I have no desire to compose an Essay on the Land Question; but it is absolutely impracticable to discuss Irish social economy without finding the Land Question in one's way. It is the question which most closely concerns the industrial classes; for the land is the mainstay of Irish industry. It is the pivot upon which all Irish politics turn; for although priestly influence counts for a great deal, that influence itself depends in great measure on the land hunger of the peasantry. I feel that I should be leaving Hamlet out of the play if I did not say a few words on the matter. As I have already hinted, the Irish peasant has three reasons for his desire to be "rooted in the soil." One is a traditional reason. He thinks that his forefathers were unjustly ousted by foreign conquerors. His belief rests on an utterly distorted view of history. It is true that eight hundred years ago a few of the ancestors of a few of the existing peasantry might in a sort of sense have been called landowners. But so far as the Gaelic race survives, it would be equally true to say that the ancestors of the existing peasantry had been the serfs or the slaves of barbarous chieftains. The old Gaelic tribal ownership, if left to itself, might or might not have ripened into a peasant proprietary; but the only real grievance which the existing Gaelic peasantry can allege, is that the English conquest forcibly interrupted the natural process of evolution. Moreover, a large number of the existing peasants are no true Gael at all, but the descendants of Danes, Normans, and the various waves of Saxon settlers from Elizabeth to William of Orange. In parts of Ireland there are even to be found the descendants of French Huguenots, of Scotch fugitives involved in the Stuart insurrections, and of refugees of 1793. That such a _colluvies gentium_ should claim to be the heirs of Septs which occupied the land "Ere the emerald gem of the Western world Had been set in the crown of a stranger,"