The very name of the Land League is significant.  Home Rule was a mere theme for academic discussion in the mouth of Mr. Butt.  Repeal itself never touched the strongest passions of Irish nature, though advocated by the most eloquent and popular of Irish orators.  Not an independent Parliament, but independent ownership of land, has always been the desire of Irish cultivators.  It was a cry for the land which gave force to the demand for Home Rule; and an Irish agitator, if his strength fails, renews it by touching the earth.  But why confine our observation to Ireland?  We here come upon the passions, not of Irish nature, but of human nature.  There is not a landowner in France who does not care tenfold more for the security of his land than for the form of the government.  If peasants trembled for their property the Republic would fall to-morrow.  This is no mere conjecture; the peasantry were Jacobins as long as the Jacobins gave them the land, they were Imperialists whilst Napoleon was their security against a restoration which to them meant confiscation of land purchased or seized during the Revolution.  The country population of France heard with indifference of the fall of Louis Philippe, and possibly approved the proclamation of the second Republic.  But the communism of 1848 roused every landowner against Paris.  The peasant proprietors filled the benches of the National Assembly with Conservatives or Reactionists who would save them from plunder; fear became for once the cause of courage, and dread of loss of property sent thousands of peasant proprietors to Paris, that they might crush by force of arms the socialist insurrection of June.  Perjury, fraud, and cruelty disgraced the coup d’etat of 1851.  But, as Liberals now see, the second Empire, hateful though it was to every man who loved freedom or cared for integrity, did not owe the permanence of its power to cunning or to violence.  It was the dread of the Red Spectre which drove the landowners of France into Imperialism; they may have liked parliamentary liberty, it was a pleasant luxury, but they loved their land and property, it was their life-blood, and by Socialism their land and property was they believed menaced.

As to the Coercion Act, no sensible man, be he Radical or Tory, need trouble himself.  The Criminal Law and Procedure (Ireland) Act, 1887, is neither a disgrace to England nor an injury to Ireland.  Its permanence, which is the cause of its mildness, is its merit.  Well would it have been had the Act been extended to the whole United Kingdom.  Local laws are open to some of the same objections as temporary laws.  The enactment contains some improvements in our criminal procedure.  There is no more idle superstition than the belief that criminal procedure does not, like other human arrangements, require change.  If incendiarism should become an element in the conduct of trade disputes, if dynamite is to be recognised as a legitimate arm in political conflicts, the criminal law of the United Kingdom will, we may be sure, need and receive several alterations and improvements.