some £22,000,000 a year, and Ireland had her share in the reduction. In 1864 a Committee of the House of Commons inquired into the taxation of Ireland, but it led to no useful result. In other directions the monotony of neglect continued. The Government and Parliament paid little or no attention to Irish needs. Ireland was the Cinderella of the three kingdoms, and fared accordingly. The third period ranged from 1869 to 1896. It might be termed the Home Rule period, for it includes the two Home Rule Bills of Mr. Gladstone, but it includes also other great measures relating to Ireland. Indeed, during the whole period of seventeen years Ireland engrossed, to a great degree, the attention of Parliament. The change was very remarkable. Up to 1869 England was indifferent to, or bored by, Ireland. She was stupid. She did not trouble herself to learn Irish wants, and she could not understand the spirit of Irish nationality. The Devon Commission, a Conservative Commission, appointed by a Conservative Minister, Sir Robert Peel, reported that 2,500,000 people in Ireland were on the verge of starvation, and gave warning of the evils, the perils, inherent in the Irish land system. England took no notice of either warning. The famine answered the first in cruel fashion. The second was pigeon-holed. Wise in her own Home administration, wise of late years in her Colonial administration, she knew no remedy for Ireland but force, and force is no remedy. She accepted, almost as matters of ordinary administration, Coercion Acts which marked with a black stigma most years of the century, unable to see that that fact alone was a disgrace to her statesmen, her Parliament, and her people. Early in the Home Rule days I heard a great English statesman say: “The first duty of a Government is to bring the people into agreement with the law; till it does that it fails in its first duty, and England has hitherto failed to bring Ireland into agreement with the law”—a truth well and forcibly expressed.