of the world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, on many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately provoked by intolerable suffering. The wealthy and educated landlord class, face to face in a free Parliament with the tenant class, including, be it remembered, the Ulster Protestant tenants, with grievances less acute in degree, but similar in kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway under the stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest. Against the great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal charge. They came into incomes derived from a certain source under ancient laws for which they were not responsible. But, acting through the ascendancy Parliament far away in London, they remained, as an organized class--for we must always make allowance for an enlightened and public-spirited minority--blind to their own genuine interests and to the demands of humane policy. Their responsibility was transferred to English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or training, to undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish land question, which had no counterpart in England, through English spectacles. We cannot attribute their failure to lack of information. At every stage there was plenty of unbiassed and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant and Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin of the trouble. Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized what Arthur Young had said in 1772, and what Edward Wakefield, Sharman Crawford, Michael Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and many other writers, thinkers, and politicians had confirmed in the intervening period, and what every fair-minded man admits now to be the truth. Commission after Commission reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they proposed were inadequate. The Devon Commission, reporting in 1845, on the eve of the great famine, condemned the prevalent agrarian tenure, and recommended the statutory establishment of the Ulster custom of tenant right. A very mild and cautious Bill was introduced and dropped.