ART. VIII.-1. The Public General Acts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, passed in the thirty-second and thirty-third years of the Reign of her Majesty, Queen Victoria. London: Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode. 1869.

2. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Third series. Commencing with the accession of William IV. Vols. CXCIV -CXCIX. London: Cornelius Buck, at the office for 'Hansard's Parliamentary Debates.' 1869-70.

'Unhappy Ireland' is to all the world a familiar theme. Her story of wretchedness is a sad one, and it has not lacked telling. Her exiles are to be found wherever in the broad world there is field for adventure, and they are seldom without that fluency of speech and that zeal for their cause which will secure for any tale a ready hearing. Certainly, the attribute of devotion to their country is always theirs. If the Confederate States had to complain that nine out of ten of the Irish in America fought in the late war to withhold from the South the right of self-government which they have so long sought to secure for Ireland, it is, at least, to be said that their course admits of some excuse. They were faithful to principle, albeit not the highest. Their principle was not the abstract one of the right of every people to choose its own. form of government, but the more interested one of the good of Ireland. They saw that it was the interest of Great Britain that there should be two rival republics on this side of the Atlantic, and they therefore strove to secure the continuance of the one. We speak of course only of their leaders. With the rank and file, a sense of gratitude to the section in which they had found an asylum, or, in most cases perhaps, the prospect of good pay and rations were the motives which led them to the Federal standard. The greater honor is therefore due to those noble Irishmen, true lovers of human liberty, who, with voice and pen and sword, stood by the weaker side. The O'Connors and Mitchels, and Cleburnes shall yet receive

from their countrymen, as they already have from the South, the appreciation which is due to their pure devotion to principle.

A stranger visiting Ireland at the present time would find much to excite his astonishment. If he should attend the Theatre Royal, in Dublin, on a 'command night,' when the Queen's most gracious Majesty is represented by Earl Spencer and his brilliant Countess, he would hear the National Anthem, which is always given on the entrance of the Vice Regal party, greeted by a storm of hisses, not to be drowned by the cheers of vociferous loyalists; while the Irish air of 'St. Patrick's Day' would receive no divided welcome. Such demonstrations merely, he would however learn, are not peculiar to the present crisis, but have long been a customary and valued privilege in Ireland. Other incidents have a deeper significance. In Tipperary county, at the election in November, 1869, O'Donovan Rossa, a convict for political offences, was returned as Member of Parliament. This election was of course null and void, but at the second election, the successful candidate, though an ultra-Liberal, received a majority of only four votes over an avowed Fenian. In the same county, at a political mecting held, as is usual in Ireland, on Sunday, after mass, a parish priest advocated in the most unequivocal terms, the 'tumbling,' as it is euphemistically phrased, of landlords who should fail to meet the views of their tenants. Far from receiving such a suggestion with horror, the National' journals seem to regard this summary process of settling pecuniary troubles as one of those inalienable rights of man which a nation is bound to defend, or at least, as entirely excusable under the circumstances. It is not surprising, to learn as the result of such teaching, as we do from Mr. Gladstone's statement to the House of Commons, that agrarian crimes, in which are included the shooting or maiming of landlords and bailiffs, the burning of dwelling houses, barns and ricks, the writing of threatening letters, and outrages of a similar kind, are fearfully on the increase.

In the month of March, 1870, Cardinal Cullen issued a manifesto in which he warned his flock in the most stringent

terms against having anything to do with the Fenian organization, either directly or indirectly. When this letter apostolic was read in the Cardinal's own cathedral, by the officiating priest, we are told that a portion of the congregation, respectable both as to numbers and appearance, arose as if by preconcerted arrangement and left the building. By this was probably intended not so much an endorsement of the Fenians as a deprecation of the interference of the hierarchy in politics. A few days afterwards, a young man named Casey, who had written a number of poems for 'National' journals, which were worthy of remark for nothing so much as for their expressions of bitter hatred of the British government, died in Dublin of a disease brought on, as it was believed, by an imprisonment which he had suffered on account of his imprudent conduct in connection with the Fenian insurrection in 1866. His corpse was borne to the grave, covered with a flag of green and orange, and followed by many thousand persons. We are not disposed to attach undue weight to a display of this sort; for it is impossible to say to what extent it represented the feelings of the factions, so long antagonists. We think that we are safe, however, in asserting that never since the day of 'Boyne water' have the Orange and the Green been in friendly conjunction until within the past five years. Certainly, never before have the Roman Catholic people of Ireland set at defiance the commands of their priesthood.

