Present Irish Questions

by William O'Connor Morris

To understand thoroughly the Ireland of the present day, it is necessary to have studied her history in the past. Nevertheless, if we go back to a comparatively recent period, say to the beginning of the reign of Victoria, we can obtain a reasonably clear idea of her existing condition. A revolution has passed over her in this space of time almost as complete as the revolution which has transformed France; the results have not yet been fully developed, but in nearly all respects they have been immense. The community has, for the most part, made material progress; but this has been far from great or decisive; it has been interrupted by seasons of distress, one culminating in a dire catastrophe, and has been retarded by many causes of trouble. Taking the external aspect of Ireland first, Dublin has certainly advanced in the last sixty years; the capital has been surrounded by fine and increasing suburbs; the squares, the streets, the shops have improved; above all, though much remains yet to be done, the contrast between the dwellings of the rich and the poor is much less painful than it was within living memory. No city, however, has made such progress as Belfast: its population, which, in 1841, was not more than 75,000 souls, was, in 1891, upwards of 255,000;[1] its opulence has probably grown tenfold; it is the centre of the great manufacture of Ulster; its building-yards are renowned for its magnificent ships; its estuary is crowded with the thronging fleets of commerce. The towns dependent on it, too, and the whole adjoining region, are flourishing from the great trade in linen, which has been aggregated within a comparatively small space; indeed, this prosperity has extended over all the north-east of Ireland, and Londonderry has long been a thriving seaport. Few of the towns of the rest of Ulster and of the southern provinces have improved; but signs of augmented wealth appear in other directions; in this respect they are striking in the extreme. The places of worship and the religious houses of the Catholic Church of Ireland have been transformed; the mean ‘chapels’ of the past have largely disappeared; most parishes have a suitable church; fine cathedrals dominate many towns; we often admire monasteries and convents in architectural splendour. The most remarkable phenomenon, however, of this description is the great and fortunate change which has taken place in the habitations of the community throughout the country. The dense and wretched hovels which, sixty years ago, barely sheltered the millions of Irish indigence, if still too frequent, have been, for the most part, effaced; the houses of the better class have greatly increased in numbers, though the population has enormously declined.[2] And the face of the landscape in most counties bears witness, on the whole, to a still perceptible progress. The chief industry of Ireland, indeed, as I shall show afterwards, has certainly retrograded within the last twenty years; her agricultural area and resources have much diminished. The advance, too, which, from about 1853 to 1876, was manifest and rapid in most of her rural districts, has been, to a considerable extent, checked; capital has, for some time, been avoiding her soil. But if the process was stern, nay, appalling, the land has, within the last half century, been thrown open to husbandry, infinitely better and more fruitful than had existed before; the exertions which were made, for a long space of time, to improve cultivation have left far-spreading traces; we still behold the beneficent results. The land over the greater part of its surface is not ‘puckered up’ in thousands of squalid patches, the holdings of masses of cottar paupers; it has been made more available for real farming; and it has been largely drained, enclosed, and covered with woodland—at least, up to a recent period.

The material condition of the Irish community has, also, improved since the late Queen ascended the throne. This, no doubt, is to be largely ascribed to the effects of the great Famine of 1845-47, and of the immense emigration that followed in its train. The resources of Ireland, before that calamity, were unable to support, in anything like comfort, the teeming multitudes crowded on her soil; an official report, made in 1838, proved that two millions and a half of the poor in Ireland were for months in the year on the brink of starvation; this huge mass of indigence, which forced up rent, beat down wages, and was most injurious to good husbandry, was almost incompatible with real social progress. The great and continuing exodus of the Irish race, which has gone on for more than half a century, has not been without untoward results; but it has relieved the country from a destructive incubus; and this has certainly wrought a beneficent change, though the population has declined from about eight millions in 1837 to about four and a half millions in 1895.[3] Ireland, indeed, is still, mainly, a poor country—in some districts she is exceedingly poor; but the disappearance of overwhelmingly redundant millions has enabled her to maintain the millions that have remained much better than of old, and has distinctly raised the standard of living among all the humbler classes. The wages of agricultural labour, seldom more than six or seven shillings a week before the Famine, and then paid in potatoes by a vile truck system, have risen to ten and even twelve shillings, usually paid in cash; and they have not fallen, though Irish agriculture is very far from prosperous. The wages of the higher kinds of labour have also greatly increased; this is apparent in nearly all trades, and is especially apparent in the trades of Ulster. At the same time, the potato has long ceased to be the sole food of the poor; their dwellings, though still too often mean and bad, are infinitely better than they once were; their attire, and even their appearance, has greatly improved. I do not think, indeed, that O’Connell’s description of the peasantry of Munster in 1825 could now be fairly applied to even the worst parts of Ireland, the impoverished tracts on the seacoast of Connaught: ‘They have no clothes to change, they have none but what they wear at the moment.... Their food consists of potatoes and water during the greater part of the year; potatoes and sour milk during another portion; they use some salt with their potatoes when they have nothing but water.’[4] There is evidence, also, that, even of late years, the wealth of Ireland has, in some measure, increased, especially in the middle and lower middle classes. The landed gentry, indeed, owing partly to the effects of Free Trade, and partly to those of legislation I shall describe afterwards, have been impoverished in many instances, and in many ruined; and the Irish tenant farmer, if gorged by the spoil of his landlord, has not gained all that an agrarian revolution was expected to give him. But the commerce of Ireland has made progress, within the last two decades, if this has not been by any means great; and though the capital she holds in the best securities has perceptibly diminished of late years, there has been a very large increase in most kinds of other investments.[5]

