I have heard and read a good deal in the past of the “Three F’s” thought a panacea for Irish discontent.  Three other F’s seem to me quite as important to the future of Irish content and public order.  These are, Fair Dealing towards Landlords as well as Tenants; Finality of Agrarian Legislation at Westminster; and last and most essential of all, Fixity of Executive Tenure.

The words I have just quoted of Earl Grey, show it to be the conviction of the oldest living leader of English Liberalism that this last is the vital point, the key of the situation.  Let me bracket with his words, and leave to the consideration of my readers, the following pregnant passage from a letter written to me by an Irish correspondent who is as devoted to Irish independence as is Earl Grey to imperial unity:—­

“If the present Nationalist movement succeeds, it will have the effect of putting the worst elements of the Irish nation in power, and keeping them there irremoveably.  We are to have an Executive at the mercy of a House of Representatives, and the result will be a government, or series of governments, as weak and vicious as those of France, with this difference, that here all purifying changes such as seem imminent in France will be absolutely prevented by the irresistible power of England.  The true model for us would be a constitution like yours in the United States, with an Executive responsible to the nation at large, and irremoveable for a term of years.  But this we shall never get from England.  Shall we make use of Home Rule to take it for ourselves?

“Many earnest and active Irish Unionists now say that if any bill resembling Mr. Gladstone’s passes, they will make separation, their definite policy.  If Home Rule comes without the landlords having been bought out on reasonable terms, a class will be created in Ireland full of bitter and most just hatred of England—­a class which may very likely one day play the part here which the persecuted Irish Presbyterians who fled from the tyranny of the English Church in Ireland played in your own Revolution beyond the Atlantic.”

APPENDIX.

NOTE F.

THE “MOONLIGHTERS” AND “HOME RULE.”

(Vol. ii. p. 38.)

On Monday, the 1st of February 1886, the Irish Times published the following story from Tralee, near the scene of the “boycotting,” temporal and spiritual, of the unfortunate daughters of Mr. Jeremiah Curtin, murdered in his own house by “moonlighters":—­

   “TRALEE, Sunday.

“It was stated that the bishop had ordered Mass to be celebrated for them—­the Curtins—­but this did not take place.  At the village of Firies a number of people had assembled.  They stopped loitering about the place in the forenoon, waiting for a meeting of the National League, which was subsequently held.  A threatening notice was discovered posted up