Nearly as much may be said of the prevention of the mischievous practice of Subdivision.  Some contend that the old disposition to subdivide is dying out; others, however, assure us that it is making its appearance even among the excellent class who purchased their holdings under the Church Act.  That Act did not prohibit subdivision, but it is prohibited in the Act of 1881.  Still the prohibition can only be made effective, if operations take place on anything like a great scale, on condition that representative, authorities resident on the spot have the power of enforcing it, and have an interest in enforcing it.  Some of the pseudo-Unionists are even against any extension of local self-government, and if it be unaccompanied by the creation of a central native authority they are right.  What such people fail to see is that, in resisting political reconstruction, they are at the same time resisting the only available remedies for some of the worst of agrarian maladies.

The ruinous interplay between agrarian and political forces, each using the other for ends of its own, will never cease so long as the political demand is in every form resisted.  That, we are told, is all the fault of the politicians.  Be it so; then the Government must either suppress the politicians outright, or else it must interest them in getting the terms of its land settlement accepted and respected.  Home Rule on our scheme was, among other things, part of an arrangement for “settling the agrarian feud.”  It was a means of interposing between the Irish tenant and the British State an authority interested enough and strong enough to cause the bargain to be kept.  It is said that the Irish authority would have had neither interest nor strength enough to resist the forces making for repudiation.  Would those forces be any less irresistible if the whole body of the Irish peasantry stood, as Land Purchase minus Self-Government makes them to stand, directly face to face with the British State?  This is a question that our opponents cannot evade, any more than they can evade that other question, which lies unnoticed at the back of all solutions of the problem by way of peasant ownership—­Whether it is possible to imagine the land of Ireland handed over to Irishmen, and yet the government of Ireland kept exclusively and directly by Englishmen?  Such a divorce is conceivable under a rule like that of the British in India:  with popular institutions it is inconceivable and impossible.

5.  It is argued that Home Rule on Mr. Gladstone’s plan would not work, because it follows in some respects the colonial system, whereas the conditions at the root of the success of the system in the Colonies do not exist in Ireland.  They are distant, Ireland is near; they are prosperous, Ireland is poor; they are proud of the connection with England, Ireland resents it.  But the question is not whether the conditions are identical with those of any colony; it is enough if in themselves they seem to promise