thus gradually acquired concurrent rights in the land, in tens of thousands of instances; and yet these were outside the pale of the law, and could be annihilated by eviction, or even the raising of rent. These rights had the support, in parts of Ulster, of a long-established custom, and were usually respected in the southern provinces; but they ought long before to have had full legal protection; and they were sometimes violated or disregarded by unscrupulous landlords. The results were seen in the White Boy and the agrarian disorders which had disturbed Ireland for more than a century, and even ran back to the confiscations of the past. This land system, essentially bad as it was, marked by evil distinctions and pregnant with wrong, scarcely attracted the attention of British statesmen, until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. Peel was the first minister who, even dimly, perceived its vices; he appointed a Commission to report on the subject. The labours of this body were, in part, laudable; but the Commissioners, filled with prejudice as to the excellence of British land tenure, and without experience of that of Ireland, made a capital mistake in the suggestions they offered. Instead of recommending that the concurrent rights of the Irish tenant in the land, often equivalent to a real joint ownership, should receive, as was but just, the sanction of law, they proposed to restrict these in many ways; they put forward a plan of 'compensation,' as they called it, that was worse than useless. Legislation to this effect was withdrawn from Parliament; the terrible visitation of 1845-47 had ere long shattered the Irish land system, bringing ruin on hundreds of the landed gentry, making thousands of farmers of the better classes bankrupt, forcing the petty holders of the land--the cottar population, as it was named--to fly from the country in despairing multitudes. The land was largely set free from a dense mass of wretchedness; it was the general belief of the public men of the day, that what was most required, at this conjuncture, was to attract men of capital to it to do it justice, and to get rid, as quickly as possible, of the large body of Irish landlords, who, even before deeply involved in debt, had been made hopelessly insolvent by recent events. The Encumbered Estates Act became law, with scarcely an opposing protest; it was to 'regenerate Ireland,' its authors proclaimed; its results were to develop a bad class of landlords, to annihilate the rights of the Irish peasant wholesale, and to cause an iniquitous confiscation on an enormous scale. The Irish Land Question, as was the phrase, was now raised once more; in 1852 the occupiers of the Irish soil set on foot an agitation to vindicate their rights, destroyed or endangered by what had lately occurred; the Government of Lord Derby lent a favourable ear; but it was defeated in the House of Commons by intrigue; the land system remained in