like equality between the different States; it is unnecessary to remark that England has tenfold the resources and strength of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; and, in truth, would annihilate the Federation were her will really crossed, and break through the arbitrary limitations imposed on her. Suppose, for example, that England had set her heart on a great foreign war, and had the support of her own Parliament; does any one suppose that, if she were outvoted, by deputies from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, in the Imperial Council, even though backed by their own Parliaments, the people of England would submit to be thwarted in this way; was Samson bound by the withs of the Philistines? Something like this, indeed, was seen in the great Civil War; the result was the subjugation of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and the complete ascendency of England, under Cromwell; an attempt to federalise the Three Kingdoms might lead to a similar issue. Let us assume, however, that, through some evil stroke of destiny, Federalism were made the constitution of these realms, and that this strange arrangement could be made to work even for a few years; the inevitable consequences, from the nature of the case, would follow. The omnipotence of the Imperial Parliament, the mainstay of the Empire, would be gone; so would the omnipotence of the Imperial Executive Government, the best security for justice and for equal liberties. Their powers would be parcelled out and subdivided; they would not survive anywhere in their complete fulness; they would be distributed in fractions between separate States, and would be transformed and impaired in the process; real Imperial unity and sovereignty could have no existence. General national weakness would be the probable result, leading, perhaps, to despotism within a short time; for Federalism is essentially weak; I have no sympathy with Jacobin France, but the Committee of Public Safety rightly put Federalism down, when they were engaged in their death-struggle with Europe; and Napoleon--perhaps the ablest ruler of the nineteenth century--approved of their conduct. But weakness would not be the only consequence; the dissemination of different powers would certainly produce disputes and conflicts between the Federal and the State authorities; above all, the very existence of separate States and of a Federal Government would divide allegiance, and powerfully tend to disruption, as was seen in the great Civil War in America. As regards Ireland, the establishment of 'Home Rule all round' would necessarily be attended by all the evils inseparable from Mr. Gladstone's schemes; but Federalism, having been thus made manifest, would probably increase, and in some sense justify, the alienation of Ireland from the other parts of these kingdoms.

Home Rule, therefore, whatever the form it may assume, would be, it is my firm conviction, incompatible with the welfare of the Three Kingdoms, injurious to Great Britain, a curse to Ireland. In the peculiar circumstances which exist in Ireland, and to which I have adverted before, separation, I believe, would be an expedient less disastrous than Home Rule of any description, this involving the creation of an Irish Parliament, and of an Irish Executive, which would be its instrument. Home Rule, in fact, gloss it over as you please, has been forced to the front by an Irish faction, hostile to a man to the existence of British rule in Ireland, and depending on Fenianism in the United States; this party would be all-powerful in an Irish Parliament; and Home Rule would be made the means to a ruinous and disgraceful end. Thousands of Irishmen, indeed, honestly think Home Rule would do their country good, and have little or nothing to do with this bad conspiracy; this too, doubtless, is the case with the followers of Mr. Gladstone; but Home Rule is an Irish Nationalist movement, and Irish Nationalist movements are dangerous to the safety of the State. The Union, therefore, must be maintained in the interest of Great Britain and Ireland alike; and the Union is an international settlement that has endured for a century. But no candid student of Irish history, no impartial observer of Irish affairs, from 1800 to the present time, can deny that the Union has been in many respects a failure. It has been an incident, perhaps a result, of the Union, that Presbyterian Ireland, rebellious from 1795 to 1798, has, we have seen, become attached to the British connection, and is now devotedly attached to England. The power of the Imperial Parliament and of its Executive have kept lawlessness and disorder down in Ireland, and has restrained the evil passions of Irish factions more than was ever the case under the rule of the Irish Parliament. The Imperial Parliament, too, has accomplished reforms in Ireland, if often unwise, in the main beneficent; and, under the Imperial Executive, justice in Ireland has been administered, for many years, in a very different way from that which was seen a century ago; its tribunals are perfectly free and impartial. But the Union was, in itself, a bad half measure, tainted with iniquity and false promises; it did gross wrong to Catholic Ireland; the evil consequences are felt to this hour. The Union has not fulfilled the sanguine hopes of Pitt; Ireland, as I have pointed out, is far more behind Great Britain in wealth than she was sixty years ago; she is perhaps the poorest country in Europe at the door of the richest. The Union, too, has not reconciled the feuds of religion and race in Ireland; they are as marked as they were a century ago, if not attended with such deeds of violence; above all, the Union has not made the chief part of the Irish community attached to England, as Pitt confidently predicted would certainly happen. Nor can it be denied that the Irish reforms of the Imperial Parliament have too often been ill-designed and faulty, especially, as we shall see, as regards the land; and they have unfortunately, in many instances, been concessions to agitation and dangerous social movements, and have been effected too late to do real good. The administration of Ireland reveals the same defects; it has been marked by good intentions, which, sometimes, have proved gross mistakes; and notably it has, over and over again, been shifty, vacillating, without principle, and showing a curious disregard of sound Irish opinion. Unquestionably, too, Ireland has, on many occasions, to the indignation of true-hearted Irishmen, been made the mere plaything of British faction, with the worst results to her best interests; this has been perhaps the most pernicious incident that has followed the Union; and in the immense revolution which has transformed Ireland, within the last hundred years, the effects that may be traced to the Union have by no means been wholly on the side of good.

The occasional presence of Royalty, too, in Ireland, as was made manifest during the late Queen's visit, unquestionably would have beneficent results. It would gratify a sentiment of Celtic nature, always attached to persons rather than to institutions and laws, and especially attached to rulers and chiefs, which, in Ireland, has been scarcely gratified before; it would spread far and wide a happy and good influence; it would certainly improve the social life of Ireland, and add something to her scanty material wealth. The maintenance of the Union, however, is the first requirement of a sound Irish and Imperial policy; one means of strengthening that fundamental law of these realms, consistently with strict constitutional justice, nay, if constitutional wrong is not to continue, has long been apparent to impartial minds. The over-representation of Ireland, in the House of Commons, is a flagrant anomaly, acknowledged for years; as I have remarked, it was largely expected that this important subject would have been taken up before this by Lord Salisbury's Government, and have been settled in the Parliament of 1895-1900. Taking the test of population alone, Ireland has, compared to England, Wales, and Scotland, an excess of twenty-three members; taking the test of population and property combined, she has an excess probably of from thirty to forty. I am willing to allow that, in this matter, we ought not to follow arithmetic only; Ireland, a poor country, far away from Westminster, may have a claim to a representation somewhat more numerous than mere figures would give her. But can anything be more unjust, nay, absurd, than that Ireland should have one hundred and three members, and that the world of London, with a population about the same as that of Ireland, and probably possessing tenfold wealth, should have little more than half that number? This excessive representation must be reduced, and Irish Nationalists cannot here appeal to the Union; the Union did not save the Established Church of Ireland, secured by the Treaty in emphatic terms; and the Union must not be wrested to work gross injustice. The anomaly can be only removed by a large scheme for the redistribution of seats, founded on sound constitutional principles; and should this become law, as I confidently hope will be one of the achievements of the existing Parliament, the Union will acquire a new security, for the Nationalist vote in the House of Commons would be greatly reduced, and the Irish Unionist vote would be greatly increased. A very few figures will prove this: the rural populations of the Unionist counties of Antrim and Down are upwards of four hundred and thirty thousand souls; the rural populations of the Home Rule counties of Kildare, Kilkenny, King's, Longford, Wicklow, and Louth have a population less than three hundred and ninety-eight thousand; yet Antrim and Down have only eight members, the other six counties have no less than twelve. The same disparity runs through all the Irish counties; in the boroughs of Ireland it is even more visible. Protestant and Unionist Ireland, in a word, has probably fifteen or sixteen members too few; Catholic and anti-Unionist Ireland fifteen or sixteen too many; it is high time this plain wrong should be redressed; it is unnecessary to point out how this would strengthen the Union. And what probably is not less important, it would make the representation of Ireland, not, what it is now, an utterly false index of Irish opinion, but a reasonably fair and trustworthy index; were the Irish representation cut down to eighty members, the Nationalists would probably command not more than fifty seats; the Unionists would command about thirty; and this, taking all things into account, would be a proportion approaching what is just. The 'doing' of right, in this matter, has been too long deferred; loyal Ireland feels strongly upon the subject; the reform would be altogether in the interest of the State.

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND--SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND TO THE YEAR 1870

The era of Protestant ascendency bringing Catholic subjection with it, had now set in for many years in Ireland; its evils were aggravated by harsh divisions of race, and by more than a century of bitter memories; its effects were more conspicuous in the land than in other social relations. This unnatural and calamitous position of affairs might, however, have been replaced ere long by a better order of things, had it not been artificially maintained and made enduring by legislation unexampled for its far-reaching cruelty. I cannot attempt to describe the Penal Code of Ireland; in the emphatic words of Burke, 'it was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts; it was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.' The objects of these execrable laws were threefold: to exclude the Irish Catholic whether of Anglo-Irish or Celtic descent--misfortune had well-nigh effaced the distinction--from every office of trust in the State, from every profession, almost from every walk of life; to persecute and proscribe the Catholic Church of Ireland, and to place its priesthood under a humiliating ban, and finally to ruin and degrade the few remaining Catholic owners of the soil; to prevent the Irish Catholic from acquiring any real interest in it; and, above all, to keep the Catholic peasantry in a condition of thraldom. The Code was only too successful in compassing its ends; I pass from its operation as regards the two first, to point out how it sought to attain the third, and how its provisions affected the Irish land and the manifold relations connected with it. The estate of the Irish Catholic owner was not to follow the ordinary courses of descent; it was 'to gavel,' and to be divided among many persons; this was for the avowed purpose of making 'the landed property of Papists crumble away, and disappear.' The Irish Catholic owner was subjected to cruel enactments that literally set his household against him; his wife and children were bribed to become his foes; law sate at his hearth to make his existence wretched. The Irish Catholic, too, was forbidden to acquire land by purchase or even to possess an incumbrance on it; as far as possible the ownership of land was strictly confined to the Protestant caste. But the wrong that, in its consequences at least, was perhaps the worst, was that the Catholic occupier of the Irish soil could not obtain anything like an advantageous tenure; he could not have a lease for a period beyond thirty-one years, and this, too, at an excessive rent; and, in the great mass of instances, he was a serf holding merely at will.

In the next generation a great but gradual change passed over the state of the Irish community. The Penal Code was not in letter relaxed; but the evil spirit which had conceived it lost much of its force. The men who had fought at the Boyne and at Aghrim had passed away; the human conscience, moved by the influences of the eighteenth century, revolted from the barbarous legislation of a half-fanatical age. The Irish Catholics slowly began to make themselves felt in the State; many amassed large fortunes in foreign commerce; shut out as they still were by law from almost every profession and office, they made their way into the medical calling, and especially at the Bar, where their disabilities were evaded or ignored. The Catholic Church was no longer proscribed; its worship, indeed, was still carried on under degrading conditions; but its priesthood were permitted to perform their sacred functions in peace; its dignitaries were even countenanced by the men in power at the Castle. This great social change was conspicuously seen in the land; landed relations were markedly improved, and partly transformed. The Catholic owners were permitted to hold their estates free from the cruel vexations of the past; they began to live on terms of friendship with the Protestant caste; legal fictions annulled the laws which had made their lives wretched; their lands were, in many instances, held by the Protestant gentry on secret trusts; and these, though contrary to law, were, as a rule, most honourably fulfilled. The principal, however, and most decisive change appeared in the position and the sentiments of the Protestant lords of the soil. As time rolled on, and threw its kindly growths over the settlement of confiscation and the sword, these men began to feel that Ireland was their country and home; they became, to a certain extent, Irishmen; they felt sympathy, by degrees, with the conquered serfs in their midst. This feeling was strengthened by the tyrannous selfishness of the British Parliament, which treated Ireland as if she were its footstool, and of the official class, nearly all Englishmen, who lorded it over the land they despised; an 'Irish interest' grew up in the Parliament at College Green, composed very largely of the Protestant landlords; this became patriotic, in a certain sense, and a protector of the scanty rights of Ireland. As social order, too, was seldom disturbed, the wealth of the country had considerably increased; the gentry acquired a greater interest in their estates, and became more and more attached to them; absenteeism, as the result, perceptibly lessened; and middleman tenures, though still prevalent, diminished remarkably in the more progressive counties. The deep lines of demarcation which kept apart the owners and the occupiers of the soil were thus to a certain extent bridged over; the Irish landlord, especially if resident, became a kindlier superior than his fathers had been; the Irish peasant became less a stranger to him.