This picture of Ireland, however, has dark features; her welfare has been, at best, partial; considerable deductions must be made from it. The progress of the capital, as has been the case in London, is largely to be ascribed to the depletion of many country districts, a change that has been going on for a long period, and has been accelerated by the decline of the landed gentry in wealth. The enormous advance of Belfast, and of the adjoining neighbourhood, has been, to a great extent, caused by the concentration of the linen manufacture within a small area; the hand-loom has disappeared from Ireland; this has been injurious to many petty towns and villages. The population and the trade of nearly all the chief towns in the southern provinces have diminished; Cork, with its immense natural advantages, has not prospered; Limerick and, notably, Galway are in decay; most of the inland towns show few signs of improvement; the outskirts of almost all are defaced by lines of ruined hovels, the wrecks of abodes a dwindling tale of indwellers has left. Many of these urban centres were, sixty years ago, seats of manufactures and of other industries, which, to a certain extent, were flourishing; but these sources of wealth have, for the most part, been dried up; they have been blotted out by the gigantic manufactures of England and Scotland poured into Ireland, everywhere, within a few hours, by steam. The collapse, indeed, of Irish manufactures in the last half century has been striking and mournful; 696,000 persons were employed in textile and dyeing industries in 1841; in 1881 there were only 130,000; and though the growth of machinery may in part account for this difference, it assuredly cannot fully explain it.[6] The same remark applies to Irish fishing industry; the small craft which once swarmed along the coast, and, rearing a breed of hardy mariners, gathered in the prolific harvests of the sea, have been vanishing year after year; in 1867, 9332 boats, and 38,444 men and boys were engaged in this calling; the numbers were 5646 and 21,940 in 1891.[7] Turning to the face of the country, agriculture, we have seen, has improved, if we look back to the period before the Famine; but it is still centuries behind that of England and Scotland, and of late years it has markedly declined. It is not only that the prices of agricultural produce are much less than they were, in the last generation, and that its total value has fallen from £97,885,000 in 1851-55, to £88,955,000 in 1889-93.[8] The agricultural area of Ireland has diminished from 1879 to 1899 by rather more than 400,000 acres;[9] and it is absolutely certain that within these decreasing limits, as I shall point out in subsequent chapters, agriculture has made little or no progress, and in some districts has distinctly become worse; we see the results of the vicious legislation of the last twenty years in deteriorated farms, in hundreds of cases, in a most injurious neglect of arterial drainage, and in the destruction of thousands of acres of woodland. And the ruin which has overtaken many of the landed gentry has been made only too manifest in the desolate aspect of scores of country seats, once happy homes, that now know their owners no more.

