In acceding to the claims of the National Party for Home Rule in Ireland another question had to be considered:  the demands of the English garrison, as it is called—­or, in plain words, of the class of Irish landlords—­for protection.  They urged that to grant Home Rule in Ireland would be to hand them over to their enemies, their tenants, and to lead to an immediate, or to all events a proximate, confiscation of their properties.  Without admitting the truth of these apprehensions to the full extent, or indeed to any great extent, it was undoubtedly felt by the framers of the Home Rule Bill that a moral obligation rested on the Imperial Government to remove, if possible, “the fearful exasperations attending the agrarian relations in Ireland,” rather than leave a question so fraught with danger, so involved in difficulty, to be determined by the Irish Government on its first entry on official existence.  Hence the Land Bill, the scheme of which was to frame a system under which the tenants, by being made owners of the soil, should become interested as a class in the maintenance of social order, while the landlords should be enabled to rid themselves on fair terms of their estates, in cases where, from apprehension of impending changes, or for pecuniary reasons, they were desirous of relieving themselves from the responsibilities of ownership.  Of the land scheme brought into Parliament in 1886, it need only here be said that it proposed to lend the Irish Government 3 per cent. stock at 3-1/8 per cent. interest, the Irish Government undertaking to purchase, from any Irish landlord desirous of selling, his estate at (as a general rule) twenty years’ purchase on the net rental.  The money thus disbursed by the Irish Government was repaid to them by an annuity, payable by the tenant for forty-nine years, of 4 per cent. on a capital sum equal to twenty times the gross rental; the result being that, were the Bill passed into law, the tenant would become immediate owner of the land, subject to the payment of an annuity considerably less than the previous rent—­that the Irish Government would make a considerable profit on the transaction, inasmuch as it would receive from the tenant interest calculated on the basis of the gross rental, whilst it would pay to the English Government interest calculated on the basis of the net rental—­and that the English Government would sustain no loss if the interest were duly received by them.

The effect of such a plan appears almost magical:  Ireland is transformed at one stroke from a nation of landlords into a nation of peasant proprietors—­apparently without loss to any one, and with gain to everybody concerned, except the British Government, who neither gain nor lose in the matter.  The practicability, however, of such a scheme depends altogether on the security against loss afforded to the British tax-payer, for he is industrious and heavily burdened, and cannot be expected to assent to any plan which will land