Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the rottenness of the economic foundations upon which the welfare of Ireland depended. The population had swollen from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a half millions in 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law of propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence. What happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, not a serious matter in most countries, but in Ireland the cause of starvation to three-quarters of a million persons, and the starting-point of that vast exodus which in the last half of the nineteenth century drained Ireland of nearly four million souls. The famine passed, and with it all recollection of the report of the Devon Commission. Hitherto most of the land legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions. Now came the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, whose purpose was to facilitate the buying out of bankrupt Irish landlords, and whose effect was to perpetuate the old agrarian system under a new set of more mercenary landlords, pursuing the old policy of rack-rents and evictions. In the three years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls. Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to retaliate with the same old defensive policy of outrage. Peaceful agitation was of no use. The Tenant League of North and South, formed in 1852, claimed in vain the simplest of the rights granted under pressure of violence in 1870 and 1881. Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for any but secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the century, when a remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, with the general consent of British statesmen and parties. Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of 1829, which was recommended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized rebellion in Ireland. Tithes, the unjust burden of a century and a half, were only commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years' War revolting in its incidents. Mr. Gladstone admitted, and no one who studies the course of events can deny, that without the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown thereby on the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to carry the Act--again overdue by a century--for the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid and ineffectual as it was, of 1870. Without the organized lawlessness of the Land League it would have been equally impossible to bring about those more drastic changes in Irish land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 1881, and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret conspiracy, extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896.