healthy were willing and anxious to work for any wages, even for twopence a day, but were unable to obtain such or any employment.”

Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from under-development.  They tabled two sets of recommendations.  The relief programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm, lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it anticipated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912 still seems extravagantly humane.  The prevention programme outlined a scheme for the development of Irish resources.  Including, as it did, demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since.  But the report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to stand a chance.  There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who, after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law System under which we still labour.  Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to him.  If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until this is added:  “Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse.”

But, of course, the capital exploit of the Economics of Unionism was its dealing with the problem of land tenure.  I shrink from inviting the reader into the desert of selfishness and stupidity which constitutes English policy, in this regard, from the Union to the triumph of the Land League.  Let him study it at large in Davitt’s “Fall of Feudalism.”  We are not concerned here to revive that calamitous pageant.  Our interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as against government from Dublin.  Even had Grattan’s Parliament remained, the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that Parliament was an assembly controlled by landlords who, for the most part, believed as strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in the sacredness of nationality.  But by the Union the conflict was embittered and befouled.  The landlords invented their famous doctrine of conditional loyalty.  They bargained with Great Britain to the effect that, if they were permitted to pillage their tenantry, they would in return uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland.