The last act of this wonderful life and its closing scene connect themselves with the history of Ireland, and are scarcely of a brighter hue than the rest of that sad story. The history of the case with which, at this juncture, statesmanship had to deal, if it was clearly apprehended, was never, so far as I remember, very clearly set forth, either by Mr. Gladstone or by anyone who took part in the discussion. Cromwell had given Ireland, with union, the indispensable boon of free trade with Great Britain. Succeeding Governments, less wise and magnanimous, had allowed British protectionism to kill the great Irish industries, the cattle trade and the wool trade. The people were thus thrown for subsistence entirely on the cultivation of the soil, in an island far the greater part of which is too wet for profitable tillage, and lends itself only to grazing. Then came the Penal Code, and to economical destitution was added utter social degradation. The people were reduced to a state bordering on absolute barbarism, a state in which they could look for nothing beyond bare food, while even bare food, the treacherous potato being its staple, periodically failed. In such a condition, all social and prudential restraints on the increase of population were lost, and the people multiplied with animal recklessness far beyond the capacity of the island to maintain them. Desperately contending for the soil on which they solely depended for their maintenance, they became, in the most miserable sense, tenants-at-will, prædial serfs of the landlord, who ground them through his middleman, and sometimes through a series of middlemen forming a hierarchy of extortion, while what the middleman had left was taken by the tithe-proctor. All the improvements of the tenant were confiscated by the owner of the soil. The only remedy for over-population, apart from the fell agencies of famine and disease, was emigration. The remedy for the agrarian evil and grievance, so far as it could be reached by legislation, apparently was some measure which would give the Irish tenant-at-will the same security for his holding which had been given to the English copyholder by custom and the favour of the courts. To buy out the Irish landlord was hardly just to the British people, and was a measure in itself of dangerous import. The abolition of the Irish gentry by any means, if it could be avoided, was a social mistake. The peasantry would thereby be deprived of the social chiefs, whose influence it specially needed, and there would be danger of handing the island over to the demagogue or the priest.