passed with ease; through the Lords, like other great measures of change, it was forced by fear. XIV From disestablishment of the Church Gladstone, now in the full swing of his Liberalism, proceeded next year to reform the land system of Ireland. Taking his cue from Ulster tenant-right, perhaps also from English copyhold, he passed an act, the first of a series which, by giving compensation for improvements and for disturbance, restricting eviction, regulating rents, and furnishing to the tenant by government loans the means of purchasing the fee, has gone far towards transferring the ownership from the landlord to the tenant. Some of these measures have virtually involved confiscation, notably in the case of purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Act, to whom full ownership had been morally guaranteed. Economically, the tendency, indeed the aim, of the land acts has been to make Ireland a land of peasant proprietors. The social tendency of such legislation is to the abolition of the gentry, of the value of whose leadership to a people eminently in need of leaders, Gladstone, personally ignorant of Ireland, might not be a competent judge. Unquestionably, the relations between landlord and tenant called for reform. The appropriation of the tenant's improvements by the landlord was in itself plainly unjust, and the sweeping evictions yielded in cruelty only to the famine. But for overpopulation the immediate remedy was depletion. Had Gladstone said that the overpopulation was originally the consequence of misgovernment and repression of industry which, reducing the people to abject misery, had wrecked their self-respect and self-restraint, he would have been emphatically right, and the fact cannot be too constantly kept in mind. Gladstone might also have said with truth that emigration was a mournful cure, though it transferred the emigrant to a far happier land and lot. But the overpopulation having taken place, whatever the cause, the only remedy was depletion. No expansion of manufacturing industry, commerce, or mining adequate to the absorption of the surplus population could be expected in time to meet the pressing call for relief. Irishmen are sensitive on this point, but no disparagement of the Irish race is implied in the recognition of the facts. Overpopulation was not the fault of the people, but their misfortune. There has been a very large migration of the Irish into England and Scotland as well as into the colonies and the United States.