I have said that land was the staple industry of Ireland. Yet Government after Government failed to realize that the enactment of laws for the protection of the tenant—the protection of his improvements from confiscation by the landlords, protection of himself from rack-rents and arbitrary eviction—were necessary for the prosperity and peace of the country. In 1836 Mr. Sharman Crawford introduced a Bill proposing that the tenant should be entitled, on eviction, to compensation for improvements of a permanent nature made with the landlord’s consent; or without his consent, provided that such improvements were, according to the Chairman of Quarter Sessions, necessary for the actual wants of the tenant. This moderate Bill, strongly opposed by the landlords, was read a first time, but it never reached another stage. Parliament having refused to protect the tenants—refused indeed to take the slightest heed of their complaints and grievances—the tenants continued to protect themselves by forming secret societies whose operations struck terror in the land. In 1838 the Under-Secretary, Thomas Drummond, boldly told the Tipperary Magistrates, who cried out for coercion, that landlordism was the cause of agrarian crime, and that remedial legislation, not coercion, was the remedy. He said, in memorable words: “The Government has been at all times ready to afford the utmost aid in its power to suppress disturbance and crime, and its efforts have been successful so far as regards open violations of the law.... But there are certain classes of crime, originating in other causes which are much more difficult of repression. The utmost exertion of vigilance and precaution cannot always effectually guard against them, and it becomes of importance to consider the causes which have led to a state of society so much to be deplored, with a view to ascertain whether any corrective means are in the immediate power of the Government or the Legislature. When,” he continues, “the character of the great majority of serious outrages occurring in many parts of Ireland, though unhappily most frequent in Tipperary, is considered, it is impossible to doubt that the causes from which they mainly spring are connected with the tenure and occupation of land. “Property,” he adds, “has its duties as well as its rights; to the neglect of those duties in times past is mainly to be ascribed to that diseased state of society in which such crimes take their rise; and it is not in the enactment or enforcement of statutes of extraordinary severity, but chiefly in the better and more faithful performance of those duties, and the more enlightened and humane exercise of those rights that a permanent remedy for such disorders is to be sought.”