have practically been reduced for all time; the reduction of English rents is temporary, and can be at once annulled; this difference makes a supposed resemblance a very striking contrast. As to the argument that the Courts which have fixed 'fair rents' have been composed of honourable men, and that it is extremely invidious to make charges against them, mere leather and prunella may be brushed aside. No one disputes the honour of the Land and the Sub-Commissioners, but it does not follow that they have not done injustice; no one has disputed the honour of the Commission which carried out the Encumbered Estates Act, and yet it repeatedly sold estates at less than half their value. The Irish landlords, I repeat, have been iniquitously despoiled; a huge confiscation has been made of their property. If the simplest right is to be done in this province, their claim to compensation has been rendered complete--apart from the utterances of Mr. Gladstone; should this be disregarded, Parliament will have been chargeable with a grave breach of faith, and a precedent will have been set from trampling on the just rights of property in the Three Kingdoms, which will be dangerous in the extreme. I pass on to consider the Irish land on the side of ownership, and the administration of the system of so-called 'land purchase.' Of the total of L40,000,000 alone available, some L20,000,000 appear to have been expended; some 50,000 tenants have been made owners of their farms, without having paid a shilling of their own, that is, rather more than one in ten of the whole tenant class in Ireland. The politicians who declared against 'dual ownership,' that bugbear of self-sufficient ignorance, can find little consolation in these figures; I shall comment afterwards on what this state of things has produced. The Government of Lord Salisbury still proposes to seek to accelerate 'land purchase' of this kind; and loud complaints have been made of the law's delay in not having made the process more speedy. I have had no experience in this matter, and shall, therefore, give no opinion on it; but it appears to me that there has been some want of care in making advances to these so-styled 'purchasers;' not a few were insolvent when they acquired their farms, and many are now on the verge of bankruptcy. This, however, was perhaps inseparable from the system that has been pursued; it is only an additional proof of its essential vices. CHAPTER VI THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (_continued_)--PROPOSED REFORM OF THE IRISH LAND SYSTEM