and Sir West Ridgeway2 have put on record their condemnation of the "Castle" system over which they had presided. Can it be reformed? Would it be possible to make the Castle government a good government, and the Union a reality and an advantage? The answer given by the experience of a century is, No! Thomas Drummond, the great Scotchman, tried and failed. Sir Antony MacDonnell has had but little better success. The cause of failure is plainly this, that an English government in Ireland will always find itself under the disastrous control of the "English in Ireland." The Garrison, the "Colony," will ever use it as a weapon in the war of the classes; however reconstructed, the Castle will remain the servant of the oligarchy. The only

possible reform is a revolution, the revolution that would be effected by the introduction of the representative principle.

2 See Nineteenth Century Review, August and October, 1906.

PART II.

MATERIAL DECADENCE

CHAPTER I.-THE LAND QUESTION

THE Irish agrarian question dates its birth from the day when the first Anglo-Normans set foot there, and began to despoil the ancient clans of their land. It grew and increased throughout those long centuries during which England neglected not merely the government but even the conquest of Ireland, and contented herself with

IV. On the agrarian question: P. Fournier, La Question Agraire en Irlande, Paris, 1882. J. Flach, Histoire du Régime Agraire de l'Irlande (leçon d'ouverture faite au Collège de France), Paris, 1883. E. Ferré, l'Irlande, Sa crise agraire et politique, Paris, 1887. Et. Bechaux, la Question Agraire en Irlande, Paris, 1906. Meyer et Ardent, la Question Agrarie, 2nd edition, Paris, 1887. L. de Lavergne, Essai sur l'Economie Rurale de l'Angleterre, de l'Ecosse et de l'Irlande, Paris, 1864. Shaw Lefevre, Agrarian Tenures, London, 1893. Nisbet, Land Tenure in Ireland, Edinburgh, 1887. Montgomery, The History of Land Tenure in Ireland, Cambridge, 1889. Lord Dufferin, Emigration and the Tenure of Irish Land, London, 1867. Barry O'Brien, Fifty Years of Concessions to Ireland, London, 1883. By the same, Parliamentary History of the Irish Land Question, London, 1881. Richey, The Irish Land Laws, London, 1881. Lord Russell of Killowen, New Views on Ireland, London, 1881. Antonio Pittaluga, La Questione Agraria in Irlanda, Roma, 1894. Modern Ireland and her Agrarian Problem, by Moritz Bonn, translated by T. W. Rolleston, Dublin, 1906. The Case of the Irish Landlords, by one of them, Dublin, 1899. O'Connor Morris, Present Irish Questions, London, 1901. Cherry, Wakely, and Maxwell, The Irish Land Law and Land Purchase Acts, 3rd edition, Dublin, 1902. Cf. the Reports (and evidence) of numerous Commissions of enquiry into the agricultural question, especially the Devon Commission, Bessborough Commission, Cowper Commission, Morley Committee, Fry Commission. Cf. the Annual Reports of the Land Commission. Cf. our communication to the Société d'Economie Sociale (Séance of Jan. 11th, 1904, Réforme Sociale of the following March 1st).

maintaining in that country a profitable state of anarchy, which prevented all progress, and which impeded the natural evolution from collective to individual property. But it is only when we reach the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the days of the Tudors, of Cromwell, and of William III., that the agrarian question begins, under the influence of the Plantations and the Penal Laws, to assume its modern shape, and to claim that melancholy pre-eminence which has lasted down to our own time.