The evidences of this better order of things became manifest on the face of the country. Agriculture, though still backward, made real progress; the breeds of farming animals greatly improved; the huge breadths of pasturage had a less deserted aspect. The country towns had generally advanced; the land had been opened by good roads; the means of locomotion had been largely multiplied. The rental of Ireland had doubled within living memory; in some counties, indeed, it was nearly as high as it is now; the land was at a price of more years' purchase than it is at the close of the nineteenth century. It was at this period that the great country houses of Ireland were built, and their vast demesnes laid out; the wages of labour were low, but had distinctly risen; the peasant hind, Arthur Young tells us, in point of food and clothing, was as well off as his fellow in England. The land was largely parcelled out into considerable farms; but small holdings were on the increase; and the cottar system, in the course of time to become a source of manifold evils, was not yet a cause of much mischief; the pressure of population on the soil was not severely felt. Many of the great landlords, too, were excellent men; they ruled the country well, and greatly improved their estates; in numberless instances they had won the hearts of dependents, who regarded them as kind masters. Yet the picture was not without a dark side; this land system still had evil, nay, repulsive, features. Except in the best part of Ulster the deep divisions of race and faith continued to be profoundly marked; the Penal Code had made these, to a great extent, indelible. There was still much oppression and exaction in landed relations; the class of small landlords and the class of middlemen were too generally tyrannical and harsh; complaints of over-renting were not infrequent; and if the great landlords, as a rule, were not severe superiors, many were extravagant, addicted to excess, and reckless duellists; they bore a strong resemblance to the seigneurie of the old French Monarchy. The peasantry, too, remained serfs, illiterate, ignorant, and superstitious; the good feelings they often had for their lords had too much of the submissiveness of the slave; and virtuous as their women ordinarily were, they too generally yielded to the lusts of their masters. The habitations, besides, of this population were still wretched; if their lot had assuredly become better, it was often hard, above all, degraded. They had begun to feel more acutely the ills they suffered; in many counties they had banded themselves together into lawless leagues, to protect themselves and to resist authority. These associations, known by the general name of Whiteboys--perhaps taken from the Camisards of the Cevennes--had as their objects the preservation of rights of commonage, the extinction of tithes, and the reduction of rents; they may be traced back to the great confiscations of the past; they were held together by secret leaders and passwords; and they often kept whole districts in a state of terror. A Draconic Code was directed against them; though often put down they have risen to life again; Ireland has never since been completely free from them; their influence still is distinctly apparent. Associations of somewhat a similar kind, known as Steelboys and Oakboys, were formed even in the good parts of Ulster; but they were much less dangerous and were not permanent. It is a characteristic of Whiteboyism, as it has ever since been called, that it has always had a political side, and lends itself to revolutionary movements against government itself.

Though Protestant ascendency was still supreme at this period, the confiscations of the past had not been forgotten; they were treasured in the minds of the descendants of the old Catholic families, and of the population among which they lived. The extinction, too, of the tribal Irish tenures, had, we have seen, been a cause of grievous wrongs; this was a tradition, also, handed down from father to son, and was still fresh in the remembrance of a whole race. The land system, though to outward seeming secure, nevertheless rested on unstable foundations, as was to appear in the course of time; another element of disturbance was being formed, which ultimately was to have immense force. Under the modes of land tenure, which prevailed in England, since the system of small holdings had been broken up, the land had generally been laid out in large farms; partly from this circumstance, and partly owing to custom, the charge of making permanent improvements of the land had almost everywhere devolved on the owner of the soil; a tenant, who rented a farm, took it, so to speak, equipped with the buildings and other things of the kind that were suitable to it. But in Ireland, partly because small farms were numerous, and partly because the custom had never grown up--the history of the past fully accounts for this--the permanent improvements were very seldom made by the landlord; the tenant, who held land, had to add, as it were, its plant to it; he had to do much that gave it any real value. As the inevitable result, the Irish occupier of the soil felt that he had acquired a concurrent right in it; this, if the improvements were solid and lasting, might almost amount to a partial joint-ownership, at least give him, in equity, a real hold on the land. But a right of this kind was not recognised by the law, founded as this was upon notions of English tenure; it was liable to be destroyed should the tenant be dispossessed; and as the tenure of the immense majority of the occupiers of the soil in Ireland was either at will, or for a short term at a high rent, this right, essentially of a quasi-proprietary kind, was made precarious, and had no legal protection. With the prescience of genius, Burke perceived the evils that might grow out of this state of things, though, as yet, these were not much felt; he saw that it discouraged improvement of almost every kind; especially he saw that the denial of legal sanction to the rights in the land a tenant might have, and the fact that his tenure was short and uncertain, might become a source of grave wrong, and of far-reaching discontent. In a word, he detected an economic vice in the land system of Ireland which, in the long run, was to do great mischief; and curiously enough he indicated the remedies that ought to be applied, and pointed out the true principles of a reform of Irish land tenure. It would have been well had British statesmen adopted these; his simple, just, and statesmanlike plan puts to shame the ill-designed and unsuccessful attempts that have been made to recast the Irish land system of late years, and the false, reckless, and socialistic theories at present current on this important subject.

I must pass over even the main events of the history of Ireland, after this period, up to the close of the eighteenth century. The 'Irish interest,' mainly composed of the great landed gentry, and turning to account the American War, compelled the Parliament at Westminster to relax many of the commercial restraints on Ireland, and to concede her a partial free trade; under the guidance of the illustrious Grattan it obtained legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. At the same time the Penal Code was largely repealed; the Irish Catholic was permitted to acquire the ownership of the soil; before long he received the electoral franchise, though he was still excluded from the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons. In these circumstances, Ireland made real material and social progress; the wealth of the country rapidly increased; the Protestant and Catholic upper classes began to unite in marriage; a commercial middle class, if still very weak, grew up. Ireland seemed about to enter a happier era; yet there were drawbacks to this partial welfare, especially as regards the land system. Middleman tenures were becoming much less frequent; absenteeism was markedly on the decline; but partly owing to their contact with the Parliament in College Green, and to the brilliant social life it created in Dublin, the landed gentry became more extravagant than their fathers had been; they began to raise their rents and to encumber their estates; over-renting became more common than before; Whiteboy movements and agrarian disorder prevailed in many districts. Ireland, however, probably would have made a great advance but for the evil passions which the French Revolution engendered in the frame of a society still deeply diseased. I cannot dwell on the unhappy years that followed, leading to the Rebellion of 1798; I must confine myself to their influence on the Irish land system. The object of Tone and of the United Irish leaders was to combine Scottish and Presbyterian Ulster, and the great mass of the Irish Catholics, into a league against British rule and for 'Irish freedom;' unhappily, they were but too successful. They appealed, not in vain, to thousands of farmers and traders in the Northern Province, who had long had solid grounds of discontent, and had been deeply stirred by the Revolution in France; they laid hold on the elements of disorder and of division of race and faith, abounding in Catholic Ireland, but largely concealed, and called on the peasantry to overthrow their Protestant tyrants, and to strike a decisive blow in 'the cause of Ireland.' Evil incentives were recklessly employed to arouse popular passions; maps of the old confiscated lands were made; and active emissaries went through the country, reviving dangerous traditions of the past, and stimulating the worst sentiments of hatred, greed, and revenge. As the result, sedition ran riot in Ulster; in the Southern Provinces there was a great outburst of Whiteboy crime, and a widespread rising against the payment of rent; and thousands of the occupiers of the soil were swept into the United Irish ranks, scarcely conscious of the perils to which they were exposed. How the movement led to the bloody rebellion of 1798, and how this was put down after a desperate struggle, it is unnecessary to consider here; the consequences in Irish landed relations were most unfortunate. It is untrue that the large majority of the owners of the Irish soil were guilty of the crimes that have been laid to their charge; but they bitterly resented the allusions to the confiscations of a bygone past; they became more estranged from their inferiors than they had been for years.

This terrible outbreak shook society in Ireland to its base, revived the old divisions of race and faith which had been disappearing to a considerable extent, and left memories behind which have not been forgotten. Its inevitable result was to lead to the Union, a measure long in the contemplation of British statesmen, and especially of Pitt, and perhaps necessary in the most critical circumstances of the time. I cannot even refer to the events attending this great constitutional change; a large majority of the leading Irish landlords disliked it at heart; but a minority, alarmed for their possessions, gave it support; how strong this feeling was may be seen in a famous speech of Lord Clare, who described the whole order of men as 'the heirs of confiscation hemmed in by enemies brooding on their wrongs.' The Union greatly weakened the influence of the Irish landed gentry, which had been very powerful in the defunct Parliament; the 'Irish interest,' for many years a real force, was almost subverted; English officials became again supreme at the Castle; a bureaucracy gradually began to supplant the aristocracy of landlords in every sphere of government. As respects the land and landed relations, the class of Catholic owners slowly augmented; but the consequences were trivial and not marked; middleman tenures continued steadily to disappear; but absenteeism certainly increased, though absentee estates were usually better managed than before. Meanwhile causes of grave importance, tending to momentous social results, were profoundly affecting the whole land system, and the position of the classes dependent on it. Partly owing to the corn laws of the Irish Parliament, partly to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise, in 1793, to the great mass of the Catholic peasantry, but principally to the effects of the long war with France, Ireland, it may be said, was well-nigh changed from a pastoral to an agricultural country; large farms were generally replaced by small; the land in most districts was divided into little tillage holdings; the cottar system multiplied apace; the population, about three millions of souls in the day of Arthur Young, increased to more than six millions at the Peace of 1815; and this population becoming every year more dense, for the most part eked existence out on a precarious root. The economic and social consequences were very great, and continued in operation during a long series of years. The competition for the possession of land became intensely keen; rents were unnaturally forced up in thousands of cases; the value of landed property enormously rose; all this encouraged extravagance among the landed gentry, and especially induced them largely to encumber their estates. At the same time the wages of labour distinctly declined; the condition of the Irish labouring peasant, when Edward Wakefield, a very industrious and able observer, wrote on the state of Ireland in 1812, was markedly worse than it had been in the time of Arthur Young. Yet these were not the most serious, at least, the most lasting, effects of the revolution taking place in landed relations. As the large farm system was being broken up, as the small farm system had come in its stead, and as population had rapidly grown, the occupiers of the soil had more and more made the permanent additions to their holdings; they had built, fenced, and reclaimed land, more and more; and in the general eagerness to obtain the possession of land, considerable sums were often paid for farms on their transfer. The concurrent rights of the tenant classes in Ireland had thus become enormously increased; they often amounted, equitably, to a real joint-ownership; yet these rights were without the support of law, and were liable to be extinguished often at the mere will of the landlord. In Ulster alone, in its Presbyterian and Scottish parts, where the landed classes had been less disunited than in the South, a custom, now of considerable strength, had for a long time made the tenure of the peasant comparatively secure; yet even this was not under the aegis of law.

Made wise, after the event, we now clearly perceive what ought to have been done for Ireland in this position of affairs. There never had been an Irish poor law; Protestant property was not to be charged for Catholic want; but the population was fast increasing; a mass of wretched poverty was being formed; this should have been supported, and yet checked, by a poor law. At the same time legislation, as Burke had contended, should have vindicated the moral rights of the occupier of the soil, should have made what really was his property his own, should have rendered his tenure profitable and secure. Nothing of the kind, however, came into the minds of British statesmen, or even, it must be said, of the best Irishmen of the day--the age was one of Toryism harsh and unfeeling; the abuses of the poor law in England were great; it was not contemplated to apply it to Ireland; above all, the equitable claims of the Irish tenant were not understood or deemed worthy of notice; English tenure, utterly unfitted to his true position, was good enough for him. The land system, nevertheless, was not much disturbed while the high prices of the war prevailed; there was a good deal indeed of disorder connected with the land, but society was not deeply affected. And it is only just to observe that the landlords, as a class, did respect the concurrent rights of their tenants in the soil; the conclusive proof is that these could not have grown up had they been generally, or even largely, set at nought. But a great and calamitous change passed over Ireland when the comparative wealth caused by the war collapsed, and when the return to cash payments made the effects worse. Rents suddenly fell greatly, and even disappeared; the wages of labour, which had usually been paid through what may be called a wretched truck system, were reduced to a remarkable degree; hundreds of thousands of the cottar peasantry sank to the lowest depths of indigence. A great social convulsion, in a word, took place; this culminated in famine in several counties; a miserable population was deprived of the means of subsistence. In these circumstances the owners of the soil acted as a class would ordinarily act; many, impoverished themselves, let things drift; many made themselves conspicuous for good works of charity; a minority had recourse to severe measures, like the English landlords of the sixteenth century, to get rid of a mass of poverty clinging in despair to the land. The old divisions of race and faith unquestionably aggravated this state of things; but the Government of the day showed little forethought, and, in fact, was infinitely the most to blame; it met the emergency, not by wise and healing measures, but by legislation, which made the eviction of the peasant from his holding easy and cheap, and by having recourse to repression unjust and severe in the extreme. In too many instances, 'clearances' of estates, an evil word, were witnessed; hundreds of families were driven from their homes and cast on the world; as the necessary result, in numberless cases, the equitable rights of the Irish tenant were ruthlessly destroyed. As a matter of course, Whiteboyism, never completely suppressed, broke out in formidable agrarian disorder; the peasantry, deprived of the protection of law, leagued themselves together to enforce a law of their own; crime multiplied to an immense extent; all the machinery of coercion could not wholly keep it under.

