enure of office I was responsible for one of these terribly
wasteful and profoundly unsatisfactory measures. Instead of relief, what
a statesman must seek is prevention of this great evil and strong root
of evil; and prevention means a large, though it cannot be a very swift,
displacement of the population. But among the many experts with whom I
have discussed this dolorous and perplexing subject, I never found one
of either political party who did not agree that a removal of the
surplus population was only practicable if carried out by an Irish
authority, backed by the solid weight of Irish opinion. Any exertion of
compulsory power by a British Minister would raise the whole
country-side in squalid insurrection, government would become
impossible, and the work of transplantation would end in ghastly
failure. It is misleading and untrue, then, to say that there is no
possible relation between self-government and agrarian discontent,
misery, and backwardness; and when Mr. Dicey and others tell us that the
British Parliament is able to do all good things for Ireland, I would
respectfully ask them how a British Parliament is to deal with the
Congested Districts.

Nearly as much may be said of the prevention of the mischievous practice
of Subdivision. Some contend that the old disposition to subdivide is
dying out; others, however, assure us that it is making its appearance
even among the excellent class who purchased their holdings under the
Church Act. That Act did not prohibit subdivision, but it is prohibited
in the Act of 1881. Still the prohibition can only be made effective, if
operations take place on anything like a great scale, on condition that
representative, authorities resident on the spot have the power of
enforcing it, and have an interest in enforcing it. Some of the
pseudo-Unionists are even against any extension of local
self-government, and if it be unaccompanied by the creation of a central
native authority they are right. What such people fail to see is that,
in resisting political reconstruction, they are at the same time
resisting the only available remedies for some of the worst of agrarian
maladies.

The ruinous interplay between agrarian and political forces, each using
the other for ends of its own, will never cease so long as the political
demand is in every form resisted. That, we are told, is all the fault of
the politicians. Be it so; then the Government must either suppress the
politicians