poverty from Ireland; and there is a reflux of its own poverty into that island.

Both Irish emigration and English immigration into towns contrast curiously with an immigration from the country into the towns of France, arising from a very different cause, the economic and political effects of which are among the subjects discussed in the two articles on La Creuse.

Although the author has described effects of the Land Systems of France, Germany, and Belgium, he has, in doing so, simply recorded facts which have come under his own observation, and the genuine impressions made on his mind by careful inquiry on the spot. He has endeavoured also to indicate the influences of geological and other physical conditions on the industrial economy of the Continental localities of which a description is given in the volume. Without reference to such conditions, to history, and to positive institutions, the author believes it impossible for the economist to arrive at a true theory of the causes which govern the production and distribution of wealth.

It is right to acknowledge the obligations the author is under to the extensive and profound learning of his friend Mr. Francis S. Reilly for information and suggestion on many, but especially legal, subjects; although he ought to add that Mr. Reilly is in no way responsible for his conclusions.

Without the hospitable aid and instruction which he has received from M. Léonce de Lavergne during visits to La Creuse, it is improbable that he would have attempted a description of that singular department— the history of which, isolated as it is, has been strangely interwoven with the political and social history of France for more than two hundred years.

2 STONE BUILDINGS, LINCOLN'S INN:

February 21, 1870.

5

THE STATE OF IRELAND,* 1867.

STUDENTS of Irish history know how from time to time in its troubled course, after some overwhelming disaster, there has come a pause in misfortune, a tranquil interval, when statesmen, beholding the capabilities of the country and its people, and mistaking the signs of exhaustion for those of a new life of peace and prosperity, congratulated themselves upon the regeneration of Ireland in their own days. In the first nine years of King James,' wrote Sir John Davis, after three rebellions in the reign of Elizabeth, 'there hath been more done in the reformation of the kingdom than in the 440 years since the Conquest.' A still profounder statesman, Bacon, four years afterwards congratulated a Chief Justice of Ireland on his appointment at a time when 'that kingdom, which within these twenty years wise men were wont to doubt whether they should wish it to be a pool, is like now to become a garden, and younger sister to Great Britain.' A generation had not passed before these words were followed by

*

Reprinted from 'Macmillan's Magazine' for February 1867. In the reprint of this and other essays in the volume, a passage here and there has been omitted. In other respects hardly any change has been made. But as the situation of things has changed in succeeding years, changes in the author's views may occasionally appear, owing to that cause, or to further inquiry and reflection.

another rebellion, suppressed in its turn in such a manner that Sir William Petty in 1672 expressed his conviction that the Irish never would rebel again, the more so, as they had never before such prosperity as then.* Political wisdom and sagacity are both supposed to have made great progress since the reign of Charles II., yet such has been the falsification of repeated hopes of Ireland's reformation that there are still to be found men who repeat the very wishes (doubtless ignorant of their antiquity) which Sir William Petty 200 years ago sternly rebuked, and of which nearly 300 years ago the poet Spenser exposed the folly. The repetition of such sentiments in itself might merely prove that political and moral progress has been unequal in England as in Ireland, and be worth notice only on the part of those historic minds who find an interest in every living vestige of ancestral barbarism in either island. But it is connected not remotely with inquiries of more practical interest and importance, to which conflicting answers are returned; inquiries such as, What is really the present state of Ireland? Has it made any real progress since its last great disaster? Is the land, the people, or the law, the cause of its

* 'Political Anatomy of Ireland,' chaps. iv. and xii.

† 'Some furious spirits have wished that the Irish would rebel again, that they might be put to the sword. But I declare that notion to be not only impious and inhuman, but withal frivolous, and pernicious even to those who have rashly wished for those occasions.'-Sir W. Petty, 'Political Anatomy,' chap. iv. 'So have I heard it often wished that all that land were a seapool, which kind of speech is rather the manner of desperate men than of wise counsellors; for were it not the part of a desperate physician to wish his patient dead rather than to apply the best endeavour of his skill for his recovery ? '—' A New View of the State of Ireland,' by Edmund Spenser, 1596.

long backwardness and misery? Can legislation do anything for its benefit?

The chief difficulty in answering the two first of these inquiries arises from the very different state of different parts of the island. Different counties and towns-adjoining estates, and even adjoining farms and houses—are very differently circumstanced, and would return a very different report; nor is it too much to assert that the man does not exist who could give a complete and true account of Ireland's present condition. Even the very same results may be produced in different places by opposite causes, and are of different import and omen accordingly. Of this a striking instance offers at once in the rate of wages; an instance of great importance in itself, because it touches the root of the whole Irish question, as for brevity it is sometimes called. Great stress is laid by some on the advance in Irish wages as a proof of a proportionate increase in general prosperity, and of the benefit of emigration. As a matter of fact, the rise

in

wages is much less than those who take this view suppose; and, in truth, the bulk of the employers of labour below the landed proprietors are in no condition to pay such a price for it. The demand at such a price as has been stated could in most Irish counties be that of one small class alone; and such wages would therefore imply a much greater emigration of labourers and disappearance of farmers than has as yet taken place. But, moreover, those who allege a rise in wages as a conclusive proof of a proportionate increase in general prosperity, overlook the distinction between a