powers.' The Bill became law in spite of predictions that it would fail, and of asseverations that force was no remedy.' But immediately after the meeting of Parliament in the following year, the Attorney-General for Ireland (Mr. Dowse, now one of the judges) was able to state that there had been a vast improvement in the condition of the proclaimed districts, an improvement so great that some Home Rule members contended that the necessity for coercion had ceased. The Act, however, was allowed to continue in force for the fixed period of two years. It acted almost as the menace of martial law in Lord Grey's Coercion Act had done by moral pressure. It taught the people that the Government was really in earnest, and that crime would not be permitted to secure impunity behind legal technicalities and the fears or sympathies of the peasantry. Before the Bill passed, it became known to the police that many of the leading spirits in the agrarian confederacy had quitted the country. The Attorney-General stated that four persons only had been arrested (during the nine months, from May 1871 to February 1872, in which the tranquillisation of Westmeath had been effected) under the provisions of the Act, and of those three only remained in custody.'

This remarkable chapter of legislation must have been in the recollection of the Government when it became evident during the autumn that a similar system of terrorism was being established in several of the Irish counties. Even in October, after the murders of Mr. Boyd, Lord Mountmorres, and Mr. Hutchins, servant, a timely proclamation of five or six well-marked districts under the Westmeath Act, had it been in force, would almost certainly have stopped the spread of lawlessness. This was, it is well known, the opinion of almost every official person in Ireland and of the great majority of persons experienced in magisterial business. But the Chief Secretary did not insist on consulting his colleagues, and while anarchy advanced with giant strides, the Cabinet was not called together until the day following the Lord Mayor's banquet. On that occasion the Lord Chancellor asserted firmly that the paramount duty of Government was to provide security for life and property, and Mr. Gladstone said that, if clear demonstration' of necessity were afforded, the Ministry would not shrink from asking Parliament for extraordinary powers. Week after week has passed and nothing has been done to redeem this pledge. There have been frequent meetings of the Cabinet, and rumours of dissension among Ministers; but no step has been taken to make the law obeyed in Ireland, or to protect law-abiding men in the enjoyment of their lives and liberties. The facts set forth in the judges' charges must have been in the possession of the Government almost in their complete form at the first Cabinet meeting. For what 'clearer demonstration' Mr. Gladstone has been waiting, before giving proof that his recognition at the Guildhall of the priority of the duty

6

before any other of enforcing the law for the purposes of order,' was not mere lip-service, may perhaps be explained to a sympathetic House of Commons. The task, however, will be far more difficult in February than it would have been three months earlier. The machinery of terrorism has been extended: its agents have been multiplied, and have found apt pupils throughout the whole of the south and west of Ireland. Fear has palsied whole sections of Irish society, and has done irreparable injury to Irish trade and industry. The value of landed property has been for the time annihilated; no man will invest capital upon any sort of Irish security, and soon, it is too probable, nobody will venture to give credit to an Irish mercantile firm. While intimidation is applied to every person suspected of being ill-affected to Mr. Parnell's government and laws, the ulterior objects of the movement are not forgotten. Behind the cupidity of the peasantry there is a design to make Ireland an impossible country to live in for those who are proscribed as 'the English garrison.' The loyal element in Irish society, the great body of the professional and the cultivated classes, the ablest and most successful men of business, even though they may not have as much land as would sod a lark,' are to be hounded out of the country in the train of the landlords, because they are Protestant and Saxon. In the meantime they are being made to drink the cup of humiliation to the dregs. The Catholics under the penal law were not more prostrate or more shamefully insulted. The law as it stands,' the fetish of the Radicals, is dead and despised as Dagon.

It is related that at a critical moment in the French Revolution of 1848, during the terrible days of June,' a member of the Republican Government spent the precious hours wringing his hands, and exclaiming 'Il faut prendre des mesures! Il faut prendre des mesures! One is reminded of this valuable contribution to the solution of a question which was one of life and death for French society, by the feeble and vacillating speeches of Liberal politicians. Take that excellent high and dry' Radical, Mr. Dillwyn, who, addressing his constituents at Swansea a month ago, told them that 'so long as the Queen's Government is to be the Government of Ireland, law and order, life and property must be protected, and no doubt strong *measures would have to be used.' But after this vigorous assertion of the duty and necessity which have not yet been acted upon by the Ministry of the Crown-'prave 'orts,' as his countryman, Captain Fluellen, would have said-Mr. Dillwyn recoils from the notion of suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, for the strangely incorrect reason that practically it meant putting Ireland under military law.' What conception of military or martial law was in Mr. Dillwyn's mind it would be futile to inquire. The absurd error, however, has been repeated in a variety of forms, and probably some vindicators of constitutional liberty will produce it again in the coming Parliamentary

debates. A signal incapacity to put real meaning into language, and to stick to it, is the mark of official and unofficial speeches on the Ministerial side. Is it to continue to paralyse the policy of the Government, when Parliament is at length consulted?

