IRELAND IN 1901

To understand thoroughly the Ireland of the present day, it is necessary to have studied her history in the past. Nevertheless, if we go back to a comparatively recent period, say to the beginning of the reign of Victoria, we can obtain a reasonably clear idea of her existing condition. A revolution has passed over her in this space of time almost as complete as the revolution which has transformed France; the results have not yet been fully developed, but in nearly all respects they have been immense. The community has, for the most part, made material progress; but this has been far from great or decisive; it has been interrupted by seasons of distress, one culminating in a dire catastrophe, and has been retarded by many causes of trouble. Taking the external aspect of Ireland first, Dublin has certainly advanced in the last sixty years; the capital has been surrounded by fine and increasing suburbs; the squares, the streets, the shops have improved; above all, though much remains yet to be done, the contrast between the dwellings of the rich and the poor is much less painful than it was within living memory. No city, however, has made such progress as Belfast: its population, which, in 1841, was not more than 75,000 souls, was, in 1891, upwards of 255,000;[1] its opulence has probably grown tenfold; it is the centre of the great manufacture of Ulster; its building-yards are renowned for its magnificent ships; its estuary is crowded with the thronging fleets of commerce. The towns dependent on it, too, and the whole adjoining region, are flourishing from the great trade in linen, which has been aggregated within a comparatively small space; indeed, this prosperity has extended over all the north-east of Ireland, and Londonderry has long been a thriving seaport. Few of the towns of the rest of Ulster and of the southern provinces have improved; but signs of augmented wealth appear in other directions; in this respect they are striking in the extreme. The places of worship and the religious houses of the Catholic Church of Ireland have been transformed; the mean ‘chapels’ of the past have largely disappeared; most parishes have a suitable church; fine cathedrals dominate many towns; we often admire monasteries and convents in architectural splendour. The most remarkable phenomenon, however, of this description is the great and fortunate change which has taken place in the habitations of the community throughout the country. The dense and wretched hovels which, sixty years ago, barely sheltered the millions of Irish indigence, if still too frequent, have been, for the most part, effaced; the houses of the better class have greatly increased in numbers, though the population has enormously declined.[2] And the face of the landscape in most counties bears witness, on the whole, to a still perceptible progress. The chief industry of Ireland, indeed, as I shall show afterwards, has certainly retrograded within the last twenty years; her agricultural area and resources have much diminished. The advance, too, which, from about 1853 to 1876, was manifest and rapid in most of her rural districts, has been, to a considerable extent, checked; capital has, for some time, been avoiding her soil. But if the process was stern, nay, appalling, the land has, within the last half century, been thrown open to husbandry, infinitely better and more fruitful than had existed before; the exertions which were made, for a long space of time, to improve cultivation have left far-spreading traces; we still behold the beneficent results. The land over the greater part of its surface is not ‘puckered up’ in thousands of squalid patches, the holdings of masses of cottar paupers; it has been made more available for real farming; and it has been largely drained, enclosed, and covered with woodland—at least, up to a recent period.The material condition of the Irish community has, also, improved since the late Queen ascended the throne. This, no doubt, is to be largely ascribed to the effects of the great Famine of 1845-47, and of the immense emigration that followed in its train. The resources of Ireland, before that calamity, were unable to support, in anything like comfort, the teeming multitudes crowded on her soil; an official report, made in 1838, proved that two millions and a half of the poor in Ireland were for months in the year on the brink of starvation; this huge mass of indigence, which forced up rent, beat down wages, and was most injurious to good husbandry, was almost incompatible with real social progress. The great and continuing exodus of the Irish race, which has gone on for more than half a century, has not been without untoward results; but it has relieved the country from a destructive incubus; and this has certainly wrought a beneficent change, though the population has declined from about eight millions in 1837 to about four and a half millions in 1895.[3] Ireland, indeed, is still, mainly, a poor country—in some districts she is exceedingly poor; but the disappearance of overwhelmingly redundant millions has enabled her to maintain the millions that have remained much better than of old, and has distinctly raised the standard of living among all the humbler classes. The wages of agricultural labour, seldom more than six or seven shillings a week before the Famine, and then paid in potatoes by a vile truck system, have risen to ten and even twelve shillings, usually paid in cash; and they have not fallen, though Irish agriculture is very far from prosperous. The wages of the higher kinds of labour have also greatly increased; this is apparent in nearly all trades, and is especially apparent in the trades of Ulster. At the same time, the potato has long ceased to be the sole food of the poor; their dwellings, though still too often mean and bad, are infinitely better than they once were; their attire, and even their appearance, has greatly improved. I do not think, indeed, that O’Connell’s description of the peasantry of Munster in 1825 could now be fairly applied to even the worst parts of Ireland, the impoverished tracts on the seacoast of Connaught: ‘They have no clothes to change, they have none but what they wear at the moment.... Their food consists of potatoes and water during the greater part of the year; potatoes and sour milk during another portion; they use some salt with their potatoes when they have nothing but water.’[4] There is evidence, also, that, even of late years, the wealth of Ireland has, in some measure, increased, especially in the middle and lower middle classes. The landed gentry, indeed, owing partly to the effects of Free Trade, and partly to those of legislation I shall describe afterwards, have been impoverished in many instances, and in many ruined; and the Irish tenant farmer, if gorged by the spoil of his landlord, has not gained all that an agrarian revolution was expected to give him. But the commerce of Ireland has made progress, within the last two decades, if this has not been by any means great; and though the capital she holds in the best securities has perceptibly diminished of late years, there has been a very large increase in most kinds of other investments.[5]

