Well might Mr. Heron say, in a paper read before the Irish Statistical Society, in May, 1864:  “Under the present laws, no Irish peasant able to read and write ought to remain in Ireland.  If Ireland were an independent country, in the present state of things there would be a bloody insurrection in every county, and the peasantry would ultimately obtain the property in land, as they have obtained it in Switzerland and in France.”  That the Irish people will eventually become the masters of the Irish property, from which every effort has been made to dispossess them, by fair means and by foul, since the Norman invasion of Ireland, I have not the slightest doubt.  The only doubt is whether the matter will be settled by the law or by the sword.  But I have hope that the settlement will be peaceful, when I find English members of Parliament treating thus of the subject, and ministers declaring, at least when they are out of office, that something should be done for Ireland.

Mr. Stuart Mill writes:  “The land of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people of that country.  The individuals called landowners have no right, in morality or justice, to anything but the rent, or compensation for its saleable value.  When the inhabitants of a country quit the country en masse, because the Government will not make it a place fit for them to live in, the Government is judged and condemned, It is the duty of Parliament to reform the landed tenure of Ireland.”

More than twenty years ago Mr. Disraeli said:  “He wished to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question was.  Let them consider Ireland as they would any other country similarly circumstanced.  They had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world.  This was the Irish question.  What would gentlemen say on hearing of a country in such a position?  They would say at once, in such case, the remedy is revolution—­not the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.  But the connexion with England prevented it:  therefore England was logically in the active position of being the cause of all the misery of Ireland.  What, then, was the duty of an English minister?  To effect by policy all the changes which a revolution would do by force.”  If these words had been acted upon in 1848, we should not have had a Fenian insurrection in 1867.  If a peaceful revolution is to be accomplished a few persons must suffer, though, in truth, it is difficult to see what Irish landlords could lose by a fair land law, except the power to exercise a tyrannical control over their tenants.  I believe, if many English absentee landlords had even the slightest idea of the evil deeds done in their names by their agents, that they would not tolerate it for a day.  If a complaint is made to the landlord, he refers it to his agent.  It is pretty much as if you required the man who inflicted the injury