It was the old picture with which M. Paul-Dubois has acquainted us, that of the “Garrison” kneeling to England on the necks of the Irish poor.  In this perversion, which under autonomy would have been impossible, we find the explanation of the extreme savagery of Union land policy in Ireland.  Its extreme, its bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in another way.  Souchon in his introduction to the French edition of Philippovich, the great Austrian economist, observes with great truth that England has not even yet developed any sort of Agrarpolitik, that is to say any systematic Economics of Agriculture.  In the early nineteenth century her own land problems were neglected, and her political leaders were increasingly dominated by an economic gospel of shopkeepers and urban manufacturers.  Forced into the context of agrarian life such a gospel was bound to manifest itself as one of folly and disaster.

If we put these two elements together we are enabled to understand why the Union land policy in Ireland was such a portentous muddle and scandal.  In 1829 the question assumed a fresh urgency, in consequence of the eviction campaign which followed the disfranchisement of the small holders under Catholic Emancipation.  That Irish opinion, which in an Irish Parliament would have had its way, began to grapple with the situation.

Between 1829 and 1858 twenty-three Irish Land Reform Bills were introduced in the House of Commons; every one was rejected.  In the same period thirty-five Coercion Bills were introduced; every one was passed.  So it began, so it continued, until at last Irish opinion did in some measure prevail.  The Westminster Parliament clapped the “agitators” into prison, and while they were at work breaking stones stole their programme....  But I have promised to spare the reader the detailed hideousness of this Inferno, and this section must close without a word said about that miserable triad, famine, eviction, and emigration.  What may be called the centre of relevancy lies elsewhere.  We have been concerned to show how Unionism, having wrecked the whole manufacturing economy of Ireland, went on, at its worst, to wreck, at its best, to refuse to save, its whole agricultural economy.

But why recall all this “dead history”?  For two reasons:  first, because it illustrates the fundamental wrongness of Unionism; secondly, because it is not dead.

On the first point no better authority can be found than Mr W.A.S.  Hewins, the intellect of Tariff Reform.  The differences between England and Ireland, he writes in his introduction to Miss Murray’s book, are of “an organic character.”  In that phrase is concentrated the whole biology of Home Rule.  Every organism must suffer and perish unless its external circumstances echo its inner law of development.  The sin of the Union was that it imposed on Ireland from without a sort of spiked strait-jacket which could have no effect but to squeeze