formed. Thanks to the defeat of England in the war of American Secession; thanks to the enrolment of a large force of Protestant volunteers in Ireland; and thanks, not least, to the eloquence of Flood and Grattan, remarkable success attended the agitation, and by 1782 a large part of the programme of the new Irish Party had been triumphantly carried out.

But the movement in the main only affected the AngloIrish colony. It hardly touched Celtic Ireland. By the legislation of 1780 Ireland had obtained a considerable instalment of commercial freedom; by that of 1782-3 the chief restrictions upon the independence of the Irish Parliament were removed. The Parliament of Great Britain renounced its right to legislate for Ireland, and the Irish Parliament repealed Poynings' Law. Two of the stumblingblocks were thus removed; but the third-the political proscription of the Irish Catholics-still remained to trouble Grattan's Parliament.

The experiment of legislative independence lasted from 1782 to 1800. It was very far from being a success. Perhaps the conditions under which it was tried made success impossible. The failure to settle the Catholic question; the suspicion aroused by Pitt's honourable and courageous effort to give Ireland complete commercial equality with England; the hopes aroused by the appointment of Lord Fitzwilliam and the dismay caused by his sudden recall; the excitement engendered by contemporary events in France; the treasonable negotiations of the United Irishmen with the French Republic; the repeated attempts on the part of the French Directory to land troops in Ireland and to sustain an Irish rebellion against England; the outbreak and collapse of the rebellion; the measures taken to stamp out its embers-all these things would have rendered the success of Grattan's experiment exceedingly dubious even had the constitution which goes by his name been a monument of political wisdom and ingenuity. As a fact it was precisely the reverse. It could hardly have lived in a calm sea; in the storms which it encountered it was certain to founder.

The admitted failure of the constitutional experiment in Ireland, coinciding as it did with a serious crisis in the external relations of Great Britain, drove Pitt to the expedient of a

legislative union. That union was at first bitterly opposed by a large section of the Irish people; but the owners of the boroughs which were deprived of representation were generously compensated; the Catholics were induced to acquiesce by a promise of complete emancipation; and the industrial community received a quid pro quo in the removal of all restrictions upon Irish trade. As Pitt perceived, the success of the Union depended on a prompt acknowledgment of the Catholic claims. But the prejudices of a half-insane monarch defeated the wisdom of the minister, and Pitt, amid the wreck of his Irish policy, resigned office.

Twenty-nine years later, Daniel O'Connell extorted from the fears of Peel and Wellington what Pitt would have conceded to the claims of justice. Spontaneously offered in 1800, Catholic Emancipation might have added a union of hearts to the union of parliaments. Conceded as a preferable alternative to civil war, after thirty years of suicidal procrastination, a healing measure might well fail to heal. Such ameliorative properties as it might still have possessed were dissipated by the concomitant legislation. The Emancipation Act was immediately followed by an Act disfranchising about 174,000 county electors out of a total of 200,000. These 40-shilling free-holders created by the landlords for their own purposes could no longer be trusted to vote in accordance with instructions.

Then nature came to the assistance of the British legislature. Population, artificially stimulated by landlords, by priests, and by potatoes, at last justified Malthus by outstripping the means of subsistence. A considerable proportion of the overgrown Irish population had long been on the verge of starvation; it succumbed to the disaster of 1846.

The Great Famine is the most important single event in the economic and social annals of modern Ireland. Its significance may, however, be summarised in a sentence. When George III. ascended the throne there were about two-and-a-half million people in Ireland; at Queen Victoria's accession there were eight millions; at her death there were four and a half. Of the eight millions living in 1846, four, it is estimated, depended for subsistence upon Raleigh's 'lazy root.' The root suddenly gave out. Between 1846 and 1851 over a million people emigrated from Ireland, and nearly a million, despite the

utmost efforts of the Government and people of Great Britain, died at home. A further million emigrated in the decade between 1851 and 1861. The emigration conferred a twofold benefit upon Ireland. Ireland. It relieved hopeless congestion and it succoured those who remained. It is estimated that in the seventeen years following the famine £13,000,000 was sent home from the United States. But the famine affected not only the peasants but the landlords of Ireland. Fully one-third of them were hopelessly ruined, with nothing before them but the cold comfort of the Encumbered Estates Court. This court, set up in 1849, initiated an agrarian revolution, the final stages of which were reached in the Land Purchase Acts associated with the names of Ashbourne and Wyndham.

This agrarian revolution is not only of great intrinsic significance; it affords also a striking contrast to the agrarian policy pursued by Prussia in Poland. On both grounds it demands something more than a passing reference.

Celtic Ireland had never been really feudalised. The tribal system survived well into the seventeenth century, and was only broken up by the plantation policy of the early Stuarts and Cromwell. The new proprietors' were mostly Protestants; but, contrary to intention, the native tribal owners, Catholics to a man, remained upon the soil as 'tenants.' These tenants continued to cherish the tradition that they were at least part-owners of the soil they tilled; and the growth of a tenant-right custom, notably in Ulster, encouraged the idea.

