This terrible outbreak shook society in Ireland to its base, revived the old divisions of race and faith which had been disappearing to a considerable extent, and left memories behind which have not been forgotten. Its inevitable result was to lead to the Union, a measure long in the contemplation of British statesmen, and especially of Pitt, and perhaps necessary in the most critical circumstances of the time. I cannot even refer to the events attending this great constitutional change; a large majority of the leading Irish landlords disliked it at heart; but a minority, alarmed for their possessions, gave it support; how strong this feeling was may be seen in a famous speech of Lord Clare, who described the whole order of men as 'the heirs of confiscation hemmed in by enemies brooding on their wrongs.' The Union greatly weakened the influence of the Irish landed gentry, which had been very powerful in the defunct Parliament; the 'Irish interest,' for many years a real force, was almost subverted; English officials became again supreme at the Castle; a bureaucracy gradually began to supplant the aristocracy of landlords in every sphere of government. As respects the land and landed relations, the class of Catholic owners slowly augmented; but the consequences were trivial and not marked; middleman tenures continued steadily to disappear; but absenteeism certainly increased, though absentee estates were usually better managed than before. Meanwhile causes of grave importance, tending to momentous social results, were profoundly affecting the whole land system, and the position of the classes dependent on it. Partly owing to the corn laws of the Irish Parliament, partly to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise, in 1793, to the great mass of the Catholic peasantry, but principally to the effects of the long war with France, Ireland, it may be said, was well-nigh changed from a pastoral to an agricultural country; large farms were generally replaced by small; the land in most districts was divided into little tillage holdings; the cottar system multiplied apace; the population, about three millions of souls in the day of Arthur Young, increased to more than six millions at the Peace of 1815; and this population becoming every year more dense, for the most part eked existence out on a precarious root. The economic and social consequences were very great, and continued in operation during a long series of years. The competition for the possession of land became intensely keen; rents were unnaturally forced up in thousands of cases; the value of landed property enormously rose; all this encouraged extravagance among the landed gentry, and especially induced them largely to encumber their estates. At the same time the wages of labour distinctly declined; the condition of the Irish labouring peasant, when Edward Wakefield, a very industrious and able observer, wrote on the state of