It must be borne in mind, too, as we examine the present state of Ireland, that if, on the whole, she has made some progress, she is still, as I have said, a poor country, and that a considerable part of Connaught, her western province, has, for years, been in so poor a condition, that the Government of late has laudably made a great effort to raise it out of the depths of indigence. Other considerations, moreover, must be taken into account, if we would form a just conclusion as to the material position of Ireland, and, especially, as to her material prospects. The reduction of her population, up to a certain point, was an essential condition of her social progress; but that limit appears to have been far surpassed; this continuous decline, during more than half a century, has become an ominous symptom. More than 3,700,000 of souls have emigrated from Ireland since 1851;[10] and this number does not include the masses which fled from the catastrophe of 1845-47. This immense drain on the life of a nation has, for years, had a pernicious effect; in large parts of the country labourers have become so scarce that it is often difficult to save the harvest, which should be quickly gathered in, in a wet climate; and hands are wanting to industry in many places. Emigration, too, has taken away the best part of the people, men and women in the flower of existence; the reproductive power of the community has, accordingly, declined; the birth-rate of Ireland is less than it was; infirmity, disease, and, notably, insanity have increased; the population of the towns is seldom active and thriving.[11] At the same time, the taxation of Ireland has become many degrees more excessive in the last sixty years; the local rates have advanced from about £1,000,000 to nearly £4,000,000; the general taxation has been well-nigh doubled; and a tribunal of the very highest authority has recently declared that Ireland is immensely overtaxed, and has been for upwards of forty years. Nor can there be a real question but that large interests connected with the land have suffered greatly in the period that has now extended from 1878-79. It is unnecessary to refer to the condition of the landed gentry; I shall notice it at some length afterwards; but, much as the Irish people dislike the Poor-law, pauperism has distinctly increased during the last ten years, though the population has fallen off in numbers, and the charge of pauperism shows a corresponding increase.[12] The Income Tax returns, too, as regards the land, are of sinister omen; those under Schedule A have greatly diminished since 1890; and there is a considerable decline of property in the Funds.[13] As to the argument that the Tenant Right of the Irish farmer has risen in value, and that this proves Irish agriculture to be in a prosperous state, this is a complete, nay, a grotesque, fallacy. The rise in the value of Tenant Right is simply one of the many signs that a huge confiscation has taken place in the Irish land.

If Ireland, therefore, has made material progress, this has been slow, partial, and with large drawbacks; such as it is, it must be mainly ascribed to the results of the Famine, which liberated the soil from a destructive burden. The whole country, it has truly been said, has still too much the look of a ‘great neglected estate,’ requiring development in most of its parts; large sections of the population are poor, feeble in health, and backward. Any advance, moreover, which Ireland has made in well being, since 1837-38, is as nothing compared with the extraordinary growth of the prosperity of England and Scotland, within the same period. True-hearted Irishmen grieve as they pass from the lesser to the greater island, and contrast the husbandry of Galway and Mayo with that of the Lothians and Kent; as they gaze on the Shannon, with scarcely a sail on its waters, and the Clyde teeming with its fleets of commerce; above all, as they turn from the decaying towns of their own country to such centres of wealth and of gigantic trade, as some even of the provincial cities of Britain, not to speak of the mighty world of London. The causes, indeed, of this contrast may be easily found; the mineral resources of Ireland are scanty; her commerce and manufactures are small; she is essentially an agricultural land, which has lost much from the effects of Free Trade; she has suffered greatly from misgovernment, agitation, and social disorder; all this has kept her back in the national race. The mineral products, on the other hand, of England and Scotland are immense, and of the first importance in an age of invention; they have decisively contributed to the huge development of the opulence and the trade of Great Britain; the policy of Free Trade, carried out for years, has had marvellous results in the same direction; if British agriculture is not progressing, British commerce and manufactures are still supreme; and Great Britain has been for ages a law-abiding land, in which order has been happily combined with liberty. These considerations fully explain the wide and ever-increasing distinction between Ireland and England and Scotland, only too manifest; they have been amply verified by unerring statistics. Two figures may suffice for a general reader; the resources of Ireland were estimated, a few years ago, at a sum of about four hundred millions sterling, that of Great Britain at not less than ten thousand millions.[14]

