consequence, the mass of tenants, kept in an inferior position, will be filled with discontent--and from their point of view with perfect justice--when, as the advances from the State run short, their prospects of "land purchase" shall wane and diminish. An "ugly rush" will be made throughout the country to force landlords, as a class, to sell, in order to get a chance of buying; in Ulster the cry for "compulsory purchase," already heard, will swell high and fierce.'[144] These, therefore, have been the fruits of the system called 'land purchase' with euphemistic falsehood. 'Compulsory purchase,' a demand caused by an unwise policy, is a question that must be fairly discussed; it is nothing to the purpose that it has as yet made little way in Parliament. This claim would have been regarded as sheer insanity thirty years ago; it was scouted by John Bright as in the highest degree mischievous, though John Bright was the first statesman who proposed making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, but through a real, not a sham, mode of purchase. The compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland is a policy that has advocates even in England and Scotland; and it is lamentable to observe how British opinion seems to take little heed how a measure of this kind would affect the position of the Irish landlord, another of the many instances of its habitual disregard of the plainest rights of property in land in Ireland. A set of doctrinaires, ignorant of Irish nature and of the Irish land, imagine that 'the creation of a peasant proprietary,' in all parts of Ireland, as the cant phrase is, would, in any case, make the Union secure, and would promote tranquillity, industry, and content. Some politicians still cherish the fond belief, that thrusting Irish tenants, wholesale, into the place of their landlords, by an act of violence without a parallel, would make Irish government and administration more easy; and shut their eyes to the nature of this policy. English and Scottish capitalists, who have made advances on Irish estates, see in compulsory purchase the best probable means of realising securities now in danger; a few great absentee landlords, eager to part with their possessions in Ireland, at almost any price, are possibly not opposed to this scheme; and so maybe a few bankrupt Irish landlords, hoping to get a trifle out of a general shipwreck. The demand, however, for compulsory purchase has its only real strength in Ireland; and unquestionably it is widespread and far-reaching. The conspiracy against British rule in Ireland, which has made the annihilation of Irish 'landlordism' one of its main objects, calls for compulsory purchase, as a matter of course; it finds no difficulty in banding together the peasantry of the southern provinces in support of a cry which means for this class an improvement in their lot, and appeals to deep-rooted sentiments of human nature. The Irish Catholic priesthood, too, back the movement to a