e great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal
charge. They came into incomes derived from a certain source under
ancient laws for which they were not responsible. But, acting through
the ascendancy Parliament far away in London, they remained, as an
organized class--for we must always make allowance for an enlightened
and public-spirited minority--blind to their own genuine interests and
to the demands of humane policy. Their responsibility was transferred to
English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or training, to
undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish land question, which
had no counterpart in England, through English spectacles. We cannot
attribute their failure to lack of information. At every stage there was
plenty of unbiassed and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant
and Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin of
the trouble. Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized what Arthur Young
had said in 1772, and what Edward Wakefield, Sharman Crawford, Michael
Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and many other writers, thinkers, and
politicians had confirmed in the intervening period, and what every
fair-minded man admits now to be the truth. Commission after Commission
reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they proposed were
inadequate. The Devon Commission, reporting in 1845, on the eve of the
great famine, condemned the prevalent agrarian tenure, and recommended
the statutory establishment of the Ulster custom of tenant right. A very
mild and cautious Bill was introduced and dropped.

Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the rottenness of the
economic foundations upon which the welfare of Ireland depended. The
population had swollen from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a
half millions in 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law
of propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence. What
happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, not a serious matter
in most countries, but in Ireland the cause of starvation to
three-quarters of a million persons, and the starting-point of that vast
exodus which in the last half of the nineteenth century drained Ireland
of nearly four million souls. The famine passed, and with it all
recollection of the report of the Devon Commission. Hitherto most of the
land legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions. Now came the
Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, w