This picture of Ireland, however, has dark features; her welfare has been, at best, partial; considerable deductions must be made from it. The progress of the capital, as has been the case in London, is largely to be ascribed to the depletion of many country districts, a change that has been going on for a long period, and has been accelerated by the decline of the landed gentry in wealth. The enormous advance of Belfast, and of the adjoining neighbourhood, has been, to a great extent, caused by the concentration of the linen manufacture within a small area; the hand-loom has disappeared from Ireland; this has been injurious to many petty towns and villages. The population and the trade of nearly all the chief towns in the southern provinces have diminished; Cork, with its immense natural advantages, has not prospered; Limerick and, notably, Galway are in decay; most of the inland towns show few signs of improvement; the outskirts of almost all are defaced by lines of ruined hovels, the wrecks of abodes a dwindling tale of indwellers has left. Many of these urban centres were, sixty years ago, seats of manufactures and of other industries, which, to a certain extent, were flourishing; but these sources of wealth have, for the most part, been dried up; they have been blotted out by the gigantic manufactures of England and Scotland poured into Ireland, everywhere, within a few hours, by steam. The collapse, indeed, of Irish manufactures in the last half century has been striking and mournful; 696,000 persons were employed in textile and dyeing industries in 1841; in 1881 there were only 130,000; and though the growth of machinery may in part account for this difference, it assuredly cannot fully explain it.[6] The same remark applies to Irish fishing industry; the small craft which once swarmed along the coast, and, rearing a breed of hardy mariners, gathered in the prolific harvests of the sea, have been vanishing year after year; in 1867, 9332 boats, and 38,444 men and boys were engaged in this calling; the numbers were 5646 and 21,940 in 1891.[7] Turning to the face of the country, agriculture, we have seen, has improved, if we look back to the period before the Famine; but it is still centuries behind that of England and Scotland, and of late years it has markedly declined. It is not only that the prices of agricultural produce are much less than they were, in the last generation, and that its total value has fallen from £97,885,000 in 1851-55, to £88,955,000 in 1889-93.[8] The agricultural area of Ireland has diminished from 1879 to 1899 by rather more than 400,000 acres;[9] and it is absolutely certain that within these decreasing limits, as I shall point out in subsequent chapters, agriculture has made little or no progress, and in some districts has distinctly become worse; we see the results of the vicious legislation of the last twenty years in deteriorated farms, in hundreds of cases, in a most injurious neglect of arterial drainage, and in the destruction of thousands of acres of woodland. And the ruin which has overtaken many of the landed gentry has been made only too manifest in the desolate aspect of scores of country seats, once happy homes, that now know their owners no more.

It must be borne in mind, too, as we examine the present state of Ireland, that if, on the whole, she has made some progress, she is still, as I have said, a poor country, and that a considerable part of Connaught, her western province, has, for years, been in so poor a condition, that the Government of late has laudably made a great effort to raise it out of the depths of indigence. Other considerations, moreover, must be taken into account, if we would form a just conclusion as to the material position of Ireland, and, especially, as to her material prospects. The reduction of her population, up to a certain point, was an essential condition of her social progress; but that limit appears to have been far surpassed; this continuous decline, during more than half a century, has become an ominous symptom. More than 3,700,000 of souls have emigrated from Ireland since 1851;[10] and this number does not include the masses which fled from the catastrophe of 1845-47. This immense drain on the life of a nation has, for years, had a pernicious effect; in large parts of the country labourers have become so scarce that it is often difficult to save the harvest, which should be quickly gathered in, in a wet climate; and hands are wanting to industry in many places. Emigration, too, has taken away the best part of the people, men and women in the flower of existence; the reproductive power of the community has, accordingly, declined; the birth-rate of Ireland is less than it was; infirmity, disease, and, notably, insanity have increased; the population of the towns is seldom active and thriving.[11] At the same time, the taxation of Ireland has become many degrees more excessive in the last sixty years; the local rates have advanced from about £1,000,000 to nearly £4,000,000; the general taxation has been well-nigh doubled; and a tribunal of the very highest authority has recently declared that Ireland is immensely overtaxed, and has been for upwards of forty years. Nor can there be a real question but that large interests connected with the land have suffered greatly in the period that has now extended from 1878-79. It is unnecessary to refer to the condition of the landed gentry; I shall notice it at some length afterwards; but, much as the Irish people dislike the Poor-law, pauperism has distinctly increased during the last ten years, though the population has fallen off in numbers, and the charge of pauperism shows a corresponding increase.[12] The Income Tax returns, too, as regards the land, are of sinister omen; those under Schedule A have greatly diminished since 1890; and there is a considerable decline of property in the Funds.[13] As to the argument that the Tenant Right of the Irish farmer has risen in value, and that this proves Irish agriculture to be in a prosperous state, this is a complete, nay, a grotesque, fallacy. The rise in the value of Tenant Right is simply one of the many signs that a huge confiscation has taken place in the Irish land.

If Ireland, therefore, has made material progress, this has been slow, partial, and with large drawbacks; such as it is, it must be mainly ascribed to the results of the Famine, which liberated the soil from a destructive burden. The whole country, it has truly been said, has still too much the look of a ‘great neglected estate,’ requiring development in most of its parts; large sections of the population are poor, feeble in health, and backward. Any advance, moreover, which Ireland has made in well being, since 1837-38, is as nothing compared with the extraordinary growth of the prosperity of England and Scotland, within the same period. True-hearted Irishmen grieve as they pass from the lesser to the greater island, and contrast the husbandry of Galway and Mayo with that of the Lothians and Kent; as they gaze on the Shannon, with scarcely a sail on its waters, and the Clyde teeming with its fleets of commerce; above all, as they turn from the decaying towns of their own country to such centres of wealth and of gigantic trade, as some even of the provincial cities of Britain, not to speak of the mighty world of London. The causes, indeed, of this contrast may be easily found; the mineral resources of Ireland are scanty; her commerce and manufactures are small; she is essentially an agricultural land, which has lost much from the effects of Free Trade; she has suffered greatly from misgovernment, agitation, and social disorder; all this has kept her back in the national race. The mineral products, on the other hand, of England and Scotland are immense, and of the first importance in an age of invention; they have decisively contributed to the huge development of the opulence and the trade of Great Britain; the policy of Free Trade, carried out for years, has had marvellous results in the same direction; if British agriculture is not progressing, British commerce and manufactures are still supreme; and Great Britain has been for ages a law-abiding land, in which order has been happily combined with liberty. These considerations fully explain the wide and ever-increasing distinction between Ireland and England and Scotland, only too manifest; they have been amply verified by unerring statistics. Two figures may suffice for a general reader; the resources of Ireland were estimated, a few years ago, at a sum of about four hundred millions sterling, that of Great Britain at not less than ten thousand millions.[14]The social structure of Ireland springs from the soil; it is most apparent in the relations that have been formed in the land. I shall dwell, at some length, in other chapters of this work, on the history and the characteristics of the Irish land system, and on the revolution through which it has passed; I can here only briefly glance at the subject. That system, at the beginning of the late reign, still represented, in many respects, the features it had borne in the eighteenth century, though these had been, in a great degree, modified. The land, over four-fifths of its surface, was still in the ownership of a small class of men, divided in race and faith from its occupants; the conquests and confiscations which had drawn deep lines of distinction between the Anglo-Protestant landlord and the Catholic and even the Presbyterian peasant, had still left their indelible traces, if these had been, to a considerable extent, effaced. Absenteeism had increased since the Union, though absentee estates were showing signs of improvement; middleman tenures, with their manifold and complex mischiefs, were disappearing, but were still numerous; various causes, to operate for many years, were diminishing the security of the peasants’ tenure. The power of the dominant landlord class was declining; it was being weakened by the Castle bureaucracy, and by the emancipation of Catholic Ireland; but it was still nearly supreme in landed relations; this class was all but the absolute lords of the tillers of the soil. It is untrue that it was oppressive and unjust as a rule; but some of its members abused their excessive power; it had too much in common with an exclusive caste; and a whole train of economic causes were aggravating the evils of a land system from its origin placed on unsound foundations. Agriculture was advancing in not a few counties; many of the landed gentry were improving men, who were making a beginning in the scientific farming, which, before long, was to be more fully developed. But the population, we have seen, had increased by millions Ireland could not support; over whole districts, especially in Munster and Connaught, the land had been split up into petty holdings, the seats of a huge multitude of human misery. Rents, therefore, were being unnaturally forced up, and the wages of labour unnaturally cut down; the land system was disorganised, and filled with dangerous elements. The worst vice of the system, however, has yet to be noticed; from different causes which I shall point out afterwards, the occupiers of the soil in Ireland had, as a general rule, made even the permanent improvements on their farms, and large sums had repeatedly been paid on the transfer of these; they had thus gradually acquired concurrent rights in the land, in tens of thousands of instances; and yet these were outside the pale of the law, and could be annihilated by eviction, or even the raising of rent. These rights had the support, in parts of Ulster, of a long-established custom, and were usually respected in the southern provinces; but they ought long before to have had full legal protection; and they were sometimes violated or disregarded by unscrupulous landlords. The results were seen in the White Boy and the agrarian disorders which had disturbed Ireland for more than a century, and even ran back to the confiscations of the past.

