a definite judgment as to the effect which its provisions may have in satisfying the hopes of the Irish tenantry. But the divisions already taken have so absolutely affirmed some of its most important and disputable principles, especially the force of local customs, and the right to damages for disturbance of occupancy, that it can hardly be doubted the measure will pass through that House in its integrity, and will go to the Lords with all the weight which the authority of the Commons expressed on every important point by great majorities commands. It is, we do not hesitate to affirm, the largest, the most liberal, and the justest measure ever proposed to Parliament in the interest of the Irish tenantry; and is distinctly superior, when viewed as a complete scheme, to the Bill of Mr. Sharman Crawford, and to the later Bill of the Tenant League. There is of course no sort of comparison between it and the measures proposed by successive Governments from the time when Lord Stanley to the time when Lord Mayo was Chief Secretary. "Its three pillars," as Mr. Gladstone described them in the debate of the 5th inst., are, first, the confirmation of Irish customs; second, the rule that improvements made by the tenant shall be the property of the tenant; and third, the principle that the tenant shall receive damages on eviction. But in addition, it contains provision for the gradual formation of a small proprietary on terms of loan from the State, not illiberal as they stand, but which can and will probably be improved. It also provides an effective remedy at law against exorbitant increase of rent. It provides for the landlord but one way of relieving himself from the uncertain pressure of the new powers given to the tenant, and that is by enlarging the tenant's security of tenure. It utterly re verses the presumption of law, which a hundred statutes had established in the landlord's favour, and definitively transfers it to the side of the tenant. It contains such effective remedies against oppression, that it may be said to place the bad landlord to a considerable degree in his tenant's power; and while it will make the minimum of change on properties which have hitherto been justly and liberally administered, its tendency will be to make it the mutual interest of landlord and tenant that their dealings shall be fair, open, and above-board, and their disputes settled, whenever any may arise, through the large authority given to tribunals of arbitration. In the words of Mr. Gavan Duffy, already quoted, it will "bring back Ireland to health and strength by stopping the system of extermination, and by giving security of tenure to the people." Had it been law when he wrote these words, such sweeping evictions as Mr. Shirley's in Farney, or Lord Lucan's, or those in Clare, of which Sir Robert Peel so indignantly spoke, or as those of a more recent date effected by Lord Sligo, and attempted by Mr. Scully, simply could not have happened. The work would have been far too costly. How many murders might have been prevented! How much wholesale plunder of the property, and banishment of the persons of honest and pious people! How should Fenianism have spread through the country had 600,000 tenant-farmers felt themselves vitally interested in its prosperity, and therefore in its peace? If, when this Bill becomes law, there be one tenant in Ireland who does not acquire or achieve Security of Tenure, it will assuredly have been, or will be, his own fault. Its provisions set a high premium on industry and energy, past, present, and future. But no law can protect idleness and improvidence. The "rights of property," which hitherto in Ireland have only related invidiously to the possessions of one class, will rapidly be so extended that they shall come to mean the sanction of thrift and labour in every cabin in the land. That such a law should be complicated is only another way of saying that it is equitable and comprehensive. That it was meant to make any invidious distinction between the Protestant of the north and the Catholic of the south is one of the grossest calumnies uttered in the course of that campaign of ignorant and mendacious declamation which has been urged against it; the simple answer to such a statement is, that the Catholic tenant-farmers of Ulster exceed by 14,000 the Protestant and Presbyterian tenant-farmers added together. That it may lead to much litigation for a time we cannot deny, and we shall not affect to regret. Good landlords will settle what disputes they may have with their tenants under the arbitration clause. Bad landlords must be allowed to make the precedents, which extend the boundaries of the statute, knowing, as they well know beforehand, that the Irish courts are weary of being obliged to "administer injustice." Under the cover of the new presumptions, a strong body of case-law will doubtless gradually grow. If, meantime, the exacting landlord is handed over to the attentions of the attorney, he is, at least it may be suggested, in proportion released from those of the assassin. It is no rash prophecy to say that agrarian crime must cease and come to an end in Ireland; and that within a very few years, that portion of its population which has hitherto been the most utterly unprotected by the law, will be the most law-loving and -abiding people on the face of the earth; for the Irish peasantry are, notwithstanding all the stains and weaknesses which long oppression and hard usage have left on their character, a noble, a pious, and a grateful race, loving justice with a love as strong as the hatred with which they hate iniquity. Despite the present confusion and conflict which rage high over the heads of the people, we look forward with assured and undoubting confidence to the time when it shall be known throughout the four provinces, while the next harvest is being reaped, that this Bill has become law. To every farmer in the land it will at once extend a boon and a security; and, as it seems to us, it is so framed as to extend the exact measure of advantage and security which each man will feel that his honesty and industry have merited. Thus the law will at last have come home as a sovereign pledge of right and of hope to the peasant's hearth, no longer the sentence of doom that only knew how to stifle its cheerful blaze. Then shall he feel that his sweat sinks not into the ground in vain, and that he may never more know the wrongs that bring the temptation of blood. Justice shall be to him as a boundary-wall, and the free field respond to his