The social structure of Ireland springs from the soil; it is most apparent in the relations that have been formed in the land. I shall dwell, at some length, in other chapters of this work, on the history and the characteristics of the Irish land system, and on the revolution through which it has passed; I can here only briefly glance at the subject. That system, at the beginning of the late reign, still represented, in many respects, the features it had borne in the eighteenth century, though these had been, in a great degree, modified. The land, over four-fifths of its surface, was still in the ownership of a small class of men, divided in race and faith from its occupants; the conquests and confiscations which had drawn deep lines of distinction between the Anglo-Protestant landlord and the Catholic and even the Presbyterian peasant, had still left their indelible traces, if these had been, to a considerable extent, effaced. Absenteeism had increased since the Union, though absentee estates were showing signs of improvement; middleman tenures, with their manifold and complex mischiefs, were disappearing, but were still numerous; various causes, to operate for many years, were diminishing the security of the peasants’ tenure. The power of the dominant landlord class was declining; it was being weakened by the Castle bureaucracy, and by the emancipation of Catholic Ireland; but it was still nearly supreme in landed relations; this class was all but the absolute lords of the tillers of the soil. It is untrue that it was oppressive and unjust as a rule; but some of its members abused their excessive power; it had too much in common with an exclusive caste; and a whole train of economic causes were aggravating the evils of a land system from its origin placed on unsound foundations. Agriculture was advancing in not a few counties; many of the landed gentry were improving men, who were making a beginning in the scientific farming, which, before long, was to be more fully developed. But the population, we have seen, had increased by millions Ireland could not support; over whole districts, especially in Munster and Connaught, the land had been split up into petty holdings, the seats of a huge multitude of human misery. Rents, therefore, were being unnaturally forced up, and the wages of labour unnaturally cut down; the land system was disorganised, and filled with dangerous elements. The worst vice of the system, however, has yet to be noticed; from different causes which I shall point out afterwards, the occupiers of the soil in Ireland had, as a general rule, made even the permanent improvements on their farms, and large sums had repeatedly been paid on the transfer of these; they had thus gradually acquired concurrent rights in the land, in tens of thousands of instances; and yet these were outside the pale of the law, and could be annihilated by eviction, or even the raising of rent. These rights had the support, in parts of Ulster, of a long-established custom, and were usually respected in the southern provinces; but they ought long before to have had full legal protection; and they were sometimes violated or disregarded by unscrupulous landlords. The results were seen in the White Boy and the agrarian disorders which had disturbed Ireland for more than a century, and even ran back to the confiscations of the past.

This land system, essentially bad as it was, marked by evil distinctions and pregnant with wrong, scarcely attracted the attention of British statesmen, until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. Peel was the first minister who, even dimly, perceived its vices; he appointed a Commission to report on the subject. The labours of this body were, in part, laudable; but the Commissioners, filled with prejudice as to the excellence of British land tenure, and without experience of that of Ireland, made a capital mistake in the suggestions they offered. Instead of recommending that the concurrent rights of the Irish tenant in the land, often equivalent to a real joint ownership, should receive, as was but just, the sanction of law, they proposed to restrict these in many ways; they put forward a plan of ‘compensation,’ as they called it, that was worse than useless. Legislation to this effect was withdrawn from Parliament; the terrible visitation of 1845-47 had ere long shattered the Irish land system, bringing ruin on hundreds of the landed gentry, making thousands of farmers of the better classes bankrupt, forcing the petty holders of the land—the cottar population, as it was named—to fly from the country in despairing multitudes. The land was largely set free from a dense mass of wretchedness; it was the general belief of the public men of the day, that what was most required, at this conjuncture, was to attract men of capital to it to do it justice, and to get rid, as quickly as possible, of the large body of Irish landlords, who, even before deeply involved in debt, had been made hopelessly insolvent by recent events. The Encumbered Estates Act became law, with scarcely an opposing protest; it was to ‘regenerate Ireland,’ its authors proclaimed; its results were to develop a bad class of landlords, to annihilate the rights of the Irish peasant wholesale, and to cause an iniquitous confiscation on an enormous scale. The Irish Land Question, as was the phrase, was now raised once more; in 1852 the occupiers of the Irish soil set on foot an agitation to vindicate their rights, destroyed or endangered by what had lately occurred; the Government of Lord Derby lent a favourable ear; but it was defeated in the House of Commons by intrigue; the land system remained in the state in which it had been left; no real attempt to improve it was made. A series of years followed in which Ireland made distinct progress, and her agriculture advanced; it became a fixed idea with British statesmen, that there was nothing radically bad in Irish land tenure, and that its defects would gradually disappear; the grievances of the Irish peasant were ignored; his claims to what was now known as his Tenant Right, urged feebly by his advocates, were voted down in Parliament; and a general belief prevailed that what Ireland most needed was a still further and steady removal of what was deemed ‘her surplus population’ from her soil.