This land system, essentially bad as it was, marked by evil distinctions and pregnant with wrong, scarcely attracted the attention of British statesmen, until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. Peel was the first minister who, even dimly, perceived its vices; he appointed a Commission to report on the subject. The labours of this body were, in part, laudable; but the Commissioners, filled with prejudice as to the excellence of British land tenure, and without experience of that of Ireland, made a capital mistake in the suggestions they offered. Instead of recommending that the concurrent rights of the Irish tenant in the land, often equivalent to a real joint ownership, should receive, as was but just, the sanction of law, they proposed to restrict these in many ways; they put forward a plan of ‘compensation,’ as they called it, that was worse than useless. Legislation to this effect was withdrawn from Parliament; the terrible visitation of 1845-47 had ere long shattered the Irish land system, bringing ruin on hundreds of the landed gentry, making thousands of farmers of the better classes bankrupt, forcing the petty holders of the land—the cottar population, as it was named—to fly from the country in despairing multitudes. The land was largely set free from a dense mass of wretchedness; it was the general belief of the public men of the day, that what was most required, at this conjuncture, was to attract men of capital to it to do it justice, and to get rid, as quickly as possible, of the large body of Irish landlords, who, even before deeply involved in debt, had been made hopelessly insolvent by recent events. The Encumbered Estates Act became law, with scarcely an opposing protest; it was to ‘regenerate Ireland,’ its authors proclaimed; its results were to develop a bad class of landlords, to annihilate the rights of the Irish peasant wholesale, and to cause an iniquitous confiscation on an enormous scale. The Irish Land Question, as was the phrase, was now raised once more; in 1852 the occupiers of the Irish soil set on foot an agitation to vindicate their rights, destroyed or endangered by what had lately occurred; the Government of Lord Derby lent a favourable ear; but it was defeated in the House of Commons by intrigue; the land system remained in the state in which it had been left; no real attempt to improve it was made. A series of years followed in which Ireland made distinct progress, and her agriculture advanced; it became a fixed idea with British statesmen, that there was nothing radically bad in Irish land tenure, and that its defects would gradually disappear; the grievances of the Irish peasant were ignored; his claims to what was now known as his Tenant Right, urged feebly by his advocates, were voted down in Parliament; and a general belief prevailed that what Ireland most needed was a still further and steady removal of what was deemed ‘her surplus population’ from her soil.

As has so often happened in the affairs of Ireland, her real condition at this period was not understood; and the reform in her land system, which had become essential, was indefinitely delayed with disastrous results. Meanwhile, though things were serene on the surface, the inherent vices in Irish landed relations were not really changed, and, in some respects, were made worse. The Fenian troubles and outbreak of 1865-67 showed how much there was still peccant in the state of Ireland; Mr. Gladstone addressed himself, in 1870, to the task of effecting a reform in her land system. The measure he carried through Parliament was bold, and, in the main, statesmanlike; but it was injured by the predilection for English land tenure its author avowed, a general misconception of British statesmen; it was not without marked and even grave defects; and though unquestionably it did real good, it did not satisfy the tenant class—at least, the men who had become its leaders. In a few years the frightful period of the Land League had begun; a Reign of Terror prevailed in about a third part of Ireland, accompanied by far-spreading and atrocious crime. The movement was really a huge conspiracy, formed in America to overthrow British rule in Ireland; but Mr. Gladstone, now minister for the second time, resolved to deal with it only on its agrarian side; he wrought a complete revolution in the Irish land system, on principles wholly different from those of his measure of 1870. This legislation was prepared without reflection; it passed through Parliament when that assembly was almost in a state of panic; its author professed that his only object was to secure the occupier of the Irish soil in his legitimate rights; but the methods he adopted to attain this end have never been heard of in modern times, and have never been employed before in civilised lands. The principle of the mediÆval statutes, which endeavoured to fix the price of bread, and the rate of wages, was extended to the Irish land system; rents were to be adjusted through the agency of the State, by tribunals to which no parallel can be found; tenants’ improvements were declared exempted from rent; and a mode of land tenure, hitherto condemned by Mr. Gladstone, and known as the ‘theory of the Three F’s,’ was applied to the great majority of Irish tenancies, in an exaggerated, crude, and dangerous form. This legislation, revolutionary and socialistic alike, has been given more ample scope in the last twenty years; it probably affects four-fifths of the rented lands in Ireland; it has fashioned the type of land tenure over nearly all the country. The successors of Mr. Gladstone, who, indeed, had boasted that it set the doctrines of Adam Smith at nought, were not blind to the evils it soon developed; but it is questionable if their attempts to mitigate these, and to place the Irish land system on a better basis, have not been at least as open to censure. With the ignorance of Irish land tenure common in British statesmen, they proclaimed, what assuredly was not the fact, that Mr. Gladstone had ‘created a dual ownership’ in the Irish land, and that, in order to get rid of this intolerable thing, it was necessary, in accord with English ideas, to bring Ireland, as far as possible, under ‘single ownership,’ and to make the occupiers of the Irish soil, to a large extent, its owners. The system of ‘Land Purchase’ in Ireland, begun in 1870, was freed from the limitations which made it safe and just, and widely enlarged under new conditions; Irish tenants were encouraged to acquire the fee in their holdings, by a process never contemplated before; instead of having to pay any part of the price, the State advanced them the whole purchase moneys, repayable by an annual charge much less than any true rent. About a tenth part of the tenant class of Ireland have become owners of their farms by these means; the transaction has been in no sense a ‘purchase;’ though given the name, it is really the exact opposite.