I must pass rapidly over the next twenty years, though a very important period in Irish history. Catholic emancipation was wrung by O'Connell, from a reluctant Ministry, through violent agitation, which distracted Ireland for years; the Irish Catholic was admitted into Parliament at last. This great event was followed by the savage Tithe War, a movement against the Anglican Church in Ireland stained with detestable deeds of blood; the representation of Ireland passed largely into O'Connell's hands, the head of what was called 'his Catholic Tail.' Protestant ascendency in Ireland received a mortal blow; the influence of the Irish landed gentry still further declined; that of the bureaucracy at the Castle increased. From this time forward the Irish landlord began to feel his position really insecure; it is remarkable how few large mansions and demesnes have ever since been designed or completed by this order of men. After the disastrous period which came to an end about 1826, the wealth of Ireland perceptibly grew; a kind of prosperity existed in many parts of the country. The age, too, had become more liberal and humane; the middleman was got rid of in not a few districts; the absentee landlords devoted more attention to their estates than they had ever devoted before. The process of eviction, moreover, became much less frequent, though too frequent for social order and peace; a considerable number of Irish landlords expended large sums in improving their lands; farms were consolidated, with good results, in many parts of the country. But the essential features of the land system were not much changed; its economic conditions became, in important respects, worse. The landed gentry, if much less extravagant than their fathers had been, were, nevertheless, as a class, much involved in debt; and, as usually has been seen in cases of the kind, they became less really prosperous, as their authority declined. Meanwhile, the population had continued rapidly to increase; by the close of this period it exceeded eight millions of souls, a total far too great for the resources of the land. The phenomena, already critical, became more sinister; rents were again forced up as the wealth of the country augmented, and reached the highest level they have ever attained; the wages of labour did not fall, indeed, they could hardly fall lower; but the cottar population had become more than ever dense; the competition for the possession of the soil grew fierce; as necessarily followed, the quasi-proprietary rights of the tenant in his holding had been enlarged, and yet these were still outside the pale of the law. A Report, made in 1837-38, disclosed the appalling fact that two millions and a half of the Irish community were for months in every year on the verge of starvation, and always in a condition of extreme misery. Though Ireland had made, in a sense, progress, her economic state had thus become dangerous, and very bad; and a poor law, enacted at last in 1838, was utterly unable to cope with the evil. Whiteboy crime and disorders continued to abound; in 1844, an average year, there were more than a thousand instances of offences in landed relations.

The year 1843 was that of the great Repeal movement, of which O'Connell was the master spirit. Peel had been Prime Minister for two years; his attention had been already turned to the vices and the perils of the Irish land system. He had been Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1812 to 1818; but he had been identified with the Tory misrule of that time; and though, like Chesterfield in another age, he had been too sagacious not to see that poverty made the social ills of Ireland more acute and worse, he had been the ablest opponent of the Catholic cause, had supported Protestant ascendency in many ways; and had not been in any sense an Irish reformer. A strong Conservative of the great middle class in England, he looked on Ireland as an almost foreign land, and had scarcely any knowledge of her real needs; and though his severe administration at the Castle had been wise and just, he carried out coercion with a steady hand, and is supposed to have been the author of the code of cheap ejectment, a cause of a great deal of evil and wrong. But his mind, if slow in moving, was moved at last; he saw that Ireland largely required the amending hand; the conduct of O'Connell, no doubt, had quickened his purpose. I cannot dwell on Peel's other Irish measures; at the close of 1843 he appointed a Commission charged to inquire into the state of Irish landed relations; had he continued long at the head of the State, he would probably have done much to improve the Irish land system. The Commission had, as President, the chief of the great House of Courtenay; it was almost wholly composed of Englishmen, more or less associated with land in England; it was, therefore, ill constituted to deal with what may be called the Irish Land Question. But it investigated the subject it treated with most praiseworthy care; entering into every detail of Irish landed relations, their history in the past, the state of land tenure, the condition of the different classes seated on the land, the working of the law with respect to tenant's improvements, the means of diminishing the wretched millions squatting on the soil, agrarian crime and all that it involved; the mass of evidence it collected is still of the greatest value. The Report it made, if somewhat over-cautious and timid, was very instructive in many respects; especially it showed how the Irish land system grew out of the conquests and confiscations of the past, and still bore the marks of its ill-omened origin, notably in the lines drawn between the owners and the occupiers of the soil marked by a profound division of race and faith; and many of the suggestions it made were wise, nay, excellent. But on the capital subject of land tenure, by many degrees the most important, the Report only too clearly revealed the ignorance of Englishmen as regards Ireland, and, above all, as regards her landed relations. The Commission ought to have fully recognised the concurrent rights in the soil, which the Irish occupier had acquired in tens of thousands of instances, rights often equivalent to more or less joint-ownership; it ought to have insisted that the Tenant Right, as it was now called, of the Ulster Custom, and the claims arising from improvements, the work of the tenant, and from sums paid on the transfer of farms, should be made law-worthy, and effectually secured. With a want of insight which would have made Burke gnash his teeth, it took exactly an opposite course; it warned the Irish landlord that these concurrent rights were creating against him 'an embryo copyhold,' and eating away his freehold ownership; it plainly hinted that he would do well to get rid of them. It even refused to acknowledge that the tenant had a claim to any improvements if made in the past; but it proposed a scheme for compensating him for improvements made in the future, so limited and fenced round with restrictions, that it was quite illusory, and indeed deceptive. The Report caused intense indignation in Ulster, and was not well received in any part of Ireland.

Bills, founded on the Report of the Devon Commission, as it was called, were brought into Parliament, but never became law. Within a few months Ireland was in the throes of an agony, the most terrible, perhaps, that has befallen any land in the nineteenth century. In the autumn of 1845, the potato, which formed the only food of the indigent multitudes fastened on the land, failed, to a considerable extent, in many districts; in the following year the crop was all but completely destroyed. Famine, far more general and appalling than that of twenty-five years before, had soon held a wretched population in its grasp; the results may almost be compared to those of the Black Death, and of the famines of the Middle Ages. The land system went to wreck in whole counties, especially in the west and along the seaboard; hundreds of the landed gentry were involved in ruin; thousands of farmers of the better class became bankrupt; the dense cottar multitudes were literally lifted up from the soil, and cast adrift, the waifs and strays of a far-reaching tempest. This is not the place to review the measures adopted to meet the dread visitation; if not free from errors, inevitable in a situation of the kind, they were, essentially, and, in the main, successful. Peel was still in office in 1845; well knowing what poverty in Ireland was, he introduced supplies of food into the remote and backward districts, which the energies of commerce could hardly reach; this wise policy saved tens of thousands of lives; as is notorious, he repealed the corn laws in the interest of the afflicted country. The Government of Lord John Russell had succeeded him in 1846; it had to confront an emergency infinitely worse; it followed, in many respects, the example of Peel, who had established 'relief works' in many counties; but it did not assist the most impoverished parts of Ireland with food through the agency of the State; this possibly was a real mistake. Nevertheless, it manfully and humanely met the tremendous crisis; it is easy to censure some of its acts, for instance, the wasteful and useless public works it set on foot, and the gigantic outdoor relief it was compelled to lavish; but millions in starvation were thrown on its hands; and the poor law, only lately in operation, could not cope with universal distress. On the whole, the statesmen in power did their duty wisely and well; thousands of unhappy victims succumbed, indeed, to famine, and to dire diseases following in its train; but Ireland as a people was saved; assuredly she could not have saved herself. A word, too, must be said on the magnificent charity which flowed in from many lands into the community in its woe. England had turned in sympathy towards Ireland in the season of distress which had followed the Peace; she bestowed great sums on her, in 1845-46, through private subscription. The United States, France, Germany, and Italy joined in the good work; even the Ottoman Empire was not behindhand.

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.' 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.

After the first months of the famine, the immense exodus of the Irish race, as it has fitly been called, began. The population fled from the country in hundreds of thousands; some found a home in England and in our Australian colonies; nine-tenths, probably, in the great Republic of the West. The sufferings of numbers of the emigrants were terribly severe; huddled together in the ill-found vessels of the time, hundreds perished before they beheld the lands they were seeking; that some check was not placed on the greed of the merchants, who subjected these victims to horrors like those of the Middle Passage, was certainly the worst mistake of the Government of the day. During the agony of the famine there was comparatively little crime; the minds of men were engrossed by a dire calamity; but in a few months Whiteboyism had been again aroused; there was a widespread outbreak of agrarian disorder followed by the abortive rising of 1848. The time was now ripe, in the judgment of even leading statesmen, for making another of the great experiments on the Irish land, which had been their policy since the age of the Tudors. Many of the Irish landed gentry had been ruined; the estates of many were heavily charged with debt, in part caused by extravagance in the past, but chiefly by large provisions made for their families in more prosperous times, especially during the period of the high prices of the war. The object of the Government--and Peel concurred--was to make a clean sweep of the embarrassed owners, and to transfer their lands to a new order of men; 'English and Scottish capital was to be attracted to the Irish soil;' the Irish landlord was to be 'sold out cheap;' his successor was to be a person fit 'to discharge the duties of property;' the 'regeneration of Ireland' was to be the magnificent result. The sale of encumbered estates in Ireland had from various causes been a slow and a costly process, an Act was run through Parliament with scarcely an expression of dissent, making the process as rapid and inexpensive as the wit of man could devise; a Commission was appointed to carry the law into effect; and intending purchasers were to be given an indefeasible title to any lands they might acquire. This was a strong measure, but it was not nearly all; the concurrent rights of the tenants in the estates to be sold were absolutely ignored, and left without protection; the new possessors were empowered to destroy them if they pleased. The results were such as might have been looked for when lands were forced into the market wholesale, when Ireland was still reeling from the strokes of a terrible famine, and agricultural ruin was seen everywhere. The Commission acted as such tribunals invariably act when skilfully selected to carry out a policy; it addressed itself to its task of 'selling land cheap;' it was egged on by the Lord-Lieutenant of the day; and it sacrificed estates, in scores of instances, at less than half their value. This iniquitous proceeding went on for years, until the market for land in Ireland righted itself at last; but the Encumbered Estates Act was often renewed; about a sixth part of the lands of Ireland has been transferred by these means. As the result many of the Irish gentry, who might have tided over the crisis, were beggared and cast on the world penniless; and confiscation from above had its counterpart in confiscation from below; the partial joint-ownership of thousands of the occupiers of the soil was ruthlessly annihilated in numbers of cases. And what were the consequences of this scheme of spoliation and wrong, which English politicians would never have thought of but for their traditional contempt of the rights of property in land in Ireland? English and Scottish capital, indeed, reached the Irish soil; but it reached it in the form of large mortgages, a heavy drain on the country's resources; the English and Scottish purchasers of the Irish land were a mere handful of men. The estates, in fact, transferred under the Encumbered Estates Acts, as a rule, passed into the ownership of jobbers, speculators, and mortgagees, people without the associations old possession ensures; they have formed, as a class, harsh and exacting landlords, the true successors of the almost defunct middleman; they are responsible for much that is bad in Irish landed relations of late years. A huge confiscation, in a word, failed, as those of Elizabeth and Cromwell failed before; the fact ought to be a warning to public men, who have been parading theories about the Irish land--strewn as this has been with monuments of misdeeds and errors--as false and more dangerous than those which produced the Encumbered Estates Acts.

For some time it seemed as though the forecasts made by the great majority of our statesmen would prove correct. The immense emigration from Ireland to the United States had important results, unfortunate in many respects; but the uplifting of redundant millions from the soil greatly contributed to the country's welfare. Holdings were consolidated over very large areas, a beneficent process, if humanely carried out; a certain number of Englishmen and Scotsmen rented large farms; the progress of husbandry of all kinds was distinct; a vast field for agriculture, really worthy of the name, was opened. A new standard for the management of land was, in fact, set up; at the same time a few purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, laid out considerable sums in improving their estates; the Treasury made large advances to many Irish landlords; these did much in works of enclosure, draining, planting, and the like. Ireland began to wear a new aspect in several counties, especially in the more thriving parts of the southern provinces; the ruins made by the Famine, indeed, caused hideous eyesores, in wrecks of villages and the remains of peasant dwellings; but the mud hovels of the cottar population had largely disappeared, and the habitations of farmers of the better class very markedly improved. The economic conditions of landed relations became more conducive to prosperity than they had ever been before; rents fell considerably during a series of years, as the intense competition for land diminished; though they gradually rose in the course of time, they never reached the excessive rates of 1840-45; and the wages of labour greatly increased, and attained a level that, happily, has since been preserved. Many circumstances concurred to quicken and augment this unquestionable social and material progress. Agricultural prices were high from about 1852 onward; Free Trade was as yet adding to the wealth of Ireland; and there was a long succession of good harvests, the most important element in her general welfare. The railway system, too, introduced of late years, opened a number of new markets to her products, and greatly facilitated their access to British markets. At the same time the turnip replaced the potato over hundreds of thousands of acres; farm machinery greatly improved in Ireland; the importation of the best stock from England and Scotland had excellent results, and almost transformed the old breeds of Irish farming animals. An era of prosperity, in a word, had seemed to dawn on Ireland; and though agrarian disorder had not disappeared, the Whiteboy secret societies were greatly broken up, and political agitation well-nigh ceased.

