ruled; of more than thirty of their castles he has the wreck of one; a scroll on the roof of his house bears the touching legend that he has sprung from the loins of the old Milesian princes. He is not wholly unknown as an Irish landlord of this day; curiously, too, his rental has been hardly reduced by the visitations of the Land and the Sub-Commissions. Is this scion of the best and the most ancient _noblesse_ of Ireland to be banished in his old age from his home, and to be replaced in it by ornaments of the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, for this would be one result of compulsory purchase? Let us imagine, however, that, owing to the malign influence which, Spenser said, attends England in Irish affairs, the Irish landed gentry were removed from the land, and their former tenants were put in their place as owners. What would be the consequences, economic, social, political, of this sudden agrarian revolution in one of the Three Kingdoms? The distribution of the Irish soil between the classes which would possess it, would be unfavourable, in the highest degree, to the establishment of a 'peasant proprietary,' the common name in use on this subject. Of the 486,000 tenant farmers in Ireland, some 132,000 hold patches of from less than one to five acres in extent; are these to be stereotyped as real land owners? More than 90,000 occupy from fifty to five hundred acres and upwards; these include the great graziers of the rich tracts of pasturage; do these supply elements of a 'peasant proprietary' in any rational sense? The only class which even on plausible, _a priori_ grounds could be made occupying owners of the land would contain much less than 300,000 families; and probably it occupies less than two-thirds of the island as a whole. Are all these bodies of men to be lumped, so to speak, together, and universally to receive the ownership of the soil; would not compulsory purchase, even on these conditions, be the sheerest folly? Furthermore, the configuration of Ireland and her climate make it next to impossible that a 'peasant proprietary' could generally thrive within her borders; Nature herself forbids an attempt to carry out, on a large scale, a settlement of the kind. The central area of the island is a low watershed of wide extent, from which a succession of streams descends through vast tracts of morass and bog; in other parts of the country there are large and deep rivers, curving as they approach the sea, and flowing through mountain spaces; the lands they traverse are swampy, and require main drainage; a large part of Ireland is composed of wild hill ranges only fit for the rearing of young and coarse breeds of cattle; she possesses a fine area of the best pasturage, confined, however, to a few counties; her true agricultural area is comparatively small. Her climate, moreover, is wet to a proverb; torrents of rain from the Atlantic fall on her plains for months; above