I shall describe all this legislation, in detail, afterwards, and shall indicate its far-reaching effects; here I can only take a cursory survey. The attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system, in the last sixty years, have been, with scarcely an exception, failures; the Irish land, it has truly been said, is strewn with the wrecks of repeated errors. The Land Act of 1870 was, on the whole, a well-conceived measure; but the recommendations made by the Devon Commission, the iniquitous and destructive Encumbered Estates Act, the agrarian revolution wrought by Mr. Gladstone, and the ‘Land Purchase’ Acts, as they are falsely called, have been monuments of want of insight and knowledge. And, what is even worse, legislation on the Irish land has, over and over again, been too long delayed, and has been inconsistent, fitful, founded on no principle; the results have been in a high degree disastrous. Reforms that would have been gladly welcomed if made years before, have been treated with contempt when made too late; and reforms have more than once been hasty experiments, carried out under the stress of menacing troubles. The fable of the Sibylline books has been realised in this matter; and not a few of the efforts to improve Irish land tenures have been little better than sudden leaps in the dark. As to recent legislation in this province, its consequences and tendencies have become manifest. That it has effected some good may be admitted; it has removed grievances that no doubt existed; it has made the government of Ireland more easy for the time; it has allayed discontent for a moment; but the good is far outweighed by the evil. It is not only that the nostrum of the ‘Three F’s,’ and the adjustment of rent by the intervention of the State, have cut down the rental of Ireland to an extent that cannot be justified, and have transferred to the occupier of the Irish soil a large part of what was the owner’s property by a process of confiscation concealed, but certain. It is not only that the status of the Irish landlord has been iniquitously transformed to his extreme injury, and that the status of the Irish tenant has been changed to his extreme advantage, in both instances without a pretence to right. The Irish land system has been reduced to an almost hopeless state; it presents some of the worst features of the past; its conditions discourage the improvement of the land, promote its deterioration in many ways, and banish capital away from it; and its plain tendency has been to make agriculture decline. And the revolution, which has been thus accomplished, has aggravated the divisions of classes in Ireland, and has been attended with ruinous litigation on a huge scale; and it has produced demoralisation far-reaching and profound, a sense of insecurity in all landed relations, and a far too general disregard of the respect due to contract. The policy, too, of so-called ‘Land Purchase’ has been accompanied with a train of evils on the increase. It is not creating, as its authors fondly hoped, a class of loyal and thriving freeholders; it is not even creating a body of industrious and improving farmers. It is, on the contrary, developing, in some of its parts, the bad land system of the eighteenth century; it has proved injurious to agriculture in one important respect. Above all, from the very nature of the case, it has drawn harsh, nay, unjust, distinctions between the landed classes, which necessarily have been a cause of much discontent; and it has inevitably provoked a demand for a universal confiscation of the Irish land even worse than any of those which have been the curse of Ireland.

I pass from the material and general state of Ireland to that of the Irish community, in its different parts. That community is still divided, as it has been for ages, into three separate and distinct peoples, marked off from each other in race and faith; whatever ‘Nationalist’ leaders may assert, it is not, and has never been, in a real sense, a nation. The lines of demarcation between Catholic, Presbyterian, and Protestant Ireland are at least as clearly defined as they have always been; they have probably been widened by the troubles of late years, and by the legislation which has been a consequence. Catholic Ireland has a population of some three millions and a half of souls; it is in the main a Celtic race, but with a considerable admixture of other elements; it has passed through a revolution remarkable and immense. Sixty years ago, the worst parts of the Penal Code had long been things of the past; but the Irish Catholics had only recently thrown off the last remains of that thraldom, under O’Connell’s guidance; and their emancipation had only been effected by a great and very threatening movement. They were still comparatively an alien and a subject people; they had not many owners of land; they were not numerous in the upper trading and the professional classes; education was greatly wanting among them; they were for the most part a backward and poor peasantry, almost serfs of landlords distinct in creed and in blood; and they formed the bulk of the teeming millions that vegetated on the soil in indigent misery. The Irish Catholics, too, had still many and real grievances; the tithe of the Established Church had long been an unjust burden on the petty husbandman; it had recently given rise to a frightful war of classes, and had only been commuted a short time; the Established Church itself was a moral wrong, felt acutely by the Irish priesthood at least. Catholic Ireland, besides, was deeply sunk in ignorance; the system of national education had only begun to flourish; and the Irish Catholic was still all but wholly excluded from county administration and municipal government. The worst of these grievances, however, was the state of the tenure of the land; this was especially harsh on the Catholic peasant; if oppression was not general or even common, he was too often subjected to excessive rent and unfair eviction. This order of things has all but completely passed away; the position of Catholic Ireland in the State has almost wholly been changed. Catholic emancipation has long been an accomplished fact; Irish Catholics and Protestants are equal before the law; and have really equal chances in fighting the battle of life. Though still not numerous, the Catholic owners of land have multiplied; the Irish Catholic middle classes have made a marked advance; they have grown in knowledge and increased in wealth; they have risen to a higher plane of existence. At the same time, the grievances of the past have nearly all been removed by law, often indeed very late, and by questionable means; but the Established Church has fallen from its high estate; education has been diffused through the Catholic masses; the Irish Catholics have obtained more than a just share in local government and administration of all kinds; their ascendency in this province is well-nigh assured. The most important, however, of these changes is that which has taken place in the state of the Irish Catholic peasantry. The process which lifted up millions of these from the land and sent them into exile was, no doubt, terrible; but it was the condition of the welfare and the progress of the population which remained. A great deal of the legislation, besides, which has revolutionised the tenure of land in Ireland, and has had a special effect on the Catholic occupiers of the soil, has been essentially ill designed and unjust; above all, it has been much too long delayed. But the Irish Catholic peasantry have long ago ceased to be serfs; they are more the owners of their own holdings than their former landlords; their rights in the land have been more than protected; they have acquired the fee in their farms in thousands of instances; the days of rack rents and harsh evictions have passed away for ever. If the lines of the old Irish land system may still be traced, they rather resemble, it has truly been said, the lineaments of a phantom than of a living being.