In these circumstances, it was a common belief in England that 'the Irish difficulty,' as it was called, was passing away, and that the 'Hibernia Pacata' had at last become a happy reality. Yet the progress and tranquillity of this brief period were largely superficial and even deceptive; fires were still alive beneath the smouldering ashes. The partial prosperity of Ireland mainly depended on good harvests and high prices; it was interrupted, even in these years, by two or three seasons of distress. Notwithstanding the widespread consolidation of farms, and the removal from the soil of indigent millions, the land still, for the most part, remained in the possession of a mere peasantry; very few of the English and Scottish capitalist farmers settled in Ireland, and really throve; the great majority left the country, like the 'Englishry' of a bygone age. And though things wore a serene aspect, the inherent vices of the land system continued to exist; in some respects they increased, or were more painfully felt. The old divisions of race and faith between the owners and the occupiers of the soil remained; they had but little changed and even had perhaps widened; much had happened to keep the landed classes more apart than before. The new purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, were, we have seen, often hard-fisted and grasping landlords; they raised their rents, without scruple, in too many instances; standing on the letter of the law, they too often ignored the partial joint-ownership in their farms of their tenants; they had sometimes recourse to unjust and severe evictions. The old landlords, too, never recovered from the effects of the Famine; they were overshadowed by the bureaucracy of the Castle, which, for many years, had been growing in power; they thus became an order of men with privileges, but without authority, in the midst of inferiors, who had little sympathy with them, a dangerous position like that of the French seigneurie in the later years of the eighteenth century--a position described by Tocqueville in very striking language. At the same time the peasantry stood aloof from them more than in the days of their fathers; and though they remained quiescent for years, as has often happened in Irish history, there were causes for this increasing estrangement. They were no longer the grossly ignorant multitude of fifty years before; education had made some way among them, though in this respect they were still backward; they felt more acutely all that was hard in their lot, like the French peasantry before the great Revolution of 1789-94. This sentiment, however, owed its principal force to sentiments engendered in far distant lands. The thousands of the exodus had left their country with memories embittered against some Irish landlords, and, notably, against the British Government; a new Ireland was rising across the Atlantic; the emigrants and their sons were in constant communication with the old Ireland once their home; socialistic ideas as regards the land, blending with dislike of the superiors and the rulers, under whom they lived, were gradually diffused among the Irish peasantry. The economic conditions, too, of landed relations by degrees made these feelings more general and intense. Rents were rising as the wealth of the country increased, though, except in the cases of the new landlords, and of a very few surviving middlemen, they were, as a rule, by no means excessive. Simultaneously a concurrence of causes had extinguished leasehold tenures in most parts of Ireland, and had reduced the status of the Irish farmer to that of a mere tenant at will, liable to be dispossessed by a notice to quit, at the mercy, in fact, of the lord of the soil. And, meanwhile, the equitable rights of the occupiers as a class, due to improvements, and to sums paid for the goodwill of farms, had been increasing to an immense extent; and yet a grievous wrong--they were not even recognised by law. Law and fact had long been sharply clashing in landed relations; there was much that was essentially bad in the land system; and agrarian trouble and crime was on the increase.

The mind of England had turned away from Ireland after the petty outbreak of 1848; it charged the Irish community with ungrateful folly, as it recollected the charity lavished during the Famine. This sentiment was replaced by what was worse, indifference; throughout this period--from 1850 to 1868--Parliament gave little attention to the affairs of Ireland. British statesmen continued to pin their faith to their policy; they disregarded ominous symptoms on the increase; Ireland was rapidly becoming more prosperous; the claims of the Irish tenant farmer were a delusion, or worse. This apathy was augmented by the state of the representation of Ireland in these years; this was in a feeble, even a degraded condition; and largely owing to the authority of Cardinal Cullen, who prohibited the Irish priesthood from taking any part in politics, agitation, I have said, had become a mere tradition of the past. Yet the causes I have glanced at were silently at work, which ultimately were to lead to grave social troubles. The first sign of disturbance was seen in a little outbreak, the result of a conspiracy hatched by one of the rebels of 1848, and supported to some extent from America: but the 'Phoenix plot,' as it was called, almost at once collapsed; the Government thought it hardly worthy of notice. Another and much more formidable conspiracy was matured in 1864-65; and though it was put down with little difficulty in time, it showed that there was much that was peccant in the state of Ireland; and it deeply affected the minds of Englishmen, aroused as it were out of a fool's paradise. The millions of the Irish race in the Far West were passionately appealed to by leaders, not without parts, to assist in a crusade against 'landlordism,' and British rule in Ireland; they gave the movement very general support; they found numerous allies in thousands of Irishmen disbanded after the great conflict between the North and the South. The Fenian conspiracy was launched on its course; its directors made skilful attempts to debauch whole regiments, and to stir up the passions of the mob in many of the towns of Ireland; and they especially turned their attention to the mass of the peasantry. Here, however, their policy was injudicious and ill-conceived; they promised the Irish land as a spoil to those who would join the ranks of the 'patriot Irish army;' but all this alarmed the occupiers of the soil, whose only object was to acquire a better mode of tenure for their farms, and who rightly thought the Fenian movement made their possessions insecure, a belief generally encouraged by the Catholic priesthood. A short-lived rising, conducted by a few American soldiers, and backed by the rabble of a few villages and towns, found no real support in Ireland, and was finally quelled in 1867; but in England there was a spurt of Fenian disorder, and this, though easily quenched, made a profound impression. It was generally felt in England and Scotland that, notwithstanding the optimism of a generation of public men, there was still much that was rotten in the state of Ireland, and that this should be removed by large and searching reforms. The chief sign of this change in British opinion was seen in the result of the General Election of 1868; Mr. Gladstone, who, hitherto, had taken comparatively little part in Irish affairs, but who, with his keen instinct of every turn in the public mind, had been vehemently enlarging on the wrongs of Ireland, was placed in power with a great majority, and at once addressed himself to the task of Irish reform.

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND --THE IRISH LAND ACT OF 1870--THE LAND LEAGUE AND THE NATIONAL LEAGUE--THE LAND OF 1881--SUBSEQUENT LEGISLATION AS REGARDS THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND

State of landed relations in Ireland in 1869-70--Mr. Gladstone Prime Minister--The Land Act of 1870--Its merits and defects--A short period of prosperity in Ireland--Ominous symptoms--Michael Davitt--The teaching of John Finton Lalor in 1848--The 'New Departure' in Fenianism arranged in America--Foundation of the Land League--It was a foreign rebellious conspiracy, with an agrarian side, under a constitutional mask--Parnell the master spirit of the League--His visit to America and the results--A short period of distress in Ireland--Conduct of the Irish landlords--Progress of the Land League--Mr. Gladstone again Prime Minister in 1880--The Compensation for Disturbance Bill rejected by the House of Lords--Outburst of agrarian crime, as the Land League increases in power--Rents at Griffith's valuation--Boycotting--Frightful state of Ireland in 1881--After a short attempt to repress it, Mr. Gladstone surrenders to the Land League--The Land Act of 1881--Mr. Gladstone breaks the pledges he had made in 1870--His promise of compensating the Irish landlords--The Land Act of 1881 a bad and unjust measure directly inconsistent with that of 1870--The 'No Rent Manifesto'--The Kilmainham Treaty--The Phoenix Park tragedy--Coercion--Parnell founds the National League, the successor of the Land League--Renewal of agitation in 1886--Struggle with law and the Government--Subsequent agrarian legislation for Ireland--This is really a concession to agitation, for the benefit of Irish tenants, and to the injury of Irish landlords.

Mr. Gladstone, after his conversion to Home Rule, more than once declared that, almost from early manhood he had given special attention to Ireland; either his memory was at fault, or he had kept the fact to himself. He had been a conspicuous figure in politics, for many years before 1868; but until he had been placed at the helm of the State, he had shown little acquaintance with Irish questions, and, indeed, had expressed few opinions on them. In 1866 he had said in the House of Commons, that the existence of the Anglican Irish Church would be probably long; he had been in high office almost since 1853, and, as a colleague of Lord Palmerston, had acquiesced in the philippics of that statesman against Irish tenant right, conduct that revealed ignorance of the land system of Ireland. But, in 1868, when the Fenian outbreak had caused the nation to demand large reforms in Ireland, he suddenly abandoned his attitude of reserve; he threw himself into Irish affairs; his zeal, it may be remarked, as often happened, fell in with his interests, and with those of the Liberal party, and gave him a leverage to drive Disraeli from office. During months before the General Election that ensued, the orator thundered on Irish grievances, and on the manifold ills of Ireland; in figurative and impassioned language, he said that the island was blighted by a huge upas tree, the Church, the land, and education being the three main branches. These harangues, addressed to the new democracy, contributed powerfully to the fall of the Conservative Ministry; it was little noticed, at the time, that one of the results was ere long to compel Mr. Gladstone himself to subject Ireland to severe repressive measures, for Whiteboy and agrarian outrages became frequent In 1869, the Minister addressed himself to the task of hewing down the first branch of the poisonous upas; he disestablished and disendowed the Protestant Church of Ireland. This is not the place to comment upon that great measure; it was well designed upon its professed principles; it dealt liberally, nay, generously, with the voluntary Church, which replaced the Church of the State it overthrew. But essentially it was a scheme of destruction, formed in Nonconformist not in Irish interests, and opposed to the views of generations of statesmen; it made no provision for the clergy of the Irish Catholic Church, a policy which Pitt, Castlereagh, and Lord John Russell had had at heart, which had been all but a condition of the Union, and which, if carried into effect, would have done much to strengthen and maintain that fundamental law, and to promote tranquillity in Ireland and her general welfare.

Mr. Gladstone now turned to the second branch of the upas, the land system of Ireland and her landed relations. His whole career, especially in its Home Rule phase, proves that his knowledge of Ireland was not exact or profound; at this time he had had little experience of the Irish land question. But the mind of England was still attracted to Irish affairs; a number of distinguished Englishmen and Scotchmen went to Ireland, to investigate the state of the country on the spot; the British Press sent some of its best contributors; the time was singularly opportune for a fair and complete inquiry; no Minister has had, before or since, such assistance in dealing with Irish problems. I must glance at the state of the Irish land system in 1869-70, as this was fully explored and made manifest. The material progress being made, since about 1854, had been largely developed in by far the greatest part of the island. The population was being still diminished by emigration and other causes; the area for real husbandry had been greatly extended; the rural community, at least in its lower grades, was infinitely better off than it had been before the Famine. The look of the country, in most places, bore witness to a change beneficent in the main; it had been almost transformed since 1844-45. The cottar system, no doubt, was to be found in backward counties; but even in these it had been largely effaced; it was all but passing away in the more thriving counties; masses of indigence were to be seen only in tracts west of the Shannon; and these were aggregated on an area comparatively small. The general consolidation of farms had, meanwhile, gone on; and though Ireland remained, on the whole, a land of small farms, her land system had, from top to bottom, ceased to depend for its support on a perishable root. In every conceivable respect a marked improvement was visible in the state of the peasantry; they were by many degrees better clothed and fed than their fathers had been; the wages of agricultural labour were still rising, and were now paid in money, and not in plots of potatoes; and though the habitations of this whole class were, as a rule, still mean, the dwellings of the class of substantial farmers had shown signs of distinct social progress. At the same time agriculture had made a marked advance, owing to the influences I have referred to before; fine specimens of extensive farming were very commonly to be seen; thousands of acres had been reclaimed and enclosed of late years; at no period certainly had the landed gentry, in a great measure through moneys borrowed from the State, expended such large sums in improving their estates, especially in arterial drainage, and the introduction of the best breeds of stock of all kinds. The wealth of Ireland, too, was increasing, if not rapidly; and a change for the better might be traced in what we may describe as her general social life. Her middle class was still weak and small compared to that of England and Scotland; but it had been growing in wealth and power; and this, to some extent, had had a good effect on a community still mainly dependent on the land.

The material and even the social progress of Ireland, since the Famine, had thus been marked; it had been more decided than it has been, at any period, except, possibly, that from 1782 to 1800. Her land system, too, had become better in important parts; but in many respects it remained vicious; some of its vices had been aggravated, or were more sensibly felt. The hope that the land would pass generally into the hands of large farmers, able to develop its resources, had not been realised, or had been realised only to a relatively trivial extent; it was still held in the main by a peasantry of small occupiers of the soil, though the consolidation of farms had gone on over extensive areas, especially over wide tracts of pasturage, in the eastern, midland, and western counties, and this, in some instances, through a process of harsh eviction. The profound divisions of race and faith, the distinctive feature in the organic structure of the whole community, were at least as visible as ever in the land system; from causes I have pointed out before, they had, not improbably, been widened; this tended to increase the old dissension in landed relations, and the long-standing separation between the landed classes. Middleman tenures, with their mischievous effects, had, since the Famine, well-nigh disappeared; but the new landlord had largely replaced the middleman; absenteeism remained what it had been; and though absentee estates, as a rule, were under good agents, there was too much of that 'absenteeism of the heart,' condemned by Tocqueville as a grave social danger. The purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts, with some honourable exceptions, no doubt, were too often oppressive landlords; the old landlords, as a class, had, certainly, done much for their estates, but they had lost their political and largely their social influence; partly owing to apprehensions as regards tenant right, partly to the assurances of statesmen that their position was safe, they had become perhaps more exacting in their dealings with their dependents; in the existing situation, they more and more resembled a weak caste, controlled by the central Government, and isolated amidst a community, to a great extent, not friendly. All this tended to produce a want of stability and insecurity in the land system, which was ominous of social strife and trouble; but the most active element of disturbance was to be certainly found in the contact with the rebellious movement which Ireland had lately witnessed. Fenianism had been scotched, but by no means slain; and though the peasantry had held aloof from it, Fenian emissaries were going through the country, appealing to the passions and the greed of the occupiers of the soil, for different reasons not contented with their lot, hostile, in a great degree, to the order of things around them, and more alive to their grievances than in the past generation; at this very time a cry against the payment of rent, and against 'landlordism,' as it was called, was being heard in a few counties. It was significant that agrarian crimes--some of the worst type--and agrarian disorder were distinctly increasing; and it should be added, that, in spite of Cardinal Cullen, the younger Catholic priests, in some districts, were beginning to play the part of agitators again.

