but the cod-fishery of the British coasts has never attained the overwhelming importance that our herring-fishery has, nor does it with us approach the magnitude that it reaches on the banks of Newfoundland, and in the seas of Iceland and the Loffoden Islands, in which last locality upwards of 20,000,000,000 are said to be annually taken!

Extra

We cannot conclude without a few words on eels. ordinary as it may seem, considering the abundance of this species of fish in this country, Dr. Günther has at the present day to write of it as might have been written by Artedi or Bloch a century ago:

Their mode of propagation is still unknown. So much only is certain, that they do not spawn in fresh water, that many full-grown individuals, but not all, descend rivers during the winter months, and that some of them at least must spawn in brackish water or in deep water in the sea; for in the course of the summer young individuals from three to five inches long ascend rivers in incredible numbers, overcoming all obstacles, ascending vertical walls or floodgates, entering every larger and smaller tributary, and making their way even over terra firma to waters shut off from all communication with rivers. Such immigrations have long been known by the name of "Eel-fairs." The majority of the eels which migrate to the sea appear to return to fresh water, but not in a body, but irregularly, and throughout the warmer part of the year. No naturalist has ever observed these fishes in the act of spawning, or found mature ova; and the organs of reproduction of individuals caught in fresh water are so little developed and so much alike, that the female organ can be distinguished from the male only with the aid of a microscope.'— (pp. 672, 673.)

Here we must stop, far as we are from having said all we should wish of this volume-a book the like of which, we believe, does not elsewhere exist and one which, if it will not interest a majority of our readers, cannot fail to please all who have any taste for Natural History and a desire to know more of it.

ART.

ART. VIII.-1. The Irish Land Act of 1881. London, 1881. 2. Speeches of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., during the Recess.

1881.

3. Official Reports of Outrages in Ireland. 1880-$1.

4. Letters of the Duke of Argyll and Mr. J. Chamberlain, M.P. 1881.

THE

HE time is now at hand when the Government will be compelled to defend a policy which has brought to pass a series of events calculated to amaze, not only the British nation, but the entire civilized world. It will be admitted that it has evinced no inclination to anticipate by a single moment the discharge of this duty. Mr. Gladstone has shown a strong desire to avoid being hampered by Cabinet meetings, just as he has shown, on many previous occasions, an uncontrollable impatience of the ordinary forms of Parliamentary discussion. Towards the end of last November, the intimation appeared in one of the numerous journals which struggle so zealously for the first place in official esteem, that the Cabinet would meet no more until the new year, and that the Prime Minister would forthwith retire into Wales. The Government, in fact, desired to have it generally understood that, although much foolish excitement prevailed in the newspaper world, the country was tranquil, contented, and prosperous. In accordance with the programme thus considerately advertised, the close of the first week in December witnessed the disappearance of the Cabinet. A letter or two appeared now and then from the Prime Minister, forewarning the House of Commons that it must be brought into due subjection to his wishes, even at the sacrifice of that freedom of debate which has been its boast for centuries. There was also a series of hardy, but futile, attempts on the part of Mr. Chamberlain to reconcile his former support of the Irish Land League with the wholesale imprisonment of its leaders, male and female. No other sign of life was given for nearly two months. Even Sir W. Harcourt relapsed into silence.

Any one who had been in the habit of observing the various movements which go on in the political world must have looked upon all this with bewilderment. During the last few years, whenever the Conservatives happened to be in power, Mr. Gladstone has frequently been impelled by his high sense of duty to come before the nation with an emphatic warning against the perils of permitting a Minister to take too much power into his own hands. Visions of usurpation disturbed his slumbers, and he saw with dismay the liberties of the people threatened

threatened with extinction. If a fortnight elapsed without a Cabinet meeting, danger signals were promptly exhibited from the well-known watch-tower, and the note of alarm was passed rapidly from one 'caucus' to another. In so grave a state of affairs,' he wrote on one such occasion, I trust we shall soon hear of a meeting of the Cabinet.' What caused him disquietude at that moment was the report of certain outrages far off in the province of Bulgaria. When he retired to his home last December, barbarous outrages, perpetrated under circumstances which might have moved the hardest heart to pity, were occurring daily and hourly in Ireland, but we did not hear of a meeting of the Cabinet.' The Prime Minister himself made a long railroad journey without delivering a single speech on the way. The rest of the Ministry dispersed in the happiest frame of mind, and multitudes of helpless women and children were left to the tender mercies of Captain Moonlight and Rory of the Hills.

