been just as
indispensable, as under the existing system was the tiresome and costly
process of valuation for purposes of fair rent. It is true that if the
policy of purchase had been adopted, this process would have been
performed once for all. But opinion was not nearly ready either in England
or Ireland for general purchase. And as Mr. Gladstone had put it to Bright
in 1870, to turn a little handful of occupiers into owners would not have
touched the fringe of the case of the bulk of the Irish cultivators, then
undergoing acute mischief and urgently crying for prompt relief. Mr.
Bright's idea of purchase, moreover, assumed that the buyer would come
with at least a quarter of the price in his hand,--an assumption not
consistent with the practical possibilities of the case.

The legislation of 1881 no doubt encountered angry criticism from the
English conservative, and little more than frigid approval from the Irish
nationalist. It offended the fundamental principle of the landlords; its
administration and the construction of some of its leading provisions by
the courts disappointed and irritated the tenant party. Nevertheless any
attempt in later times to impair the authority of the Land Act of 1881
brought the fact instantly to light, that the tenant knew it to be the
fundamental charter of his redemption from worse than Egyptian bondage. In
measuring this great agrarian law, not only by parliamentary force and
legislative skill and power, but by the vast and abiding depth of its
social results, both direct and still more indirect, many will be disposed
to give it the highest place among Mr. Gladstone's achievements as
lawmaker.

Fault has sometimes been found with Mr. Gladstone for not introducing his
bill in the session of 1880. If this had been done, it is argued, Ireland
would have been appeased, no coercion would have been necessary, and we
should have been spared disastrous parliamentary exasperations and all the
other mischiefs and perils of the quarrel between England and Ireland that
followed. Criticism of this kind overlooks three facts. Neither Mr.
Gladstone nor Forster nor the new House of Commons was at all ready in
1880 to accept the Three F's. Second, the Bessborough commission had not
taken its evidence, and made its momentous report. Third, this argument
assumes motives in Mr. Parnell, that probably do not at all cover the
whole ground of his policy. As it happened, I called on Mr. Gladstone one
mo