ceased. In these circumstances, it was a common belief in England that 'the Irish difficulty,' as it was called, was passing away, and that the 'Hibernia Pacata' had at last become a happy reality. Yet the progress and tranquillity of this brief period were largely superficial and even deceptive; fires were still alive beneath the smouldering ashes. The partial prosperity of Ireland mainly depended on good harvests and high prices; it was interrupted, even in these years, by two or three seasons of distress. Notwithstanding the widespread consolidation of farms, and the removal from the soil of indigent millions, the land still, for the most part, remained in the possession of a mere peasantry; very few of the English and Scottish capitalist farmers settled in Ireland, and really throve; the great majority left the country, like the 'Englishry' of a bygone age. And though things wore a serene aspect, the inherent vices of the land system continued to exist; in some respects they increased, or were more painfully felt. The old divisions of race and faith between the owners and the occupiers of the soil remained; they had but little changed and even had perhaps widened; much had happened to keep the landed classes more apart than before. The new purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, were, we have seen, often hard-fisted and grasping landlords; they raised their rents, without scruple, in too many instances; standing on the letter of the law, they too often ignored the partial joint-ownership in their farms of their tenants; they had sometimes recourse to unjust and severe evictions. The old landlords, too, never recovered from the effects of the Famine; they were overshadowed by the bureaucracy of the Castle, which, for many years, had been growing in power; they thus became an order of men with privileges, but without authority, in the midst of inferiors, who had little sympathy with them, a dangerous position like that of the French seigneurie in the later years of the eighteenth century--a position described by Tocqueville in very striking language. At the same time the peasantry stood aloof from them more than in the days of their fathers; and though they remained quiescent for years, as has often happened in Irish history, there were causes for this increasing estrangement. They were no longer the grossly ignorant multitude of fifty years before; education had made some way among them, though in this respect they were still backward; they felt more acutely all that was hard in their lot, like the French peasantry before the great Revolution of 1789-94. This sentiment, however, owed its principal force to sentiments engendered in far distant lands. The thousands of the exodus had left their country with memories embittered against some Irish landlords, and, notably, against the British Government; a new Ireland was rising across the Atlantic; the emigrants and their sons were in constant communication