policy.  Their responsibility was transferred to English statesmen, who were not fitted, by temperament or training, to undertake it, and who always looked at the Irish land question, which had no counterpart in England, through English spectacles.  We cannot attribute their failure to lack of information.  At every stage there was plenty of unbiassed and instructed testimony, Whig and Tory, Protestant and Catholic, independent and official, as to the nature and origin of the trouble.  Mill and Bright, in 1862, only emphasized what Arthur Young had said in 1772, and what Edward Wakefield, Sharman Crawford, Michael Sadler, Poulett Scrope, and many other writers, thinkers, and politicians had confirmed in the intervening period, and what every fair-minded man admits now to be the truth.  Commission after Commission reported the main facts correctly, if the remedies they proposed were inadequate.  The Devon Commission, reporting in 1845, on the eve of the great famine, condemned the prevalent agrarian tenure, and recommended the statutory establishment of the Ulster custom of tenant right.  A very mild and cautious Bill was introduced and dropped.

Next year came the famine, revealing in an instant the rottenness of the economic foundations upon which the welfare of Ireland depended.  The population had swollen from four millions in 1788 to nearly eight and a half millions in 1846, an unhealthy expansion, due to the well-known law of propagation in inverse ratio to the adequacy of subsistence.  What happened was merely the failure of the potato-crop, not a serious matter in most countries, but in Ireland the cause of starvation to three-quarters of a million persons, and the starting-point of that vast exodus which in the last half of the nineteenth century drained Ireland of nearly four million souls.  The famine passed, and with it all recollection of the report of the Devon Commission.  Hitherto most of the land legislation had been designed to facilitate evictions.  Now came the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849, whose purpose was to facilitate the buying out of bankrupt Irish landlords, and whose effect was to perpetuate the old agrarian system under a new set of more mercenary landlords, pursuing the old policy of rack-rents and evictions.  In the three years 1849-1852, 58,423 families were evicted, or 306,120 souls.  Aroused from the stupor of the famine, the peasants had to retaliate with the same old defensive policy of outrage.  Peaceful agitation was of no use.  The Tenant League of North and South, formed in 1852, claimed in vain the simplest of the rights granted under pressure of violence in 1870 and 1881.