1365]

Industries.

the arts. The manufacture of bichromate of potash, used as a New
mordant in dyeing, was so highly developed at Shawfield, near
Glasgow, that the output here soon equalled that of all the king-
dom combined. The shale-oil industry, again, owed much to the

technical education of the Glasgow Andersonian College, for here Young worked and studied under Thomas Graham. Finding the bituminous coal of Boghead, near Bathgate (1850), rich in oil, Young established there a vast industry. Paraffin had been discovered (1830) independently by Reichenbach and by Christison of Edinburgh. To the early studies of the latter

P. W.
JOYCE.
Ireland.

"Young Ireland."

The Land
War.

[1846

(1818) was also due the application of naphtha as the best solvent of india-rubber. But Macintosh of Glasgow and Hancock of Liverpool stepped in here, and reaped all the honour and profit. Large rubber (1855) and vulcanite (1862) works were set agoing in Edinburgh. Floor-cloth making was successfully established in 1847 at Kirkcaldy, and this, the cradle of the industry, is still without a rival in the trade.

AFTER the proclamation of the Clontarf meeting in 1843 (p. 338) there was a serious split in the Repeal party. The younger men grew tired of O'Connell's method of peaceful constitutional agitation, as leading to nothing; stronger views began to prevail among them; and a number of them--all men of great ability and of the highest character-seceded and formed what is known as the Young Ireland party. O'Connell had mainly worked for and by Catholics, but these men entered on the task of uniting the whole of the Irish people of all religions in one grand organisation. Their organ was the Nation, a weekly paper, founded by Thomas Davis, a Protestant, and by Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, two Catholics. Meantime the famine came; O'Connell died; and in 1848 the Young Ireland party sprang at once into great prominence. The Nation continued to be conducted with great literary ability; but several other papers of a much more violent character were started by men of more advanced opinions, conspicuous among whom was John Mitchel, a Unitarian, the most powerful and daring writer of them all. At last, in 1848, the Government issued a number of warrants; and there was an abortive rising under William Smith O'Brien, Dillon, Thomas Francis Meagher, and others. The leaders were nearly all arrested and sentenced to various terms of penal servitude. It may be said that this brought to a close the brilliant and brief Young Ireland movement.

The land troubles inherited from the bad old times of the Plantations reached an acute stage in the years following the famine. Those of the tenants who survived that calamity came out of the trial utterly impoverished; the landlords pressed for impossible rents, and evictions came by the thousand. In Ireland, as a rule, the tenants made all the farm improvements:changing moorland into arable, building, draining, fencing, sub

1865]

soiling, and so forth; the landlords, with rare exceptions, did nothing. Accordingly, in almost all cases of eviction, the tenants had to leave behind them the results of the labour of a life, which formed the best part of their capital. There was much resistance, but it was in most cases in the shape of secret outrage. Thus the bitter land war went on; and for ten years or so after the

famine Ireland was one of the most perturbed and most miserable countries on the face of the earth.

bered

A large proportion of the landlords as well as of the tenants Encumhad been ruined by the famine, and their estates were heavily Estates mortgaged. To relieve these by enabling them to dispose of Act. their property, the Government, in 1849, instituted a court in Dublin to facilitate the sale of encumbered estates. The Act was purely in the interest of the landlords, and no thought was taken of the tenants. The purchasers bought the estates as they stood, including the tenants' permanent improvements, which were all confiscated by becoming the property of the new landlords. In 1850 a Land League was formed in Ireland with the

[1846-1865

object of forcing the Government to pass some measure of relief; and several Bills were introduced from time to time, which came to nothing. In 1860 the Government passed a Bill by which all improvements made by the tenant by the tenant were secured to him, provided they had been made with the consent of the landlord; but the landlords never gave consent, and this Bill turned out quite ineffective. Meantime it soon appeared that under the operations of the Encumbered Estates Act the state of the country became worse than before. The new proprietors were generally men who had purchased as a speculation-merely to make money-having no knowledge of the tenantry and no sympathy with them. Rents were very generally raised; there was a resurgence of evictions, resistance, outrages, and emigration; and the peasantry continued to disappear from the face of the country.