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departure from it under any circumstances lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.'s

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The evident purpose of the general taxpayer not to throw 200,000,000l., or even half that sum, into the turbid maelstrom of the Irish Land is a real security against Compulsory Purchase' and the extinction of the Irish landed gentry, as a class, by force. But a security depending on the trend of opinion is not good or adequate; as long as the so-named system of Land Purchase' continues, and draws the iniquitous distinctions already dwelt on, property in land in Ireland will be utterly unsafe. It is significant in the highest degree that the present Ministry, it may be affirmed, have no objection in principle to 'Compulsory Purchase'; 'no doubt they have made professions against it, but, save that they dread the taxpayers' wrath, they do not condemn this policy at heart; if they could see their way to carry it out, in all probability they would do so. The Chief Secretary for Ireland a few weeks ago talked against this scheme of confiscation, but moved his lips only; he did not utter a word against its foul injustice; he did not put forward one of the conclusive arguments which may be urged against it; he dwelt only on difficulties of detail, mere leather and prunella that may be brushed aside. With the Land War in Connaught staring him in the face he did not, moreover, express the least sympathy with the landlords wronged by the quackery of Land Purchase'; he would not admit that they were aggrieved by having a false measure of rent made current against them, exactly of the nature of a base coinage; he was indifferent how they were despoiled, perhaps ruined. He indeed stuck to his nostrum of Land Purchase,' as Molière's doctors stuck to the drugs that killed their patients; he plaintively protested that his favourite scheme had nothing to do with the disorders in the West of Ireland, a funny paradox that shows, in the words of Junius, how 'opinions may be too absurd to be easily renounced.' The Chief Secretary, in fact, has lately introduced a Bill to facilitate and extend Land Purchase,' of course with the sanction of the Cabinet. This is not the place to examine the project; I shall have an opportunity to deal with it elsewhere. It will, should it become law, expedite 'Land Purchase' to a certain extent; but its effects will not, I believe, be great; the chief inducement for the transfer of the Irish Land from owners to occu

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piers has not been forthcoming. The Irish landed gentry very generally assumed that, in order to encourage them to part with their estates, they would receive a bonus upon the transaction;

For the ruin that would befall Irish landlords under a system of Compulsory Purchase,' see my work, Present Irish Questions, p. 248. I have understated the case, but have proved that a country gentleman in receipt of 1,1001. a year before 1878 would, if expropriated by force, receive only 240l. It is a mockery to assert that Irish landlords could retain their demesnes.

language of the Chief Secretary, fairly interpreted, pointed in this direction. For one, I never entertained the idea; Irish tenants no doubt may be bribed wholesale, but that Irish landlords should be bribed was not to be thought of; nevertheless if, as has been asserted, there was a clause in the measure to that effect, which has not been allowed to see the light, this is only one of the many proofs how Irish landlords have been deceived and betrayed. These unhappy 'rent-gatherers,' indeed, in the language of Burke, have been so displumed, degraded, and metamorphosed, such unfeathered twolegged things, that we no longer know them.'

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In two other ways property in the Irish Land is exposed to the gravest danger under existing conditions. The wrongful distinction between 'purchasing' and rent-paying tenants is so evidently a cause of discontent and trouble that there will always be a temptation to efface it; a Government may yet be formed which will cut the knot, by transferring the rented lands of Ireland at an illusory price. The Land Commission, too, may be induced to cut down 'fair rents' until they shall have fallen as low as 'purchase annuities'; they may annihilate property wholesale to effect this purpose. Let no one babble that this apprehension is vain. I am old enough to recollect how the Encumbered Estates Commission sold estates at much less than half their value, in order to carry out a policy; and Irish history is full of examples of the kind. In truth, as long as the sham called Land Purchase is continued, the property, or rather what is left of it, of the Irish landed gentry is absolutely insecure, and must be so from the nature of the case. It is extraordinary that many of this order of men will not see what is as plain as daylight, and for different reasons have supported 'Land Purchase.' Excuses, no doubt, may be made for them: some have cleared off encumbrances through this method; others have endeavoured to save all they could from a shipwreck. But it is not wise' propter vitam vivendi perdere causas': thoughtful and really well-informed landlords know that 'Land Purchase,' on its present lines, is a cunning device to ensure their destruction by degrees; they are not flies to be lured into the web of the spider. I trust Irish landlords will avoid Land Purchase,' or, at all events, will insist on getting such a price for their property as will make the 'purchase annuities' nearly as high as 'fair rents.' Some have been severely taken to task for announcing that this was their purpose-a strange commentary on what is going on in Ireland-as if men could not put a value on what is their own. Land Purchase' unhappily must go on until the fund appropriated to it shall have been expended: but Parliament, I hope, will never vote a sixpence again to promote an experiment essentially bad and immoral, and proved to have led to disastrous results. A reform of the Irish Land system should be effected on different principles, and made after a searching and full inquiry :

VOL. LI-No. 303

3 C

though much mischief beyond recall has been done, something useful and valuable may be yet accomplished. That reform should be sought in an improvement of the conditions of Irish Land tenure, that is, in the relations of landlord and tenant, as has been the opinion of every thinker from Burke to John Stuart Mill, and from Longfield to Butt: it will never be effected by the legislative and administrative quackery of the last twenty years. And an enquiry would prove the right of the Irish landlord to compensation for the grave wrong he has suffered, a right which even Mr. Gladstone predicted might be his due, a right which civilised usage has always recognised, a right, moreover, which can be realised without the charge of a shilling to the State.

