failed before; the fact ought to be a warning to public men, who have been parading theories about the Irish land--strewn as this has been with monuments of misdeeds and errors--as false and more dangerous than those which produced the Encumbered Estates Acts.[51] The exodus had, by 1851, reduced the population of Ireland by nearly two millions of souls; this decline has continued ever since; the population which, in 1846, was considerably more than eight millions, is now, we have seen, only about four and a half millions. In 1852 an agitation sprang up, which might have wrought a great change in Irish landed relations, had it not been brought by mere accident to an untimely end. The Report of the Devon Commission, I have said, had troubled Ulster; the Famine had driven peasants, in tens of thousands, from their homes; the operation of the Encumbered Estates Act was destroying their concurrent rights in their holdings. At the General Election of 1852 Ireland returned a large party of representatives to the House of Commons pledged to vindicate the claims of the tenant farmers; these were expressed in a demand that has been called the 'Three F's,' 'Fair Rent,' 'Fixity of Tenure,' and 'Free Sale,' a mode of occupation which had been largely secured by the Custom of Ulster, and to which O'Connell had given his sanction. The Government of Lord Derby was now in office; it had brought in measures which, in some degree, would have legalised the rights of the Irish tenant; but the Ministry was defeated, partly through an intrigue;[52] the cause of the Irish farmer was baffled and kept in suspense for years, largely owing to dissensions and treachery on the part of some of the Irish members. By this time the country had begun to revive, and to throw off the worst effects of the Famine; vast depopulated tracts had been opened to new husbandry; the land had been set free, over an immense area, from the incubus of a mass of wretchedness which had preyed on it, and had completely disorganised the land system, unnaturally forcing up rent and cutting down wages. Under these conditions the statesmen in power, already expecting great things from the Encumbered Estates Act, believed that the Irish land system would right itself, and that it was unnecessary to consider or to protect the rights of the tenant classes; these would either disappear, or would be fairly adjusted in the improved landed relations that were being formed. At all events, there was no legislation to secure these claims; the scanty legislation, that dealt with the Irish land, was unfavourable, in many ways, to these, and endeavoured to assimilate Irish to English tenures, as Tudor lawyers had done three centuries before; and Lord Palmerston, for a long time the head of the State, discouraged Irish tenant right, in more than one speech, and declared that it only meant landlord wrong, unwise utterances that showed he did not understand the subject. At the same time, the