fruitful labours; and if indeed the poet's dream should ever be realized, of that land where at last The common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, it may well be among this goodly people. With religious ascendancy abolished, with a just Land Law in active and widening operation, the great sources of disaffection and of alienation will have been closed. The Education Question comes next in order of time and of importance, and its discussion will doubtless occupy a prominent place in the debates of next Session. But that question is already in some degree resolved by the force of facts. A secular scheme with a conscience clause has been tried in Ireland for the space of a whole generation; and it has failed. The National System has become and is becoming every year more and more of a distinct denominational system. If, on this question, the minister is bound to respect" the views of the majority of the people," then his course his clear, as there is no minority to be polled. The Irish Protestant equally with the Irish Catholic insists upon a religious education of the people. The efforts of a knot of obscurantist professors, interested in the maintenance of the Queen's Colleges, and influential with a few of the London editors, may lead for a while to the supposition that there is a substantial party in Ireland in favour of the indifferentist system of education; but the Irish nation has always had a lively horror of ideologues; and if it is asked nowa. days to choose between the law as laid down by priests and the law as laid down by professors, it will answer that that cause was finished so long ago in its history as the time of S. Columb-kille. It long ago chose the priest for its guide in this province of thought, and it has not regretted its choice. In its history, religion and education have always gone hand in hand. S. Patrick taught his people the alphabet and the Decalogue together. The Irish monastery, wherever its site, at S. Gall or at Donegal, was the home of learning as well as of piety. The same penal laws tried to strike the primer from the schoolmaster's, and the chalice from the priest's hands; and now Ireland will hardly stultify its whole history, and stunt its progress, in consideration of the penitence of Trinity College and the nihilist zeal of Mr. Fawcett. The time, at all events, we sincerely hope, is at hand when the National schoolmaster will no longer be paraded before Parliament as the well-known Fenian Centre and the amanuensis in ordinary of the Riband Lodge. Much, even after the Education question has been settled, will remain to be achieved in the field of Irish government and administration. There is a large, but not a very difficult labour before the Irish Secretary, in the readjustment of the administration of the Poor Law-which had been provided to meet the wants of a population of eight millions, of whom a fourth received relief in one year, and is out of all proportion to the real necessities of a population of five millions, from which pauperism has to a great extent sloughed away. The cost is inordinate the moral effect depressing. It is, we submit, a legitimate object of Irish policy to see that two-thirds of the workhouses shall be let as factories or turned into Industrial Schools. The railway system of the country will, there is good reason to hope, be consolidated and extended under State direction; and in Ireland there is little doubt that the State can interpose to effect an amalgamation of the present companies without risk of loss and with very great public benefit. There is much to be done for the development of the long-wasted natural resources of the country, which the State may be fairly expected to assist; much which industry invigorated by security will spontaneously achieve. The Irish river must be aided to keep to his own channel, and to take tribute besides from the bog. The brown turf will all in time turn to green, and the forests far-famed of old clothe the bare hills again, and the rich beet will encroach more and more on the province of the potato, and the industry of Ulster will spread with its tenant right over the other provinces, and Irish fishermen will at last learn to catch Irish fish. But behind all, the problem of problems remains. Is it possible to blend the sentiment of nationality with the sentiment of loyalty in Ireland as in Scotland? England has learned even to take pride in the Scotch plaid, but as yet has only contumely for the wearing of the green. England loves to see her Highland volunteers march past in their tartan, but in Ireland there must be no volunteers, whether in green or orange. Who shall answer for the heart of a nation, the heart of a nation which is its nationality? We do not pretend to do so. But the immediate future to which we look forward in Ireland is one of peaceful industry, and of a grateful calm. The generation which has attained so miraculously to religious liberty and to the longsought securities of the soil, will certainly not conspire, and will hardly agitate. Its first duty will be, as it were, to take possession of its own country, to develop its resources, and to repair the ravages of the past. But it may safely be said that whatever the future may have in store for either people, the bitter hatred of England, the result of centuries of misrule, must swiftly pass away; for the Irish nation has already learned that just laws can come from the free will of a British Parliament; and through all time the figure of one great Englishman will stand between them and the evil images of the pasthe whose first use of supreme power was to give them happy homes and altars free, who in so short a time, by the sole force of his genius and his will, reversed the course of centuries of cruel policy, and for ever blotted out from the page of their history "the curse of Cromwell." ART. IX. CONTROVERSIES ON THE COUNCIL. The "Vatican": a Weekly Record of the Council. Letters in the "Weekly Register." By Very Rev. HERBERT VAUGHAN, D.D.; Rev. JOHN NARY; Rev. J. G. WENHAM; Rev. Dr. TODD, &c. &c. WHEN first Pius IX. summoned his Ecumenical Council, the English Protestant journals affected supreme scorn for the whole proceeding, though sufficiently indicating by their tone their anxiety and annoyance. But since the Council has assembled, they have entirely dropped the mask of indifference; and have thrown themselves heart and soul into what they represent as a conflict between the "Ultramontanes" and the Opposition." We cannot be surprised that their whole |