him to pay attention to no interests but his own, is the most convenient person to bridge over the chasm between the public, personified in the State, and the actual cultivator of the soil.

This will be done by empowering the solvent tenant to exact from his landlord the protection of a lease of say not less than thirty years; by making compensation for occupation right a statutable right; by making it the landlord's interest to renew the tenant's lease at some fixed period, say ten years, before the expiration of such lease; by enacting that the landlord who should refuse thus to renew a lease should pay all rates and taxes for the last ten years of the unexpired term; also, that he shall allow the legal compensation for occupation right by a pro rata deduction from each of the last ten years' rent. A measure embodying these or similar provisions would put an end to the present cruel insecurity, and enable industry and thrift to reap their just reward.'

The practical aim of legislation on this matter should clearly be to make success or failure in agricultural pursuits the manifest result of the agriculturist's own merits or defects. If a farmer is a fool who cannot learn his business, it is no one's

1 These suggestions are taken almost literally from the admirable pamphlet of Mr. Marcus Keane already referred to.

interest to keep him on his farm; it is the public interest that he should be thrust out of his farm, and that a worthier man should take his place. On the other hand, the good and improving farmer should be protected by walls of adamant from coercion, injustice, or harshness. To say that this is beyond the power of legislation is to say that politics are an impossibility. The good farmer is entitled to every consideration as a faithful soldier in the social army. Not only does he do his duty, but by his example he helps others to do their duty. That such a man should be liable to be robbed of his earnings in the improvements and the capital he has invested in the land, that he should be liable to the odious injustice of being deprived of the post he so worthily fills, is little short of barbarous. The system under which such a thing could occur is nothing less than an organization for disseminating a social blight throughout the country. It stifles industry, energy, and thrift, in their very cradle; it expunges them from the list of publicly useful virtues.1

No class can be a healthy and permanently useful member of the body politic in which energy and intelligence do not meet with their proper reward, and incompetency and sloth their proper chastise1 See Appendix D.

ment. All the community suffers when a grounded discontent pervades any large branch of industry. A "devil's dust" is in such circumstances always mixed with the work they do, and the commodity they produce.

Great calamities and hardships can be borne stoically, if not cheerfully, both by individuals and classes, when it is distinctly seen that no human agency is to blame for them. Earthquakes and tornadoes cause no resentment, frightful as may be their devastations. A cotton famine can reduce four millions of operatives to pauperism and short commons, and the visitation shall be heroically endured when it is clear that no human power could have prevented the catastrophe. But maltreat men by laws and arrangements which only exist because you choose to make them, and then the fiercest passions in the human heart declare war against you. Persist in them after remonstrance and fair warning, then prepare for the day of wrath and vengeance which is surely coming.

III. THE NATION.

IT thus appears that Ireland suffers under two great oppressive grievances: the Established Church and the Tenure of Land. That is to say, that the people of that country are injured both spiritually and materially—in their religious susceptibilities and in their pockets.

But owing to the conditions, especially to the insularity, of the country, these grievances are not merely the grievances of classes, of sections of the community, but of the community itself,—of the Nation, in short.

And these grievances further have been inflicted upon the Irish nation by another nation. The alien Church which casts scorn on the religion of the people was imported into the country, was placed in a position of power and honour with the avowed object of coercing and insulting it. The alien proprietary which holds the land was endowed with that land with the express understanding that the original owners and inhabitants should be carefully

expelled from it.' And both these things were done, not by a powerful unscrupulous class in the country itself, but by a foreign power which, by reason of

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1 The attempt of the English Government to exterminate the native Irish in the reign of Elizabeth has lately had justice done to it by Mr. Froude, in his 10th vol. chap. 24. "The English nation," he says, was shuddering over the atrocities of the Duke of Alva. The children in the nurseries were being inflamed to patriotic rage and madness by the tales of Spanish tyranny. Yet Alva's bloody sword never touched the young, the defenceless, or those whose sex even dogs can recognise and respect. Sir Peter Carew had been seen murdering women and children, and babies that had scarcely left the breast. But Sir Peter Carew was not called to answer for his conduct, and remained in favour with the deputy. Gilbert, who was left in command at Kilmalock, was illustrating yet more signally the same tendency..... He regarded himself as dealing rather with savage beasts than with human beings, and when he tracked them to their dens he strangled the cubs, and rooted out the entire broods." Mr. Froude adds that this method of treatment had the disadvantage that it must be carried out to the last extremity, or it ought not to be tried at all, and there were obvious difficulties in the way of doing it thoroughly.

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Therefore the next effort on the part of the English to rid themselves of the Irish took the form of transplanting. James I. did this for Ulster, and was very successful. Cromwell tried to continue his work in Leinster and Munster, and failed in comparison. Those who wish to obtain a clear notion of what literally without any exaggeration is one of the most awful chapters in human annals, should read the "Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland," by Mr. John Prendergast. Connaught was selected for the habitation of all the Irish nation by reason of its being surrounded by the sea and the Shannon all but ten miles, and the whole easily made into one by a line of forts. To further secure the imprisonment of the nation, and to cut them off from relief by sea, a belt of four miles wide, commencing one mile west of Sligo, and so winding along the sea-coast and the Shannon, was reserved by the Act (27th September, 1653) from being let out to the Irish, and was to be given to the soldiery to plant. . . . . There they were to dwell without entering a walled town, or coming within five miles of some on pain of death. All were to remove thither by the 1st of May, 1654, at latest, under pain of being put to death by sentence of a court

....