Only a revolution, which Parliament would not have sanctioned, could have effaced the inveterate ills of the Irish land system, running up to the conquests and the confiscations of the past, and the divisions of race and faith in the Irish land; the remark is as true now as it was thirty years ago; and a revolution of the kind, I am firmly convinced, would, even under the best conditions, make infinitely worse whatever was already bad. But it was possible for legislation to remove or mitigate the essential vices in the modes of Irish land tenure; Mr. Gladstone rightly confined himself to this object. He brought in his first Irish Land Bill in the early spring of 1870; he had to address a House of Commons not much in sympathy with a project of the kind. Many of the members were ignorant of the subject; many thought English land tenure perfect, and could not understand why it would not do for Ireland, a prejudice at least three centuries old; some believed Irish tenant right to be a violation of Free Trade, then in the ascendant in every phase of commerce. The Minister's speech was adapted to those who heard it; it was tentative, moderate, not striking; he drew, indeed, very plain distinctions between British and Irish land tenure, and showed how the first could be no rule of right for the second; but if he enlarged on the just claims of the occupier of the Irish soil, he did not venture to maintain, what he probably felt, that these were often equivalent to a joint-ownership more or less developed. He was, in short, dexterous, but not profound; very inferior to Burke, who, a century before, had grasped the essential facts in this province, though the question was still in the remote future. The most important parts of Mr. Gladstone's speech, and indeed, of those of his leading followers, regard being had to events by no means distant, were those in which he repudiated, with no doubtful censure, the whole theory of the 'Three F's,' the extreme demand, at this time, of the tenant class in Ireland. 'Fair Rent' he argued, especially if adjusted by the State, deprives a landlord of his first proprietary right, and involves his expropriation in the long run; 'Fixity of Tenure' means a perpetuity for the tenant, to which he has no just claim, and involves confiscation hardly disguised; 'Free Sale' was but a corollary to legislation on these principles. At the same time, Mr. Gladstone protested, with marked emphasis, that the Bill he was introducing was to be absolutely a final measure; it was to effect a permanent settlement of the Irish land; Irish landlords would have nothing more to apprehend, Irish tenants to expect. In this instance, as in that of Home Rule, the orator was to belie himself, and to be a curious example of the irony of Fate; within a few years he was to legislate on the lines he had denounced as dangerous and false; to carry into effect a scheme for dealing with the Irish land, infinitely worse than that of the 'Three F's;' to scatter the 'finality,' to which he had pledged his word, to the winds.

The Bill thus launched was a comprehensive and wise measure, if not free from real, even grave, defects; it remains the only statesmanlike scheme for the settlement of Irish landed relations that hitherto has received the assent of Parliament. It made the tenant right of Ulster, in its various forms, as these existed in different estates, law-worthy, and protected to the fullest extent; it gave the same sanction to the inchoate tenant right of the southern provinces. This was, in itself, an immense reform; but the Bill properly had a far wider sweep; it extended, with the exception of certain kinds of lands, such as demesnes, town parks, holdings of a residential type, and, in most cases, large pastoral holdings, to nearly all the occupiers of the Irish soil; even the excepted lands were partially within its scope. The first great object of the measure was to secure to the Irish tenant the rights he had acquired to improvements he may have made on his farm, a right hitherto not within the pale of the law; its provisions, in this respect, were, I think, excellent. With a true perception of the unquestionable fact that, though the Irish landlords, especially of late years, had expended considerable sums on their estates, still, as is inevitable under the small-farm system, the Irish tenant, as a general rule, had made the greatest part of the additions to the land, Mr. Gladstone provided that, subject to limitations by no means severe, in order that the law should not run wild, improvements made on farms, in the absence of proof to the contrary, should be deemed to be the tenant's property, thus reversing the presumption of English law, iniquitous when applied to Irish tenures, that what is annexed to the soil belongs to the owner, and not to its occupant. The ground being, so to speak, cleared, the Bill declared that, in almost all cases, a tenant should have a right, when leaving his farm, even though dispossessed for the failure to pay his rent, to claim compensation, from his landlord, for his improvements; and facilities were offered to landlords to discharge these claims through loans from the State. In order, however, reasonably to secure right being done, in a complex and very difficult matter, the Bill proceeded to define improvements, and to impose restrictions on claims, to which objection could fairly be made. Apart from unexhausted tillages and manures, an improvement was to be a work 'suitable to a holding, and adding to its letting value,' a description as equitable and precise as could well be desired. And, speaking generally, claims in respect of improvements were not to be preferred were the improvement twenty years old, except in the case of buildings and the reclamation of waste land; nor if the improvement were prohibited by the landlord, under the conditions laid down; nor if it were made under a contract for value; nor if it were forbidden by a special contract; nor if, in certain cases, the landlord had agreed to make it; nor if the claim was barred by express written contract, in the case of improvements made before the Bill became law; nor, in the case, with some exceptions, of certain classes of leases; nor if the landlord, under certain conditions, permitted a tenant to dispose of his interest in his farm.

This measure, therefore, gave the Irish tenant farmer complete property in his improvements, within reasonable bounds, and yet did not here invade the just rights of the landlord; it was only to be regretted that it had not been proposed many years before. It proceeded, however, a great deal further, and asserted a principle, for the behoof of the tenant, which has since been very generally condemned, though in my judgment, it was essentially right, if carried somewhat beyond proper and safe limits. Except in the case of leases granted before the Bill, and of a class of leases granted when it was to become law, Mr. Gladstone engrafted on the great mass of Irish tenancies what really was a new tenant right; he was probably convinced, though he did not say so, that this was to be an equivalent for the joint-ownership, more or less manifest, which, in innumerable instances, the Irish occupier had acquired in the soil. This tenant right was given the rather ambiguous name of 'Compensation,' in the event of 'Disturbance;' a sum varying in amount from seven to one year's rent, according to the size of the holding, but in no case to exceed ?250, was to be paid to a tenant when dispossessed by a notice to quit, and, in some circumstances, by other means; this was to be over and above any sum due in respect of improvements; but this, too, as in the case of the last-named sum, was to be paid only when the tenant was 'quitting' the land. Obviously this was a potential tenant right, if to be realised only in one way; it practically gave a quasi-proprietary right in the fee, as, when commenting on the Bill, I pointed out at the time; and I certainly thought that the compensation was very large, and introduced a principle into the Bill which might be abused. Two other provisions of the measure, with respect to the position of the Irish tenant, may be briefly noticed. No attempt was made to adjust rents, through the agency of the State, Mr. Gladstone having expressly denounced the idea; but in the case of petty occupiers, subjected to 'exorbitant rents,' compensation for disturbance might be adjudged to them, even if evicted for not paying the rent, that is, the landlord might be mulcted in very heavy penalties. In nearly all instances, too, the tenant was declared to be entitled to 'his away-going crops,' another privilege, sometimes of no little value, and analogous to that secured by usage in many parts of England. So far the Bill dealt with the Irish land on the side of occupation; but it dealt with it, also, on the side of ownership. John Bright had urged the expediency, during several years, of facilitating the transfer of the fee simple, in his holding, to the Irish tenant; this policy had been carried out, to some extent, by the Act disestablishing the Anglican Church in Ireland. The Bill of 1870 extended the principle; it provided that the State might advance moneys to Irish tenants, to enable them to become owners of their farms; but--and this should especially be kept in mind--the tenant was to supply a third part of the purchase money at least; and the transaction was to be effected by free contract, that is, by the voluntary act of the landlord disposing of his land. It remains to add, that the administration of the measure, was, for the most part--subject to an appeal to the Superior Courts--entrusted to the County Courts of Ireland, that is, to long-established tribunals of repute.

The Bill passed through both Houses with little change; it has long been known as the Irish Land Act of 1870. It was, in the main, I repeat, a great reforming measure; it effected a far-reaching improvement in the tenure of land in Ireland, and that without any marked infringement of the just rights of property. No impartial mind can fairly object to the protection given to the tenant right of the north and the south, or to the compensation secured for tenants' improvements; if 'Compensation for Disturbance' was a bold experiment, still this Parliamentary tenant right, as it may be called, was in harmony with fact in nearly all instances. Nevertheless, the Act had three marked defects; these largely detracted from its practical value. It bristled with such exceptions and limitations that it was difficult even for the learned to understand; it seemed to the unlettered peasant a dangerous puzzle, involving him, perhaps, in lawsuits and costs; it did not strike his imagination as a substantial boon. Though, too, it annexed a real tenant right to nearly all farms, and thus secured to the Irish tenant, in almost all cases, any joint-ownership he may have acquired in the land, still this was intelligible only to educated men; 'Compensation for Disturbance' was to be given only when an occupier was about to leave his holding; but this was exactly what he could not bear to do; he was, therefore, ready to accept almost any terms, rather than face consequences he dreaded to think of. Mr. Gladstone, again, had, in this measure, shown that he wished to assimilate Irish to English land tenure in the long run; he sought to vindicate the just claims of the Irish tenant; but he desired ultimately to give him the status of his fellow in England, a long-standing, false conception of British statesmen. The Land Act, therefore, provided that most of the rights it conferred on the tenant might be commuted by the grant of a lease for thirty-one years or upwards; and it further enacted that tenants of the larger kind might 'contract themselves out' of the privileges it gave, by voluntary agreements made with their landlords. The object of this was to place the Irish land, by degrees, no doubt, under rather long leases, discharged from the tenant right and other claims; but in the circumstances of Ireland this was a mistake. This part of the Act was a temptation to landlords, to persuade or even to force tenants to accept leases under conditions which might be too severe, with respect to rent and many other things, and to forego rights they would otherwise have enjoyed, by a process which might not be a free contract; it encouraged, in a word, unfair evasion of the law. This flaw in the measure was pointed out from the first; Mr. Gladstone, however, denied its existence, and characteristically shut his ears to other schemes of reform, notably to an ingenious proposal of the late Judge Longfield to extend the Ulster tenant right to all Irish tenancies by a very simple and self-acting process, and to a proposal of Butt to convert tenancies at will into long leaseholds, at the rents then current. These projects certainly deserved attention; and, whatever their shortcomings, were easy to understand.

The Act of 1870, like the Act dealing with the Protestant Church, was followed by a short-lived outbreak of agrarian crime put down only by severe coercive measures. This phenomenon has been common in Irish history, from the days of Tyrconnell to the present time; disorder has been the immediate result of concessions; peccant humours discharge themselves if you touch the head of an ulcer. There is some reason, too, to believe that in a few instances--and they were very few--wrongheaded landlords, alarmed at the prospect before them, began to harass and even to dispossess tenants; they aimed at 'clearing' their estates, in order to evade the law; conduct of this kind naturally provoked indignation in some places. Nevertheless, the Land Act of 1870 was generally well received in Ireland, though it fell short of the popular demand, and it was ill understood by the tenant classes; many farmers availed themselves of its benefits, especially those holding under the Ulster custom. Five or six years of prosperity followed, the brightest perhaps ever seen in Ireland; agricultural prices were high, harvests extremely good; the material progress of the country was decided; the peasantry seemed, as a rule, contented; agitation abandoned, as it were, the land, and concentrated itself on the Home Rule movement. Mr. Gladstone, always optimistic, and proud of his own offspring, boasted, towards the close of his first Ministry, that his recent legislation had done wonders; the Land Act had reconciled Irish landlords and tenants, and had greatly increased the selling price of land; he refused to see how much of all this was due to a cause wholly independent of himself, the comparative well-being of nearly all Ireland. As had happened in the period from 1854 to 1870, this tranquillity was not deeply founded or complete; as then, it was, in a great degree, deceptive. The peasantry were living fast in a good time; banks and traders had made large advances to them on the security of tenure the law had created; their position became such, in some districts, that a season of distress might reduce many to sudden poverty, and be productive of the necessarily resulting evils. Rents, again, were rising as the country grew in wealth, though except in comparatively few cases--a fact that should be steadily kept in view--they were still, as a rule, by no means excessive; they were far below the rents of thirty years before; but this gradual rise was of course not popular. In some instances, too--but these were very rare, as was conclusively proved at a subsequent time--tenants, under more or less pressure on the part of their landlords, had accepted leases excluding them from the advantages of the law, and not equitable in some respects, or had wholly 'contracted themselves out' of the Act; this naturally caused alarm and distrust in many peasant dwellings. But the principal reasons that content was really less than it seemed to be in landed relations were altogether of a different nature. Like too many even excellent reforms in Ireland, the Land Act of 1870 became law too late; twenty years before it would have been hailed as an extraordinary boon; it was now regarded as almost a half measure, in view of the socialistic ideas about the land afloat. At the same time, Fenianism continued to make its influence felt; Irish-Americans continued to flit through the country denouncing British rule and Irish landlords, and calling upon the peasantry, as in 1798, to rise. Even in these years of prosperity, though rents were well paid, there was a secret movement against rent beneath the surface of things, so well concealed that it was absolutely unknown by the Government.

