help. Every improvement and ornament would add to the value of the goodwill; the man would be a free man, not a slave.

We will suppose now the one-acre man has bought out the feesimple of house and land. Is all chance of further improvement to be closed to him? No; for the Government has more land reserved, divided into two, three, four, and five-acre good plots; it has also waste lands in plots ranging up to twenty acres. A B, having bought his fee-simple, re-sells to Government, gets his good-will from his successor, and so, his pocket full of cash, goes to the next agent, offers his bid for the land, which should be regularly advertised; a certain proportion of the fee-simple being required as entrance money on the plots above one acre; and so he settles into his tiny farm, to redeem it too. He labours, and his children labour on it, and he goes out to hire, to save money to buy; he sends his children to service and to America to earn for him; the greed of thrift has sprung up with its attendant virtues (for the nation) of hardness to beggars and sharp canniness. He is the Irishman as you see him out of Ireland even now; once the owner of a five-acre plot he is an independent man, able to enter into competition with the farmers and holders of land, the sale of land being then presumably free.

It will be asked-This is a long process. What, meanwhile, is the Government to do with the larger plots?' There is where immigration would work. A mason left my brother's employment in the spring; before the year was out he sent home 60%. An immensity of money would return to Ireland if it got a chance. It would buy up these Government plots either for relatives or for a home for immigrants. Now money returns by millions, but mostly in the form of emigration tickets paid to the steamboat companies and bearing no fruit in Ireland. Then money-probably in much larger sums-would tend to remain in the country, and would aid the small tradesmen, artisans and hucksters, who themselves would save, to buy a home, instead of drinking all their spare cash, 'because you wouldn't feel the difference of the few shillings to put it by.' Every man who had money to buy his holding would give employment. A man with three acres would go out as a labourer part of the year, and for other parts he would need help. A good deal of give and take would go on between the holders of plots. Employment for children would be constant. The children are now brought up in enforced idleness, except for schooling; then every household would be at work in common. Improvements of all kinds should be freely allowed, and many would be the small jobs for mason and carpenter. Now cases like the following are the reward of industry. W. W. built a house and a workshop, or rather his uncle did so. The workshop is taken by the landlord and given to another, no reduction of rent being made. On the death of the old people, W. W., who had paid up their old rents and was their successor, asks for the house. He is told

to bid; offers nearly double rent, and to make repairs, and is promised a thirty-one years' lease. He expends 25l. on house and asks for lease. Is offered a lease on a man's life instead of the thirty-one years. He refuses, and stays on as a yearly tenant, having also built a new workshop, &c., though he has no security. People improve now, when in all reason they ought not to do so; if they had hope and security, work would go on apace, and on no matter how small a hand-tilled garden, numbers of little matters are daily wanted, which in the making and in the using would give employment and repay it.

As things now stand, no regular employment is given, from the 1st of October to the 1st of February. It is a matter of luck, and men learn to be idle, and so do the children. They get accustomed to a wintry semi-starvation, and when men have got to that it is very hard to raise them. They hunger for land or work, and they get neither. The law cannot give them work nor rise of wages, but it could give them land and hope. It will be said, 'We are having a lesson this year against undertaking the position of Irish landlords.' But, first, the Government will not rack-rent, it will not suck up the value of men's improvements. It is more powerful, more punctual, and less indulgent than landlords: it will hold the value, and much more than the value of the rent owed, and, above all, every pound a man wishes to lessen his rent he lessens his own part property in the land. The Government rent would be based on the clearest and simplest sum, and would be plain to the simplest instead of being a capricious extraction of the pound of flesh. No other landlord could afford house and land as cheap as Government; therefore they would prefer the Government houses.

Proceedings should be taken against defaulters as now for taxes. Building and repairs should be done under the Board of Works (renovated); rents collected by the tax-collectors, and weekly savings towards purchase by the Post Office. All might be done simply and cheaply out of the present staffs.

It appears to me that one change in the law might help in rescuing the poor, that is, the extending of the Bankruptcy Laws to all classes. If a man could be sold up and cleared of old debts any day, I think the 'gombeen-man' would not have a good time, and the honest traders would not allow credit to run on as it does now.

According as the fee-simples were bought out, I should allow the Government to enter the market as purchaser to the extent of the money originally voted for the first purchase of land now. The Government should have the power of re-selling according to above scheme, dividing the land so bought in plots not exceeding the value of a five-acre plot of fair land. A five-acre plot of county Limerick land could well support a family; but of Donegal, fifteen would not be too much, or indeed would be far too little in parts.

The money would so turn over, some slight margin might be left

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for profit, and the whole country might then be peopled with industrious labourers who hoped to rise, with immigrants who bad already collected their 'handful of half-pence,' with artisans who had saved their wages instead of drinking them, as they almost invariably do now, and with household servants who, here or abroad, had bided their time to seek a home.

