Englishmen, inheriting English conceptions of the rights of landed property, to devise any means of placing the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland, inhuman and absurd as they were, on a sound and durable basis.  The dual ownership set up by the Land Acts was more humane, but in some respects no less absurd and mischievous.  It exasperated the landlord, while, by placing before the tenant the continual temptation of further reductions in rent, it tended to check good cultivation.

Men came to realize at last that the complete expropriation of the landlords through the State-aided purchase of the land was the only logical resource, and this process, begun tentatively and on a very small scale as far back as 1870, under the inspiration of John Bright, and extended under a series of other Acts, was eventually set in motion on a vast scale by the Wyndham Act of 1903.

I leave a final review of Purchase and of other quite recent remedial legislation, as well as the far more important movements for regeneration from within, to later chapters.  Meanwhile, let us pause for a moment and pronounce upon the political system which made such havoc in Ireland.  All this havoc, all this incalculable waste of life, energy, brains, and loyalty, was preventable and unnecessary.  Ethics and honour apart, where was the common sense of the legislative Union?  Would it have been possible to design a system better calculated to embitter, impoverish, and demoralize a valuable portion of the Empire?

Let us now turn our eyes across the Atlantic, and observe the effects of an Imperial policy founded on the same root idea.

FOOTNOTES: 

[19] “Principles of Political Economy,” vol. ii., p. 392.

CHAPTER V

CANADA AND IRELAND

In comparing the history of Canada with the closely allied history of Ireland, we must bear in mind that in the last half of the eighteenth century the present British North America consisted of three distinct portions:  Acadia, or the Maritime Provinces, which we now know as Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, colonized originally by a few Frenchmen and later by Scotch and Irish; Lower Canada, extensively colonized by the French, which we now know as the Province of Quebec; and Upper Canada, which we now know as Ontario, colonized last of all by Americans under circumstances to be described.

In 1763, before the repeal of any part of the Penal Code against Irish Roman Catholics, the French Catholic Colony of Lower Canada, with a population of about seventy thousand souls and the two small towns of Quebec and Montreal, passed definitely into British possession under the Treaty of Paris, which brought to a conclusion the Seven Years’ War.  Fortunately, there was no question, as in Ireland, of expropriating the owners of the soil in favour of State-aided British