The change in the proprietorship of the land, necessitated by the ruin of the old landlords and facilitated by the Encumbered Estates Act, embittered the relations between tenants and landlords; for the latter were 'new men' who had purchased the land on a commercial basis and for commercial purposes.

Agrarian discontent was intensified by the Repeal movement, by the agitation against tithes, and not least by the fiasco of the Young Ireland' rebellion in 1848. Sir Robert Peel, recognising the urgency of the land question, had in 1841 appointed a strong Commission, under the chairmanship of Lord Devon, to inquire into the law and practice in respect 'to the occupation of land in Ireland.' The Devon Commission reported in 1845, and a Bill was introduced to give the tenant

compensation for unexhausted improvements. But the Bill met with strong opposition; the Peel ministry fell; and not until 1860 did an English ministry find time to return to a question which was in reality the core of the Irish problem. In that year Mr. Cardwell, one of the most capable of Peel's disciples, attempted to apply Free Trade principles to Irish land tenure. The Act, though well intentioned, was a dead failure. In 1870 Mr. Gladstone passed an Act which was intended to put a stop to capricious evictions; to give the force of law to the Ulster custom of tenant-right wherever such custom was recognisable; to secure to an outgoing tenant compensation for unexhausted improvements; and to facilitate the purchase of holdings by cultivators. The last object was dear to the heart of Mr. Bright, who knew much more about the Irish land system than his chief, and the clauses intended to effect it were known by his name. The purchase scheme was, however, clogged with conditions so complicated as to render it practically inoperative, and the Act, as a whole, did little to solve the land problem. Then came the period in Ireland, as in England, of agricultural depression. Tenants got into arrears with their rents; evictions took place on a large scale; Parnell launched the Land League; outrages multiplied, and in 1881 Gladstone again tried his hand at the land question. The Act of that year was based upon the ' three F's '-free sale, fixity of tenure, and fair rents, to be determined by a land court. It was drafted in defiance of the best Irish opinion and attempted to do the right thing in the wrong way.

The principle of dual ownership, which the Act of 1881 was intended to sanctify and perpetuate, was fundamentally unsound, and until that principle was frankly abandoned no real progress towards a solution of the problem could be made.

The Unionist party, on coming into office in 1885, adopted the principle of land purchase; and Lord Ashbourne's Act, enlarged and elaborated by the Acts of 1888 and 1891, has gone far to transfer the soil of Ireland from big landowners to cultivating owners. Two-thirds of the Irish tenant farmers are now, or will shortly become, owners of the land they till. At last, therefore, the most difficult and the most intimate of all Irish problems is in a fair way towards a satisfactory and permanent solution.

The land question is, however, only one of a sheaf of questions

which in the aggregate constitute the Irish problem. Ecclesiastical, educational, and constitutional questions have demanded, and received, hardly less attention at the hands of the Imperial Legislature.

From the days of Queen Elizabeth to those of Queen Victoria the religious question loomed large on the horizon of Irish politics and baffled the statesmanship of England. Down to the sixteenth century Ireland was less ultramontane in its Catholicism than England; but the clumsy efforts of the Tudor statesmen to impose Protestantism upon a country utterly unprepared for it served to convert the mass of the Irish people into zealous Papists.' The peasantry clung to their traditional creed as they clung to their ancestral soil, partly out of sheer affection, but partly also in opposition to their English rulers.

The 'Orange' policy initiated by the victories of William III. -the penal laws, the proscriptions, the proselytising, and the bribes held out to converts from Catholicism-did little to wean from their faith the mass of the Irish peasants. Gradually the rigours of the Penal Code were relaxed, but the Act of 1829 came, as we have seen, too late to conciliate the Irish Catholics. The grievance of tithes still remained unremedied, and Protestants still held a position of ascendency. The former grievance was removed by the Tithes Commutation Act of 1838; while the Protestant ascendency was finally destroyed by the Disestablishment Act of 1869.

There remained the constitutional problem. Whether, as Lord Rosebery suggests, the legislative union might have solved it had Pitt's intentions been carried out, who can tell? The fact remains that whereas the working of the Scottish Union very soon dissipated the suspicions with which the measure had, on both sides of the Tweed, been originally regarded, the Irish Union served only to inaugurate a period of more or less persistent agitation. That agitation has not been entirely quenched by the settlement either of the ecclesiastical or of the agrarian problem. Whether the Home Rule Act, now on the Statute Book but not yet in operation, is destined to solve the problem is more than doubtful.

No fair-minded critic can, however, deny that, for at least a century, the British people have been making sincere if somewhat blundering and belated efforts to find a solvent, or a