s, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to
stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who,
after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law
System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir
George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to
him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until
this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave
her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."

But, of course, the capital exploit of the Economics of Unionism was its
dealing with the problem of land tenure. I shrink from inviting the
reader into the desert of selfishness and stupidity which constitutes
English policy, in this regard, from the Union to the triumph of the
Land League. Let him study it at large in Davitt's "Fall of Feudalism."
We are not concerned here to revive that calamitous pageant. Our
interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence
introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as
against government from Dublin. Even had Grattan's Parliament remained,
the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that
Parliament was an assembly controlled by landlords who, for the most
part, believed as strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in the
sacredness of nationality. But by the Union the conflict was embittered
and befouled. The landlords invented their famous doctrine of
conditional loyalty. They bargained with Great Britain to the effect
that, if they were permitted to pillage their tenantry, they would in
return uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland.

It was the old picture with which M. Paul-Dubois has acquainted us, that
of the "Garrison" kneeling to England on the necks of the Irish poor. In
this perversion, which under autonomy would have been impossible, we
find the explanation of the extreme savagery of Union land policy in
Ireland. Its extreme, its bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in
another way. Souchon in his introduction to the French edition of
Philippovich, the great Austrian economist, observes with great truth
that England has not even yet developed any sort of _Agrarpolitik_, that
is to say any systematic Economics of Agriculture. In the early
nineteenth century her own land problems were neglected, and her
political leaders were increasingly dominated by an economic gospel of
shop