ut the character of the Irish
people themselves, and the very existence among them of the elementary
conditions of a Christian civilisation.

It would be unjust to the Irish people to forget that this demoralising
"Coercion" against which the Head of the Catholic Church has declared
war, seems to me to have been seriously reinforced by the Land
Legislation of the Imperial Parliament.

No one denies that great reforms and readjustments of the Land Tenure in
Ireland needed to be made long before any serious attempt was made to
make them.

But that such reforms and readjustments might have been made without
cutting completely loose from the moorings of political economy, appears
pretty clearly, not only from examples on the continent of Europe, and
in my own country, but from the Rent and Tenancy Acts carried out in
India under the viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin since 1885. The conditions
of these measures were different, of course, in each of the cases of
Oudh, Bengal, and the Punjab, and in none of these cases were they
nearly identical with the conditions of any practicable land measure for
Ireland. But two great characteristics seem to me to mark the Indian
legislation, which are not conspicuous in the legislation for Ireland.

These are a spirit of equity as between the landlords and the tenants,
and finality. I do not see how it can be questioned that the landlords
of Ireland have been dealt with by recent British legislation as if they
were offenders to be mulcted, and that the tenants in Ireland have been
encouraged by recent British legislation to anticipate an eventual
transfer to them, on steadily improving terms, of the land-ownership of
the island. Mr. Davitt is perhaps the most popular Irishman living, and
I believe him to be sincerely convinced that the ownership of the land
of Ireland (and of all other countries) ought to be vested in the State.
But if the independence of Ireland were acknowledged by Great Britain
to-morrow, and all the actual landlords of Ireland were compelled
to-morrow to part with their ownership, such as it is, of the land, I
believe Mr. Davitt would be further from the recognition and triumph of
his principle of State-ownership than he is to-day with a British
Parliament hostile to "Home Rule," but apparently not altogether
unwilling to make the landlords of Ireland an acceptable burnt-offering
upon the altar of imperial unity. Probably he sees this himself, and the
existing state o