sublet, and mortgage their farms in tens of thousands of cases; they would become middlemen, over whole counties, the harsh oppressors of a multitude ground down by rack-rents; the worst kind of 'landlordism' would be reproduced in the worst aspect. The tendency of events is even now confirming what I wrote a long time ago on this subject: 'Freehold ownership, therefore, would disappear more or less quickly over extensive tracts, the "yeomen" would become a diminishing quantity, and these would be replaced by a new class of landlords with tenants at competition rents, that is, determined by the land hunger of the Celt. The transformation would inevitably go on, for its causes would operate with intense force; and before many years probably two-thirds of Ireland would have become a land of mere peasant landlords placed over a mass of rack-rented tenants.'[147] The creation of a universal 'peasant proprietary,' by force, would, in fact, bring the Irish land system back by degrees into the state in which it was before the Great Famine, when millions of serfdom squatted on the soil, disorganising agriculture and preventing social progress. These considerations, however, by no means exhaust the case against the compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland. Irish landlords have been decried, for an evil purpose, during many years; their position is difficult and open to attack; but if they are an unpopular class, they have been a civilising influence in Ireland of real value, the most civilising influence, perhaps, in her three southern provinces. Their annihilation, despoiled and impoverished as they are, would still withdraw a large fund from Irish rural labour; and it would be most injurious to agriculture in many ways, especially as regards main and arterial drainage, an absolute necessity for the Irish soil, and scarcely possible except under a system of large estates. Their extinction, too, Englishmen ought not to forget, would deprive the State of one of its mainstays in Ireland; the idea to the contrary growing up is a mere delusion; it was not for nothing that Parnell and Davitt described this order of men as 'the British garrison' and insisted that were it once out of the fortress the power of England in Ireland would certainly perish. The conversion of Irish farmers universally into landowners would also have a ruinous effect on many Irish industries. It would do infinite harm to many branches of commerce, especially to trades of the higher type; it would be disastrous to such towns as Dublin and Belfast, already beginning to protest against it; and, whatever may be said, the prospect of it is dreaded by agricultural Irish labourers as a class, which has always been ill-treated by their masters, the farmers, though, owing to the influence of priests and demagogues, they are unwilling to express the sentiments they really feel. Compulsory purchase, in fact, is by no means so generally asked for