tions with the British State and Constitution. It would be difficult to praise too highly the zeal and care with which he has studied those relations, and the brilliant and energetic eloquence with which he has stated his conclusions. His papers are written throughout in a spirit and style befitting the disciple of that master of statesmen, Edmund Burke; and it is to be regretted that one so competent to deal with great questions of state is obliged to do so through newspaper letters and the restricted medium of the pamphlet, instead of from the place in Parliament which in any other country than Ireland would surely offer itself to his acceptance. When the Irish Church Question comes, as it necessarily must come, within a very few years, to be definitively settled, even though Mr. de Vere's scheme be not its accepted solution, his writings on the subject will assuredly have simplified its issues, and made the task of Parliament and the people comparatively clear and easy.

We do not profess to discuss his views at present in any degree of detail, because we believe that the settlement of the Irish Church Question is not a subject for next session; and the state of affairs in Ireland is so exceedingly grave and ominous that the topic presents itself to our mind rather in the character of a brilliant distraction. The question of to-day, for statesmen, for Parliament, for the Irish Clergy, and the Irish People, is, how to abolish Fenianism. We believe it is obvious enough to be assumed without argument, that if Mr. de Vere's plan were enacted into law within a week after the commencement of the next session, it would not have the faintest effect in alleviating the revolutionary propagandism from without, or checking the chronic disaffection within the country. It might tend to weaken the influence of the Catholic clergy, which has hitherto exercised the most effective control over the operations of the organization. But Fenianism is the result of a discontented emigration, which has acquired an abnormal political power in a country with hostile instincts, and grave causes of complaint against England,-reacting upon a population socially insecure and long misgoverned. It is not the Established Church which caused the emigration. Thirty years have passed since the personal payment of tithes has been exacted by law from the population which remains, nor, if the tithe-rent charge were abolished to-morrow, would its abolition make an appreciable difference in the rent of land throughout Ireland. In this sense, the Irish Church may be regarded as a "sentimental grievance." Far be it from us to undervalue the pressure of sentimental grievances, sometimes the most intolerable to which man can be subjected,

but the people of Ireland suffer from substantial grievances which are at present more galling, which are also more immediately remediable, and the settlement of which would, in our belief, more directly contribute to the present pacification of the country.

The first question to be settled in Ireland ought to be the Landlord and Tenant Question. It is eagerly denied by the members and organs of the Government that the Fenian movement is, in any considerable degree sympathized with by the Irish agricultural classes; and this statement is supported by the fact that very few farmers have been arrested under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. But, can it be doubted that there is a strong sympathy on the part of the great mass of the Irish population with Fenianism? Can it be doubted that this sympathy is as strong in districts which are purely and exclusively agricultural, as in the towns? Is it not the fact that the difference between the town and the country population in Ireland is less than that which exists between the same classes in any other country in the world? And has not the chief cause of discontent which the emigration carried with it to America been its sense of the injustice of the land laws, and its common experience of eviction? An Irish Bishop,-than whom no one has had more thorough experience of the operations of the Fenian organization,—and who has resisted its action with singular zeal and energywe allude to the Bishop of Kerry-declared before a Committee of the House of Commons that, so deep-seated and so widely spread is disaffection among the mass of the Irish peasantry, that any foreign enemy of England, landing in Ireland, would be sure to receive their zealous support. It is not to suppress the parson, one may safely say, that the Irish peasant would take that risk, but to exterminate the landlord and the Government that lends its strong arm to execute the landlord's arbitrary will.

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In our July number we expressed our apprehension that owing to the factious opposition of the Irish Liberal Members, the Government would be unable to proceed this year with its Landlord and Tenant Bills; and our regret that they had not been allowed to go into Committee, when, we believe they might easily have been shaped into a most beneficial and tical measure. But it may be fairly said, neither in the House nor in Ireland were those Bills considered on their actual merits, yet their merits were great, their defects slight, and easily reparable. They were the first Bills proposed to Parliament, which gave the tenant power to create a property in improvements, even against the landlord's consent; which

established a fit and proper permanent umpire between the landlord and tenant; and enabled the tenant at once to effect all the improvements which his farm might require, with money borrowed from the State. It is true the Chief Secretary did not propose to restrain the landlord's power of eviction at the inception, or during the execution of improvements, even though they might be sanctioned by the Board of Works, and created by a Treasury loan. He doubtless hoped that both landlord and tenant would see their true interest in availing themselves of the financial aids offered by the State, to execute all over the country those solid agricultural works of which Ireland stands in such lamentable need. Instead of the patchwork repairs which the Irish tenant now makes in trembling insecurity, he was offered the money and the countenance of the State, to build, and drain, and reclaim; and, the impulse once given, it might naturally have been hoped that other moneys, now locked up on deposit in Joint Stock Banks, at one per cent., would have followed the money of the State, into the farmer's true bank-his land.