The attitude, however, of Catholic Ireland, and the sentiments of the immense majority of the Irish Catholics, must cause painful misgivings in reflecting minds. Their aristocracy, indeed, and their landed gentry have always been loyal and true subjects; they can scarcely be distinguished from their Protestant fellows. The Irish Catholics, too, of the upper middle classes are generally attached to the institutions under which they live; and Catholic Ireland has produced many eminent public servants, and has given splendid ornaments to the Bench and the Bar. But the spirit that prevails among the Irish Catholic lower middle classes, and notably among the masses of the peasantry, and the opinions and feelings they ostentatiously avow, are deeply to be regretted in many respects. Notwithstanding all that has been done for it, and the immense reforms made in its interest, this part of Catholic Ireland is, beyond question, more disaffected and disloyal to the State than it was when O’Connell was its master spirit; it is more hostile to government, law, and the existing order of things. The teaching of the Land and the National Leagues, and of the successor which has taken their place, has penetrated into the Corporations and Local Boards, in which the Catholic Irish are supreme; these assemblies echo with revolutionary and socialistic cries, and denounce the whole system of British rule in Ireland, aiming especially at the Sovereign and those in the highest places. The Irish Catholics, too, in the three provinces of the south, have gained a complete ascendency in county and municipal affairs; their first object has been to exclude the landed gentry from them, and to destroy the influence which belongs to property; and they have exhibited tendencies absolutely opposed to the Constitution to which they owe their authority. The worst symptoms, however, appear in the state of the peasantry; they have obtained advantages of which their fathers never even dreamed; the land system has been turned upside down for their behoof; they have no grievance in landed relations; and yet they remain unfriendly to the State, and show no sign of gratitude. This class contains the multitudes, who for more than twenty years, have allied themselves with a conspiracy against our power in Ireland, and who, at the bidding of designing men, shout treasonable utterances at mob gatherings, and denounce the ‘Saxon’ and ‘landlordism’ with one voice; and though they are a timid and somewhat inert mass, and they would not rise like their fathers in 1798, they would not lift a hand to support our rule were foreign invaders to descend on our shores. This state of opinion, no doubt, is intelligible to the real student of Irish history; the Irish Catholics are a people who have been cruelly wronged; they have only slowly risen out of serf-like thraldom; above all, they have only attained the position they hold in the State after long years of trials, and by giving trouble; they treasure the Celtic traditions of the past; we may regret that they are what they are, but can hardly feel surprise. In other respects, the Irish Catholic masses, especially in a democratic age, must arouse the solicitude of thinkers worthy of the name. Many thousands of them are still illiterate; they are too generally the mere followers of priests and demagogues, tossed hither and thither as their masters direct; they are animated by crude and wild ideas, like the peasantry of France before the Revolution; they have scarcely anything in common with the corresponding class in England, trained for centuries in habits of well-ordered liberty. They form, in a word, a dangerous and easily led democracy; and yet, owing to recent legislation, ever to be deplored, they possess almost a monopoly of political power in Ireland, and have sent representatives to Parliament whose acts are a byword.

Conciliation, therefore, as the phrase is, has failed in the case of the greatest part of Catholic Ireland; this remains an alien, even a perilous, element in the State; it is worse than useless to shut our eyes to the truth; the time is still apparently distant when it will become contented and loyal. Presbyterian Ireland is a people of rather more than half a million of souls, almost concentrated within a nook of Ulster; it was rebellious in sentiment a hundred years ago; it is now devotedly attached to the British connection, and has firmly supported the Union during a period of trouble. This community, nevertheless, of artisans and farmers is rather widely separated from the aristocracy in their midst, for the most part English in blood, and of the Anglican faith; and though the Presbyterian farmer has obtained the benefit of the late reforms of land tenure, and has received advantages far in excess of justice, he declares himself to be discontented with his lot, and is clamouring for a vast confiscation of the Irish land in his selfish interest. The Irish Protestants are a population rather larger than the Presbyterians; but they are scattered over all parts of the country; they do not possess the political influence of their distant kinsmen in Ulster. They comprise at least three-fourths of the leading landed gentry, and a considerable number of the better class of farmers; they predominate in the learned professions, and in the higher walks of commerce. But their lower orders feel the loss of the ascendency which was once their birthright; they have been thrust out from corporate and local government; they are isolated amidst a population not in sympathy with them; as a people they can hardly be described as prosperous. As to the Protestant landed gentry, they have for centuries been the most loyal of subjects; it is significant that they have been called the British garrison by the conspirators who seek to overthrow our rule in Ireland; they have given many eminent worthies to the State, and proved their devotion to it at the gravest crises; what they are has been shown in the war in South Africa. At present, however, profound and just discontent has sunk deep into the hearts of this order of men. They are the heirs of conquest and confiscation, it is said; but they were placed in the position they hold by English kings and Parliaments; is that any reason that, within the last half-century, the Nemesis of conquest and confiscation should have been invoked against them, in the Encumbered Estates Act and predatory agrarian laws? They were too much of an exclusive caste, separated from their dependents, and possessing powers over the occupiers of the soil, which were sometimes abused; is that any reason that they should have been deprived of political influence, supplanted by the bureaucratic Castle, changed from owners of their estates into mere pensioners, shut out by the force of law from local and county government? What, however, the Irish landed gentry most deeply feel is that, in the course of the last sixty years, they have been deceived, nay, betrayed, by British statesmen, who, having repeatedly assured them that their position was secure, have sacrificed them when it seemed to suit their purpose.

The Imperial Parliament has, during the last century, had absolute control over the affairs of Ireland. No impartial student of history will deny that it has governed Ireland very much better than her old Parliament could possibly have done, after the dreadful rising of 1798 had literally torn the country to pieces. The large majority of thinking persons have long ago been convinced that the policy of Home Rule, that is, the substitution for the Houses at Westminster of a statutory legislature seated in Dublin, would be disastrous to the Empire and Ireland alike; and that the evils attendant on the present system would be aggravated a hundred-fold by the revolution Mr. Gladstone tried to effect. Nor can it be questioned that the Imperial Parliament has, for a long period, sincerely desired to legislate and rule for the good of Ireland, and has accomplished important Irish reforms, whatever legitimate exceptions may be taken to them. Protestant ascendency and the Established Church have fallen; the law has long been indifferent to Irishmen of all classes; education has been brought home to the mass of the people; the tenure of land has been transformed, unwisely no doubt, but wholly in the interest of the occupiers of the soil. Nevertheless, much that the Imperial Parliament has done, and left undone, in the Victorian era, remains matter of censure and regret; and its Irish administration has been in many respects unfortunate. The neglect to make a provision for the Irish Catholic priesthood, a main object of Pitt and of our best statesmen, when the Anglican Church was disestablished in 1869, was a grave and a calamitous mistake; the attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system have, with scarcely an exception, been sorry failures; the results have been, in no doubtful sense, deplorable. Few, too, will justify such measures as the establishment in Ireland of household suffrage, that is, giving a monopoly of political power to an ignorant and priest-ridden democracy,[15] and depriving property and intelligence of all influence, or as the handing over county and city government, in three-fourths of Ireland, to much the same classes. Nor are even positive errors such as these the worst, perhaps, that can be laid to the charge of the Imperial Parliament in the conduct of Irish affairs. With rare exceptions, the reforms it has made have been, unhappily, too late, and have been obtained only through menacing popular movements; it has over and over again made Irish questions the mere subjects of the selfish strife of party, with evil consequences for Irish interests; it has occasionally, and even for large spaces of time, shown a marked indifference to reasonable Irish demands; and its administration of Ireland has repeatedly been inconsistent, even contradictory, shortsighted, and feeble. It must be acknowledged, indeed, that the rule of the Imperial Parliament, in the circumstances in which Ireland has been placed, is, from the nature of the case, faulty in many respects; it is that of a dominant assembly practically controlling a subject dependency; and, as we see in the striking instances of Athens and Rome, this kind of government has never been free from great and real objections. This, no doubt, is no reason that we should fly from less to unbearable evils, and adopt the fatal scheme of Home Rule; and the causes that have made our Parliamentary rÉgime in Ireland as defective as it is are evident, and, as I shall point out afterwards, may probably be removed, to some extent at least, without subverting the constitution of these realms. But the broad fact remains, and cannot be concealed; the Imperial Parliament, much as it has done, has not reached the hearts or gained, in any degree, the sympathy of an immense majority of the Irish people.