Meanwhile, in the midst of apparent peace, the elements of trouble in Ireland still quiescent were to come to a head and to give rise to a movement. The most formidable to British rule though skilfully masked, which had been seen since the rebellion of 1798. Revolutionary schemes in Ireland have always fastened on the land as the chief source from which they could derive strength; the United Irish movement as I have pointed out, was connected with a peasant movement against the payment of rent. This idea had been brought into marked prominence by John Finton Lalor, one of the rebels of 1848, a comparatively unknown but a sagacious man; 'You must associate' he wrote, 'the cause of Irish liberty, for which the people really care little with a cause for which they care a great deal; an inert mass must be yoked to a powerful engine; the Irish landlord must be driven from the land and the peasant masses be made its owners; and the fall of English power will follow that of its landlord garrison.' These words fell for the moment on unheeding ears; but the tradition has continued from that day to this the destruction of Irish 'landlordism' was one of the objects of the Fenian leaders of 1865-67, and they denounced the Irish gentry in atrocious language, though they did not know how to carry out their policy. This teaching was eagerly adopted by Michael Davitt, a Fenian, who had been convicted of a crime against the State; during a long imprisonment at Dartmoor, he brooded 'on his country's wrongs,' but satisfied himself that if the independence of Ireland was a patriot's first object, this could be attained only by uprooting the existing land system, by hounding on the occupiers of the soil against its owners, and by handing it over as spoil to the peasantry. Davitt was released from Dartmoor at the close of 1877; he attended a meeting in Dublin at which Parnell was present, and two of the assassins of the Phoenix Park tragedy; and he became supreme in the ranks of the Fenian societies, known as 'the Irish Republican Brotherhood,' which still retained a feeble life in Ireland, and even in England and Scotland. A short time afterwards he made his way to the United States, where he found the Fenians divided into two parties, known under the general name of the Clan na Gael, but having different objects, though with a common purpose. Both parties were for liberating Ireland 'from the Saxon yoke;' but the most violent and the most active sought to attain this end by expedients of desperate force; a 'skirmishing fund' had been established; 'England was to be invaded' by small bodies of 'resolute men;' her capital and chief towns were to be destroyed by dynamite. The other party, more prudent, but with similar aims, had been struck by Parnell's attitude in the House of Commons, and by the success of his unscrupulous tactics; its leaders began to think that something might be done by 'constitutional means;' they gradually came to an agreement with Davitt, that 'the overthrow of English domination' was to be their ultimate end; but that efforts in this direction were to be linked with energetic efforts to subvert 'the landlord system, a disgrace to humanity and to the civilisation of the present century;' to banish the Irish landed gentry from their country, and to secure their estates for their tenantry. This movement, though rebellious in no doubtful sense, was nevertheless to have a legal disguise; the wolf was to wear sheep's clothing; the 'formation of a peasant proprietary, and the abolition of arbitrary evictions,' were to be its proposed objects.

Treason, seeking support from socialistic greed, was thus the origin of the Land League conspiracy, for this was its only legitimate name. I have glanced at this movement, on its political side, as it was associated with the cause of Home Rule; I must here consider it on its agrarian side, the most prominent, if not the most dangerous, to the State. The compact between Davitt and the moderates of the Clan na Gael was called the 'New Departure;' Davitt returned to Ireland to stir up what became known as the 'Land War;' Fenian emissaries went to Ireland, about the same time, in order to collect arms and to drill peasants, with a view to a possible rising should the occasion be found. Meanwhile, Davitt had addressed himself to what was more immediately at hand; in the spring of 1879 he got a meeting together, in his native county, Mayo, at which 'landlordism' and all its works were savagely denounced; during the following months other meetings of the same sort were held, but as yet only in the western province of Connaught. At these gatherings the crusade against the landed gentry went on; rebellious utterances were blended with ferocious diatribes against landlords sometimes marked out for vengeance by name; and the peasantry were called on to keep 'a firm grip on their lands;' these would become their own should they only be steadfast. The Land League movement was now launched on its course; but it was known to be an essentially Fenian movement; it was subsidised from Clan na Gael funds; it was supported by a murderous Clan na Gael print; it was condemned in the severest language by an aged Catholic prelate, one of the few of O'Connell's surviving friends. The movement, however, as yet was not of much strength; Davitt had opinions about the 'nationalisation of the land,' which, like those of the Fenian leaders of 1865-67, were not to the mind of the peasantry; his efforts, hitherto, had not had much success. In this position of affairs he addressed himself to Parnell, who had had Fenian sympathies and associations for years, and had, we have seen, attracted Fenian admiration abroad; what passed between the two men has not transpired; but Parnell, if with reluctance, consented at last to become the head of the Land League and to direct the movement. The measures he adopted were skilfully designed, in harmony with the 'New Departure,' and with the double-dealing nature of a true conspirator. A Central Land League was established in Dublin; it was to have 'branches' extending through the country; it was to make a steady attack on the land system. Its professed objects, however, were constitutional, nay, fair; it was 'to agitate against rack-rents and unjust evictions,' and to 'facilitate the ownership of the soil by its occupants.' The ultimate purpose of the League, nevertheless, was that of the Fenian chiefs; of its seven high officers four were Fenians; it was wholly supported by Fenian moneys; its most prominent members made a boast of their Fenian sentiments. It was, in a word, a rebellious organisation in a constitutional garb; it was the embodiment of what Parnell avowed afterwards: 'A true revolutionary movement in Ireland should, in my opinion, partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character. It should be both an open and a secret organisation, using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of its secret combination.'

The teaching of Parnell was disseminated by the League and its agencies, especially at gatherings of peasant mobs; it was largely followed wherever the League prevailed. In hundreds of instances tenant farmers were compelled or induced to tender sums, 'at Griffith's valuation,' as it was called, in lieu of the rents they were bound to pay; and on the rejection of the offer, refused to pay anything. A widespread combination against rent was thus set on foot, sustained by a principle of greed which held it together; the League was more completely organised than it had been before; it made its way into ten or eleven counties, the only centres in which it was formidably strong. In these circumstances the landed gentry acted, as an order of men so assailed would act; not a few accepted the terms imposed on them, and took their rents at the reduced scale, the majority resisted the mandates of the League, and appealed to the law to enforce their rights. The terrors of the League were at once directed against those who had dared to defy it; in a certain number of instances landlords and agents were brutally murdered, for popular passions had been let loose for years; in many more 'boycotting' was carried out with such fatal effect that scores of families were driven out of Ireland, banned, persecuted, deprived even of the necessaries of life; in many others the demesnes of gentlemen were ravaged by 'Land League hunts,' overrun and half destroyed by savage mob gatherings. Evictions of course increased as the law was being trampled under foot; it is hardly necessary to say that Parnell's doctrine was here ruthlessly applied; evicted farms were left deserted and waste over thousands of acres; the fears caused by 'boycotting' had become so intense, that no 'land-grabber,' as the name was, would dare to take them; the success of the League was in this respect remarkable. The vengeance of the conspiracy, too, was extended universally to another class of persons. Tenants in numbers of instances paid their rents, either from an honest motive, or through dread of eviction; the payment was often made at night, and under a pledge of secrecy; but wherever they were discovered the League marked 'the traitor's doom;' they were sometimes 'boycotted' almost to death; sometimes murdered, often visited by gangs of ruffians--significantly known as Parnell's police; the victims were shot in the legs, or the hair of their women was cut off, or their cattle were cruelly mutilated and maimed. It deserves special notice that, as was to be expected, Parnell's warning against open crime was but little heeded; 'boycotting,' as Mr. Gladstone said, truly 'was but a passive thing;' it 'required assassination as its sanction;' the peasantry had been stirred up, in places, to frenzy; although Parnell made few violent speeches at the time, his satellites still gave a free rein to their wicked licence. Agrarian crime increased to an appalling extent; it had reached in 1881 a total of four thousand four hundred and thirty-nine cases, nearly two thousand more than those of the preceding year.

The centre of disturbance formed by the Land League was, I have said, comparatively small; and it was, for the most part, limited to backward and poor districts; its wicked and sordid teaching did not command the sympathies of the more intelligent and better parts of Ireland. Its influence, however, spread, in different degrees of strength, over nearly the whole of Catholic Ireland, and it was more or less supported by the Catholic priesthood, in many instances yielding to the pressure of their flocks. Within the bounds where it did not create a Reign of Terror, it was joined by thousands who thought it a constitutional movement, especially by peasants only seeking an improved tenure; and it is not pretended that even a majority of those who took part in it had treasonable or rebellious objects in view. But it was not the less a conspiracy hatched abroad, and aiming at the subversion of British power in Ireland; this was the policy its leaders avowed; and a conspiracy must be judged by the acts and words of those who direct it. The state of anarchy in Ireland had become such, in the spring of 1881, that the Government was compelled to try to put it down; a prosecution against Parnell and his chief lieutenants had failed; a Bill, resisted by obstruction, more persistent than had been ever known before, passed through Parliament with the object of repressing the Land League. The measure, however, was not well designed; minor agents of the League, 'village ruffians,' 'Parnell's police,' and the like, were imprisoned in large numbers, no real punishment; but the chiefs of the conspiracy were not brought within the law; the funds of the League were removed to Paris; the movement went on in its destructive course. 'Coercion,' nevertheless, was beginning to produce its effects, as it has always done in Irish disorders, when Mr. Gladstone made a sudden change in his policy, never made before by a Minister at the head of the State. He had denounced the conspiracy in passionate language; he had partly at least seen what its objects were; 'it aimed at dismemberment through rapine;' but always a man of phrases and not of action, he had shrunk in every passage of his career from facing difficulties where popular feelings were involved; and while Ireland was still in a terrible state, he resolved to make a great concession to the League, and to effect a complete revolution in the Irish land. It was a surrender akin to that of Majuba, made with little information, and without mature reflection; whether its author believed, as I have remarked, that the conspiracy was most dangerous on its agrarian side, or was willing to propitiate Parnell, at the expense of the Irish landed gentry, he inaugurated the legislation, ever since pursued, which has resulted in destroying the property of the Irish landlord, without gaining the sympathy of the occupier of the Irish soil, has reduced the land system of Ireland to a ruinous chaos, and has, in essential respects, been an absolute failure.

Mr. Gladstone's position was difficult when he introduced his new Irish Land Bill; his speech in the House of Commons, lucid as regards details, was apologetic, ambiguous, often beside the subject. He went out of his way to praise Irish landlords, 'acquitted,' he declared, by the late Commission; he deeply regretted a new experiment on the Irish land. He retained his admiration for the Act of 1870, but insinuated that it had been injured in the House of Lords; had this not been the case, it would have settled the Irish land question. He passed over his solemn pledges, on the faith of which millions had been lent on Irish estates, that the legislation of eleven years before was final; here he took refuge in appeals to 'Divine Justice,' in the 'light of which' a statesman must walk, as if Divine Justice was an excuse for a gross breach of faith. He then unfolded his plan of reform; he endeavoured, with an ingenuity all his own, to distinguish it from the schemes he had emphatically condemned in 1870; but in this respect mystification was at fault; the measure was a clumsy imitation of the 'Three F's,' and where it differed, it differed greatly for the worse. Anticipating objections certain to be made, the orator dismissed 'political economy to Saturn' with a confident gesture; for some untold reason the philosophy of Adam Smith could not possibly apply to the order of things in Ireland. But by many degrees the most important part of the speech, in view of events which have since happened, was that in which Mr. Gladstone announced that should the measure really injure the Irish landlord, the State was bound to provide an indemnity. He denied, indeed, that the Bill could have any such effect; it would be a boon, he gravely said, to the Irish landed gentry; but should the contrary be the case, 'compensation' would be clearly their right. 'I do not hesitate to say'--these were his very words spoken after the Bill had made much progress--'that if it can be shown, on clear and definite experience, at the present time, that there is a probability, or if after experience shall prove that, in fact, ruin and heavy loss has been brought on any class in Ireland by the direct effect of this legislation, that is a question which we ought to look very directly in the face.' The same meaning was even more clearly expressed: 'I should certainly be very slow to deny that where confiscation could be proved, compensation ought to follow,' and several of Mr. Gladstone's lieutenants spoke in the same sense.

The Bill, I have said, applied the principle of the 'Three F's' to the relation of landlord and tenant in by far the greatest part of Ireland. As in the case of the Land Act of 1870, it excluded certain classes of lands from its scope, demesnes, residential holdings, town parks, and large pastoral farms; it extended also only to tenants at will, that is, subject to a notice to quit; it left tenants under leases outside its purview. It was confined, too, to 'present tenants in occupation,' at or near the existing time; it had no reference to 'future tenants,' that is, to tenants holding by contracts made after the Bill should pass, or a few months afterwards. Subject, however, to these exceptions, on the whole not large, the measure placed tenancies in Ireland under the 'Three F's,' but with conditions of tenure peculiar to itself, and hitherto unknown in Ireland, or in any part of Europe. 'Fair Rent,' which, under the Ulster Custom, was settled by a bargain between landlord and tenant, was to be adjusted through the intervention of the State, legislation akin to the mediaeval statutes regulating the price of bread, and the wages of labour. 'Fixity of Tenure' was not to be a perpetuity in name; Mr. Gladstone feared that the speeches would be thrown in his teeth, in which he had declaimed against the idea; it was to be a lease for fifteen years, but capable of being renewed for ever, as a rule, through a periodical and costly lawsuit. 'Free Sale' was to be conceded under somewhat strict conditions; and the landlord was to be afforded a right of pre-emption in the case of such sales, in accordance with the analogy of the Ulster Custom. An estate virtually perpetual, at a State-settled rent, was thus to be carved out of the landlord's fee, and given to tenants actually in possession of the land; it was created in absolute derogation from the landlord's rights; it was a large if partial expropriation, in no doubtful sense. As to the interest of landlords in what was left of their property, they were to retain what are usually known as 'royalties'--timber, minerals, mines, and privileges of sport; they were to have the ordinary remedies for enforcing payment of rent; and the statutory leases were to be subject to certain conditions, taken, for the most part, from the Ulster Custom, the violation of which might lead to their forfeiture. A tribunal, called the Land Commission, was to be set up to carry the law into effect, that is, to 'fix fair rents,' and to make tenures 'fixed;' it was to be assisted by dependent agencies, known as Sub-Commissions, which, Mr. Gladstone intimated, were to be quite subordinate, and from which appeals to the Land Commission were to run; but a sinister feature of an untried revolutionary scheme--the decision of the Land Commission as respects 'fair rent'--was to be final. Subject to an appeal to the Land Commission, the Irish County Courts were empowered to administer the law; but it was foreseen that they would not do much in this province. The new modes of tenure might be applied to lands, by agreements between landlords and tenants carefully guarded; and Mr. Gladstone believed that this would be the ordinary course of dealing. The Bill, he thought, would not cause litigation to any great extent; it would operate as a self-acting force to lead to friendly contracts.

