the same time the Fenians in the United States, much its best supporters, withdrew the subsidies they had hitherto lavished; the League became penniless and almost powerless. By 1895 the conspiracy showed scarcely a sign of life; agrarian crime had sunk to a very low ebb; there was no sign of a movement against the payment of rent; order prevailed, it may be said, throughout the community. The conspiracy, nevertheless, was not dead; its leaders, if quiescent, had not disappeared; well-informed observers knew that the end had not come. I have described in another chapter, by what means, and through what conditions, it revived gradually under Lord Salisbury's third Government, and acquired strength that may be on the increase; it is not yet formidable, in any real sense, and its leaders are not to be named with Parnell; it is not receiving funds as yet from America; but the United Irish League is its true successor; and this commands eighty votes in the House of Commons. Time only can show if a period of agrarian strife and crime may not be about to open again for Ireland; it is foolish optimism to assert that this is impossible, or to contend that the agrarian legislation of the last twenty years, as regards the Irish land, will necessarily, or even probably, produce this fortunate result. In 1891 another change was effected in Irish landed relations, as usual in the interest of the tenant, and against his landlord. Middleman tenures had well-nigh been extinguished; but some hundreds, probably, were still to be found; and as a middleman, through the legislation of 1887, was enabled to repudiate his contract, in certain cases, and to escape the payment of rent to his superior landlord, he was now to obtain an advantage in other instances. The large majority of this class of intermediate owners, originally created in the eighteenth century, held, at least, in present times, by perpetual leases, which had long ago, as a rule, been converted into estates in fee farm, that is, estates in fee, subject to a perpetual rent; Parliament passed an Act in 1891, enlarged and amended five years afterwards, declaring that, in cases in which tenants of this kind were 'in _bona fide_ occupation' of lands, under rents which, in the judgment of the Land Commission, should be 'a full agricultural rent,' they might either agree with their landlords to redeem the rent at a price to be determined by that tribunal, or, should the landlords refuse their consent, might have 'fair rents' fixed as in the instance of common farming tenants.[83] The application of this law could not extend far, for tenants of this description were very few; but it asserted a strange, and, I think, a most vicious principle. The Act practically forced a superior landlord, often a poor man, either to accept a price assessed by a Court over which he had no control, in lieu of a rent, in all probability reasonably well secured, or, as an alternative,