ticular classes of producers, of which examples are, as before said, to be seen in other countries. Moreover in this case Parliament has bowed down to the little heap,' and set one of the worst precedents that the new constituencies could have before them. The attempt last session to introduce the principle of foreign law, that the failure of crops shall exempt small holders from the payment of rent, was likewise of ill omen. 'He that observeth the winds shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.' The husbandman should count on the chance of foul weather and unfavourable seasons, and a fair-weather farmer is unfit for his trade. He has in truth begun to count on them in a wrong fashion. The scene in Punch of the Irish peasant saying, 'Plase God, we'll have another bad year yet,' was a divination. Words to that effect were actually used in the West. The Fleming inherits a love of minute and careful cultivation, but out-door relief and compensation for the failure of crops would soon turn the Pays de Waes itself back into a desert.

Instead of seeking to protect other holdings by special privileges, the Legislature should assist escape from them by emigration, as Mr. Mill strenuously urged; and the best of their occupiers might thus get elbow-room to work up to larger farms of their own. In all Mr. Tuke's sad story of the distress in the West of Ireland last spring, there is nothing so sad as the case of the man who saved 125l. in seven years in America, and came back to sink it in Donegal on the tenant right of a small farm. It's no use,' said the poor fellow;

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a man may as well lie down and die; we're beaten, everything is against us; I shall take my wife and family to Ameriky again!' When asked why he had come back before and bought the farm, he replied Nature binds a man to his own counthrey;' on which Mr. Tuke remarks, What true pathos and sentiment there is in these men!' Pathos and sentiment, certainly, but not true in the sense of being directed aright. By his own counthrey' the man meant that part of Ireland in which he was born and bred; and few men or women in the most fortunate ranks of life can cleave to the place in which their childhood was passed. The son of an Irish farmer, who had left the paternal hearth, and made his way in the world, said to the present writer that, had he twelve sons, like Jacob, instead of gathering them round his bedside in his old age, he would drive them from his door with his crutch and scatter them over the globe.

No measures of the character indicated will, however, suffice in the present emergency. One is reminded of the crimes that have been committed in the name of liberty, when one hears it invoked against 'coercion' to prevent anarchy and to maintain security of life and property. All government is coercive, and its restraints become more strict and more numerous for their protection, as regard for the weak and defenceless grows stronger, and the forces at the disposal of the State become more powerful and better organised. The Norman,

Plantagenet, and Tudor kings were arbitrary rulers, yet powerless to prevent innumerable acts of oppression, cruelty, and wrong, and had themselves small feeling for suffering. None but a highwayman would have stopped a coach in the last century, though it were likely to run over a woman or child. Now persons of high rank are ordered about by a policeman, and bidden to stop or go this way or that as he directs. When a fire takes place, the neighbouring houses may be injured or destroyed, and their inmates turned into the street, to prevent the conflagration from spreading. Men are compelled to vaccinate their children, to send them to school, to serve on juries themselves, and try prisoners, at great inconvenience and loss; and they would be forced to bear arms as soldiers in defence of the country were it invaded. The notions of some politicians about liberty are partly survivals of muddy eighteenth century theories of natural rights, and partly results of thoughtlessness respecting the nature and objects of civil government, and the numerous restraints it imposes which they never think of disputing. It is not on behalf of landlords and agents alone that preventive measures against outrage are needed in Ireland, but also of thousands of peaceable, industrious, and thrifty tenants and their families. At a public meeting a few weeks ago Mr. Parnell's secretary spoke with theatrical and grotesque commiseration of the anxiety an assassin, who had shot a man a few days before, must have endured while lying in wait for his victim. Think of the anguish of mind he must have suffered during those hours!' Good citizens are likely to think more of the anguish of mind in the homes of honest men who are liable to be fired at through their windows at night, dragged out of bed, carded, cruelly beaten, mutilated, and finally perhaps murdered, for paying their debts, or farming land that had never been decently farmed before. Principles adverse to that of the general good, Bentham has contemptuously characterised as maxims of sympathy and antipathy. Punish as you hate; if you hate not, punish not at all.' There are doubtless persons who, exasperated at the fiendish outrages committed in Ireland, are disposed to punish as they hate; yet the politicians who oppose the coercive measures necessary to prevent their commission, because their own anger and antipathy are not aroused in the cause of Irish landlords, may be more cold-blooded, but are not less irrational. Among the measures most urgently needed is a change in the Irish jury system. A country of which most of the inhabitants resembled Lord O'Hagan would have small need of any criminal jury system at all; but the noble lord overestimated the stage of advancement his own country had attained, and the Jury Act that goes by his name is an obstacle to its attainment.5

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5 A resident magistrate of great ability and long experience says on this subject: 'No amelioration of affairs can be expected until crime is punished, and that cannot be as long as the present jury system exists. From the class from which petty jurors are taken emanate agrarian outrages, disaffection, and perjury. It is childish

Repression of agrarian crime is an indispensable step towards the solution of the Irish land question, but it is only a step. It will never be solved until so large a number of the Irish people are on the side of landed property that its rights are sacred in the eyes of the majority. Fixity of tenure, fair rents, and free sale,' would stop short of creating a multitude of families interested in the maintenance of landownership, and taking a pride and a pleasure in it. Acute logicians like Lord Sherbrooke will easily find objections to any plan of diffusing landownership by the intervention of the State. But logicians should remember Archbishop Whately's refutation of 'the fallacy of objections,' that is to say, of concluding that a system is untenable because some objections may be urged against it. The true question is whether there are not greater objections to its rejection. There may be risk in adopting it, but much greater danger in turning away from it for fear of them. The British Empire is surrounded with risks; so is every undertaking in life. There is risk in going out of one's house; but the slothful man who says, there is a lion without,' is more likely to perish by bringing 6 the wolf to his door.

T. E. C. LESLIE.

to expect such a tribunal to punish the guilty. Nothing takes the heart out of all entrusted with the administration of the law so much as to see, assizes after assizes, juries retiring to "consider their verdict," and returning half an hour afterwards to affirm that in their belief the accused did not commit the offence with which he has been charged, though proved in the clearest manner.'

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

Communications to the Editor should be addressed to him at 39 Paternoster Row, E.C.

As the Magazine has an ample staff of Contributors, MSS. are not invited without previous correspondence, and uninvited MSS. cannot be returned ezcept at the convenience of the Editor. No copies of verses can be returned.

INDEX

VOL. XXII. NEW SERIES.

MARY ANERLEY: a Yorkshire Tale, by Political Parties, Parliamentary Diffi-
R. D. Blackmore:
culties and, 279