This conclusion, indeed, has been made only too manifest, if we look back at the history of Ireland within living memory. The Catholic Association defied the Imperial Parliament, and was supreme in four-fifths of Ireland, from 1824 to 1829; O’Connell, in 1843, rallied the Irish Catholic millions to the cause of the Repeal of the Union, that is, to the subversion of British rule from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. Home Rule became a popular cry when proclaimed by Butt; Parnell soon rose to the head of an Irish faction, which deliberately tried to paralyse and cross Parliament, and to make its sway in Ireland of no avail and contemptible. The Land League and the National League were essentially conspiracies of foreign origin, and they appealed to socialistic greed in a season of distress; but their chief object was to annihilate British power in Ireland; they had the support of huge Catholic masses; they returned to Parliament a band of more than eighty men, one of whose purposes was to checkmate its authority. Too much is not to be made of these movements; three-fourths at least of the Irish community have repeatedly been led away by able but unscrupulous leaders, and rush into courses to which they are not earnestly inclined; but these unquestionable facts assuredly prove that the institutions under which they exist are not acceptable to the great body of the people of Ireland. This attitude has been displayed with marked and too plain significance, within a period, as it were, of yesterday. The United Irish League fills the place of the Land and the National Leagues; it is a conspiracy against the State, like its forerunners; it aims ultimately at the same objects; its organisation and machinery are the same; it seeks to establish its domination by similar methods. It is, no doubt, less formidable than the Land and the National Leagues; it has received little support from America, and has no one to compare with Parnell at its head; but it has sent more than three-fourths of the representatives of Ireland into the House of Commons; and these have combined to put in force the arts of obstruction with an audacity, a perseverance, and a measure of success, perhaps never so conspicuous before. Its authority is less far-reaching than that of its predecessors; but it has established a reign of tyranny in not a few counties; it is largely backed by the Irish priesthood and by much the greatest part of Catholic Ireland; and its leaders boast, not without truth, that, disloyal as many of their utterances are, they are completely in accord with popular sympathies. The acts and the speeches, indeed, of these men have never been more unequivocal than within the last two or three years;[16] yet almost everywhere they obtain the applause and the support of the multitude. An Irish contingent was sent to fight for the Boers; the war in South Africa was yelled at, at huge public meetings, as an odious instance of English tyranny and crime; every reverse that befell our arms was welcomed; the Irish masses, especially of late, have made a display of their antipathy to, and hatred of, the State. There was an outbreak of disloyal rioting in Dublin at the Diamond Jubilee; but for the accident of the Spanish War there would have been a great commemoration of the rebellion of 1798; even the visit of the late Queen to Ireland was made an occasion for seditious speeches; if her death was very generally mourned, public bodies were found to refuse an expression of regret.

Irish administration, I have remarked, is in many respects faulty; this is mainly because it is dependent on British parties; it fluctuates as one or the other prevails in Parliament. It sometimes represents completely opposite principles; besides, as Lord-Lieutenants and Chief Secretaries usually hold office for a short time only, they are tempted to adopt a hand-to-mouth policy, and to govern with little thought of the morrow. A marked change, however, has, in the course of time, passed over the ordinary system of administration carried on at the Castle. The aristocracy and the leading Irish gentry had still, even at the beginning of the Victorian age, much influence in directing local affairs; their authority was not nearly as great as it had been; but they were still looked up to and consulted by the central government. This state of things has long ago ceased to exist; this order of men has long ago lost all political, and nearly all social, power; it has been superseded by a bureaucratic rÉgime, depending mainly on paid officials and police, which rules Ireland from the Castle, with little external support. This mode of government is imposing and apparently strong; but it is essentially weak, and has little real hold on the country; the information, with which it is amply supplied, is often false, and occasionally causes grave mistakes; it forms an administrative system resembling that of the old centralised monarchy of France, of which Tocqueville has exposed the defects and the vices. Under this rÉgime, however, the law of the land has certainly been vindicated more successfully than had been the case before; the Government has acquired decidedly increased power in dealing with disorders dangerous to the State, and perhaps in holding the scales of justice even between divided classes; it has not diminished the strife of hostile Irish factions, but it has maintained order more completely than of old; and this unquestionably is a great advantage, and a real set-off against some mischiefs and failures. It would be untrue to assert that this system of rule has been the paramount and even a main cause of the great decline in agrarian crime and trouble which Ireland has happily witnessed of late years; other and far more potent causes have concurred; but it may fairly be said that it has contributed to it. It would, however, be a complete mistake to suppose that agrarian disorder, even in its worst aspects, has become permanently a thing of the past in Ireland, or that this destructive curse of Irish social life has not immense influence even at this moment, though its outward manifestations have been greatly changed. It was, so to speak, only yesterday that, under the auspices of the Land and the National Leagues, there was the most frightful outbreak of agrarian crime that had been seen since the great tithe conflict; it assumed the proportions, in fact, of a horrible servile war; and shallow, indeed, the understanding must be which imagines that this state of things can never recur. If open agrarian disorder, too, has been largely diminished, the spirit of agrarian disorder is still strong; and it is doing infinite mischief in many parts of Ireland. Steadily adhering to the precepts laid down by Parnell, the United Irish League has brought the detestable system of ‘boycotting’ to a hideous perfection in several counties; whole districts are subject to this secret but villainous tyranny; the results are seen in numbers of derelict farms, in hundreds of victims writhing under ever-present terror, in an infamous interference with trade and industry. This malignant influence is more or less felt through nearly the whole of the southern provinces, and even to a considerable extent in Ulster; it should be added that the United Irish League, for the present, discourages active agrarian crime, though its agents hold this force in reserve; it believes it can compass its ends without making use of this weapon.[17]

