fierce
struggle for the land affords the crucial test. Landlordism of that most
savage type which held for its whole gospel that a man may do what he
likes with his own was conceived to be the very corner-stone of British
rule in Ireland. It controlled Parliament, the judiciary, the schools,
the Press, and possessed in the Royal Irish Constabulary an incomparable
watch-dog. It had resisted the criticism and attack loosened against it
by the scandal of the Great Famine. Then suddenly Ireland took the
business in hand. On a certain day in October 1879, some thirty men met
in a small hotel in Dublin and, under the inspiration of Michael Davitt,
founded the Land League. To the programme then formulated, the
expropriation of the landlords at twenty years' purchase of their rents,
England as usual said No! The proposal was thundered against as
confiscation, communism, naked and shameful. To any student, with
patience sufficient for the task, the contemporary files of such
journals as the _Times_ will furnish an exquisite chapter in the
literature of obtuseness. England sustained her No! with batons,
bullets, plank-beds, Coercion courts, and an occasional halter; Ireland
her Yes! with "agitation." Is it necessary to ask who won? Is it
necessary to trace step by step the complete surrender of the last
ditchers of those days? The fantastic and wicked dreams of the agitators
have in thirty years translated themselves into Statute Law and solid
fact. An English statesman of the period, say Mr Balfour or Mr Wyndham,
is fortunate if, with a few odd rags pilfered from the Land League
wardrobe, he can conceal from history his utter poverty of ideas.

This, then, is the essential wisdom of Irish history: Ireland has won
all along the line. The Normans did not normanise her. The Tudors did
not exterminate her. She has undone the Confiscations, and drawn a
cancelling pen through the Penal Laws. The Act of Union, so far from
suppressing her individuality or overwhelming it, has actually brought
it to that full self-consciousness which constitutes the coming of age
of a nation. Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are
due; if there be anyone with tears at command he may shed them, with
great fitness, and with no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of
Ireland. But let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before he
goes on to apply to her that other line which speaks of human hopes
defeated and overthrown. No othe