We have been accustomed to think of Ireland as in a chronic state of distemper becoming at intervals exacerbated into one of those frightful blood-pourings in which her best and her worst blood were strangely mingled. What, at first glance, appears singular in the present condition of affairs is, that these aggravated symptoms have followed upon honest and, to a certain extent, judicious efforts to relieve her malady. Upon the Disestablishment Act follows the Land Bill; yet the turmoil seems to increase. It will not, perhaps, be hard to find the deep-seated cause and to trace to it the various symptoms to which we have adverted above. In the first place,

however, it may be well to take a brief review of the more recent legislation in regard to Ireland, with its effects so far as they have hitherto developed themselves.

the merest right.

The Disestablishment Act is generally received as an act of Among the majority who secured its passage were of course a large number of members of the Church of England. To tax a whole people for the support of a religion which five-sixths of them regard not merely as error but as positive heresy, is one of those sweeping measures of injustice which are the easy growth of times of hot blood and civil disturbance, but which, like other ill weeds, root themselves so deeply that the most earnest efforts to remove them are necessarily slow and gradual. The time when a Roman Catholic gentleman's blooded carriage-horses could be taken by any of his Protestant neighbors who were sufficiently unscrupulous, at a valuation fixed absurdly low, has long since passed; but it was not until within the memory of many now living, that all civil disabilities were removed. Even at the time of the passage of the Disestablishment Act there was to be found a respectable minority who deplored the measure as iniquitous, short-sighted, and probably disastrous in its consequences. This is naturally the view of the more narrow-minded portion of the Anglican Church. Even from their point of view, however, no such consequences seem to be probable. The Anglican Church will be freed from the tendency to supineness. and satisfaction which is incident to a dominant power, whether religious or secular, while the Roman Church will lose the potent argument of persecution. On the other hand, the extreme party of the latter communion demand that their religion shall be supported by the State to the exclusion of the Protestant form. In their view it is perfectly proper that the State should withdraw its aid from Trinity, but they are not willing to give up the £26.000 per annum which has for some years been appropriated to Maynooth. To the great bulk of the members of both churches, however, the Disestablishment Act is perfectly satisfactory. Two effects which might naturally have been expected from it, are already manifest, illustrations of which we have mentioned above; namely, increased kindliness of feeling between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics, and a growing independence of the priesthood, on the part of the latter, in all secular matters.

The Land Bill is as alien to our American ideas of right and justice as the Disestablishment Act is in accordance with them. The law of landlord and tenant is, throughout all the Englishspeaking world, substantially the same, being founded on the common law, and being in accordance, as we conceive, with common sense. For our present purpose it is sufficient to say, that under this law the landlord has all rights to his property saving such as the tenant, by express contract, secures to himself. It is unnecessary to follow this doctrine into all the relations between the parties. Let us consider it simply as it affects the question of improvements put upon the soil by the tenant, whether in the shape of buildings, drainage, manures, or whatever else. Under the rule which we have mentioned, which, so far, flows from the common law maxim, 'Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad cælum,' all such improvements, upon the determination of the tenancy, fall in to the owner of the soil. The law reasons that if a tenant makes an outlay which, from the shortness of his term or other circumstances, will redound more to the advantage of his landlord than of himself, it is of his own folly. What has once been attached to the soil can neither be removed nor be liquidated in damages; and to this rule there is no exception made, save in favor of the interests of trade, which have ever been sedulously guarded by the British Legislature. Moreover, the policy of the law has been to interfere as little as possible in these matters, and to leave them to regulate themselves. If a landlord refuses to enter into a fair and reasonable contract, he must be content to go without tenants. If a tenant has the reputation of impoverishing land by inju dicious or careless farming, he will find it difficult to secure a holding. Such is the working of the law here, as well as in England. Any attempt to regulate the duration of tenancies, the yearly rental, or any other matter subject to the governance of the generally just natural law of supply and demand, would be regarded with us not merely as impolitic, and unjust as well to the tenant as to the landlord, but as utterly impracticable. It is just such matters as these that the Irish Land Bill is framed to regulate.