bad; and a poor law, enacted at last in 1838, was utterly unable to cope with the evil. Whiteboy crime and disorders continued to abound; in 1844, an average year, there were more than a thousand instances of offences in landed relations. The year 1843 was that of the great Repeal movement, of which O'Connell was the master spirit. Peel had been Prime Minister for two years; his attention had been already turned to the vices and the perils of the Irish land system. He had been Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1812 to 1818; but he had been identified with the Tory misrule of that time; and though, like Chesterfield in another age, he had been too sagacious not to see that poverty made the social ills of Ireland more acute and worse, he had been the ablest opponent of the Catholic cause, had supported Protestant ascendency in many ways; and had not been in any sense an Irish reformer. A strong Conservative of the great middle class in England, he looked on Ireland as an almost foreign land, and had scarcely any knowledge of her real needs; and though his severe administration at the Castle had been wise and just, he carried out coercion with a steady hand, and is supposed to have been the author of the code of cheap ejectment, a cause of a great deal of evil and wrong. But his mind, if slow in moving, was moved at last; he saw that Ireland largely required the amending hand; the conduct of O'Connell, no doubt, had quickened his purpose. I cannot dwell on Peel's other Irish measures; at the close of 1843 he appointed a Commission charged to inquire into the state of Irish landed relations; had he continued long at the head of the State, he would probably have done much to improve the Irish land system. The Commission had, as President, the chief of the great House of Courtenay; it was almost wholly composed of Englishmen, more or less associated with land in England; it was, therefore, ill constituted to deal with what may be called the Irish Land Question. But it investigated the subject it treated with most praiseworthy care; entering into every detail of Irish landed relations, their history in the past, the state of land tenure, the condition of the different classes seated on the land, the working of the law with respect to tenant's improvements, the means of diminishing the wretched millions squatting on the soil, agrarian crime and all that it involved; the mass of evidence it collected is still of the greatest value. The Report it made, if somewhat over-cautious and timid, was very instructive in many respects; especially it showed how the Irish land system grew out of the conquests and confiscations of the past, and still bore the marks of its ill-omened origin, notably in the lines drawn between the owners and the occupiers of the soil marked by a profound division of race and faith; and many of the suggestions it made were wise, nay, excellent. But on the capital subject of land tenure, by many degrees the most important, the