Nantes, to lay the foundation of the linen manufacture of Ulster, now one of the most flourishing industries of the world, woollen manufacturers, both Protestant and Catholic, were flying in thousands from Ireland to parts of the Continent where the industry they planted flourishes still, but in Ireland has only begun to revive. The history of Flanders affords a precisely parallel instance; the manufactures which the Spaniards drove from its provinces took lasting root in Great Britain, but only begin to reappear in the land of their birth.* The foregoing is not the only historical explanation of the exclusion from three provinces of Ireland of every industry but that of tilling land. It has been pointed out by Adam Smith, that whatever progress was made by England in rural industry itself, originated in the trade and freer institutions of its towns. In common with other philosophers, he has also remarked that in every part of Europe wealth and civilisation began upon the borders of the sea, where there was comparatively free and easy communication with the outer world, but in Ireland the English seized every important port; and Sir John Davis, early in the seventeenth century, asked, 'When the Irish might not converse or commerce with any civil men, nor enter into any town. without peril of their lives, whither should they fly but into the woods and mountains, and there live in a wild and barbarous manner?' It was no more the policy of the age following than of the one preceding that

When manufactures started up with steam in Belgium, it was in the Walloon provinces near mines of coal and iron they rose. Now, however, the Flemish provinces begin to count their growing manufactories again.

eminent statesman, to civilise and elevate the Irish; and the period of the Commonwealth was signalised by repeated orders to drive all Irish and Papists to a distance from every considerable town. When to this we add the blighting influence of the penal laws and the exclusive municipal institutions of a later time, we need hardly wonder that the Irish people clung with 'morbid hunger' to the land alone for their support. But why did the land afford so little support? why was their only industry so barren of results when starvation was frequently the penalty of failure? Why, as it has been often asked, did the English system of landed property, which has succeeded so well in England, fail so utterly in Ireland?

The first answer such a question ought to get is that the English system has not succeeded well in England, but has, on the contrary, proved a most disastrous failure. Agriculture, it is said indeed, has been carried in England to the greatest known perfection. If this were so, it would nevertheless be true that the proper test of any rural system is the peasantry, and not the beasts or herbs it produces; and that the English peasantry, descendants of a noble race, are a reproach to the name of Englishmen. But can agriculture really be said to have prospered when Sir Robert Peel in 1850 could describe it in the terms that follow, though favoured by the very circumstance the Irish cultivator lacked, the contact and demand of wealthy towns? You will find,' the statesman wrote to Mr. Caird, immense tracts of good land in certain counties, Lancashire and Cheshire for example, with good roads,

good markets, and a moist climate, that remain pretty nearly in a state of nature-undrained, badly fenced, and wretchedly farmed. Nothing has hitherto been effectual in awakening the proprietors to a sense of their own interests.'* Such was the state of English agriculture under the legislation of the proprietors of the soil for its especial benefit; and the improvement since an improvement far from general-is traceable to an opposite policy, the policy of commerce and of towns; towns which have long been cities of refuge for the rural population while half the island is uncultivated.

But England at least had towns to receive and employ its landless population, while Ireland was without them. And thus, while the chief movement of population in England has been a migration from the country to large towns, in Ireland the chief movement has been emigration-to the towns of England and America. This emigration of the rural population of Ireland to America is no new phenomenon of this century; it was the subject of treatises more than a century ago. 'What was it,' says a writer of 1729, 'induced so many of the commonality lately to go to America, but high rents, bad seasons, and want of good tenures or a permanent property in their lands? This kept them poor and low, that they scarce had sufficient credit to procure necessaries to subsist or till their ground. They never had anything in store, all was

This description was more than borne out by the published accounts of Mr. Caird's tour, and in reference to many counties in addition to those particularly named by Sir R. Peel.

from hand to mouth, so one or two bad crops broke them. Others found their stock decaying visibly, and so removed before all was gone, whilst they had as much left as would pay their passage, and had little more than would carry them to the American shore.'* It might have been urged then, as it is urged now, that the emigrants were but seldom evicted. Eviction. was unnecessary-not even a notice to quit was commonly required. The broken down, the breaking down, and those who feared to break down, fled along with the evicted. Even farmers with capital, the writer adds, fled likewise, from the want of security for its investment on their farms. It has been lately maintained that the absence of leases cannot be the present cause of the distress and emigration of the farming classes of Ireland, since leases were almost universal in the eighteenth century,' when rural distress was as great as it is now, or lately was, before the worst cases of distress disappeared. But in the first place, the fact is not so; farming leases were not common in that century. Where leases to farmers existed at all, they were for the most part too short to permit of the permanent improvements essential to husbandry being made by the tenant; and the landlord never made them-what with settlements, charges, and mortgages, seldom could make them. The actual cultivators, however, for the most part had no leases and

'An Essay on the Trade of Ireland,' 1729. A beautiful edition of this and several other rare treatises on Ireland, including those of the poet Spenser, Sir John Davis, Sir W. Petty, and others, was published some years ago by Messrs. Alexander Thom, of Dublin, with great liberality, for private circulation.

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were placed and displaced, as the Highlanders are to this day, at the whim of the landlord. Accounting for a decrease in the number of houses in Ireland, the writer last quoted observed in 1729: Another reason I apprehend to be that from gentlemen's receiving or dismissing whole villages of native Irish at once; and this is done just as gentlemen incline to break up their lands and improve them by tillage, or as they lay them down under grass and enlarge their sheep-walks; and by this means the poor are turned adrift, and must remove to some other place where they can get employment.' And this was while Ireland had no Poorlaw-the contrivance in England to prevent insurrections of the peasantry. But the middlemen, it is said, had leases, and long leases, yet cultivation did not prosper with them. The middleman, however, was a landlord, not a cultivator; and it is for cultivators that security is demanded. It is not proposed to increase the security of landlords, otherwise at least than by making their titles more marketable and their tenants more solvent. The middleman lived in a world. from which commerce and enterprise were banished; his only ambition was to live like a landlord; he was often deeply embarrassed; his title was almost always defective; but he had a famishing crowd round his doors offering rent, and a power of distress to take all they could give. The petty freeholders of a more recent date were not middlemen, it is true, and they had leases of a kind much better than none; but they were made at random for political objects; the measure of security allowed them came