278 «TUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



It may here be objected that, as in the scheme of the 

 Land League, the country would be impoverished by the 

 whole rental of the land being paid to the English 

 Treasury, and thus leaving the country. But this need 

 not be so, because there is a radical difference between 

 the two cases. In the Land League scheme the tenants 

 would be paying interest and repaying part of the 

 principal of a loan, and the money so paid would not, of 

 course, be again available for any local purpose ; but in 

 the case we are now considering, the ground-rent paid by 

 the tenant would be so much clear gain to the State, and 

 should therefore be applied to the remission of local and 

 general taxation in equitable proportions. But, for some 

 considerable time after the scheme came into operation, 

 large funds would be required, to be employed, by way of 

 loan or otherwise, to enable the poorer class of tenants to 

 build themslves decent houses, to make roads and fences, 

 to stock the farms, and generally to bring the holdings 

 into a reasonably good state of cultivation and 

 improvement, which has been altogether impossible under 

 the system of absentee landlords, middlemen, and 

 exorbitant rents. It must be claimed as a special merit 

 of this scheme of land reform, that it would provide ample 

 funds for such a truly national purpose as the raising of a 

 whole people from a chronic state of pauperism, only 

 relieved by emigration or by the depopulation caused by 

 famine and disease ; and we may be sure that whenever 

 the Legislature becomes sufficiently liberal and far-seeing 

 to enact such a law as is here advocated, it will be 

 generous enough to empower the National Land 

 Commission (or whatever body may be created to carry 

 the law into effect) to apply the funds at their command 

 in any way that may best further the great object of 

 raising the peasantry of Ireland into a condition of 

 independence and well-being. 



Aid of this kind would of course be strictly limited to 

 repairing the obvious physical evils which the old system 

 had brought about. When once the lowest class of 

 tenants were placed in such a condition as to enable them 

 to cultivate and improve their holdings with a fair 



