with the old Ireland once their home; socialistic ideas as regards the land, blending with dislike of the superiors and the rulers, under whom they lived, were gradually diffused among the Irish peasantry. The economic conditions, too, of landed relations by degrees made these feelings more general and intense. Rents were rising as the wealth of the country increased, though, except in the cases of the new landlords, and of a very few surviving middlemen, they were, as a rule, by no means excessive. Simultaneously a concurrence of causes had extinguished leasehold tenures in most parts of Ireland, and had reduced the status of the Irish farmer to that of a mere tenant at will, liable to be dispossessed by a notice to quit, at the mercy, in fact, of the lord of the soil. And, meanwhile, the equitable rights of the occupiers as a class, due to improvements, and to sums paid for the goodwill of farms, had been increasing to an immense extent; and yet a grievous wrong--they were not even recognised by law. Law and fact had long been sharply clashing in landed relations; there was much that was essentially bad in the land system; and agrarian trouble and crime was on the increase. The mind of England had turned away from Ireland after the petty outbreak of 1848; it charged the Irish community with ungrateful folly, as it recollected the charity lavished during the Famine. This sentiment was replaced by what was worse, indifference; throughout this period--from 1850 to 1868--Parliament gave little attention to the affairs of Ireland. British statesmen continued to pin their faith to their policy; they disregarded ominous symptoms on the increase; Ireland was rapidly becoming more prosperous; the claims of the Irish tenant farmer were a delusion, or worse. This apathy was augmented by the state of the representation of Ireland in these years; this was in a feeble, even a degraded condition; and largely owing to the authority of Cardinal Cullen, who prohibited the Irish priesthood from taking any part in politics, agitation, I have said, had become a mere tradition of the past. Yet the causes I have glanced at were silently at work, which ultimately were to lead to grave social troubles. The first sign of disturbance was seen in a little outbreak, the result of a conspiracy hatched by one of the rebels of 1848, and supported to some extent from America: but the 'Phoenix plot,' as it was called, almost at once collapsed; the Government thought it hardly worthy of notice. Another and much more formidable conspiracy was matured in 1864-65; and though it was put down with little difficulty in time, it showed that there was much that was peccant in the state of Ireland; and it deeply affected the minds of Englishmen, aroused as it were out of a fool's paradise. The millions of the Irish race in the Far West were passionately appealed to by leaders, not without parts, to assist in a crusade against 'landlordism,' and British rule in Ireland; they gave the