fficulties and the harmonizing of her own discordant elements had been
systematically dammed, or diverted into revolutionary excesses, which,
in the traditional spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for
more stupid torture. Thus, O'Connell, whose attachment to law was so
strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached seemingly
irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it, was tried for
sedition. So, too, were dissipated the brilliant talents of the Young
Ireland group and the grave statesmanship of Isaac Butt. Fits intervened
of a penitent and bungling philanthropy which has left its traces on
nearly all Irish institutions. For example, it was decided in 1830 that
the Irish must be educated, and a system was set up which was
deliberately designed to anglicize Ireland and extirpate Roman
Catholicism. Four years later, in defiance of Irish opinion, a Poor Law
pedantically copied from the English model was applied to Ireland. The
railway system also was grossly mismanaged. And so with the land. When
reform eventually came, the evil had gone too far, and it was beyond the
art of the ablest and noblest Englishmen, inheriting English conceptions
of the rights of landed property, to devise any means of placing the
relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland, inhuman and absurd as
they were, on a sound and durable basis. The dual ownership set up by
the Land Acts was more humane, but in some respects no less absurd and
mischievous. It exasperated the landlord, while, by placing before the
tenant the continual temptation of further reductions in rent, it tended
to check good cultivation.

Men came to realize at last that the complete expropriation of the
landlords through the State-aided purchase of the land was the only
logical resource, and this process, begun tentatively and on a very
small scale as far back as 1870, under the inspiration of John Bright,
and extended under a series of other Acts, was eventually set in motion
on a vast scale by the Wyndham Act of 1903.

I leave a final review of Purchase and of other quite recent remedial
legislation, as well as the far more important movements for
regeneration from within, to later chapters. Meanwhile, let us pause for
a moment and pronounce upon the political system which made such havoc
in Ireland. All this havoc, all this incalculable waste of life, energy,
brains, and loyalty, was preventable and unnecessary. Ethics and honour
apart,