As has so often happened in the affairs of Ireland, her real condition at this period was not understood; and the reform in her land system, which had become essential, was indefinitely delayed with disastrous results. Meanwhile, though things were serene on the surface, the inherent vices in Irish landed relations were not really changed, and, in some respects, were made worse. The Fenian troubles and outbreak of 1865-67 showed how much there was still peccant in the state of Ireland; Mr. Gladstone addressed himself, in 1870, to the task of effecting a reform in her land system. The measure he carried through Parliament was bold, and, in the main, statesmanlike; but it was injured by the predilection for English land tenure its author avowed, a general misconception of British statesmen; it was not without marked and even grave defects; and though unquestionably it did real good, it did not satisfy the tenant class—at least, the men who had become its leaders. In a few years the frightful period of the Land League had begun; a Reign of Terror prevailed in about a third part of Ireland, accompanied by far-spreading and atrocious crime. The movement was really a huge conspiracy, formed in America to overthrow British rule in Ireland; but Mr. Gladstone, now minister for the second time, resolved to deal with it only on its agrarian side; he wrought a complete revolution in the Irish land system, on principles wholly different from those of his measure of 1870. This legislation was prepared without reflection; it passed through Parliament when that assembly was almost in a state of panic; its author professed that his only object was to secure the occupier of the Irish soil in his legitimate rights; but the methods he adopted to attain this end have never been heard of in modern times, and have never been employed before in civilised lands. The principle of the mediæval statutes, which endeavoured to fix the price of bread, and the rate of wages, was extended to the Irish land system; rents were to be adjusted through the agency of the State, by tribunals to which no parallel can be found; tenants’ improvements were declared exempted from rent; and a mode of land tenure, hitherto condemned by Mr. Gladstone, and known as the ‘theory of the Three F’s,’ was applied to the great majority of Irish tenancies, in an exaggerated, crude, and dangerous form. This legislation, revolutionary and socialistic alike, has been given more ample scope in the last twenty years; it probably affects four-fifths of the rented lands in Ireland; it has fashioned the type of land tenure over nearly all the country. The successors of Mr. Gladstone, who, indeed, had boasted that it set the doctrines of Adam Smith at nought, were not blind to the evils it soon developed; but it is questionable if their attempts to mitigate these, and to place the Irish land system on a better basis, have not been at least as open to censure. With the ignorance of Irish land tenure common in British statesmen, they proclaimed, what assuredly was not the fact, that Mr. Gladstone had ‘created a dual ownership’ in the Irish land, and that, in order to get rid of this intolerable thing, it was necessary, in accord with English ideas, to bring Ireland, as far as possible, under ‘single ownership,’ and to make the occupiers of the Irish soil, to a large extent, its owners. The system of ‘Land Purchase’ in Ireland, begun in 1870, was freed from the limitations which made it safe and just, and widely enlarged under new conditions; Irish tenants were encouraged to acquire the fee in their holdings, by a process never contemplated before; instead of having to pay any part of the price, the State advanced them the whole purchase moneys, repayable by an annual charge much less than any true rent. About a tenth part of the tenant class of Ireland have become owners of their farms by these means; the transaction has been in no sense a ‘purchase;’ though given the name, it is really the exact opposite.

I shall describe all this legislation, in detail, afterwards, and shall indicate its far-reaching effects; here I can only take a cursory survey. The attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system, in the last sixty years, have been, with scarcely an exception, failures; the Irish land, it has truly been said, is strewn with the wrecks of repeated errors. The Land Act of 1870 was, on the whole, a well-conceived measure; but the recommendations made by the Devon Commission, the iniquitous and destructive Encumbered Estates Act, the agrarian revolution wrought by Mr. Gladstone, and the ‘Land Purchase’ Acts, as they are falsely called, have been monuments of want of insight and knowledge. And, what is even worse, legislation on the Irish land has, over and over again, been too long delayed, and has been inconsistent, fitful, founded on no principle; the results have been in a high degree disastrous. Reforms that would have been gladly welcomed if made years before, have been treated with contempt when made too late; and reforms have more than once been hasty experiments, carried out under the stress of menacing troubles. The fable of the Sibylline books has been realised in this matter; and not a few of the efforts to improve Irish land tenures have been little better than sudden leaps in the dark. As to recent legislation in this province, its consequences and tendencies have become manifest. That it has effected some good may be admitted; it has removed grievances that no doubt existed; it has made the government of Ireland more easy for the time; it has allayed discontent for a moment; but the good is far outweighed by the evil. It is not only that the nostrum of the ‘Three F’s,’ and the adjustment of rent by the intervention of the State, have cut down the rental of Ireland to an extent that cannot be justified, and have transferred to the occupier of the Irish soil a large part of what was the owner’s property by a process of confiscation concealed, but certain. It is not only that the status of the Irish landlord has been iniquitously transformed to his extreme injury, and that the status of the Irish tenant has been changed to his extreme advantage, in both instances without a pretence to right. The Irish land system has been reduced to an almost hopeless state; it presents some of the worst features of the past; its conditions discourage the improvement of the land, promote its deterioration in many ways, and banish capital away from it; and its plain tendency has been to make agriculture decline. And the revolution, which has been thus accomplished, has aggravated the divisions of classes in Ireland, and has been attended with ruinous litigation on a huge scale; and it has produced demoralisation far-reaching and profound, a sense of insecurity in all landed relations, and a far too general disregard of the respect due to contract. The policy, too, of so-called ‘Land Purchase’ has been accompanied with a train of evils on the increase. It is not creating, as its authors fondly hoped, a class of loyal and thriving freeholders; it is not even creating a body of industrious and improving farmers. It is, on the contrary, developing, in some of its parts, the bad land system of the eighteenth century; it has proved injurious to agriculture in one important respect. Above all, from the very nature of the case, it has drawn harsh, nay, unjust, distinctions between the landed classes, which necessarily have been a cause of much discontent; and it has inevitably provoked a demand for a universal confiscation of the Irish land even worse than any of those which have been the curse of Ireland.

