s good, its towns prosperous, its
national economy secure.

The history of Ireland, ever since the first Englishman set foot on it
with the eye of conquest, centres to a more or less degree around the
land. We know how the ancient clans tenaciously clung to their
heritage and how ruthlessly they were deprived of it by the
Plantations and the Penal Laws and by a series of confiscations, the
memory of which even still chills the blood. Conquest, confiscation,
eviction, persecution--this was the terrible story of Ireland for
seven centuries--and the past century worst of all. At the
commencement of the nineteenth century Ireland was extensively
cultivated. The land had been parcelled out amongst the people;
holdings were multiplied and tenancies for life increased amazingly
because it meant a larger rent-roll for the landlord and a great
increase in the voting power of his serfs. But there came the Corn
Laws, making cultivation unprofitable, and earlier the law of Catholic
Emancipation, withdrawing the right of voting from the forty-shilling
freeholders, and the crisis was reached when the Great Famine appeared
and was followed by the Great Clearances. The Famine lasted for three
years, the Clearances endured for over thirty. Houses were demolished,
fences levelled, the peasants swept out and the notices to quit kept
falling, as the well-known saying of Gladstone expressed it, as thick
as snowflakes. Between 1849 and 1860, according to Mulhall, 373,000
Irish families were evicted, numbering just about 2,000,000 in all. "I
do not think the records of any country, civilised or barbarian," said
Sir Robert Peel, "ever presented such scenes of horror."

Legislation became necessary to counteract the appalling evils arising
from such a state of things. It went on through the years with varying
fortune, never providing any real solution of the intolerable
relations between landlord and tenant, until the blessed Land
Conference pact was sealed and signed and the country finally
delivered from the haunting terror of landlordism. Now although the
entire population may be said in Ireland to be either directly or
indirectly dependent on the land, two classes were absolutely
dependent on it for their very livelihood--namely, the farmers and the
agricultural labourers. And through all the various agrarian
agitations they made united cause against their common enemy, the
landlord. There was also in the days of my boyhood a far friendli