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"They who destroy everything,' Burke sarcastically wrote, certainly will remove some grievance. They who make everything new have a chance that they may establish something beneficial.' I am free to admit that the Irish agrarian legislation of the last two decades, revolutionary and socialistic as it is, has been productive of a certain measure of good-has not been in every respect pernicious. The mode of tenure created by the Act of 1881 has put an end to rack renting where this existed, if it did not exist to any large extent; it has given the peasant increased security; it has made the Government of Ireland somewhat less difficult. Land Purchase,' too, may have planted in the Irish soil a certain number of industrious and solvent farmers, though considering the vices of this policy I do not look for grapes from thistles, or for figs from thorns. But whatever advantages have been derived from these nostrums, the evils they have caused immensely preponderate. The structure of a whole land system has been violently broken up; nothing solid or lasting has been put in its place; the inheritances of a kingdom have been tossed on a sea of troubles, and we see the results in a wide-spread shipwreck. Nothing is fixed or stable in Irish landed relations; a cry has gone up for the annihilation of a whole class, without a shadow of excuse, and for a universal confiscation of the Irish land; a dangerous restlessness pervades the minds of the occupiers of the soil, and a vague desire for a revolutionary change, both fatal to the sober pursuit of industry; law has decried the respect that should be given to contract; demoralisation and endless litigation abound. And the consequences are what ought to have been foreseen. Irish agriculture has distinctly declined; emigration and pauperism have increased; capital shuns the Irish Land as a quicksand; this is kept out of commerce, in a kind of mortmain. For boldly expressing views which do not fall in with those of the United Irish League or of ministerial partisans, I have been subjected to some vitriolic abuse, and to apologies which I might resent more; I can afford to treat such sorry stuff as it deserves. I write with authority in this matter: fifty years ago I condemned the Encum

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bered Estates Act- the regeneration of Ireland,' as it was then described as the scheme of confiscation which it has proved to be. I have steadily denounced the legislation which began in 1881, and the policy of that falsehood called Land Purchase'; and the disastrous results are now but too manifest. On the other hand, no living man has contributed so much as myself to the passing of the Irish Land Act of 1881-on the whole, a great and wise remedial measureand to the enactment of another excellent law, which relieved the Irish peasant from the ruinous weight of long standing arrears. I have always been on the side of reform in this province. For the rest, if I am an Irish landlord my rental has been rather raised than lowered in consequence of the changes of the last twenty years; and if I am an Irish landlord owing to the accidents of life and of historical associations I do not care to dwell on, I have no sympathy with the existing settlement of the Irish Land, so far as it rests on confiscation and conquest.

WILLIAM O'CONNOR MORRIS.

THE UNIQUE CONTINUITY OF OUR

CORONATION RITE

THE usually unimaginative public has of late been mildly astonished to learn that the kings of this country are inaugurated with the oldest coronation service in the world, and in fact that England, apart from Hungary in the West and comparatively modern Russia in the East, is unique in possessing an ancient rite at all. The Holy Roman Empire is no more. Spain, Portugal and Belgium bave passed through revolutions and retain only a bare regal installation. The new Italian monarchy sits excommunicate in Rome. The other dynasties are young or Protestant. Until a new Joan of Arc arises Rheims, the scene of every coronation of the House of France (save Henri Quatre's), will witness no royal sacring, and the mediæval French Use was after all but a replica of the English. It is certainly extremely remarkable that the Church of England alone should have conserved this highly ceremonious and mystical rite. The form of consecration,' wrote the late Lord Beauchamp in his edition of Liber Regalis, 'remained essentially unaltered from the time of Ethelred to that of George the Fourth-for whose coronation copies of 'Abbot Lytlington's' precious manuscript were privately printed. But Lord Beauchamp might well have lengthened that secular continuity in both directions. The central point of the service is the Anointing, which is the principal feature of a still earlier AngloSaxon Ordo than the one called Ethelred's, viz. Archbishop Egbert's, c. 737. Again, the last two coronations need not have been excluded. For though some unfortunate excisions were made in 1831 and 1838, and though everything save the actual service in church was abolished, the continuity, in most details the minute conservatism, of the rite was not substantially impaired.

Ours is a land of old and just renown; but it has seen considerable political and religious upheavals. Changes of dynasty, it is true, are not opportunities for alterations in coronation ritual. The new régime is anxious to link itself with the old, and to strengthen rather than weaken the supernatural sanctions of government. The Conqueror was crowned beside the reliques of the Confessor with the Anglo-Saxon rite. Edward the First conveyed' to Westminster

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