farmer will never cease to believe ownership a panacea for all his ills, until he shall have tried it, and failed. Of course it does not absolutely follow that the experiment of creating a peasant proprietary must needs fail. It may succeed; and then the Irish land problem is solved. For the reasons given above, however, I think it would fail. If all the holdings of fifteen acres and under (there are 285,000[27] of them, or nearly half the whole number of farms in Ireland) were turned into peasant properties tomorrow, I believe they would in thirty, or at most in fifty, years be recast into large cattle farms, owned probably for the most part by joint-stock companies. The process of consolidation would be partly the buying out of ruined peasants after some such seasons as we are now undergoing; partly a voluntary union of the residue, who would find association desirable in order to secure a sufficiency of land and capital. But those who might be compelled to part with their lands could no longer ascribe their ruin to the tenure by which they held. It would be made clear to them and to all concerned that it is the laws of Nature and not the laws of England which hinder Ireland from maintaining a dense agricultural population. It may be urged against what I have here said, that it is hardly worth while engaging in a social revolution merely in order that the last state of things may turn out on the whole very similar to the first. I cannot deny the force of this remark; though I may suggest, in my turn, that perhaps it is worth while to make some sacrifice for the sake of attaining stable equilibrium in the social system. I am persuaded that the one great difficulty in Irish affairs is to convince the peasant that the law is a power not hostile but friendly to him. This is no easy task. It is not so very long since the law actually was the hard master it is still supposed to be. Nor is the peasant's own attitude of mind a very easy one to deal with. He clamours loudly to be "rooted in the soil," or, in other words, to be made absolute owner of his farm; but he clamours not less loudly against the absenteeship of his landlord. He utterly fails to perceive the inconsistency of his position. He cannot eat his cake and have his cake. He cannot be at one and the same time tenant to a resident lord of the manor, and owner in fee-simple of his own holding. Absolute peasant ownership is _primâ facie_ incompatible with the very existence of a landed aristocracy; and it may be some perception of this that induces certain of the land agitators to propose fixity of tenure at a quit-rent rather than absolute peasant proprietorship. But it is clear that this is a mere evasion of the difficulty. A landlord, who is merely a rent-charger, has no more motive to reside on his estate than if he sold it and lived on the interest of the purchase-money. There is no doubt a sense in which the two things are not absolutely incompatible.