So much for the scope of the Bill and the classes of tenants to which its benefits were to extend. A most important change was made in the measure, which contained, originally, nothing of the kind; this has been attended with far-reaching results. As we have seen, tenants were to be compensated for their improvements, under the Act of 1870; but the compensation was to be paid only when they were leaving the land; Mr. Healy, one of the ablest of Parnell's lieutenants, induced Parliament to accept a provision exempting tenants' improvements from rent, when the adjustment of 'fair rent' was to be made. However equitable in principle this might appear to be, it was, in the peculiar state of Irish land tenure, unjust in the extreme to landlords, as I shall endeavour to point out afterwards; and it has been a source of litigation, as mischievous and demoralising as can well be conceived. The Bill, like the Act of 1870, prohibited the subdivision and subletting of farms--an inveterate evil practice of the Irish peasant--under conditions possibly rather too strict; and it made changes, in that statute, which require attention. It added weight, so to speak, to the law, in the tenant's interest; it increased the amount of compensation in respect of disturbance; it limited the power of 'contracting out,' to a smaller class of tenants than had been the case before, in fact, to large capitalist farmers; and it provided that tenants, who had accepted leases excluding them from the benefits of the Act of 1870, through illegitimate conduct on the part of their landlords, should be exonerated from such unfair contracts. It thus greatly amended the original Land Act; but it left many of its defects untouched; it is only right here to add that despite the lying clamour raised by the subsidised Press of Parnell--lying has ever since been part of its stock-in-trade--the instances were exceedingly few in which 'forced leases,' as they were called, were set aside by the Courts. A remarkable feature of the Bill has yet to be noticed: Mr. Gladstone, as was the case eleven years before, had still the wish, so characteristic of British statesmen, to assimilate Irish to English land tenure; for this reason, as I said, he deprived 'future tenants' of the advantages of the Bill; these were to hold their farms on the footing of pure contract. This was a shortsighted and bad arrangement; it tempted directly ill-conditioned landlords to dispossess tenants, whenever a chance offered, and to create 'future' tenants so as to discharge their estates from a burden; it revealed marked ignorance of the affairs of Ireland. The Bill dealt, also, with the land on the side of ownership; it gave additional facilities to tenants to purchase their holdings; the State was empowered to advance three-fourths of the moneys; but the tenants were to find the remaining fourth; the transaction was to be still a purchase, and not in the nature of a gift.

The Bill became law, with very little change; the House of Lords, though fully alive to its evils, did not amend it in any important respect; the Peers had in mind, perhaps too much, what had followed the rejection of the Bill of the year before. Mr. Gladstone and his followers maintained at the time, and the statement has been ever since repeated, that the Land Act of 1881, its popular title, was but a natural development of the original Act of 1870; but this assertion is not only untrue, but absolutely contrary to the truth. The Act of 1870, no doubt, considered as a whole, annexed a large tenant right to the estate of the landlord, and to that extent placed a burden on it; but it preserved for the landlord the ownership of the land; it did not interfere with his rent, his first proprietary right; above all, it was, in the main, in accord with fact, and just. The Act of 1881 was almost the exact opposite; it deprived the landlord of the ownership of his land, and nearly converted him into a mere rent-charger; it created against him a perpetuity at a State-settled rent; it really all but made the tenant the owner of the land; it was, in short, inconsistent with fact, and essentially unjust. The Act of 1881, too, established a principle, never heard of before in civilised countries, that tribunals of the State were to fix the rate of rent; this not only annihilated the most important of landed contracts, entirely to the landlord's detriment, it inevitably tended to cut down rents wholesale, as Judge Longfield had predicted would be the case. 'It is probable,' wrote that great authority, 'that the value of land, as fixed by any tenant-right measure, would be less than half the rent, which a solvent tenant would be willing to pay;' the prediction has been too well verified. The Act of 1870, in a word, was a remedial law, fairly adjusting the rights of landlord and tenant; the Act of 1881 was a socialistic law, despoiling the landlord of his property wholesale, and handing it over to a dependent who had no claim to it; it was sheer confiscation hardly disguised; and it should be added that the exemption of tenants' improvements from rent, as affairs stood in Ireland, was a grave wrong to the landlord. The Act of 1881, to speak plainly, transformed the Irish land system iniquitously for the benefit of a single class; and it directly promoted litigation of the very worst kind, on an enormous scale, embittering, and still further dividing, the classes connected with the land. The evils of this legislation, a monument of reckless unwisdom, were at once manifest to well-informed persons; the Duke of Argyll and Lord Lansdowne resigned office rather than take part in a measure of the kind; Lord Ashbourne, the present holder of the Great Seal in Ireland, caustically remarked that Parliament would do much better should it deprive Irish landlords of a fourth part of their rents on the spot. The verdict of enlightened and impartial opinion in Ireland was very much the same.

The Land League was paralysed, if not destroyed; its organisation was, in name, suppressed by its framers. It reappeared, however, at once, in a new form; the skill of Parnell in masking a conspiracy was never more fully displayed. He felt that the Land League could not cope with the law; that the crimes of violence and blood, which attended its course, gave the Government opportunities to put it down; that its openly avowed purposes were a danger to it. He set up, therefore, the 'National League' in its stead; the professed object of the association was to promote 'Home Rule,' while it upheld the rights of the occupiers of the Irish soil, and kept the Irish land, so to speak, in view; it was thus apparently a mere centre of a constitutional movement. Through these means, and under these pretences, the astute and able plotter swept into his net thousands who had held aloof from the Land League; many of the middle classes joined the National League, notably hundreds of the clergy of the Catholic Church in Ireland; the peasantry gave it increased support; its influence spread beyond its predecessor's limits. The National League, however, was only the Land League under another name; its leaders and officials were the same men; its 'branches' were those of the League it replaced; its real objects were exactly the same, the overthrow of British rule in Ireland, and the annihilation of the Irish landed gentry. But the methods it employed to work out its ends were, to a great extent, different; open agitation was kept down; public meetings, likely to be violent, were not held; the perpetration of agrarian crime was not encouraged. The movement, in a word, was comparatively secret and below the surface; but it was essentially the successor of the Land League in its aims; we may say of it, with a slight change, in the words of the poet--

'Facies non una sororum, Nec diversa tamen.'

'Boycotting' was now made the chief weapon of the reformed conspiracy; 'National League Courts' were held regularly in many districts, at which this barbarous interdict was systematically pronounced on persons violating 'the unwritten law' of the old League; the persecution against landlords, agents, 'land-grabbing' peasants who were 'disloyal and traitors,' and traders suspected of dealing with 'rotten sheep,' was carried on with a pertinacity and ingenuity hardly known before; the number of derelict farms augmented; and the Government found it far from easy to deal with these crimes. At the same time, 'the Nationalist Press,' as it had been named, fully revealed the purpose of the conspirators; trusting to impunity, under the law of libel, which depended upon the will of juries, it was even more treasonable and seditious than before; and it gave infamous license to defamation of personages in high places, worthy of the abominations of the P?re Duchesne. Ireland, however, remained in comparative peace while the recent measure of repression continued in force; but this was injudiciously allowed to expire in 1885--a strange act on the part of a Conservative Ministry; and in a short time agrarian disorder broke out afresh. Crimes of this class had fallen, in 1884, to seven hundred and sixty-two in number; they were one thousand and fifty-six in 1886; and 'boycotting' had increased fourfold.

In 1887 another change was made in the Irish land system, essentially a development of the Land Act of 1881. That measure, I have said, applied to tenants at will only, that is, liable to be dispossessed by a notice to quit; it did not apply to tenants under leasehold tenures. A sharp distinction, therefore, was drawn between the two classes; a farmer, with land on one side of a ditch, could secure the advantages of the 'Three F's;' his neighbour, on the other side, could not; the distinction was so palpably harsh, that many landlords in Ireland saw its injustice, and enabled leasehold tenants to obtain the benefits of the law. An Act, prepared by Lord Salisbury's Government, brought ordinary Irish leaseholders within the Land Act of 1881; these were given a right to have 'fair rents' fixed, and 'fixity of tenure' and 'free sale' under certain conditions. The Act of 1887, also, empowered the Courts to set aside perpetual leases unfairly obtained; and it relaxed the restrictions of the Act of 1881 with respect to subletting and subdivision, and the exclusion of 'town parks.' It improved, moreover, the law of ejectment, facilitating the vindication of the rights of the landlord; and--a strange provision--it enabled a middleman, in certain events, to creep out of his contract, and to free himself from the rent due to his superior landlord. In consequence of the fall of prices that had lately occurred, and the depression of agriculture that had been the result, the Act, too, reduced, for a short period of time, 'fair rents' that had been already fixed; and it contained other enactments wholly in the interest of the occupier of the Irish soil. Regarded as a whole, something was to be said for the measure, on the principles of the legislation of 1881; but the liberation of the middleman from the payment of a debt has been attended with grave wrong, and was an ominous precedent leading to others of the kind. The new law was, of course, another inroad on the rights of the Irish landlord, another innovation made against his interests; it has certainly strengthened his claim to compensation for the loss of his property, acknowledged by Mr. Gladstone to be unquestionable, should it be reasonably made out. For the rest, the National League made a boast that the Act had been wrung by its efforts from a foreign Parliament; the Act certainly, like that of 1881, was a concession, derogating from the rights of a powerless class, in the hope of weakening a conspiracy against the State, by detaching from it large classes supported by it, and handing over to these what had belonged to the Irish landed gentry.

In 1896 another inroad was made on the rights of Irish landlords, and another dole given to the tenant class in Ireland; the descent to Avernus had proved easy; a Conservative Government had followed it since 1887. This fresh legislation was mainly in the interest of the Presbyterian farmers of Ulster, who had supported the Union almost to a man, and possessed no little political weight; but who, always separated more or less from their landlords, had shown dissatisfaction with the fixing of 'fair rents,' and had begun to cry out for what is called 'the compulsory purchase' of the estates of their landlords, a policy on which I shall comment afterwards. The Bill contained just and well-devised provisions; it improved the procedure for fixing 'fair rents,' if not nearly as thoroughly as it ought to have done; it protected the leases creating 'fixity,' under the new tenure--Mr. Gladstone, flying in the face of the ablest lawyers, had passionately declared that these were sacrosanct--in instances in which these might have been annulled; it proposed, what I had always considered right, that old arrears of rent ought not to be allowed to hang over the heads of tenants, and that rent could not be recovered on eviction, if due for upward of two years. But the Bill abounded in principles dangerous and false; it was, taken as a whole, a mischievous measure; it was another mine sprung upon the Irish landed gentry. Lands hitherto excluded from the benefits of the 'Three F's,' under the Acts of 1881 and 1887--that is, demesnes, town parks, residential, and pastoral holdings--were largely brought within the scope of the Bill, that is, they were made subject to 'fair rents,' and, if held by tenants, were practically taken away from the landlords; the provisions of the Bill, as to demesnes, were especially harsh; many a mansion and demesne, which might happen to be let, would really become the property of the tenant, the owner being put off with a rent-charge. The worst proposals of this measure, however, were those relating to improvements made by tenants, exempted from rent, we have seen, by the Act of 1881. The Courts of Justice in Ireland had rightly declared with one voice, that improvements of this kind were not to be discharged from rent, unless they were the improvements treated by the Act of 1870, that is, rents might be charged on tenants' improvements, if these did not fall within the definition laid down by that law, or if they were outside the limitations it had imposed, in order to shut out obsolete and unjust claims, which might harass and do grievous wrong to landlords. All this was completely changed by the new measure; the definition of improvements was wholly altered, in order to secure their being exempted from rent; the restrictions in point of time, and many other matters, as regards claims for improvements, were largely swept away, and the power of 'contracting out' of such claims was still further abridged. The whole law, in a word, as to tenants' improvements, as these were to create exemption from rent, was placed on altogether a new basis; this was detrimental in every respect to the landlord, and gave advantages to the tenant, in my judgment, utterly unjust.

The Bill contained other provisions, all in the same direction, that is, for the advantage of the Irish tenant, and to his landlord's loss, especially one relaxing the law as to the subdivision and subletting of farms, an inveterate and very pernicious practice. It introduced, also, a new principle, on which I shall say some words afterwards, with respect to another experiment on the Irish land, that is, what is called Land Purchase, under conditions, not thought of before, until they were laid down by a Conservative Government. The measure was hustled through the House of Commons with such indecorous haste, that Sir Edward Carson, now a law-officer of the Crown, walked out of that Assembly to express his disgust; it narrowly escaped defeat in the House of Lords, loyal as the Peers to Lord Salisbury are; indeed, though hardly debated, its vices were soon made manifest. It is unnecessary to point out what the general character of the Act is; it enlarged very considerably the sphere of the 'Three F's,' greatly increasing the wrong done to the Irish landlord, by doing away with the restrictions, placed by Mr. Gladstone, in 1870, on illegitimate claims in respect of improvements; its direct tendency was to reduce rents wholesale, and to promote more litigation between landlord and tenant; and if it encouraged tenants to make improvements on their farms, its plain effect, I will not say its purpose, was to 'improve the Irish landlords out of their estates,' the contemptuous phrase of a great master of Equity. Its mischief, however, went a great deal further; tenants making improvements are only exempted from rent, in respect of these, by this Act; they are not within the protection of the Act of 1870, if improvements of any kind are excluded by it; if a tenant, therefore, makes an improvement on his farm, which is not 'suitable' to it in a real sense, say, builds a mansion upon a petty holding, he will not be entitled to compensation, should he quit it, even though dispossessed for non-payment of his rent. But tenants, in these circumstances, like those I have referred to before, would assuredly proclaim that they had here a great and real grievance; and they would be relieved from it, doubtless, by another law, giving them compensation, perhaps, to their landlord's ruin. A dangerous principle is thus hidden within the Act; this will probably be asserted against the owners of ground rents, not only in Ireland, but in England and Scotland; and the law, taken as a whole, has strengthened the claim of the Irish landed gentry to be indemnified, as was solemnly promised, for what they have suffered from the legislation begun in 1881.

