he prosperous times of Irish
agriculture, which culminated a few years before the passing of the
'Tenants' Charter,' were followed by a serious reaction, the result of
causes which, though long operative, were only then beginning to make
themselves felt, and some of which, though the fact was not then
generally recognised, were destined to be of no temporary character. The
agricultural depression which has continued ever since was due, as is
now well known, to foreign competition, or, in other words, to the
opening up of vast areas in the Far West to the plough and herd, and the
bringing of the products of distant countries into the home markets in
ever-increasing quantity, in ever fresher condition, and at an
ever-decreasing cost of transportation. Great changes were taking place
in the market which the Irish farmer supplied, and no two men could
agree as to the relative influence of the new factors of the problem, or
as to their probable duration.

Whatever may be said in disparagement of the great experiment commenced
in 1881, there can be no doubt that it enormously improved the legal
position of the Irish tenantry, and I, for one, regard it as a
necessary contribution to the events whose logic was finally to bring
about the abolition of dual ownership. But what a curious instance of
the irony of fate is afforded by this genuine attempt to heal an Irish
sore, what a commentary it is upon the English misunderstanding of the
Irish mind! Mr. Gladstone found the land system intolerable to one
party; he made it intolerable to the other also. For half a century
_laissez-faire_ was pedantically applied to Irish agriculture, then
suddenly the other extreme was adopted; nothing was left alone, and
political economy was sent on its famous planetary excursion.

When Mr. Gladstone was attempting to settle the land question on the
basis of dual ownership, the seed of a new kind of single
ownership--peasant proprietorship--was sown through the influence of
John Bright. The operations of the land purchase clauses in the Church
Disestablishment Act of 1869, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, were
enormously extended by the Land Purchase Acts introduced by the
Conservative Party in 1885 and in 1891, and the success which attended
these Acts accentuated the defects and sealed the fate of dual
ownership, which all parties recently united to destroy. In other words,
Parliament has been undoing a generation's legislative work upon the