When the land question should arise, there might ensue a triple danger, that of three sets of clergy divided in theology and matters of discipline, but united in discontent; and the three might eventually demand the restoration of the national property; and if it were refused, there might be revolution. England could afford no more revolutions. But, in any case, the spoliation of the Protestant clergy would breed jealousies among themselves also; for they were actually invited and induced (by means which he exposed) to co-operate in their own expropriation. The plunder of the Catholic clergy had bred great discontent. The plunder of the Protestant clergy would do the same. And if discontent were left to grow as it went, the land outcry would produce others, and they again others in their turn and train. There would be no rest, no finality. It would be discontent without end. Far more than this, however, he objected to the ultimate consequences of this revolutionary departure. Confiscation was contagious. What was now applied--and applied in a form aggravated by its complications--to the national property, might one day be applied to private property. What was now applied to Ireland might one day be forcibly applied to England. If the public disaster of the disestablishment and disendowment of the English Church ever took place, in deference to the jealousy of a class and not because of its own inherent decay as a great civil and ecclesiastical institution, it would be aided by the precedent of Ireland. Such is the pith, though many of the details and much of the historical criticism are omitted; nor have I here dealt with the Maynooth and “Regium Donum” problems and their bearings on these matters, which Disraeli discussed in full. But I have condensed enough to point the path of his ideas. Not all these dismal forebodings have yet been realised; but many of them, unfortunately, came to pass. Ireland’s discontent, Catholic discontent, were, neither of them, allayed by the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church. The clergy of that Church are still far from contented. The land question burst out within a brief space of Disraeli’s prediction. It brought with it a long and fatal series of cumulative troubles; and, as Disraeli had also predicted, the actual rights of civil property, the rights of civilised society, became invaded. “Compensation for disturbance” asserted the right to pay no rent. For a time the last state of Ireland was almost worse than the first. There were “months of murder, incendiarism, and every conceivable outrage.” “The Executive absolutely abandoned their functions.” Disraeli’s last trumpet-call was to warn the country, in his celebrated letter to the Lord-Lieutenant, that there were those who wished to sever Ireland from England as part of a scheme for the disruption of the Empire. In 1881 he adverted to that warning.