landlord's and the peasant's interest, securing the rights of pasture and perhaps even in some cases buying out the landlord's interest in the whole townland and vesting it in the inhabitants, would afford the best scope for the experiment of peasant proprietorship that could well be obtained; whilst the fact that the process would go on gradually, townland after townland, and year after year, where it was most needed, would awaken life and industry and corporate action in the townlands, at the same time keeping up the feeling everywhere that something was always being done, and that a prospect of progress lay in the future. But this is not the place to enter into details. It is enough to have made the suggestion. No doubt it will be the duty of the law in some way or other to make provisions for peasant proprietorship where the necessities of the case require it. And in this provision, together with the full recognition of the new tenure of tenant right, the solution of the legal problem may perhaps be found.

But I confess that I rise from the study of the economic history of the Irish peasantry with a deep sense that however completely the legal problem may be solved, there will still remain an economic problem of the greatest gravity.

For the moment, no doubt, the great question is how to make peace between landlord and tenant, and how to restore that spirit of law and order which lies at the root of all real economic progress. The restoration of law and order and an increasing population will no doubt soon restore to the landlord the full value of his qualified ownership. The tenant, too, of a fair-sized holding with a fully acknowledged tenant right will have himself to blame if he do not by thrift and industry become a prosperous semi-proprietor.

But what will become of the tenants of the too small holdings and of the landless class? It is well known that the lot of a labouring class beneath a class of peasant proprietors or peasant occupiers is everywhere exceptionally hard.

It is easy to say that the future of this class may be left to economic laws. But, as we have said, the constitution of human nature is one of the two factors from the interaction of which economic laws arise. And there are two peculiarities of the Irish people which may easily influence for evil their economic future. 1. The tribal instinct is not yet altogether overcome. The instinct of the people is still to swarm and sprawl upon the land. 2. The priestly influence, so powerful over the Irish mind, pulls in the same direction; partly because the priesthood dreads the mixing up of its adherents with those of other creeds, and partly because it is from population that it draws its tributes, and upon population that its maintenance depends. Possibly these influences may be in some measure counteracted by education, and by the firm enforcement of a wisely arranged poor law, which (justice having been done to the

land, its owners, and occupiers) shall justly cast upon the land of a district the honest maintenance of its own pauperism.

But, nevertheless, the economic future of Ireland seems to tremble in the balance between two opposite courses. One is that into which her peculiar national tendencies would lead her, if they were allowed blindly to mould the future. Satisfy the labouring class by giving them land, and the increasing population by bringing more and more of Irish waste lands under cultivation. Satisfy the still increasing demand as one generation succeeds to another by still increasing the supply. What will be the result of this artificial process? When the extreme limits have been reached, the congestion of population will continue under higher pressure than ever until a fresh Irish famine produces another crisis and another exodus.

The other possible future is surely a far more hopeful one. Counteract these peculiar tendencies by a firm resolve to follow that policy which is really economically sound. Resist the temptation artificially to provide for the maintenance of population at too high a level. Wisely accept the fact that the vastly larger proportion of the sons of Ireland as well as of England must in the future dwell across the Atlantic, and therefore at once, and without hesitation, include the other Irelands and Englands across the ocean in the area within which economic laws must be expected to work, and then return to the Irish problem. Compare the waste lands of Ireland with the transatlantic prairies, and instead of asking the question whether it will barely pay to plough up the Irish bog, boldly ask which will pay best, the same labour and capital expended here or there; and according to the answer cultivate the Irish bog or leave it alone. Instead of rooting greater numbers to the soil, let in the daylight of education, and trust to the growth of individual independence and general enlightenment. Open the sluice of emigration as wide as possible till a real level in population is reached, grudging no longer the flow of population to the place where it is most wanted. Never mind if, having done justice to the peasant tenants of Ireland, the free course of economic laws should be found, there as in England, as capital increases, to work in favour of large rather than of small holdings. Rejoice if Irish tenants find a better investment for their capital than can be got from a few poor acres of land, and a wider field for their increasing enterprise and energy than bogs and mountains afford. If this should be the result of England's doing justice to Ireland, then the higher happiness and freedom of her sons, wherever they may live, will reflect back a greater prosperity on their old country and upon those who stay at home than any possible ingenuity could secure by making artificial and uneconomical provision for them where they ought not to be.

Ireland, or England for her, must make up her mind which of these two economic futures she wishes to work for!

F. SEEBOHM.

THE PRESENT ANARCHY.

For the past four or five months Ireland has presented a spectacle to which no parallel can be found in any civilised country. Her own miserable annals, indeed, offer only too many parallels, but the fact simply warns us that Irish civilisation is scarcely skin-deep. In some parts of Turkey and Greece there is imperfect security for life and property, but even in those border-lands of Europe there is no organised conspiracy to defeat and trample upon law. In Ireland such a conspiracy has been at work since last summer with fatal success. Early in the autumn the peasants in Mayo and Galway began to boast that 'the English law was broke,' and this is now the language commonly used throughout Connaught and Munster, in a great part of Leinster, and in some districts of Ulster. This popular belief has kept pace with the establishment of the branches of the Land League throughout the country and the working out of the policy long ago proclaimed by Mr. Parnell. Its practical application, however, goes far beyond the avowed limits of the Land League system. The Land League recommends the peasantry to combine for unlawful objects, to enforce by menaces the abrogation of existing contracts and to intimidate all who do not at once yield to the mandate of the Leaguers. But the lesson of lawlessness is carried further by those who are told that legal right may be thrust aside at the bidding of agitators. The small farmers have the strongest inducement to make the system of the Land League effective, and if mere threats of popular displeasure and of a social ban such as that by which Captain Boycott was crushed do not avail, they do not hesitate to extort submission by murder, torture, incendiarism, and cruel mutilation of living animals. Boycotting' itself can rarely be made perfect, unless the refusal to carry it into effect is punished by outrage. When obnoxious landlords and agents are placed under the ban, it is necessary for the purposes of the Land League policy that no shopkeeper shall be allowed to deal with them, no artisans or labourers to work for them, no innkeepers to entertain them, no vehicles to carry them, no messengers to bring them letters or telegrams. The same treatment must be rigorously applied to land-grabbers,' as farmers are now called who venture to take holdings from which defaulting tenants have been evicted; and to respectable men who knowing