I pass from the material and general state of Ireland to that of the Irish community, in its different parts. That community is still divided, as it has been for ages, into three separate and distinct peoples, marked off from each other in race and faith; whatever ‘Nationalist’ leaders may assert, it is not, and has never been, in a real sense, a nation. The lines of demarcation between Catholic, Presbyterian, and Protestant Ireland are at least as clearly defined as they have always been; they have probably been widened by the troubles of late years, and by the legislation which has been a consequence. Catholic Ireland has a population of some three millions and a half of souls; it is in the main a Celtic race, but with a considerable admixture of other elements; it has passed through a revolution remarkable and immense. Sixty years ago, the worst parts of the Penal Code had long been things of the past; but the Irish Catholics had only recently thrown off the last remains of that thraldom, under O’Connell’s guidance; and their emancipation had only been effected by a great and very threatening movement. They were still comparatively an alien and a subject people; they had not many owners of land; they were not numerous in the upper trading and the professional classes; education was greatly wanting among them; they were for the most part a backward and poor peasantry, almost serfs of landlords distinct in creed and in blood; and they formed the bulk of the teeming millions that vegetated on the soil in indigent misery. The Irish Catholics, too, had still many and real grievances; the tithe of the Established Church had long been an unjust burden on the petty husbandman; it had recently given rise to a frightful war of classes, and had only been commuted a short time; the Established Church itself was a moral wrong, felt acutely by the Irish priesthood at least. Catholic Ireland, besides, was deeply sunk in ignorance; the system of national education had only begun to flourish; and the Irish Catholic was still all but wholly excluded from county administration and municipal government. The worst of these grievances, however, was the state of the tenure of the land; this was especially harsh on the Catholic peasant; if oppression was not general or even common, he was too often subjected to excessive rent and unfair eviction. This order of things has all but completely passed away; the position of Catholic Ireland in the State has almost wholly been changed. Catholic emancipation has long been an accomplished fact; Irish Catholics and Protestants are equal before the law; and have really equal chances in fighting the battle of life. Though still not numerous, the Catholic owners of land have multiplied; the Irish Catholic middle classes have made a marked advance; they have grown in knowledge and increased in wealth; they have risen to a higher plane of existence. At the same time, the grievances of the past have nearly all been removed by law, often indeed very late, and by questionable means; but the Established Church has fallen from its high estate; education has been diffused through the Catholic masses; the Irish Catholics have obtained more than a just share in local government and administration of all kinds; their ascendency in this province is well-nigh assured. The most important, however, of these changes is that which has taken place in the state of the Irish Catholic peasantry. The process which lifted up millions of these from the land and sent them into exile was, no doubt, terrible; but it was the condition of the welfare and the progress of the population which remained. A great deal of the legislation, besides, which has revolutionised the tenure of land in Ireland, and has had a special effect on the Catholic occupiers of the soil, has been essentially ill designed and unjust; above all, it has been much too long delayed. But the Irish Catholic peasantry have long ago ceased to be serfs; they are more the owners of their own holdings than their former landlords; their rights in the land have been more than protected; they have acquired the fee in their farms in thousands of instances; the days of rack rents and harsh evictions have passed away for ever. If the lines of the old Irish land system may still be traced, they rather resemble, it has truly been said, the lineaments of a phantom than of a living being.