The indifference exhibited by the Government for the misery which it has in no slight degree occasioned is consistent with its entire policy, and it is fully shared by its customary supporters. They are ready to admit, upon compulsion, that what Mr. Chamberlain has pleasantly described as this kind of thing'-referring to murders, maimings, and brutal assaultsis to be regretted; but, after all, what have we a right to expect? The Irish are gifted with a sensitive nature and a lively imagination, and they cannot always control their feelings when they are asked to pay rent. If occasionally they are unable to resist the temptation to cut off a neighbour's ears, or to hamstring his cattle, it is our duty to remember the wrongs inflicted upon their country by Saxon rule. We are also frequently reminded that 'things' were much worse in 1798. It is to be hoped that these considerations have afforded comfort to the bereaved or impoverished mothers and children for whom 1881 was a year of calamity, ever to be remembered with sorrow and tears. If discontent was more rife in 1798, at least we had then made no great effort to allay it. Since that time concession after concession has been granted, and healing measures' have been passed almost without number. Catholic disabilities are gone; so is the Irish Church; so is the right of the landlord to manage his own property. Priesthood and laity alike have had almost everything yielded to them which they have demanded-except total separation; and even that is not altogether beyond their hopes. But it is clear that we have made no approach whatever towards a true conciliation of the people. The spectacle which has been presented for many months

months past in Ireland is, considering all the circumstances of the time, entirely without a parallel. Numbers of families have been deprived of the ordinary protection of the law, and have almost entirely lost their means of subsistence. Some of them have been brought to the very verge of starvation, and are compelled to depend upon public charity for food, or to take refuge from cold and hunger within the walls of the workhouse. The Ministry hope to be able to tell Parliament, with some plausibility, that outrages are less numerous than they were; but the truth is that the system of terrorism is now so complete that there is no necessity,' as Mr. Parnell once said, for murders. This is 'peace,' no doubt, much in the same sense as that in which Byron, after Tacitus, describes it. If nobody is killed, it is because nobody resists. Meanwhile, the entire relations between landlord and tenant have been practically reversed. The tenant, as an Irish correspondent has recently explained, 'is owner of the soil, while his landlord is only a receiver of rent (if he can get it). With his lease for fifteen years and a covenant for perpetual renewal, at a rent fixed by himself and his neighbours, and with the sanction of his sympathetic friends, the Sub-Commissioners, the tenant is better off than the nominal owner of the fee. If the times prove more prosperous, his alone will be the benefit, and at the end of the fifteen years his good farming will be rewarded, and his rent remain unchanged.'

*

The only offence, which has been charged against the class which has thus been dispossessed of its rights, is that it had inherited or purchased land. It is not pretended that the majority of landlords have been harsh or unjust in the exercise of their rights; on the contrary, Mr. Gladstone himself, in introducing the measure for their spoliation, expressly declared that they had been put upon their trial, and had been acquitted. Mr. Chamberlain, whose ideas concerning the private property of others are at least as liberal as Mr. Gladstone's, admitted that he could not find a single word to say against Irish landlords as a class;' that they had upon the whole been 'just, and even generous.'† Against the most helpless of this classthose who are unable from poverty or other causes to leave Ireland—a war has been waged in which cruelty in almost every known form has had free license. It is easy to imagine how Mr. Gladstone would have made the world shudder over the barbarity of the system known as boycotting' if it had

*The Times,' January 2nd, 1882.

† Speech at Liverpool, October 26th, 1881.

grown

grown up under a Conservative Government. With the instinct of a rhetorician, he saw how grand a field for display lay here before him, and on two occasions he found it impossible to resist the temptation to venture at least upon the edge of it. He told his audience that boycotting meant simple ruin' to all who decline to obey the doctrines of the Land League.' He admitted that he had received reports of more than a thousand cases' down to that time, and he added, 'the ferocity, I may say the cruelty, with which the thing is pushed to its remotest consequences is hardly credible.' An equally emphatic description of it has been given by Earl Fitzwilliam, in a letter to the magistrates of the West Riding of Yorkshiret:

'When a man is under the ban of the League, no one may speak to him, no one may work for him; he may neither buy nor sell; he is not allowed to go to his ordinary place of worship, or to send his children to school. The horses of those who are "boycotted" are not allowed to be shod; their cattle are mutilated; their property of every description is destroyed; their lives are menaced, and have often been taken. This tyranny is not confined to the owners and occupiers of land, but is extended to the labourers who venture to work for them. The absolute martyrdom which has been endured by many honest and loyal men in Ireland has hitherto been little known or appreciated by the public in England.'

This system was notoriously in operation for many months before any effort was made to suppress it, and it formed a recognized part of the agitation which a Minister of the Crown has told us was allowed to go on unchecked, in order that 'I and my colleagues'-to use his own modest phrase-might introduce what they called their 'reforms.' So far from regretting anything that has happened, this sagacious Minister assured the public not long ago that all was well; no mistake whatever has been made; if we had to do it again, I would do the same.' The peculiar language used—'I and my colleagues,' 'I would do the same,' 'the time had come, in my opinion, to act,'' in doing this I confidently rely on the support of every Liberal'§-might naturally have given rise to the impression that it was Mr. Gladstone who was addressing the country. In reality, it proceeded not from the Prime Minister, but from the gentleman who intends to be Prime Minister, and

* At Liverpool, October 27th, 1881, and at the Guildhall, London, November 9th, 1881.

+ Published in the 'Times,' January 2nd, 1882.

Speech at Liverpool, October 26th, 1881.

§ Letter to Rev. J. P. Hopps, Times,' Dec. 26th, 1881.

who