that they hold their land on reasonable terms and are reluctant to break their word, are audacious enough to pay their rents without insisting that the landlord shall accept Griffith's valuation.' Against all these classes are employed the weapons of organised agrarian terrorism which have been employed in Ireland during several months with almost complete impunity and with too conspicuous a success over a daily increasing area. In some counties the system has so thoroughly quelled all spirit of resistance that few outrages are any longer needed to enforce the Land League Code. In others the struggle continues, and wherever it is maintained, the record of crime is terribly augmented.

The magnitude of the evil was daringly denied, not by followers of Mr. Parnell only, but by English members for democratic constituencies down to the beginning of December. It was alleged that the amount of crime was exaggerated, and that there was reason to believe that the powers of the ordinary law' were being used to keep under control that which existed. Mr. Gladstone himself at the banquet on Lord Mayor's day, intimated that he was still waiting for demonstration of the fact that the ordinary law had failed to cope with the enemies arrayed against it in Ireland. When the Cabinet, after frequent meetings and rumours of dissension on this very question, separated at the end of November without taking steps to obtain additional powers for the Irish Executive, the reports of outrage did not cease or lessen, but exaggeration' was the answer in the mouth of every Ministerial apologist. On the opening of the Winter Assizes for Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, the charges of the judges made a full disclosure of the actual state of things. Mr. Justice Fitzgerald in Cork, Mr. Justice Barry in Waterford, and Baron Dowse in Galway had the same tale to tell. Crime has greatly increased in amount since the last summer assizes, and practically it has been unchecked by public justice. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the facts stated in these charges: one or two taken from Baron Dowse's will be sufficient. In Galway (county and city) the police have returned 291 offences of a grave character as having been committed since July last, but only twelve cases have been sent for trial. In Mayo 236 grave offences were returned, and again only twelve cases were for trial. In these two counties 493 persons, either through a desire to shield the guilty or through terror,' refuse to give any information by which the criminals could be brought to justice. If this state of affairs,' says Baron Dowse, is allowed to continue much longer, immediate danger to Ireland will be the consequence and ultimate disgrace to the empire of which she forms a part.' Mr. Justice Barry spoke scarcely less strongly, though in the south-eastern counties the evil had not yet reached the same proportions as in Galway and Mayo. If, he said, even one-tenth of the outrages reported be true, 'no sane and candid man can deny that there exists in many parts of this country a state of things demanding grave and

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anxious consideration.' According to Mr. Justice Fitzgerald, 'in nine-tenths at least of the cases of reported criminality, no one has been made amenable;' yet in several districts embracing a great part of Munster true liberty has ceased to exist, and an intolerable tyranny prevails. Life is not secure, right is disregarded, the process of the law cannot be enforced, and dishonesty and lawlessness disgrace the land. It is not too much to say with Mr. Justice Fitzgerald that a criminal organisation, acting on the cupidity, the passions, and the fears of the people,'' had reduced some districts of the country to anarchy and confusion, differing little, if at all, from civil war.' The English sympathisers with the agrarian movement in Ireland denied this down to the last moment. One expositor of Radicalism, writing at the end of November, boldly asserted that 'agrarian murders and outrages have not been frequent,' and attributed the prevailing alarm to the fact that events are viewed through the disturbing and exaggerating medium of fear.' The imperturbable courage which refuses in Piccadilly to recognise the dangers threatening other people in Mayo or Kerry is to be admired, but the charges of the Irish judges dispose of the theory that the crisis has merely been developed out of a' landlords' panic.' The same critic, nevertheless, admitted that if it were shown that the operation of the law in its normal state was insufficient, that assassinations, outrages, and other crimes of violence were being committed in alarming or unprecedented number, that constitutional authority had completely collapsed, there would be fair grounds for the institution of coercive measures.' Most persons will be of opinion that the required proof has been abundantly given in the figures cited by the judges. But those figures were not brought to light at the assizes. They have been collected by the county inspectors of constabulary and, as a matter of course, the Government has been made acquainted with them from day to day. Mr. Forster has seen the evidence grow under his eyes since Parliament was prorogued; he was able to lay it before the Cabinet in November, and it is currently believed that he then represented the necessity of giving the Irish Executive peremptory and summary powers for the repression of crime. But if he did so he was overruled by his colleagues, and he did not emphasise his protest in the only effective way, by presenting his resignation as the alternative of the rejection of his policy.

Whatever were the causes which determined the conduct of the Cabinet, and of the Irish Secretary in particular, the fact remains that the anarchy and confusion differing little, if at all, from civil war,' which is denounced from the judicial bench, were allowed to make head and to set justice at defiance. The judges lament the impotence of law and the triumph of lawlessness. But the Government has made no sign. The members of the Cabinet, indeed, do

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