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It seems to us that both the landlord and the tenant had a strong interest in the well-working of such a measure. rectly, and ultimately it is the landlord's estate which would be benefited. He is at present harassed by indefinite apprehensions of the course of legislation to which Parliament may be driven, if the condition of Ireland remains so troubled and disturbed as it now is, and if the English people should come to the conclusion, as they are fast coming, that the Irish landlords are mainly responsible for the plague of Fenianism. Already, advanced opinion in England points to a settlement of the Irish Land Question by plans borrowed from the Indian Government, such as, perpetual tenure at a fixed rent, or by compulsory purchase of absentee properties, and their sale in small allotments to peasant proprietors. Every year, nay, every month that a just and equitable settlement is delayed increases the danger that the Irish Land Question may be ultimately solved in some such arbitrary and simple manner. At all former times the Irish landlords might safely count on the sympathies of a Parliament mainly composed of men of their own order, and who regarded them as a garrison desperately defending the interests of the British Constitution and Church in the midst of a nation alien in blood, religion, and laws. But this has all changed. The Irish landlords are at present looked on with little favour by any class, even their own, in England. It is generally felt that they have not done their duty by their people, as English and Scotch landlords do theirs. Crowds of English travellers visit Ireland every

year, and have become aware of the harshness and rapacity with which Irish estates are, even still, too commonly administered; of the fact that as a rule, the Irish landlord never has made, and does not make those substantial agricultural improvements which the English and the Scotch landlord does, as a rule, make; and, that having allowed the tenant to make them, in such wretched fashion as they are habitually made, he is rarely tempted to give the tenant any compensating security of tenure, and is even not ashamed to tax the tenant in the form of increased rent, for the value which his industry has added to the land. Finally, English public opinion has become fully aware that the feeling of the Irish landlords, as a class, is to reduce Irish tenants, as a class, to the condition of tenantsat-will-a condition in some respects specifically worse than that of serfdom, and which is no more capable of being permanently maintained in the world, as the world is now governed, than serfdom. It seems to us that the bills of Lord Mayo, offering the intervention of the State, and the assistance of the State, were calculated, more wisely than any measure previously submitted to Parliament, to establish a new, common, and beneficial interest between the landlord and the tenant, of which the State would be the guardian and Parliament the natural protector. It was said that the landlords would, to a man, combine to prevent the beneficial operation of the proposed law. We cannot believe it, but are convinced that if they did so combine, it would be so much the worse for them. In one respect, in which, however, they were easily remediable, Lord Mayo's bills were defective. Some security of tenure ought to have been provided for the tenant, who, having obtained the consent both of his landlord and the State, should proceed to make solid improvements. He should be guaranteed the use and enjoyment, for a certain term, of those improvements. This, it may be said, would be an interference with freedom of contract, but the Irish land question is impossible of settlement if the standard to be applied to it is always to be the merely commercial side of political economy. Lord Mayo boldly set this aside when he proposed to give the tenant power to make a certain class of improvements with Treasury money, even against the expressed will of the landlord. But of what use to the tenant would have been such a provision if the landlord could have at once checkmated both the tenant and the Treasury by serving a notice to quit? We cannot believe that Lord Mayo was blind to such an obvious defect in the machinery of his measure, but it was a defect for which the cure would have been simple,

had the bills gone into Committee. If the State should feel itself warranted to advance public money to the tenant, in order to enable him to make agricultural improvements, even against the openly expressed opposition of the landlord, surely the State would be morally bound to prevent the landlord from victimizing the tenant, for an act in which it (the State) was equally responsible with the tenant, and equally interested. The fundamental principles of the bill were in this way capable of an extension which was, we think, little, if at all considered at the time. Under its provisions, the State would gradually have become the guardian of a vast new property, created in and on the soil, in which all its interest would have been with the tenantry, and yet in which it would not have been necessary to establish any new administrative machinery, or to incur any risk worth computation, in comparison with the risk of having to manage a country divided into two hostile and intractable classes. How far the easy government of the country would be facilitated by the operation of such a measure it is not difficult to foresee. In so far as it should operate it would give the tenant a common interest with the State: and a common interest with the State is, with the agricultural classes of every country in the world, the basis of the most conservative loyalty. The Irish farmer who had built a comfortable house, reclaimed a bit of bog, drained his meadow, and fenced his potato-ground with money lent him by the Treasury, on the recommendation of the Board of Works, would see the whole character and value of the government of the country in a very different light from the present discontented occupier, who regards the law as always on the side of the landlord, and knows that he has

more security in his holding than the fox has in his covert. How can the Irish tenant-at-will possibly feel any loyalty towards the system of government which keeps him in the state in which he is? In the very fact that they provided for the growth of an entirely new system of relations between the landlord, the tenant, and the State, Lord Mayo's Bills showed sound and masterly policy.

We hope, for the sake not merely of the aggrieved class, but for that of the general peace and good government of the country, that the next session of Parliament will not be so barren of result in this particular direction as the last session, and that which preceded it, were. The Land Question is one which can be by far more effectually dealt with by a Conservative than by a Whig Government. The authority of a Conservative Minister, when he proposes measures with that end, to a Parliament mainly composed of landlords, is greater