noble scheme for bringing an ill-governed dependency within the domain of order and law, by planting an Anglo-Norman and native aristocracy in the soil, subject to a strong monarchy that would have protected the community as a whole. Most unfortunately the policy of Henry VIII. was not carried out; in the great conflict of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Ireland was drawn into a long struggle with England, and was repeatedly made a place of arms for her foes; an era of savage conquest, accomplished piecemeal, with ruthless confiscation following in its train, was protracted during nearly a century and a half; and at the close of the reign of William III., nine-tenths probably of the land of Ireland had been wrested from its former possessors, and the old Celtic land system had been destroyed by the sword and by law. Race and religion made this position of affairs much worse; the age of Protestant ascendency in Ireland began; in infinitely the greatest part of the island the land was parcelled out among a caste of owners distinct in blood and faith from the children of the soil, and lording it over an oppressed peasantry; and the system was propped up by a code of cruel laws, which maintained and, so to speak, stereotyped these evil divisions. The lines of the land system of Ireland were thus finally laid down; a variety of economic and social causes increased and deepened their extreme harshness; and though they have gradually been softened, and are now all but effaced, their traces and the results are still to be seen. The last thirty years have witnessed repeated attempts to effect radical changes in the modes of the ownership and the occupation of the land in Ireland; they have wrought a revolution in Irish landed relations, and have well-nigh turned them upside down; but the consequences have assuredly not been fortunate. The land system of Ireland has been made a chaos of economic disorder, of dissensions of class, of legalised wrong, absolutely incompatible with social progress and the general welfare.