My own opinion (_valeat quantum_) is that the soil and climate of Ireland render the country utterly unfit to maintain a considerable body of peasant proprietors; but that, nevertheless, it would be wise and politic to establish peasant properties as widely as may be practicable. The climate is notoriously damp, and variable in the extreme. Grain crops are inferior and precarious--root crops are not much better--even meadows are untrustworthy, because of the difficulty of haymaking--but Irish pasture is perhaps the best in the world. Natural conditions mark out Ireland as a pastoral and cattle-breeding country; and such a country is the destined home of _latifundia_. It is not merely that cattle require large spaces of pasture; but the trade in cattle requires capital, and requires the power of staying through seasons of adversity. An attempt to breed or deal in cattle by a class of peasant proprietors, acting singly, could only end in ruin; a ruin even more complete than bad seasons would bring upon unsuccessful cultivators of grain. Another product for which Ireland is eminently fitted is timber.[26] This also obviously requires spaces of land, and intervals of idle capital, utterly incompatible with any system of small holdings. Nature would seem to have marked out Ireland as a country to be thinly populated; historical accident once made her one of the most populous of countries, and we all know what came of it. The people were dependent on a single kind of food; it failed, and misery ensued such as modern Europe had never beheld. The scenes of 1847 we may devoutly hope will never be witnessed again; but such a season as 1878-79 would be a trial that few peasant proprietors could stand. Why then do I say that a peasant proprietary ought to be created? Because I believe that in the experiment is to be found the sole method of convincing the Irish peasants that their true interest lies in quite another direction. The peasant now believes that all he wants in order to be prosperous is to be "rooted in the soil." It is of no use to appeal to abstract reasoning. He knows that he has to pay rent, and that he is liable to eviction for non-payment. Carefully as recent legislation has guarded him against capricious eviction, he knows that if his landlord chooses to pay for turning him out, out he must go. The few of his neighbours who do acquire freeholds, he perceives to be comparatively prosperous. He does not take into account that the prosperity of the freeholder is maintained by precisely the same exceptional energy and thrift which in the first instance enabled him to secure the freehold. Besides, it is undeniable that _cæteris paribus_ a man who holds rent-free is likely to be better off than one who pays rent; and so long as rent is the rule and freehold the exception, the few freeholders will seem at least to possess an advantage over the many rentpayers. In short, the peasant