THE ANALOGY OF IRELAND 8i 



passages which present such illuminating analogies 

 between India and Ireland that I cannot refrain from 

 quoting what he says about the Irish agrarian legisla- 

 tion of the last twenty-five years. 



' Whatever may be said in disparagement of the 

 great experiment in 1881, there can be no doubt that 

 it enormously improved the legal position of the Irish 

 tenantry, and I for one regard it as a necessary con- 

 tribution to the events whose logic was finally to 

 bring about the abolition of dual ownership, . . . Mr. 

 Gladstone found the land system intolerable to one 

 party ; he made it intolerable to the other. For half 

 a century laissez faire was pedantically applied to 

 Irish agriculture, then suddenly the other extreme 

 was adopted ; nothing was left alone, and political 

 economy was sent on its famous planetary excursion. 



'When Mr. Gladstone was attempting to settle the 

 land question on the basis of dual ownership, the seed 

 of a new kind of single ownership — peasant proprietor- 

 ship — was sown through the influence of John Bright. 

 The operations of the land purchase clauses in the 

 Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and the Land 

 Acts of 1870 and 1881 were enormously extended by 

 the Land Purchase Acts introduced by the Con- 

 servative party in 1885 and 1891, and the success 

 which attended these Acts accentuated the defects 

 and sealed the fate of dual ownership, which all 

 parties recently united to destroy. In other words, 

 Parliament has been undoing a generation's legislative 

 work upon the Irish land question.'* 



* ' Ireland in the New Century/ by the Right Hon. Sir Horace 

 Plunkett. Third impression, p. 25. 



