would be found flowing through Ireland, and the answer to Bishop Berkeley's question would be that poor Ireland' does not still continue poor. The ballad might then ask with truth in 1898, the centenary of the last Rebellion,

'Who fears to speak of '98?

Who blushes at the name?'

57

THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870.

MANY CAUSES have tended to concentrate almost exclusive attention on that side of the Irish Land System which relates to agricultural tenure. In so far as those causes are historical, they have been to some extent indicated in preceding pages. The exclusion of the Irish from the maritime ports of their own island, the confiscation of their lands, the denial of landed property to Catholics, restrictions on Irish manufactures and trade, have necessarily left their traces in the industrial economy of Ireland at this day. These historical causes, however, being now beyond control, are worth taking into practical account only as disposing of insolent theories of race on the one hand, and adding urgency on the other to the necessity for a thorough reformation of a land system, which, by making agriculture the only employment accessible to a great mass of the people, and tenancy the highest position to which they could aspire in connexion with agriculture, has made agricultural tenure appear almost the only land question. The real problem which the legislature has to solve relates to the Irish Land System as a whole, to the distribution of landed property, and the conditions of ownership as well as to tenure; to commerce, manu

factures, and mines as well as to agriculture; to the towns, in short, as well as to the country. The system of agricultural tenure is admitted on all sides to be an intolerable evil, both politically and economically regarded; but it has become so, not through its own inherent impolicy and injustice alone, but by reason also of the entire structure of the land system, which gives the occupation of the tenant-farmer an undue predominance in the economy of the island as in the mind of the public. The position of the tenant-farmer cannot indeed be fully understood without reference to the unhealthy and unnatural economy produced by the land system as a whole.

A complete investigation of the condition of Ireland would show that its prosperity has been cramped in every direction, and with respect to all its resources and natural uses for its inhabitants. It would show that much as its cultivators have suffered from the insecurity of their own position, they have suffered inore by its being generally the only career open to them above that of hired labour, by the excessive competition to which they have been exposed in it, and by the loss of the numerous local markets which a community flourishing in all the departments of industry would create. It would show, too, that much as the country has suffered under the present land system, the town-using the term for brevity, to denote nonagricultural employments in general-suffers still more, for it suffers extinction.

No more than an indication can be attempted in these pages of the manner in which both town and country are affected. The interests of both are closely

interwoven, and it is a misfortune in this as in many other cases that a description in words cannot place things in their true relative position at once under the eye. As they can be presented only in succession, it is natural to glance first at the state of the country, which comes first in the natural order of development, and goes far to determine the state of the town; although it must be subsequently shown that it is by no means only by its effects on the rural population and on agriculture that the land system militates against the prosperity of other employments and classes. Not only is the town dependent on its rural neighbourhood for a local market, and for cheap supplies of materials and food, and is straitened accordingly if the population and cultivation around it decline, but security and freedom of action are even more necessary to its prosperity and its very existence. Town industry is a more delicate plant and of slower growth than the industry of the country. It is the creation of man-nature does nothing for it directly. The country cannot disappear under any land system, and will produce something, at least in these islands under any. Crops will rise and ripen even under a notice to quit; grass will grow over a soil so fertile as Ireland's without even an effort on the part of the husbandman. But the town draws no nutriment from the ground on which it stands, nor from the air around; rains do not refresh it, suns do not bring it to maturity, its harvests need much costlier sowing and labour, and much longer abstinence. Whatever evils then follow in the case of the country from insecurity and restraints on industrial energy must be tenfold greater in the

case of the town. The effects of the Irish Land System on agriculture deserve attention accordingly, not only for their own sake, or for their immediate bearing on other industries, but also as examples of influences operating with far greater force on the latter; although for that very reason their effects may be to a great extent indiscernible. Towns and villages that are falling to decay may be seen, those which have altogether disappeared, and those which have been prevented from coming into existence, are invisible.

And looking even at the agricultural side of the island, one may see such evidence of the effects of a land system essentially anti-industrial (if the expression may be allowed) in its structure and principles, because essentially feudal, that the chief mark of its influence on the life and business of towns might almost be expected to be an entire absence of towns. It is not indeed a feudal land system in the sense of securing the defence of the State; but it is so in aiming at the concentration of territory and power in a few families and in the feudal line, by regulations and restrictions absolutely hostile to all commercial policy and industrial progress.

One observation relating to both country and town should be borne in mind throughout; namely, that there ought to have been in the case of both continuous and rapid improvement in the last twenty years; the period selected on all sides as a test of the working of the system under which the island is placed. That period includes the sudden removal of