been accompanied with a train of evils on the increase. It is not creating, as its authors fondly hoped, a class of loyal and thriving freeholders; it is not even creating a body of industrious and improving farmers. It is, on the contrary, developing, in some of its parts, the bad land system of the eighteenth century; it has proved injurious to agriculture in one important respect. Above all, from the very nature of the case, it has drawn harsh, nay, unjust, distinctions between the landed classes, which necessarily have been a cause of much discontent; and it has inevitably provoked a demand for a universal confiscation of the Irish land even worse than any of those which have been the curse of Ireland. I pass from the material and general state of Ireland to that of the Irish community, in its different parts. That community is still divided, as it has been for ages, into three separate and distinct peoples, marked off from each other in race and faith; whatever 'Nationalist' leaders may assert, it is not, and has never been, in a real sense, a nation. The lines of demarcation between Catholic, Presbyterian, and Protestant Ireland are at least as clearly defined as they have always been; they have probably been widened by the troubles of late years, and by the legislation which has been a consequence. Catholic Ireland has a population of some three millions and a half of souls; it is in the main a Celtic race, but with a considerable admixture of other elements; it has passed through a revolution remarkable and immense. Sixty years ago, the worst parts of the Penal Code had long been things of the past; but the Irish Catholics had only recently thrown off the last remains of that thraldom, under O'Connell's guidance; and their emancipation had only been effected by a great and very threatening movement. They were still comparatively an alien and a subject people; they had not many owners of land; they were not numerous in the upper trading and the professional classes; education was greatly wanting among them; they were for the most part a backward and poor peasantry, almost serfs of landlords distinct in creed and in blood; and they formed the bulk of the teeming millions that vegetated on the soil in indigent misery. The Irish Catholics, too, had still many and real grievances; the tithe of the Established Church had long been an unjust burden on the petty husbandman; it had recently given rise to a frightful war of classes, and had only been commuted a short time; the Established Church itself was a moral wrong, felt acutely by the Irish priesthood at least. Catholic Ireland, besides, was deeply sunk in ignorance; the system of national education had only begun to flourish; and the Irish Catholic was still all but wholly excluded from county administration and municipal government. The worst of these grievances, however, was the state of the tenure of the land; this was especially