I do not believe that the Government loans can provide either. A newer and little less rapacious and less unintelligent race of landlords might achieve it. The bland, benevolent money-dropping Englishman, who out of his generosity or his scheme of politics desires to assist the Irish people, should buy a place in Ireland and do his best to live there. The country is full of properties which would be cheap at treble the prices that are now being asked for them. There is plenty of land and there is plenty of labor. The Land Laws, it is true, seem on the face of them ridiculous, that is to say, if you happen to be a landlord whose eye is forever on the rent-roll and the automatic improvement of properties at other people’s expense. But if, on the other hand, you are a comfortable, high Tory, patriarchal landlord, with bowels, and a proper appreciation of sport, and a proper interest in agriculture and the breeding of cattle, Ireland need have no terrors for you. There is a notion abroad that the Irish farmer has deep-rooted prejudices against landlords of whatever degree. We are told that he is a confirmed shirker of the prime duty of rent-paying, and that he will let a holding go to rack and ruin for the sole purpose of cheapening its value, so that he may himself buy it in for the merest song. The demand throughout the country, we are told, is for farmer and peasant proprietorship, and the legislature has formulated wonderful machinery in the interest of such proprietorship. My own view is that of two evils the Irish cultivators have in this matter chosen the lesser. On the one hand they had rack rents, absentee landlords and agents who, if they had bodies to be shot, appear to have had very small souls to be saved. On the other hand, they have been offered schemes of purchase that sound very well but do not work out quite so well in practise. Still a bad scheme of purchase is better than bad landlords and worse agents. An intelligent and reasonable landlord of bucolic tastes, who will look as sharply after his agent or factor as he will look after his tenants on rent-day, could in my opinion do quite as well in Ireland as he can do in England. In a sentence, Ireland wants settling, not touring. CHAPTER XVIII POTATOES