hose purpose was to facilitate the
buying out of bankrupt Irish landlords, and whose effect was to
perpetuate the old agrarian system under a new set of more mercenary
landlords, pursuing the old policy of rack-rents and evictions. In the
three years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls.
Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to retaliate
with the same old defensive policy of outrage. Peaceful agitation was
of no use. The Tenant League of North and South, formed in 1852, claimed
in vain the simplest of the rights granted under pressure of violence in
1870 and 1881.

Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for any but
secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the century, when a
remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, with the general consent of
British statesmen and parties. Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of
1829, which was recommended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a
measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized rebellion
in Ireland. Tithes, the unjust burden of a century and a half, were only
commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years' War revolting in its incidents.
Mr. Gladstone admitted, and no one who studies the course of events can
deny, that without the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown
thereby on the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to
carry the Act--again overdue by a century--for the disestablishment of
the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid and ineffectual as it
was, of 1870. Without the organized lawlessness of the Land League it
would have been equally impossible to bring about those more drastic
changes in Irish land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested
interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 1881,
and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret conspiracy,
extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896.

Briefly, the effect of these Acts was to establish three principles: a
fair rent, fixed by a judicial tribunal, the Land Commission, and
revisable every fifteen years; fixity of tenure as long as the rent is
paid; and free sale of the tenant-right.

The remedy eventually brought widespread relief, but, from a social and
economic standpoint, it was not the right remedy. There is no security
for good legislation unless it be framed by those who are to live under
it. Constructive thought in Ireland for the solution of her own
di