to a rent-charge only which would discharge the sums payable to the old proprietors, and which, were the credit of the State pledged, would be not only less than the existing rents, but would cease after a given period of years. Whether the expropriation of the landlords which is thus to take place is to be compulsory or not seems to be uncertain; but it is a sine quá non that it is to be general; and as a scheme of expropriation, voluntary in name, could be made compulsory without difficulty-the terms offered by the State under the supposed plan, involving an immediate reduction of rent and the extinction of rent in the course of time, would, for instance, force landlords, as a class, to sell-we must regard such a measure as a settled project to annihilate the present owners of the Irish land, and this, indeed, is openly avowed. It should be observed, moreover, that we are not informed by the sanguine advocates of this policy what compensation is to be given the landlords, for the extinction of their proprietary rights, or indeed, from what fund compensation is to come, except from the rent-charges representing their rents; nor are we told how, and to what extent, the credit of the State is to be involved, and the general tax-payer to be made liable. Even the machinery through which the rent-charge payable by the new peasant owners is to be collected a point of supreme importance-is not indicated; we only hear that the State must buy out the landlords, and place the occupiers of the soil in their stead, by a large but indefinite scheme of Land Purchase; and when this shall have been accomplished, the Irish Land Question, it is assumed, will have been settled; the Irish Land System will have been placed on the solid and lasting foundations of right; and the peasantry of Ireland, turned into owners of their holdings at a low terminable charge, will faithfully discharge their obligations to the State, and will become contented and lawabiding subjects.

It is curious to note how this theory has found advocates among classes and persons of the most opposite views and opinions. The Land League and the National League demand a transfer to the peasantry of the Irish land, because they avowedly aim at the ruin of landlords. Doctrinaire thinkers wish to see the experiment of petty farm ownership extensively tried; English Radicals conceive that an Irish precedent would second their designs against landlordism' at home; untaught by the lessons of Irish history, some statesmen1 believe, or pretend to believe, that å fresh confiscation, on a gigantic scale, would create a new 'loyal Irish interest.' Absentees from Ireland, too, are disposed to sell; mortgagees of Irish estates are eager to realise securities now in grave danger;

1 It is simply melancholy to notice the prevalence of this delusion.

and many Irish landlords, especially those of the encumbered and the exacting classes, cry out for a measure which, they hope, might rescue them from impending shipwreck. The general expropriation of landlords in Ireland, through the agency of the State, is thus favoured by powerful although conflicting interests; and, as I have said, a scheme of Land Purchase is part of the programme of the present Government. The only arguments, however, openly urged on behalf of this policy are miserably weak, and are scarcely worthy of serious attention. Dual ownership,' which is denounced as unbearable, prevails in most of the land systems of Europe, and even, to a considerable extent, in England; it has been the peculiar glory of Ulster under the name of the tenant-right usage; instead of creating it the recent Land Acts have only given it the sanction of law; and if it does, in a certain degree, prevent the making of large improvements of land, this mischief is as nothing compared to the good which has flowed from the reform of Irish tenures, and it is an evil, besides, which admits of a remedy. In fact the clamour against 'dual ownership' is partly founded on the prevailing ignorance respecting the facts of the Irish Land System, and is partly an appeal to English prejudice in favour of absolute freehold ownership; but it really means that Irish landlords can no longer claim proprietary rights, and are, many of them, in a position of hardship; and, as an argument, it is almost worthless. Again, after the revolution which has passed over Ireland, I agree that landlordism,' in its present form, can scarcely have a protracted existence; but that is no reason why Irish landlords should be generally expropriated and deprived of all rights in their lands, through the interposition of the State. The arguments against any scheme of the kind appear to me to admit of no answer. Let us regard this policy first from the point of view of justice; and all Irish history, and the calamitous history of the Irish land1 in a special manner, is a warning against the violation of rights in this matter, for supposed expediency. An immense majority of the landlords of Ireland would consider it an intolerable wrong that their lands should be forcibly taken from them, or be filched away by a device of State-craft; how can this be accomplished on any plea of equity, especially as Mr. Gladstone himself has repeatedly asserted that, as a class, they have done nothing that deserved forfeiture? Are the O'Conor Don, and the Duke of Leinster, and the Duke of Abercorn, and Lord Portarlington, representative types of different races established upon the Irish soil, but all known as beneficent landlords, to be driven from their homes by 1 Why too is the Union still condemned in Irish opinion? Because it began in wrong. The precedent is significant.

confiscation by force, or by what would be even more odious, a manœuvre that would 'rig' the land market against them? The idea seems to me simply shocking; and, passing from what is general to details, the iniquity of this policy becomes apparent everywhere. For example, the great body of Irish landlords possess family mansions and demesnes, not to speak of forests, of woods, of plantations; but it is not contemplated to deal with these, for the intended plan is to apply only to lands held as farms by bona fide occupants. Are the landlords, therefore, when deprived of their estates, to be obliged to retain these fag-ends of them, the appurtenances of what had been their property; or are they, if, as would probably happen, they should resolve to depart for ever from Ireland, to be driven to sell them at a price which would be1, from the nature of the case, little more than nominal?

