counties if regarded as a dangerous and formidable power. It is also absolutely untrue that the movement was the uprising of an injured peasantry against oppressive landlords. There was little distress in 1880 and 1881, when the League was rapidly growing in strength, for the harvests of those years were above the average; and the Commission lately appointed by Mr. Gladstone had reported that over-renting in Ireland was not common, though instances of over-renting were of course to be found.[73] The centre of disturbance formed by the Land League was, I have said, comparatively small; and it was, for the most part, limited to backward and poor districts; its wicked and sordid teaching did not command the sympathies of the more intelligent and better parts of Ireland. Its influence, however, spread, in different degrees of strength, over nearly the whole of Catholic Ireland, and it was more or less supported by the Catholic priesthood, in many instances yielding to the pressure of their flocks. Within the bounds where it did not create a Reign of Terror, it was joined by thousands who thought it a constitutional movement, especially by peasants only seeking an improved tenure; and it is not pretended that even a majority of those who took part in it had treasonable or rebellious objects in view. But it was not the less a conspiracy hatched abroad, and aiming at the subversion of British power in Ireland; this was the policy its leaders avowed; and a conspiracy must be judged by the acts and words of those who direct it. The state of anarchy in Ireland had become such, in the spring of 1881, that the Government was compelled to try to put it down; a prosecution against Parnell and his chief lieutenants had failed; a Bill, resisted by obstruction, more persistent than had been ever known before, passed through Parliament with the object of repressing the Land League. The measure, however, was not well designed; minor agents of the League, 'village ruffians,' 'Parnell's police,' and the like, were imprisoned in large numbers, no real punishment; but the chiefs of the conspiracy were not brought within the law; the funds of the League were removed to Paris; the movement went on in its destructive course. 'Coercion,' nevertheless, was beginning to produce its effects, as it has always done in Irish disorders, when Mr. Gladstone made a sudden change in his policy, never made before by a Minister at the head of the State. He had denounced the conspiracy in passionate language; he had partly at least seen what its objects were; 'it aimed at dismemberment through rapine;' but always a man of phrases and not of action, he had shrunk in every passage of his career from facing difficulties where popular feelings were involved; and while Ireland was still in a terrible state, he resolved to make a great concession to the League, and to effect a complete revolution in the Irish land. It was a surrender akin to that of Majuba, made with little