Even those bad laws could be made to work as long as there was a human relationship between the landlords and their tenants. Up to 1830, at any rate, there was a strong motive for that relationship. The victory of Catholic emancipation was a colossal triumph for the genius of Daniel O'Connell. It removed one of the worst surviving religious injustices in this kingdom. But in Ireland it was a victory of the tenant over the landlord, and it was achieved by a new alliance between tenant and priest against the landlord. While giving emancipation to the Catholics, the Act of 1830 also raised the level of the franchise, and abolished the forty shilling freehold vote, thus removing the landlord's motive for preserving the small tenancies. The result was that the Irish landlords as a class--always, of course, with many conspicuous individual exceptions--entered from 1830 onwards upon a new career of hostility towards their tenants, amounting to little less than a passion for revenge. Being, for the most part, both Protestant and Absentee, they lost all interest in their tenantry, except that of rent collectors. The Irish famine made matters far worse. For the famine deprived the Irish tenant, for the moment, of the power of paying rent. Not only so, but by reducing him to pauperism it turned him into a distinct and definite burden on the rates. The Irish landlords then first conceived the idea that, by getting rid of the people, they could save their pockets. At the same time, they made the great discovery that beasts were more profitable than peasants. Hence the great clearances and evictions of the period between 1840-1870. Hence the cruel compulsory exodus of vast masses of the people of Ireland to the shores of America. Hence, finally, the bitter cleavage between landlords and tenantry which brought the whole land system of Ireland crashing into ruin. These disasters had one good effect. They roused the Irish people from their indifference. The bitter proofs of mis-government shown by the breakdown of their land system brought home to every cottager the need of a Home Rule Government. The great agitations for land reform and Home Rule went on side by side--sometimes taking a form of violence, but more and more of orderly constitutional pressure--until in the seventies there emerged at Westminster a powerful Irish Party, too strong either for the neglect or the indifference of any British Government. ENGLAND'S NEED