A long summer was spent by me in that loveliest of all parks, the Phœnix, as the guest of Edward Cardwell, then Chief Secretary and real head of the Irish government. Under Cardwell’s roof the Irish Question was fully discussed by able men, Robert Lowe among the number. But I had a still greater advantage in constant and lasting intercourse with such friends as Lord Chancellor O’Hagan, Sir Alexander Macdonald, the head of the Education Department, and other leading Irish Liberals of the moderate

Of all histories the history of Ireland is the saddest. For nearly seven centuries it was a course of strife between races, bloodshed, massacre, misgovernment, civil war, oppression, and misery. Hardly even now have the troubles of Ireland come to a close, either for herself or for her partner. Unrest still reigns in her and, embodied in her Parliamentary delegation, harasses the Parliament and distracts the councils of Great Britain. The theatre of this tragedy is a large island lying beside on

It was not likely that the colony, in the state in which it was, would gain by emigration from England. It was probably losing by depletion. English kings drew soldiers from it for their wars. There being no university or means of education, youths who wanted to study went to Oxford, where, though they were not native Irish, they seem to have played in academical brawls the part which native Irish might have played. Thus the colony was emptied of its intellect. Fiefs by feudal rule of descent pa

During the early part of the reign of Henry VIII. the policy of the English government was a continuation of that of Henry VII. It was a policy of conciliation and of ruling through the great Irish chiefs, the heads of the Butlers, the Geraldines, and the O’Neills, who were gratified by the bestowal of English titles of nobility, with flattering marks of confidence, and by a change in the tenure of their land from tribal to feudal, which invested them with full ownership. The Irish chief and the

Thus the day of the Elizabethan era which dawned so brightly upon England came on in heavy clouds for the unhappy dependency. The religious compromise which it brought to England was adapted by the English statesmen who framed it to the religious condition and temperament of their own people. To the condition and temperament of the Irish people there was no such adaptation. To the Catholic lords of the Pale the Elizabethan religion was alien; to the native Celts it was not only alien, but utterl

Ireland, conquered, now became shire land, at least in contemplation of law. The law of England, in the eyes of its professors the consummation of human wisdom, ousted the Brehon law. The feudal system of land tenure supplanted the tribal system. Freehold and leasehold, primogeniture and entail, took the place of tribal ownership and tanistry. Justice was henceforth to be administered in English courts, and judges were to go circuit as in England. The change at first seemed to be well received.

There was still in Ireland a mine charged with the wrath of the dispossessed added to the hatred of race and religion, the religious hatred being the more deadly because, the Protestants of Ireland being Calvinist, the antagonism was extreme. The match was applied to the mine by the outbreak of revolution in England under Charles I. Strafford, having passed from the ranks of patriotism to the place left vacant by the death of Buckingham in the councils of the king, came with his dark look of com

The death of the Protector before his hour, and the military anarchy which ensued, brought on the Restoration. The Restoration brought claims on the part of dispossessed Royalism for restitution in both countries. The occupants of confiscated lands in Ireland, seeing what must come, had under the leadership of opportunist politicians, such as Broghill and Cork, worshipped with politic rapture the return of the Royal Sun. The disinherited on the other hand clamorously pressed their claim to resti

Signs of preparation for the Stuart attack on Protestantism and liberty were visible in Ireland as well as in England in the last years of Charles II. But the blow was suspended during the life of the Merry Monarch, who preferred the calm of the seraglio to the stir of a great enterprise, and did not want to go again upon his travels. With the accession of Charles’s fanatical and blundering brother, the crisis came. The Viceroy Clarendon, a Tory of Tories, but an Anglican, was deposed from the v

In that mortal struggle, had the Catholic won, he would have deprived the Protestant certainly of his land, perhaps of his life. The Protestant, having won, proceeded at once to avenge and secure himself by binding down his vanquished foe with chains of iron. Chains of iron indeed they were. By the series of enactments called the Penal Code, passed by the Irish Parliament with some assistance from that of England, the Irish Catholic was reduced to helotage political and social, while measures we

Presently, too, inexorable nature made her voice heard, proclaiming that Ireland, with its rich pastures and watery skies, was in the main not an arable but a grazing country. There was a good market for meat. Speculators began buying up land and throwing it into large grazing farms. The cotter was ejected and driven to the bogs and mountains. This overtaxed even a cotter’s submission, and there broke out an agrarian war, the most deadly perhaps in history, the canker and disgrace of British gov

There was no lack, say apologists of the Irish Parliament, of useful legislation on subjects with which a landed gentry was qualified to deal. There was a fatal lack of legislation on one momentous subject with which a land-owning gentry ought to be qualified to deal, but from which the Irish Parliament resolutely turned its eyes. For half a century before the union, that body steadfastly abstained from inquiring into the causes of disaffection among the peasantry. It even repressed a report upo

Pitt now resolved on a legislative union of Ireland with England and Scotland, thus reverting to the policy of the Commonwealth. But union had been the ideal of Molyneux, and since the revolution of 1782 it had found many advocates, among them Adam Smith. An Irish government of sectarian ascendancy and oligarchy combined, controlled, and held in precarious subordination to the government of Great Britain by intrigue and corruption, had ended in murderous and ruinous conflict of political parties

Daniel O’Connell, whose figure fills the next page in Irish history, was a Dublin barrister who, having gained a unique reputation as a skilful or more than skilful winner of verdicts, passed from the forensic to the political field. He was of pure Irish blood, Irish in physiognomy, typically Irish in character. Nature had endowed him with all the gifts of a popular leader, bodily as well as mental; for he had a voice of unrivalled power and compass as well as extraordinary tact in dealing with

From disestablishment of the Church Gladstone, now in the full swing of his Liberalism, proceeded next year to reform the land system of Ireland. Taking his cue from Ulster tenant-right, perhaps also from English copyhold, he passed an act, the first of a series which, by giving compensation for improvements and for disturbance, restricting eviction, regulating rents, and furnishing to the tenant by government loans the means of purchasing the fee, has gone far towards transferring the ownership

Looking back on these most melancholy annals, we shall find that for their general sadness Nature is as much to be blamed as man. She did well in placing at the side of a country rich in coal and minerals, destined to be manufacturing, one of pasture to supply food. She made a fatal mistake in peopling them with different and uncongenial races. War, in the age of war, and conquest of the weaker by the stronger were sure to be the result. For the form in which conquest came, the Papacy has partly

By Hugh J. McCann, B.L. The Irish landlord, poor as his circumstances were before the famine, was in many instances reduced to sorer straits after the terrible scourge had passed away. The good landlord, anxious to do his duty by his tenants, helped them as far as his mortgages and other financial burdens would allow. The tyrannical one, regardless of the sufferings of his victims, sought to extract impossible rents from an unfortunate tenantry who had scarcely the means of subsistence. The Encu