A few words must be said, in this short survey, on the organisations that uphold the Christian faith in Ireland. The disestablished Anglican Church has certainly made progress in spiritual life; it has more moral and even, perhaps, social influence than when it was an appurtenance of the Erastian Castle. It has been admirably administered and ruled; the uses of adversity have been sweet to it, and it has been successfully launched on its new career; this is a strong proof of the inherent energy and capacity of the Anglo-Protestant Irish people. Very different, too, from what had been expected, moderation and wisdom prevail in its councils; its clergy are sincerely pious, but not given to extreme doctrines; its members are for the most part free from the narrow sectarian views which had formerly, not without reason, been laid to their charge. Its funds, amassed by good management, are, for the present, ample; but the rapid impoverishment of the landed gentry, the class from which it chiefly obtains support, and the confiscation with which they are threatened, no doubt expose it to future dangers; and it must always be the Church of a small minority, surrounded by influences hostile to it, but a Church which the State is bound to protect. The Presbyterian Church of Ireland has but little changed; it has felt the effect of the great religious movement, which has stirred the Three Kingdoms in the last half-century, and it is less rationalistic than it once was; but it is still what it always was, a powerful centre of the faith of John Knox, with a communion of strong democratic sympathies. The Catholic Church of Ireland still rests on the old foundations; but it is hardly the unshaken structure it was in the last generation. Its material resources have enormously increased; its fine edifices spread over the land; it still exercises immense influence over probably nine-tenths of Catholic Ireland. But a party has been growing up within it which resents, and has even defied, its pretensions; and though the power it possesses is, in the main, beneficent in the extreme, this has too often been abused in the domain of politics, and especially of late in Irish landed relations. The priesthood still largely direct their flocks, but they are more dependent on them than they once were; had it been otherwise, they would have hardly conformed to the bidding of the Land and the National Leagues, as unhappily they did in too many instances. Their leading men perceived from the first that these conspiracies were destructive of their moral influence; and had the whole body of the clergy received a just provision from the State, it would all but certainly have condemned the methods of the Leagues as these were decisively condemned by Rome. For the rest, the Catholic Church of Ireland is no friend of Protestant England, and of many of the institutions that exist in Ireland; but this has been inevitable from the events of Irish history; and whatever may be said, it has been essentially an ally of the State, by reason of its great religious authority. And if properly understood, it is a mighty conservative power, which ought if possible to be won over to the side of order and law; this is an ample, if there were no other, reason that statesmen should comply with its most reasonable demand, and remove the grievance, in high Catholic education, that only blind bigotry can deny.

The administration of justice in Ireland is better, on the whole, than it was in the early Victorian era. It is not only that the law’s delay has been to a considerable extent, remedied, as it has been, in England, by an improved procedure. Traces of Protestant ascendency were to be seen on the Irish Bench sixty years ago, though these were evanescent and few; such a trial as that of O’Connell in 1844, marked by partiality and even by wrong, would be simply impossible at the present time. Trial by jury, however, in Ireland too often reflects the animosities and prejudices of class, and is liable to grave perversion and errors; it is sometimes necessary, in causes where religious or political feeling is engaged, to make a careful selection in forming juries, in order that common right should be done; this inevitable, but invidious, process, held up to execration by the name of ‘packing,’ is certainly a matter that causes regret. The fairness seen in the administration of the law in Ireland has been strikingly illustrated of late years; leaders and agents of the Land and the National Leagues have had to answer for their offences in the inferior courts; but despite rabid clamour against what is called ‘coercion,’ the conduct of these inquiries has not been really impugned. A laudable attempt, however, to make the magisterial bench more popular, has lately placed on it an order of men, of whom some have abused their power; these instances, nevertheless, have not been frequent; the experiment cannot be pronounced a failure. The intellect of Ireland is not so fruitful as it was in the generation before the union; she has no political thinkers to be named with Burke, no writer of fiction equal to Maria Edgeworth, no dramatist to be compared to Sheridan, no orators who have reached the heights of eloquence reached by Grattan, Curran, Plunket, and other glories of her defunct Parliament. But there has been progress in this respect within the last sixty years; Ireland cannot boast of such public men as O’Connell, Sheil, and even Spring Rice; but she possesses Dufferin in the diplomatic sphere, and Lecky, and one or two others of repute in that of letters; she has only recently lost Lord Cairns and Lord Russell. The improvement of primary education in Ireland has been immense; the land is full of elementary schools, which, in the last generation, were, comparatively, very few, and though a considerable part of the population is still illiterate, the greater part, whose fathers were sunk in ignorance, has felt the good influence of the light of knowledge. High education, too, has advanced in Ireland; Trinity College is greater than before as a place of learning; if two of the Queen’s Colleges have certainly failed, the Royal University has been, in a sense, successful. But, as I shall point out, in subsequent pages, University education in Ireland remains defective; a University for the Irish Catholic upper middle class is a requirement rightly demanded from Parliament. As for Irish secondary education, it is still backward, but there is hope of improvement in this respect; the general standard of Irish education, it should be added, is, except at Trinity College, low, though this has been inevitable if we look back at the events of history. Irish opinion generally still embodies the deep-seated animosities and strife of race and faith, at least as fully as it ever did; with few exceptions this appears in the tone of the newspaper press. The utterances of many of the self-styled ‘Nationalist’ journals have been far more hostile to the State, and are conceived in a much worse spirit, than those of the same class of journals in O’Connell’s day.