The delay has rendered it more than doubtful whether a simple suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act will now be sufficient to do what must be done, although it must form a part of the coercive measures to be adopted. In October or November the arrest of perhaps a dozen well-known local organisers of terrorism would have broken down the system, not only because the masses in Ireland are easily led and singularly timid when left without leaders, but still more because Irish conspirators deeply distrust one another, and not without cause. The arrest of a few leaders'-I do not mean political spouters, but the men who plan and carry out a system of outrage and intimidation -strikes dismay into the hearts of their accomplices, their tools and their dupes, who suspect, reasonably enough, that the imprisoned persons will purchase their own safety by giving information respecting undetected crimes. There is a sudden flight of the worst, and a desperate effort on the part of the rest to show by their conduct that they are innocent industrious people, who have never dreamed of wielding the rod of 'Rory.' Even after the conflagration has been permitted to rage so long unchecked, these influences may be able to make themselves felt, but they will have to be supplemented probably by the re-enactment of the most stringent provisions of Mr. Chichester Fortescue's Peace Preservation Act of 1870, and the new coercive law must be enforced consistently and without remission for a long period. Such is the necessity which Liberal Ministers have created for themselves by neglect of duties they continued to acknowledge in word while they rejected them in deed. As for the caucuses' and their organs, which have been proclaiming that a Liberal Government is bound to show the difference' between it and a Conservative Government by refusing to coerce at all, they will doubtless discover that public opinion is shifting, and will then assure the world that they have always been in favour of making life and property secure in Ireland, and of exacting obedience to the law. But the significance of the history of these months cannot be mistaken, and will not, I hope, be soon forgotten.

EDWARD D. J. WILSON.

THE THREE "F'S."

IN attempting to offer any suggestion on the land question, I am aware that I must, to a great degree, travel over ground that has been most ably dealt with by eminent writers; and, in fact, I do not pretend to throw any new light on the subject, my object being to bring afresh to general notice the more salient suggestions that have of late been so profusely put before the public.

In order to do so, it will be necessary to consider the conditions of the three principal points likely to be reported upon by the Land Commission, viz., the existing tenure in the Southern and Western provinces of Ireland, more particularly those of Leinster and Munster; secondly, the extension into those provinces of tenant-right; thirdly, the conversion of the present occupiers into freeholders.

I believe that I shall but express the wishes of the great majority of the landowners and occupiers, when I say that they hope and expect from the present Government a measure that will be final in its settlement, and that will bring to an end the intolerable deadlock at present arresting the progress and prosperity of their common country. It was foreseen from the first, by one who knew Ireland and the people well, that the Land Act of 1870 could not be a final settlement. He, objecting strongly as he did, on principle, to the disturbance clauses, held that difficulty would arise, not so much from what was embodied in the Act, as from what that class of legislation would infallibly lead an excitable people to seek for through agitation.

The result has but too well justified his forebodings. The rude tests of adverse harvests have obliterated the short-lived prosperity that prevailed during the first few years following on the passing of the Act, and anarchy prevails.

With regard to the agitation of the Land League under the guidance of Mr. Parnell, I have but little to say. The whole conduct of the League is at present undergoing the test of a legal prosecution, and the question whether or no they have offended against the law of conspiracy is foreign to the permanent settlement of the land question. We may accept the assurance of Mr. Herbert Gladstone, that the Government wish to exhaust all the existing powers of the law before applying to Parliament for coercive legislation. I cannot, however, pass over the subject without directing attention to the fact that the partially avowed object of the agitation is mainly directed against the

existence of large, and even of moderate-sized, holdings. It would be well for the substantial class of farmers in Ireland, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, to remember that, if the extreme views of the Land League could be carried out, and all landlords compulsorily deported, the virulence of the agitation would be directed against themselves. As proof of this may be adduced Mr. Parnell's remedy for the distress existing amongst the over-populated districts of the West, viz., transmigration to the more fertile lands of Leinster and Munster, as opposed to emigration to our colonies and the United States. It should be borne in mind, that the big words of the agitation would matter but little were it not for the notorious fact that Ireland is full of arms. One thing is certain, that the country will insist upon the law being respected and enforced, and it is satisfactory to see that the Premier and the Lord Chancellor, in their speeches at the Mansion House, expressed their intentions of doing all in their power to secure this object. The former stated in the House of Commons that Ireland was within a measurable distance of civil war.' I believe that if with the approaching winter outrages and assassinations continue and increase, Ireland will find herself within a measurable distance of Vigilance Committees,' a state of things far more deplorable and more disastrous to the reputation of the Government of a civilised country.

Before entering on the question of the land tenure, I should protest against the manner in which landlords have been attacked for availing themselves of the provisions in their favour in the Land Act of 1870; notably so in the case of the Leinster leases,' which raised, at the time they were offered to the tenants on the Duke of Leinster's property, a storm of abuse. I believe that, upon examination, this lease will be found to contain nothing that the Act does not permit, and even encourage. Even the late Mr. Butt stated that there was nothing in the lease that could be construed as straining the provisions of the Act.

There is an assertion that is constantly made by the advocates of the tenants, viz., that the permanent improvements of the land are invariably and entirely the work of the tenants. This statement must be accepted with reservation, for on the estate of the large resident proprietors, more especially in Leinster and Munster, it will be found to have but little foundation in fact. It is, however, maintained by Mr. Robertson, one of the ablest of the writers on the land question, in a letter of some length to the Daily News of the 2nd of October. He indeed qualifies his assertion by admitting that landlords do sometimes improve, but says that when it is done with money borrowed from the Board of Works, the improvement is in reality made by the tenant if he be called upon to pay an increased and fair rent for the increased value of the land. I fail to see, when the land is permanently improved at the landlord's expense and risk, what