all, her inland towns are far from each other, and petty; scarcely one is peopled by more than 10,000 souls. Any well-informed and right-judging person who knows the conditions under which a 'peasant proprietary' can alone flourish, must know that, from the nature of the case, it would be a failure, in the circumstances in which it would be necessarily placed, were it forcibly established in every part of Ireland. Ireland has little in common with Belgium, with Northern Italy, with France; this settlement of confiscation would go the way of the Englishry of the Middle Ages and the Cromwellian colonists. The most conclusive argument against compulsory purchase has, nevertheless, to be yet put forward. The state of things 'voluntary purchase' is evolving would assuredly be aggravated a hundred-fold were every tenant in Ireland made the owner of his farm by a revolutionary act on the part of the State. It is significant, in the highest degree, that from the time of the 'New Departure' to this hour, the conspiracy against our rule in Ireland has clamoured for the expropriation of the Irish landed gentry by force, and for the conversion of their tenants into possessors of these estates; far better informed than British statesmen, it has rightly calculated that this violent change would increase the 'Nationalist' sympathies of the Irish peasant; and this opinion is being confirmed, to a great extent, by the results of 'voluntary purchase' being now developed. The coarse materialist view that bribery will make a class law-abiding and loyal, is opposed to human nature and fact; bribery will not efface ideas, feelings, and tendencies, deep-rooted in history and ancient tradition; above all, if it is a concession to agitation and a rebellious movement, it will only quicken the animosity to the State and the greed of the favoured class. Parnell, I have said, had his mind made up on this subject; he always insisted that the Irish tenant, wherever his holding had been made his own, would be 'more true to the cause than ever;' it is curious that the confident prediction of a most able man appears to have been persistently ignored. For the rest, the mischief 'voluntary purchase' is already doing would be enormously aggravated by the effects of compulsory purchase. The Irish tenant farmers, made owners of the land everywhere, would, like the present 'purchasers,' cut down woodland wholesale; the country would be disafforested over an immense area; the consequences to agriculture would be as bad as possible. Arterial and main drainage too would, as a rule, be neglected; but these would, comparatively, be trifling results; the compulsory purchaser would deal with the land as their 'voluntary' fellows are now largely dealing, but, in all probability, more generally, and in much a greater proportion. Holding as they would nine-tenths of the Irish soil at terminable annuities much lower than any rent, they would inevitably subdivide,