I. HISTORICAL.

Of all the past then, whether Celtic, Anglo-Norman, or even feudal, nothing remains by the end of the seventeenth century but the mere memory. With the reigns of William III. and Queen Anne a new state of things comes into being. The old Celtic tenure2 has disappeared, just as, with a few exceptions, the clans themselves and the old Brehon laws have passed away. Confiscations and plantations have transferred the ownership of the soil into the hands of a small number of large proprietors or landlords. These new settlers, for the most part AngloSaxon and Protestant, have now beneath them, at their beck and call as holders of precarious tenancies, all the victims of both recent and former conquests. These latter, whether Celts by blood or Celticised strangers, have all alike sunk to the condition of helots. The Penal Laws are completing, as we have seen, the reduction to servitude of the Catholic masses. Papists are forbidden to buy land; they can take it on lease, but only for a term of under thirty years, and at a rent equal to not less than two-thirds of the produce of the soil. A reward is offered to anyone who reports a breach of these laws.3 We come in this way to the birth of the new regime,

2 As regards Celtic tenure we can only refer our readers to the learned works of M. D'Arbois de Jubainville, Maine, O'Curry, etc.

3 2 Anne ch. 6, Sec. 2 (1703). Cf. Beaumont op. cit., I., 95, etc.

which is by nature half agrarian and half political, and is the fruit of conquest, confiscation and persecution. It establishes a condition of things for which I believe no parallel could be found in the world, but which for nearly two centuries is to remain master of Ireland, namely, landlordism.

It places the mass of the tenants at the mercy of the landlord, who exploits them without mercy. There are few, if any, leases; the tenants hold the land by the year or even at will, at the discretion of the master. The result is complete insecurity. In his capacities of proprietor, judge and administrator, the landlord in reality has power of life and death over his tenants; he evicts them at will; fixes their leases at his pleasure; imposes rules upon them, tyrannical regulations, together with a whole system of fines and corporal penalties wherein are to be found the worst feudal exactions.4 "The landlord of an Irish estate inhabited by Roman Catholics," writes Arthur Young,5 "is a sort of despot who yields obedience, in whatever concerns the poor, to no law but that of his will."

One-third of the landlords are absentees, and Ireland is, as a consequence, left to middlemen who, renting their estates at a low price and for a long term of years, sublet them in portions to the peasants. Young denounces this class as "the vermin of the country." Under a regime of this nature, agriculture rapidly declines; the trees disappear off the face of the earth; at the beginning of the eighteenth century half Ireland is a desert, and down to the time of the Great Famine of 1847, famines are periodical. "The rise of our rents," says Swift, "is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars." Why should we be astonished if the peasant then resorts to assassination as his method of defence

4 Cf. Cardinal Perraud op. cit., I., 222, etc. T. P. O'Connor, The Parnell Movement, Chapter VI.

5 Tour in Ireland, II., 126.

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and his hope of revenge? "Whiteboyism" is the only curb that landlordism has ever known; the one will last as long as the other, and "weighing one against the other," writes an English M.P., Mr. Poulett Scrope,6 in 1844, "horror against horror, and crime against crime, it is, perhaps, the lesser evil of the two."

After the abrogation of the Penal Laws a lull occurs in the agrarian troubles of Ireland. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, it continues into the early years of the nineteenth, during the period of agricultural prosperity which came to the United Kingdom as one effect of the Napoleonic wars and the continental blockade. Cultivation regains its hold over these huge tracts which, during the eighteenth century, had been surrendered to pasture. The land is parcelled out; holdings are multiplied; and tenancies for life become more common, All these developments are encouraged by the landlords, who rejoice over the growth of their rent rolls, and, during those times of political serfdom, over the increased number of their voters. But a reaction is close at hand and a fresh crisis about to occur, for reasons that are now of common knowledge. First of all comes the fall in the price of agricultural produce after 1815, a fall intensified by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847 which, combined with excessive sub-division of the land into small holdings, would seem, for a time, to make all cultivation unprofitable. Then we have the law of Catholic Emancipation of 1829, which withdraws the right to vote from freeholders with an income of forty shillings, that is to say, from the great majority of the tenants for life. By this measure the peasant is deprived of his best weapon against the landlord, and the landlord of all incentive to grant leases or multiply holdings. Matters come at length to a crisis ; and a fearful crisis it is, accompanied by the Great Famine which lasts three years, and by the Clearances, which last thirty. Throughout the whole country the landlords level the fences, demolish the houses, and evict the

6 Barry O'Brien, A Hundred Years of Irish History, p. 64