These are such commonplaces in every other part of the Empire, which has an individual life of its own, that men smile if you suggest the contrary.  But ordinary reasoning is rarely applied to Ireland.  There “good government” has been held to be “a substitute for self-government” and a regime of benevolent paternalism to be a full and sufficient compensation for cruel coercion and crueller neglect.  In this paternal regime it is impossible to include those great measures of land reform passed in 1870, 1881, and 1887, which revolutionized the agrarian system, and converted the cottier tenant into a judicial tenant.[42] Although these measures, which fall into an altogether different category from the subsequent policy of State-aided Land Purchase,[43] were inspired by an earnest desire to mitigate frightful social evils, they cannot be regarded as voluntary.  They were extorted, shocking as the reflection is, by crime and violence, by the spectacle of a whole social order visibly collapsing, and by the desperate efforts of a handful of Irishmen, determined at any cost, by whatever means, to save the bodies and souls of their countrymen.  The methods of these men were destructive.  They were constructive only in this, the highest sense of all, that while battling against concrete economic evils, they sought to obtain for Ireland the right to control her own affairs and cure her own economic evils.  It is often said that Parnell gave a tremendous impetus to the Home Rule movement by harnessing it to the land question.  True; but what a strange way of expressing a truth!  Anywhere outside Ireland men would say that self-government was the best road to the reform of a bad land system.

With the tranquillity which was slowly restored by the alterations in agrarian tenure and the immense economic relief derived from the lowering of rents, a change came over the spirit of British statesmanship.  With the exception of the short Liberal Government of 1892-1895, which failed for the second time to carry Home Rule, Conservatives were responsible for Ireland from 1886 to 1905.  They felt that opposition to Home Rule could be justified only by a strenuous policy of amelioration in Ireland, and the efforts of three Chief Secretaries, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. Gerald Balfour, and Mr. George Wyndham—­efforts often made in the teeth of bitter opposition from Irish Unionists—­to carry out this policy, were sincere and earnest.  The Act of 1891, with its grants for light railways, its additional facilities for Land Purchase, and its establishment of the Congested Districts Board to deal with the terrible poverty of certain districts in the west, may be said to mark the beginning of the new era.  The Land Act of 1896 was another step, and the establishment of a complete system of Irish Local Government in 1898 another.  In the following year came the Act setting up the Department of Agriculture, and in 1903 Mr. Wyndham’s great Land Purchase Act.  Then came the strange