I shall describe all this legislation, in detail, afterwards, and shall indicate its far-reaching effects; here I can only take a cursory survey. The attempts that have been made to reform the Irish land system, in the last sixty years, have been, with scarcely an exception, failures; the Irish land, it has truly been said, is strewn with the wrecks of repeated errors. The Land Act of 1870 was, on the whole, a well-conceived measure; but the recommendations made by the Devon Commission, the iniquitous and destructive Encumbered Estates Act, the agrarian revolution wrought by Mr. Gladstone, and the 'Land Purchase' Acts, as they are falsely called, have been monuments of want of insight and knowledge. And, what is even worse, legislation on the Irish land has, over and over again, been too long delayed, and has been inconsistent, fitful, founded on no principle; the results have been in a high degree disastrous. Reforms that would have been gladly welcomed if made years before, have been treated with contempt when made too late; and reforms have more than once been hasty experiments, carried out under the stress of menacing troubles. The fable of the Sibylline books has been realised in this matter; and not a few of the efforts to improve Irish land tenures have been little better than sudden leaps in the dark. As to recent legislation in this province, its consequences and tendencies have become manifest. That it has effected some good may be admitted; it has removed grievances that no doubt existed; it has made the government of Ireland more easy for the time; it has allayed discontent for a moment; but the good is far outweighed by the evil. It is not only that the nostrum of the 'Three F's,' and the adjustment of rent by the intervention of the State, have cut down the rental of Ireland to an extent that cannot be justified, and have transferred to the occupier of the Irish soil a large part of what was the owner's property by a process of confiscation concealed, but certain. It is not only that the status of the Irish landlord has been iniquitously transformed to his extreme injury, and that the status of the Irish tenant has been changed to his extreme advantage, in both instances without a pretence to right. The Irish land system has been reduced to an almost hopeless state; it presents some of the worst features of the past; its conditions discourage the improvement of the land, promote its deterioration in many ways, and banish capital away from it; and its plain tendency has been to make agriculture decline. And the revolution, which has been thus accomplished, has aggravated the divisions of classes in Ireland, and has been attended with ruinous litigation on a huge scale; and it has produced demoralisation far-reaching and profound, a sense of insecurity in all landed relations, and a far too general disregard of the respect due to contract. The policy, too, of so-called 'Land Purchase' has