Unjust, too, as is the idea of this scheme, it would be, I think, impossible to carry out, except through the perpetration of wrong to which Parliament will never assent. If Irish landlords are to be bought out wholesale, the policy of every civilised country requires that they should be compensated in full; and this could only be done by a payment in cash, or by the creation of a stock or of a kind of debentures, guaranteed by the Imperial Legislature 2; for-without speculating on the possible results of the agitation for Home Rule for Ireland-the guarantee of the unborn 'Irish State' cannot at present be even considered, and, in no event, probably, could be deemed adequate. The compensation, however, if right is to be done, has been estimated by Mr. Gladstone at not less than £300,000,000; and though this sum is, I conceive, too large, it cannot fall short of £200,000,000, and those who have reduced it to £140,000,000 have made, I think, a complete mistake. But is it possible to suppose that £200,000,000, or British securities of an equal amount, will be forthcoming as compensation for the Statepurchased estates of Irish landlords? The obligations in this matter of England are, I admit, weighty: the title to nineteentwentieths of the Irish land is held under an Act of Charles II; the enormous sum of £52,000,000 has been invested in the purchase of estates in Ireland under an Act of this reign; the increased security of Irish landlords was one of the inducements to pass the Union; to destroy, or even ruinously to impair, the rights of

This has already been prefigured in intended legislation. Under Mr. Gladstone's defunct Land Purchase Bill of 1886, Irish landlords were to be allowed to obtain for their 'Demesnes' a price equivalent to their worth as 'agricultural holdings'—that is perhaps 7 shillings in the £.

2 This article was written before Mr. Arnold Forster's proposed solution of this difficulty was published. His plan in my opinion deserves the severest censure, but is not worth discussing as it cannot bear examination. It is useful, however, as indicating the difficulties of any scheme of general Land Purchase.

Irish landlords without affording a reasonable equivalent, would be as dishonest as the repudiation of the National Debt; and I certainly think, after what has happened, that the class have a claim to consideration and support, and even to help from the credit of the State, in any final settlement of the Irish Land Question. But that the general tax-payer should be made responsible, directly or indirectly, for a gigantic sum, equal to the indemnity of the war of 1870, in order to try the mere experiment of expropriating Irish landlords en masse, and placing peasants in their stead as owners, appears to me a Laputan dream; the proposal will certainly not be made, and the notion cannot, I maintain, be justified, on any grounds of equity or national duty. If compensation, however, on this immense scale, cannot be made available, the whole scheme must fail; the essence of it is to buy out the landlords, through the agency of the State, and to give the tenants the land at terminable. rents less than those now current, and if a necessary condition of this transaction is found to be impossible to fulfil, the arrangement, it follows, cannot be made. The only alternative would be to offer the landlords no compensation at all, or compensation of an illusory kind; and England, assuredly, will give no countenance to projects of simple rapine and fraud.

The principle of this scheme being thus impracticable, as I hope I have shown, it becomes unnecessary to discuss its details, more especially the machinery to work it out, a matter, I have said, of extreme importance. If the project, however, could be made feasible, would it really conduce to the welfare of Ireland? Consider it again on the ground of justice, not from the landlord's but from the tenant's side, and I ask what title have Irish tenants to drive their superiors from their lands and their 1 homes, and to be turned into owners at terminable rents; and this at the cost of an enormous sum, at the risk of the mass of the general tax-payers? They have a right to have their equities in the land protected to the fullest extent, nay it is advisable, in the interest of peace, and of a complete settlement of a great social question, to concede even more than is strictly their due; but they have no right to destroy the position of a class, and to possess themselves of a gigantic bribe, which would mortgage the industry of the three kingdoms: and if this be so, an arrangement of the kind, being essentially unfair, could never prosper. If the scheme, however, from this point of view, and indeed from every other, is radically unjust—

It is coolly assumed by the advocates of wholesale expropriation that landlords if deprived of their estates would, as a class, retain and live in their houses and demesnes. This is, I believe, a complete delusion. My own feeling at least would be tout ou rien; and I hold the small remains, of what had been an immense inheritance, by a title antecedent to the First Norman Conquest of Ireland.

and justice, I repeat, should be always our guide in efforts to deal with the Irish land-is it commendable on any grounds of expediency? The general expropriation of Irish landlords means the banishment from Ireland of an order of men who, whatever have been their faults and shortcomings, have given the State more than a fair proportion of eminent and even of illustrious. names, have, in the past, been the mainstay and prop, in perilous times, of the British connexion, and remain the natural leaders and guides of some of the best parts of the Irish community; and, in our own time, the class is the main agency to perform functions of the most important kind, in the administration of justice and in county government. I wish to avoid controversial politics, but, in the existing state of Ireland, would it be safe for England, or wise, as regards hundreds of thousands of loyal Irish subjects, to expatriate an aristocracy like this; and, if it were gone, where could we find in Ireland—a country without a powerful middle class, as regards education extremely backward, and torn by faction, ill-will, and disorder-the elements of a trained and impartial magistracy, and of capable Grand Juries and Local Boards? I entirely agree with Mr. Gladstone-he has said so over and over again—that landlords form an essential member of the organised frame of the Irish nation; and I firmly believe, if they were severed from Ireland, that it would be necessary to replace them by a bureaucratic regime, a bad and very unpopular type of government. A peasantry, again, which has acquired land, and has become its owner upon a great scale, through its own exertions and its well-applied industry, will be a sound and wholesome element in a State; but it is idle to argue from such a case that a proprietary of peasants suddenly called into being without an effort of its own-the forced creation of a perplexed Parliament as a concession to agitation of extreme violence-would exhibit qualities of this kind; and it seems to me to be mere folly to think that Irish tenants, made owners wholesale of their holdings under conditions like these, would become a law-abiding and a conservative power, and be really loyal and contented subjects. The assumption, too, I conceive, would be equally vain that, in such circumstances, they would readily pay the terminable rents belonging to the State: they would have gained much through their leader's policy, and they would be easily induced to contend for more; and plausible arguments would not be wanting to urge them to repudiate what they would be told was a tribute to a foreign and an absentee Power 1. A revolutionary settlement of

1 Surely we have had revolutionary settlements enough of the Irish land; and how have they prospered?