While the Irish land system was thus being dealt with, on the side of occupation, during many years, experiments were made on it, likewise on the side of ownership. Resenting the legislation that had produced the 'Three F's,' Conservative politicians took it into their heads that Mr. Gladstone had 'created' 'dual ownership,' as they gave it the name, in Ireland; they insisted that this was simply an intolerable thing. Unfortunately Mr. Gladstone had no more 'created dual ownership' than he had created the mountains and lakes of Ireland; he had only developed the joint ownership, which the Irish tenant possessed in his holding, in thousands of instances, if he had developed it under the very worst conditions. This theory, however, at which Burke would have laughed with contempt, and which revealed the incapacity to understand Irish land tenure, ingrained, it would appear, in the English mind, was eagerly taken up and found much support; it was resolved to extend the process of converting tenants in Ireland into owners of their farms, by a method hitherto untried, and unknown in any part of Europe. Under the Church Disestablishment Act, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, the State had advanced money to the occupier of the Irish soil, in order to enable him to acquire his farm; but it had made it incumbent on him to contribute part of the price; the transaction, therefore, was, in a real sense, a purchase. This, the only security for honesty and thrift, was taken away in 1885; Parliament passed an Act enabling the Irish tenant to become owner of his holding without paying down a shilling; the State was to advance the whole price; and the State was to be repaid by a terminable annuity, charged on the land, and extinguished at the end of less than half a century. This terminable annuity was to be much less than a true rent, or even than a 'fair rent' adjusted by the State; the transaction, therefore, was not a purchase, but a gift, akin to a bribe, another largess bestowed on the tenant class in Ireland, and another injury, as I shall prove, inflicted on the Irish landed gentry. This 'Land Purchase,' as it was falsely called, was to be voluntary on the part of landlord and tenant; it was to be conducted on the footing of free contract, as had been the case under the preceding statutes; the State was to obtain a guarantee from the landlord; and Parliament voted ?5,000,000 to carry out this policy.

Only a sum, it will be observed, of about ?40,000,000, that is, two of ?5,000,000, and some ?30,000,000 more, has thus been made available for 'Land Purchase;' this obviously could not transfer even a fourth part of the Irish land, valued, we have seen, by Mr. Gladstone at ?300,000,000--in a remarkable speech in reply to Lord George Hamilton--and almost certainly worth from ?150,000,000 to ?200,000,000. The process of doing away with 'dual ownership' and making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, having been pronounced by its authors slow, the Act of 1896, referred to before, enabled the landlord's guarantee to be dispensed with, and provided that, in the case of hopelessly embarrassed landlords, whose estates were being offered for sale in the Courts, the tenants should virtually have a right of pre-emption, thus asserting a principle, on which I shall dwell afterwards, and known as the 'Compulsory Purchase' of the Irish land. I shall point out, in another chapter, the present and the inevitable future results of this policy of so-styled 'Land Purchase;' suffice it to say here, that, in my judgment, it betrays utter ignorance of the Irish land system, and of the customs and inclinations of the Irish peasant; that it proceeds on an essentially immoral principle, the bribery of a class to promote its welfare; that, from the very nature of the case, it cannot abolish 'dual ownership;' that, human creatures being what they are, it cannot, as is being already proved, establish a thriving body of occupying owners on the Irish soil; that it must create sharp and unjust distinctions in Irish land tenure, iniquitous to the landlord and to every tenant, who may be excluded from its benefits; that it must directly tend, as it is even now tending, to arouse a cry for a wholesale confiscation of Irish estates, the most shameful and wrongful Ireland has yet witnessed; and that so far from settling the Irish Land Question, it must necessarily unsettle it from top to bottom. As respects the legislation I have briefly described, on the side of the occupation of the Irish land--by many degrees the most important--I shall also comment upon its results in a subsequent chapter, after examining its administration by the tribunal it has set up. But a word may be said, in this place, on its essential character: from 1881 to the present time, it is absolutely without a precedent in civilised lands; it has trampled on economic science and the truths it teaches, as, indeed, its chief author made his boast; it has created a mode of land tenure in Ireland not in accord with fact, which has virtually deprived the Irish landlord of real ownership in his estate, has turned him into a kind of annuitant, and has virtually changed the Irish tenant into a kind of owner, but under conditions absolutely bad; its inevitable tendency was to cut down rents wholesale, without regard to the simplest justice; it established a system of mischievous litigation between landlord and tenant, demoralising and increasing the division of classes; it exhibited, on an enormous scale, characteristic contempt of Irish rights of property; and finally, if Parliamentary pledges are to be fulfilled, and gross wrong is not to be consecrated by law, it has given the Irish landlord a great and legitimate claim to compensation from the State. As we survey this unwise and destructive medley of law, we are forcibly reminded of the words of Burke:--'I am unalterably persuaded that the attempt to oppress, degrade, impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen, and landed property of a whole nation, cannot be justified under any form it may assume.'

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND --THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE IRISH LAND ACTS

I turn to the administration of the new Irish Land Code, of which I have described the distinctive features. The County Courts of Ireland, I have said, were entrusted with the task of carrying out the Land Act of 1870; the principal duty of the judges was to determine rights, under the Ulster and analogous Customs in the south, and to declare the sums to be paid to tenants, when leaving their holdings, for compensation for improvements, and in respect of disturbance. As evictions were by no means frequent, in the period between 1870 and 1879, the litigation before these tribunals, under these different heads, though by no means trivial, was not excessive; the applications on the part of tenants were not very numerous; there was ample time to consider the law, whether in the subordinate or the appellate Courts; and though there was much difference of opinion as to the amount of compensation to be given to suitors, the administration of the Act was not seriously impugned, and, on the whole, was reasonable and just. The most remarkable circumstance in the inquiries held before the Courts was, certainly, the extravagance of the claims put forward, on account of tenants' improvements, circumscribed as these were by the limitations of the law; everything in the nature of an agricultural work was called an improvement, from repairing an old fence to cleaning an old drain; hours and days were lost in endeavours to disentangle the truth, and to arrive at sound and legal conclusions. I could fill scores of pages with descriptions of demands of this kind, usually pressed with reckless and hard swearing; they ought to have been a warning, as unhappily they were not, not to break down the restrictions contained in the Act of 1870, and not to extend legislation, in this direction, against the rights of the landlord. I confine myself to a single example: I tried a case, in 1895, in which a tenant's claims, under the Act of 1870, were ?1130; I cut these down to ?164; after deducting ?155 found due to the landlord, I adjudged to the tenant a sum of less than ?10; and there was no appeal from the decision I pronounced.

The Land Act of 1870 has been well-nigh superseded by the great measure of 1881, and by the legislation which has been its supplement. The administration of this part of the new Land Code, by many degrees the most important, was given, as I have pointed out before, to a wholly new tribunal, the Land Commission, and to Sub-Commissions dependent on it; a concurrent jurisdiction was given to the Irish County Courts; but they have had very little to do in this province. The principal work of the Land Commission has been to fix 'fair rents,' and to make statutory leases, 'fixity of tenure,' in a word, in a kind of disguise, and thus to give effect to the policy adopted by Mr. Gladstone in 1881. The three original members of the Land Commission, in all respects its directors, were the late Mr. Justice O'Hagan, the late Mr. E. F. Litton, and the late Mr. John E. Vernon; Lord Salisbury denounced these appointments in emphatic language, as being against the just rights of Irish landlords; the charge was not without plausible grounds at least, for Mr. Justice O'Hagan had been one of the 'Young Ireland' party, and Mr. Litton had been a strong tenant-right advocate. These two gentlemen, nevertheless, were most honourable men, and capable, if not very distinguished, lawyers; Mr. Vernon was an excellent and experienced country gentleman, if, in politics, of the Liberal faith; and as all three have long ago passed away, it would be unjust to make charges of illegitimate conduct, even if they may not have been wholly free from unconscious bias. Great allowance ought to be made, in common justice, for the Commissioners in the situation that had been made for them, and regard being had to their most arduous duties. To fix 'fair rent,' even approximately, was difficult in the extreme; as Judge Longfield predicted many years before, and every well-informed Irishman knew, the adjustment of rent, through the agency of the State, would inevitably cause a general lowering of rents. Again, the Commissioners were, from the outset, harassed by a rush of applications to fix 'fair rents;' these came in, within a few weeks, in thousands; they were tempted, therefore, to set about their work at once, without taking the careful precautions, or entering into all the considerations, the nature of their duty required. Two circumstances, also, no doubt, had effect on their minds; the Land League was creating a Reign of Terror, and destroying the property of the Irish landlords; the Commissioners probably hoped that they would weaken the power of the League, by, so to speak, bidding against it, and cutting rents down. Above all, the Land Commission, like the Encumbered Estates Commission, was a tribunal set up to carry out a policy, that is, in word, to abate rents; and all experience, Irish experience notably, proves that such a body of men usually fulfils its mission.

Mr. Gladstone, we have seen, had expressed a belief that 'fair rents,' as a rule, would be fixed by contract; that the Act of 1881 would produce this result; and that this part of the work of the Land Commission, accordingly, would not be very great. Unquestionably, too, with his leading followers, he was convinced that rents in Ireland would not be largely reduced; it is important to bear this distinctly in mind, regard being had to subsequent events. These anticipations were to prove vain; but the Land Commissioners possibly may have shared his views, and may have resolved to act upon them, before they first addressed themselves to the task of 'fixing fair rents.' After experience, it is easy to be wise; but we can now clearly discern what they ought to have done, considering the heavy work they were soon to find imposed on them. Their first duty should have been to establish some standard, which would make a reasonable criterion of rent; the means to accomplish this end were not wanting. Mr. Law, the Irish Attorney-General of Mr. Gladstone, one of the most distinguished lawyers of his day, and afterwards a holder of the Great Seal of Ireland, had made a definition of 'fair rent' in the House of Commons; 'a fair rent was to be a competition rent minus the yearly value of the tenant's interest in the holding; that was what was intended, and anything else would be monstrously unjust.' For some reason that has not transpired, this definition did not find a place in the Act; but the authority of its framer was great; it must have been known to the Land Commissioners; had they adopted it, and based their decisions upon it, things would have been very different from what they are at the present time. But there were other tests to indicate a standard of rent, to be regarded at least, if not conclusive. The valuation of the lands of Ireland made for the assessment of rates, Griffith's valuation, as it was commonly called, which Parnell had made a measure of 'fair rent,' would certainly have been of real use, though it varied greatly in different counties; and the Commission appointed by Mr. Gladstone, only a few months before, had, I have said, reported, that Ireland, as a whole, was in no sense an over-rented land. There was another consideration, as regards Irish rents, which the Land Commissioners ought to have borne in mind. The rents on the estates of the great landlords, and of the gentry of old descent, were, as a rule, low; the rents of the purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts were high, nay, excessive, in not a few instances.

Other circumstances, moreover, of great importance, ought to have been taken into account, with respect to this subject. The rental of Ireland was not as high as it had been before the Great Famine; where rents, therefore, had not been increased, and had been regularly paid for a long series of years, there was the strongest possible presumption that these would be 'fair.' Again, the material progress of Ireland had been great during the forty preceding years: the wages of labour had, indeed, risen; but owing to the introduction of good farm machinery, the cost of production, in agriculture, had diminished; the extension of the railway system had opened new markets, and had brought even Connaught within a few hours of Great Britain; steam navigation had multiplied and improved; the modes of husbandry and the breeds of stock of all kinds had become infinitely better than they had been; and prices of late had been very high. These were all elements to be regarded in the determination of 'fair rent;' they ought to have been examined with care; and inquiries on these matters should have extended over a long space of time. Moreover, as the Land Act of 1881 discharged improvements made by tenants from rent, as these were defined and limited by the Act of 1870, the greatest pains ought to have been taken that claims for exemption should be strictly dealt with, and not permitted to run riot, especially as it was notorious that demands of this kind, made under the law already in force, were usually excessive, supported by untrue statements, and by no means easy to resist and disprove. Another fact, also, of the gravest moment, ought to have been thoroughly considered, as regards this question. As improvements made by tenants were not to be charged with rent, it was but equitable that the lands they might hold should be valued as if in their normal state; that if these had been deteriorated, either through wilful misconduct, or gross neglect, their occupiers were not to make profit of their own wrong; that deterioration, in a word, was not to be allowed to work rent down, and was to be taken into account, in adjudicating upon 'fair rent.' This was the more necessary because it was well known that numbers of farms in Ireland had been more or less run out; and especially because, as in the case of the ryot of Bengal, under the Permanent Settlement of Lord Cornwallis, an Irish tenant would be strongly tempted to injure his lands, if he believed that, when 'a fair rent' should be fixed on them, he would be permitted to take advantage of his own default. It should be added that, in the fixing of 'fair rents,' the large sums which, in many instances, Irish landlords had laid out in improving their estates, notably since the years that succeeded the Famine, ought, as a matter of course, to have been kept in mind.

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