cluded, but when the flax-spinner consulted his legal adviser, he discovered that the law prevented the landlord from carrying out the very liberal terms he had agreed to. He was bound by settlement to let at the best rent only; the longest lease he could grant was for three lives, or thirty-one years. Such a lease, however, at the full rent of the land, was quite too short a term to secure the flax-spinner in laying out his capital in building; the statute enabling tenants to lease for mill sites only allowing leases of three acres. The mill was not built, and mark the consequence. Some twenty miles from the spot alluded to, the flax-spinner found land in which he could get a perpetual interest; there he laid out his thousands; there he has for the last fifteen years given employment to hundreds of labourers, and has earned money. The poor but populous district continues as populous, but, if anything, poorer than it was. During the past seasons of distress, the people of that district suffered much from want of employment, the landlord's rents were worse paid out of it than from any other part of his estate. of his estate. Could there be a stronger case to prove how much the present state of Ireland arises from the state of the law?'

The present writer knows of several similar cases; and when Lord Dufferin says of the industrial resources of Ireland, A hundred fountains remain to be unsealed,' he might have added that it is the seal of the law which closes them up, and that the law furnishes an answer to Bishop Berkeley's last question in the Querist,' a hundred and thirty years ago, 'Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor?' A part of the

impoverishment which Ireland suffers, not only pecuniarily, but socially and morally, from entails, insecure tenures, incumbrances, and other consequences of the present state of the law, is absenteeism; the evil of which is the one point about which all parties in Ireland are agreed, and in removing which the legislature would be really legislating according to Irish ideas.

The excellent results which in several counties have followed the Government grant for instructors in the best methods of growing and saving flax, exemplify another direction in which the interference of the State is urgently required, namely, for general agricultural instruction throughout Ireland. The suppression of the Chairs of Agriculture in the Queen's Colleges was an act of sheer fatuity, as the suppression of the Professorships of Irish was an act of sheer barbarism on the part of the Treasury. There ought to be a modelfarm attached to a national school in every parish, and there is no sort of reason why the Irish peasant should not learn the all-important lesson of a rotation of crops, and of the proper house-feeding of cattle, as well as to read, write, and count. The intervention of the State is also indispensable for the deepening of rivers and providing outfalls for arterial drainage. The state of the Suck, for example, is a scandal to a civilised Government, and an insuperable obstacle to the improvement by private enterprise of a vast district which it floods. Lastly, remains the extension and cheapening of railway communication. The completion of a commercial union between the two islands is almost as vital a point as the maintenance of their political

union, and a Government can look to indirect and distant results in promoting it, which are not economically within the contemplation of private enterprise. The English buyer, for example, who pays but a small sum to a company for his fare, may be worth more than a thousand times the amount to the trade of both islands; and a not unimportant economy in the workings of the Irish lines could be effected by a centralisation of management.*

Other things there are, doubtless, which ought to be done for Ireland, and among them are some which Parliament has not at present the requisite information to do; therefore, among the things which ought at once to be done is, to make inquiry into the actual condition and resources of the island, not for the purpose for which such inquiries have too often been made, of postponing legislation, but to prepare for it. But if even the measures sketched out in these pages were carried at once into effect, in the next generation but one economic current of progress

It is to be feared that the purchase of the Irish railways by the State will meet with great difficulty from the exorbitant demands of Companies; and, perhaps, also from a demand on the part of the Government for a guarantee on the part of Ireland alone against loss, which the shareholders are very ready to offer on behalf of the people of Ireland, but which the latter ought not to be expected to give. A railway which carries the produce of the west of Ireland cheaper to England, benefits producers in the former and consumers in the latter; and why should the consumer in Ireland, who does not benefit as a producer-the fundholder, for example-pay part of the carriage of provisions away from himself? If the cost of carriage were annihilated between the islands, meat and other provisions would become cheaper in London, and dearer in Limerick and Galway. Why should consumers in Limerick and Galway, but not in London, guarantee the State against loss by a measure tending to that result?

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