If we examine the condition of Ireland, as a whole, we see that there has been some material progress, but with retrogression in important respects; and if a certain measure of good has been done, great wrong and evil have been accomplished, in the principal and the most far-reaching of her social relations. Her moral and political progress has been at least doubtful; notwithstanding immense and searching reforms, the mass of the population is more disaffected than of old; discontent largely pervades the classes most loyal to the State; if the mere power of government has increased, its beneficent influence is but little recognised; the great body of the community maintains a hostile attitude. The crooked has not been made straight in Ireland, nor the rough places plain; a state of society exists, in which, as the Greek poet said, ‘the fountains flow backwards, and things are out of joint.’ An old order has nearly passed away; but the new order that is replacing it is but of little promise; a type of society has been well-nigh broken up, but a strong and solid type is not being formed in its stead; at all events, in the phrase of Bacon, the time is still distant ‘when the strings of the Irish harp will all be in tune;’ many respond to the player’s hand in discord. ‘The Constitution in Ireland,’ Peel once exclaimed, ‘is not the British Constitution, but its ghastly image;’ let us see what it is in Ireland at the present time. The Sovereign is, in England, a main pillar of the State; he is a great political and social force; the Monarchy is enthroned in the heart of the nation. In Ireland he is almost an unknown name, associated with not a few evil memories; his influence, which ought to be immense over a Celtic race, has never made itself sensibly felt. In England Parliament responds to the national will, and has gathered the reverence of ages around it; in Ireland it is a foreign and alien assembly, with which the mass of the people has no sympathy. In England the aristocracy is at the head of public affairs, leads society, commands universal respect; in Ireland it has lost all authority; has no weight in the National Councils; has no popular support, is even disliked at the Castle. In England the middle class is enormously strong, and is the best bulwark of order and law; in England the democracy is almost wholly free from revolutionary ideas, as regards property, and seeks reforms by constitutional methods. In Ireland, it is unhappily quite otherwise; the middle class is comparatively weak, and, in its lower strata, is opposed to the existing order of things; the democracy is an easily led multitude, ready at its leaders’ bidding to rush into socialistic courses. In England, too, the Commonwealth is completely secure; in Ireland there is literally no Commonwealth; and such organisations as the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, are dangerous symptoms of a kind of Jacobin antipathy to the State. The words of Peel are still unhappily true; but painful as the contrast he pointed out is, even this is not the worst circumstance in the present condition of Irish affairs. What, I think, most alarms a reflecting mind, is the restlessness that pervades the mass of the people, an eagerness for some undefined change, a demand for the universal spoliation of a class, a sense of insecurity spreading far and wide, a neglect of the pursuits of calm industry in the hope of what a revolution may effect, an instability in the social fabric from top to bottom. The agitation, the disorder, and, I will add, the vicious legislation of late years, will, however, largely explain these phenomena.

Lord Salisbury’s Ministry came into office, six years ago, at the head of the most powerful majority that had been returned to the House of Commons since the great Reform era. The time was singularly opportune to consider the state of Ireland, and to deal with the Irish questions that required sound and wise treatment. The Opposition was paralysed by a rout at the polls; the National League conspiracy showed few signs of life; the ‘Nationalist’ party was rent asunder; the community was more quiescent than it had been for years. It would be unfair to deny that, since it acquired power, the Government has been beset by many and grave obstacles in legislating on domestic subjects; it has been encompassed by a sea of foreign troubles; it has had to conduct the protracted war in South Africa. It would be absurd, too, to expect that it could, once for all, have placed Irish affairs permanently on a secure basis; this can only be the result of the wisdom of years aided by the healing influence of time. But it has disappointed enlightened Irish opinion; it has not done, or even tried to do, what it might have accomplished. Undoubtedly parts of its policy have been good; it has effected something, if not much, in developing the material resources of the west of Ireland, and in mitigating the danger and the stress of Irish poverty; it has carried on the excellent work of Mr. Arthur Balfour in this respect; the Department of Agriculture it has lately formed will, not improbably, be of real use in promoting industry and self-reliance among the peasantry, on the principles advocated, a century and a half ago, by Berkeley. But commendation, I think, must here end; the Government, I believe, has made grave mistakes; it has assuredly not successfully dealt with the great ‘Case of Ireland,’ greater now than in the days of Molyneux and Swift. It has not reduced the excessive representation of Ireland in the House of Commons; until this is done the Union will not be secure. It has disregarded the verdict of the important Commission which has declared that Ireland has been immensely overtaxed for years; here it defies universal Irish opinion; and having pledged itself to make a further inquiry, it has not hitherto taken a step to redeem its pledge. It is divided on the question of high education in Ireland, and professes that this must be an ‘open question,’ as if this was not unwise and perilous; and though it has appointed a Commission to report on the subject, Catholic Ireland very possibly may not obtain the place of learning which it is entitled to demand. Above all, on the capital question of the Irish land, the Government has certainly all but ignored the recommendations of a Commission chosen by itself, and has refused to lessen the injustice proved to have been done wholesale; like its predecessors, in the case of the Encumbered Estates Act, it is still bent on agrarian legislation that has done infinite mischief. Its administration, too, up to this has not been successful; it has allowed the United Irish League to grow up and to gain strength, with far-spreading evil results; its conduct of Irish affairs has been weak and empirical, and notably marked by false optimistic fancies. Of late there has been improvement in this respect; we can only hope it will not be abortive.

‘In this gigantic body,’ Macaulay exclaimed fifty-seven years ago, ‘there is one vulnerable part near the heart.’[18] The Empire has expanded into ampler proportions than those described by the orator; its subject kings, dominations, princedoms, powers, above all, its myriads of many races and tongues, are united by far more durable ties than those which held it together in a generation that has passed away. Four years ago, Canada sent messengers from her great lakes, Hindustan representatives of her ancient dynasties, the great island continent envoys from her free nations, to do homage to Queen Victoria; the pageant, gathered ‘within London’s streaming roar,’ was a magnificent spectacle of world-wide loyalty. England has seen another and a still more wonderful sight; the martial sons of our great self-governing colonies have flocked in thousands to do battle in her cause, in the distant and ill-known wastes of South Africa; in a long, bloody, and sometimes disastrous conflict, they have proved themselves to be worthy companions in arms of the offspring of the soldiery of Blenheim and Waterloo; they have fought and bled for England as if she was their common country. But Ireland, as regards the mass of the people, has, on both occasions, stood sullenly aloof; her heart has gone out in sympathy with the Boers; she remains, for the most part, hostile to our rule and disloyal. It is mere foolishness to shut our eyes to plain facts; still more so to join in the false pÆans of interested partisans, and ignorant scribblers, who announce that because Ireland is, on the surface, comparatively at peace, she is in every sense a contented or a happy land, free from grave elements of political and social danger. She is still the ‘vulnerable part at the heart of the Empire;’ the spectre at the great national festival; the warning token, as in the case of the Oriental despot, that human grandeur and power are, in the nature of things, mortal. She is still, as she was in the day of Spenser, a malign influence across the path of our greatness, a riddle difficult to understand and interpret; the many problems she still presents to the statesman are perplexing in the extreme, and await solution. That any policy will suddenly remove the many evils apparent in her organic structure is a delusion a rational mind rejects; the deep-seated ills in that distempered frame may never be completely and finally cured. Something effectual, nevertheless, may, I think, be done; I proceed to examine, in the following chapters, the ‘Present Irish Questions’ that confront our rulers; and to consider what the amending hand may accomplish.