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'Grateful for what? - For even fair play: not favours only, but even fair play.

'What has been their character as to peace and order for seventeen years ? - I do not remember that a single crime, even to stealing a chicken, has been committed on the Devon estate for seventeen years.

'Are they frugal in their habits? - Very much so : too much so.

'Do you think that security, whether by a lease, or by an extended period of compensation, is necessary as a stimulus to the tenants to make improvements? I think a tenant is a fool to expend his money without a security of that description.

'Have large improvements been made on the estate which you manage? - They have.

'By whom has the mountain land been reclaimed? Exclusively by the tenants.

'I believe that you hold different opinions on certain points from witnesses who have been previously examined? First of all, I do not concur with those who conceive that no additional legislation is required to stimulate Irish tenants to invest their capital in improvements.'

Lord Dufferin is no adversary to additional legislation to stimulate Irish tenants to invest their capital in improvements; on the contrary, he contributes towards it an excellent suggestion. * But he bids us expect little from such legislation, and certainly 'no comprehensive remedy for the perennial discontent of Ireland, or to unprecedented emigration from her shores.' His

* ' Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land, pp. 271, 272,

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first and last lesson is that 'no nation can be made

industrious, provident, skilful, by Act of Parliament. It is to time, to education, and above all to the development of our manufacturing resources, that we must look for the reinvigoration of our economic constitution.' It might, we do not hesitate to assert, be said with more justice, that every people is industrious, provident, and skilful just in proportion to the security given by its Government, laws, and customs as powerful as laws, that he who sows shall also reap. What has time, to which Lord Dufferin looks, done hitherto for Ireland, but maintain a system which, in the words used by the Devon Commissioners, paralyses all exertion, and places fatal impediments in the way of improvement? What practical lesson does education, again, teach the Irish peasant more plainly than this, that an intelligent man can always get on in America, and can seldom do so in Ireland? Lord Dufferin's readers will easily believe that so generous a mind 'cannot contemplate the expatriation of so many brave hearts and strong right arms with equanimity.' But when he adds, 'The true remedy is to be found in the development of our commercial enterprise, of our mineral resources, of our manufacturing industry,' we are driven to ask, why not in the development of our agricultural industry, the prime industry of all, the healthiest, and the natural base of all other industries? According to the natural course of things, Adam Smith has striven to impress upon mankind, the greater part of every growing society is first directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufacture.*

• Wealth of Nations,' book iii. chap. i.

To the same purpose Mr. Mill observes that 'in every country without exception in which peasant properties prevail, the towns, from the larger surplus which remains after feeding the agricultural classes, are increasing both in population and in the well-being of their inhabitants.' The present landowners of Ireland may therefore assure themselves that the conviction will at length force itself upon the public, that for the prosperity, not of agriculture alone, but of all the other industries of which the island is capable, either tenancies at will must cease to exist, or peasant properties must at any cost be created. M. de Tocqueville's reflection has already been quoted, that it is a sign of the imminent subversion of aristocratic institutions when the relation between landlord and tenant has become one of the briefest duration; but he adds the significant remark that if democratic tendencies shorten the duration of tenures, democratic institutions 'tend powerfully to increase the number of properties, and to diminish the number of tenant-farmers.' The land system of Ireland is one without the advantages either of feudalism or of democracy. As long as a numerous population,' says Lord Dufferin, ' is cursed with a morbid craving to possess land, so long will the owner be able to drive hard bargains.' The conclusion which these 'hard bargains' are likely to force before long on the public mind is, that the morbid craving for land ✓ with which the people of Ireland have been cursed, is that which moralists in every age have denounced, and against which the prophet cried, 'Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the earth.' The landlords of England may likewise rest assured that their own interests are involved in the Irish land question in a different manner from what they suppose. They are afraid of a precedent of interference with established territorial institutions; they have more to fear their self-condemnation.

151

MR. SENIOR ON IRELAND.*

AFTER centuries of alternate rebellion and famine, and finally the loss of a third of the Irish nation in twentytwo years, the Irish question' for,' as Mr. Senior said a generation ago, 'there is but one'- has become the English question too, the main question on which a general election is about to turn. Some of the chief guides of public opinion in England nevertheless profess themselves still in perplexity as to what the Irish question is. For their information, and to find the key to its solution, let us state the question in Mr. Senior's words: 'The detestation by the mass of the people of Ireland of her institutions,' being he said the fundamental evil, 'the first step towards the cure of this detestation must be to remove its causes; the first step towards making the institutions of Ireland popular must be to make them deserve to be so. If, indeed, they were deserving of popularity, the remedy would be hopeless. But this is an impossible supposition. No population hates the mass of its existing laws without sufficient reason. The tendency is to cling to whatever is established, merely because it is established.'

This statement of the question seems to us comReprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review,' November 1868..

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