Ireland is suffering now from stagnation, not from over-population. Tear aside the bonds of entail, legal expenses, &c., put a staff in the hand of the weak and throw a rope to the drowning; bring back her successful exiles; and commerce will return, and knowledge of practical arts will arise; the life-blood of the nation will flow again; and if we do have Home Rule, it will be the rule of a happy, hopeful people, not of a people lost in misery and despair.

POSTSCRIPT.

CHARLOTTE G. O'BRIEN.

Since writing the above, a 'Labour League' has spread silently through Limerick and Cork, if not further.

THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

IN reading more than once Lord Sherbrooke's able article on Legislation for Ireland,' in your Review of this month, two things strike me forcibly: the closeness and accuracy of his reasoning as regards the rest of the civilised world; and his Lordship's inaccuracy as to the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of the Irish tenant. In endeavouring to test this matter, I will take but one sentence of Lord Sherbrooke's. Much turns on that one sentence (p. 684)-Notwithstanding all that the Devon Commission may say, the Irish tenant knows perfectly well that he has no claim, in equity or otherwise, to payment for the cabin he may build, the bog he may drain, or the stones he may roll away.' True, according to the laws under which he lives, or did live until the passing of the Land Act, he has no such claim; but that he 'knows' that such is the case in equity' is the reverse of the fact.

The Irish people are to the last degree credulous, and Ireland is the hotbed of misstatements. In the very year which is not yet concluded, a famine was proclaimed, which had no existence, though there was much distress in a few isolated limited districts. A gentleman on one side of politics drew upon the charity of our cousins in the United States, by the plea that a thousand people had died of starvation in the county in which I live, where not one person has died of starvation, or was ever likely to do so; while, on the other side, a statement was made, that there was not a single potato left in this same county, at the very time that we were exporting potatoesto Scotland. These statements, made so lately, and with the perfect power, existing to anyone, to ascertain their truth or falsehood, have never been met, save in a few isolated denials by individuals. Is it wonderful then that the meagre, party-poisoned, histories of Ireland which are read by the people, have induced the Irish peasant to hold the belief that, not only in equity, but by custom, he has a claim on the land, which Lord Sherbrooke supposes he cannot hold? It is needless to say how elastic this belief may be, and how important to the peace and prosperity of Ireland, or the contrary. I will now endeavour to show how this belief has been implanted, grown, and,

finally, has been perfected by the Land Act of 1870; and then, if I can keep my statements within such bounds as not to completely weary your readers, I will venture to state my opinion as to what might be done to mitigate-for I believe no more can be done -the miserable condition of this country.

The tribal' system, under which the Irish people lived at the time of the English conquest, and by which they reaped a few precarious and scanty crops, and grazed their cattle in common, is thus described by no less an authority than Mr. Stuart Mill. Before the conquest the Irish people knew nothing of absolute property in land. The land virtually belonged to the entire Sept, the chief was little more than the managing member of the association.' This would certainly imply that the land belonged to the Sept-in other words, to the people. What was the fact, however, according to Sir John Davis, Irish Attorney-General to James I., who wrote altogether in the interests of the people? 'This extortion of Coigne and Livery did produce two notorious effects. First, it made the land waste; next, it made the people idle, for when the husbandman had laboured all the year, the soldiers in one night did consume the fruits of all his labour. But these Irish exactions, extorted by the Chieftains and Tanists by colour of their barbarous Seignory, were almost as grievous a burden as the others; namely, Cosherings, sessing of the Kerne, of his family, called kernity; of his horses and horse-boys; of his dogges and dogge-boys, and the like; and lastly cuttings, tallages, or spendings, high and low at his pleasure (the Chief's). All which made the lord an absolute Tyrant, and the tenant a very slave and villain; and in one respect more miserable than bond slaves, for commonly the bond slave is fed by his Lord, but here the Lord is fed by the bond slave.' I do not think the above implies much right of freehold property in the tenant. It is with the tenant only that I have to do. I admit that, in many cases, the 'managing members of the associations' were very harshly and unjustly treated. As early as the reign of Edward III. the Irish people petitioned the King that they might be permitted to use and enjoy the laws of England; but, according to Sir John Davis, 'The English lords finding the Irish exactions to be more profitable than English rents and services, and loving the Irish tyranny, did reject and cast off English law and government.' They unhappily had sufficient interest with the Crown to delay for many long years those equal rights, and economic laws, the justice of which Lord Sherbrooke states so forcibly, and Irishmen now reject. It is not my business, even if I had space, to dwell on the long melancholy history of Ireland. All I have to do with at present are the fictions which have led the Irish tenant to believe that he has a claim, in equity or otherwise,' to his farm, large or small. The next point I must touch is the supposed analogy between the rights of the Irish landowner and his tenant, and those of the Prussian Knight and Bauer, under the