If such a provision were inserted, it would make the position of the Treasury extremely secure. When Mr. Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill in 1886, the land war was at its height. The country was, on the one hand, full of intense and unreasoning bitterness and resentment, and, on the other hand, of unreasoning terror of the consequences of the change of administration. There are many persons, to-day convinced believers in the policy of Home Rule, who do not regret that the Bill of 1886 failed to pass. Things were not very much better in 1893, although, owing to the Land Act of 1881, the land war was slowly losing its fierceness. Since then a slow, but no less deep and far-reaching, change has passed over the tenant farmers of Ireland. The bitterness and discontent which rightly possessed them during the whole of the last century have at last given way to more kindly and contented feelings. This is due in a great measure to the large remedial measures passed first by Mr. Gladstone’s Government of 1880 to 1895, and afterwards by the Conservative Administration between 1896 and 1905; but it is perhaps even more due to the feeling which has slowly grown up among the agricultural population that, at last, they are being listened to, and that their wants are being attended to, imperfectly, no doubt, but still with sympathy and with a desire to do what can be done to meet them. Whatever dangers may attend the granting of Home Rule now, they will not be the dangers which terrified and controlled public opinion in 1886 and 1893. Almost all the confusion, trouble, and crime of last century was due to the vicious absurdity of the Irish land code and to the miserable condition of the Irish tenant farmers produced thereby. That is now changed and Ireland has become a quiet and comparatively crimeless country. The danger which many foresee under a Home Government is of a different kind. It is rather that the overwhelming peasant vote may render the administration unduly parsimonious and so unwilling to place any additional burden on the owners of land that a kind of political stagnation may arise therefrom. Ireland cannot, of course, be kept permanently out of the great movements of European thought, but, for the moment, it may be safely alleged that in no part of Europe is property safer. Part I. The Fair Rent Acts and the Land Purchase Acts.(121) Two Classes of Occupiers of Land in Ireland—Economic and Uneconomic.