If the picture I have drawn of Ireland is correct in outline, there is much of evil omen in her present condition. The ancient divisions of race and faith, the most distinctive feature in her social structure, are at least as deeply marked as they have been for a century; bad legislation has made them deeper and wider. Catholic Ireland remains disaffected to British rule, despite efforts of conciliation and concessions that cannot be justified; no class in the community is completely satisfied; discontent rankles in the hearts of the landed gentry. The Union, indeed, has been successfully maintained; the frightful agrarian disorder of 1881-89 no longer exists. But the Union is not permanently assured as long as the Liberal party and eighty Irish members demand Home Rule, and the over-representation of Ireland continues; the conspiracy of the Land and the National Leagues has revived in that of the United Irish League; and this seeks to compass the ends of its prototypes by obstruction in Parliament and detestable socialistic tyranny. And the frame of Irish society has been well-nigh shattered; ruins have been made, nothing solid has been put in their place. An aristocracy, long waning, has been practically destroyed, and can no longer be a support of the State; the bureaucracy of the Castle reigns in its stead; but this is essentially a weak Government; it can maintain order, but has no hold on the people; the Irish democracy, to which power has been transferred, regards it with a dislike and a contempt it does not try to conceal. The country has made hardly any progress of late years; if some improvement in the state of the middle classes appears, agriculture, its leading industry, has perceptibly declined. In by far the most important of Irish social relations, those connected with the land, a revolution has taken place; a huge if a veiled confiscation has gone on; the landed gentry have been shamefully wronged; the occupiers of the soil have been most unduly favoured; yet both classes declare they have been ill-treated, notably the last. And the Irish land system has been turned upside down, with consequences disastrous and far-reaching; the landlord has been cut off from his estate; the tenant has been encouraged in thriftlessness and waste by law; the land has been bound in a ruinous mortmain, like that which existed under the penal code, and subjected to demoralising litigation, breeding a war of class; capital and fruitful enterprise turn away from it. And, at the same time, in order to lessen these evils, recourse has been had to remedies that are perhaps worse; the system of so-called 'land purchase' has been devised; the result has been to create a class of peasant owners reproducing the nearly extinct middleman, and, above all, to arouse a cry for the 'compulsory purchase' of the rented lands of Ireland, an act of wholesale spoliation unjust and disastrous alike. In the position of affairs we now see in