of the English manufacturers to fight the bogey of Irish competition by protective duties in England against imports from Ireland, it is not surprising that Irishmen who allow sentiment to get the upper hand of sense should now think of playing a return game.  England went in fear then not only of Irish beasts and Irish butter, but of Irish woollens, Irish cottons, Irish leather, Irish glass.  Nay, absurd as it may now seem, English ironmasters no longer ago than in 1785 testified before a Parliamentary Committee that unless a duty was clapped on Irish manufactures of iron, the Irish ironmasters had such advantages through cheaper labour and through the discrimination in their favour under the then existing relations with the new Republic of the United States that they would “ruin the ironmasters of England.”

In Ireland, as in America, the benign spirit of Free Trade is thwarted and intercepted at every turn by the abominable ghost of British Protection.  What a blessing it would have been if the meddlesome palaverers of the Cobden Club, American as well as English, could ever have been made to understand the essentially insular character of Protection and the essentially continental character of Free Trade!

It should never be forgotten, and it is almost never remembered, that when the Treaty of Versailles was making in 1783 the American Commissioners offered complete free trade between the United States and all parts of the British Dominions save the territories of the East India Company.  The British Commissioner, David Hartley, saw the value of this proposition, and submitted it at London.  But King George III. would not entertain it.

When I rose to leave him Father Keller courteously insisted on showing me the “lions” of Youghal.  A most accomplished cicerone he proved to be.  As we left his house we met in the street two or three of the “evicted” tenants, whom he introduced to me.  One of these, Mr. Loughlin, was the holder of farms representing a rental of L94.  A stalwart, hearty, rotund, and rubicund farmer he was, and in reply to my query how long the holdings he had lost had been in his family, he answered, “not far from two hundred years.”  Certainly some one must have blundered as badly as at Balaklava to make it necessary for a tenant with such a past behind him to go out of his holdings on arrears of a twelvemonth.  Father Keller gave me, as we left Mr. Loughlin and his friend, a leaflet in which he has printed the story of “the struggle for life on the Ponsonby estate,” as he understands it.

A minute’s walk brought us to Sir Walter Raleigh’s house, now the property of Sir John Pope Hennessey.  It was probably built by Sir Walter while he lived here in 1588-89, during the time of the great Armada; for it is a typical Elizabethan house, quaintly gabled, with charming Tudor windows, and delightfully wainscoted with richly carved black oak.  A chimney-piece in the library where Sir John’s aged mother received