wyers, hardened and convicted economists,--not economists like Mill, but
men saturated with English ideas of contract, of competitive rent, of
strict rule of supply and demand. Mr. Bright, it is true, had a profound
conviction that the root of Irish misery and disorder lay in the land
question. Here he saw far and deep. But then Mr. Bright had made up his
mind that the proper solution of the land question was the gradual
transformation of the tenants into owners, and this strong preconception
somewhat narrowed his vision. Even while Mr. Gladstone was in the middle
of his battle on the church, Bright wrote to him (May 21, '69):--

When the Irish church question is out of the way, we shall find
all Ireland, north and south alike, united in demanding something
on the land question much broader than anything hitherto offered
or proposed in compensation bills. If the question is to go on
without any real remedy for the grievance, the condition of
Ireland in this particular will become worse, and measures far
beyond anything I now contemplate will be necessary. I am most
anxious to meet the evil before it is too great for control, and
my plan _will meet_ it without wrong to any man.

(M85) "I have studied the Irish land question," said Bright, "from a point
of view almost inaccessible to the rest of your colleagues, and from which
possibly even you have not had the opportunity of regarding it.... I hope
you are being refreshed, as I am, after the long nights in the House--long
nights which happily were not fruitless. I only hope our masters in the
other House will not undo what we have done." Mr. Gladstone replied the
next day, opening with a sentence that, if addressed to any one less
revered than Bright, might have seemed to veil a sarcasm: "I have this
advantage for learning the Irish land question, that I do not set out with
the belief that I know it already; and certainly no effort that I can make
to acquire the mastery of it will be wanting." He then proceeds to express
his doubts as to the government embarking on a very large operation of
land-jobbing, buying up estates from landlords and reselling them to
tenants; and whether the property bought and sold again by the state would
not by force of economic laws gradually return again to fewer hands. He
then comes still closer to the pith of the matter when he says to Mr.
Bright: "Your plan, if adopted in full, could only extend, to