the premier received from all parts of the country, from great political and social bodies as well as from private individuals, and from societies and schools of men, women, and children, warm and enthusiastic congratulations on having completed fifty years of parliamentary life, chiefly passed in active and often in strenuous efforts for the advancement of the welfare of the country.

On the 21st of April, 1881, all England mourned the death of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. From the queen upon the throne to the cotter's child sitting on the door-step the intelligence was received with a sentiment that arose from a sense of national loss; but many, including her majesty, felt also that they were bereaved of a true and genial friend.

In an early page of this book,1 written on the day following his death, some record will be found of a political career which was perhaps the most remarkable of modern times. Of his personal and intellectual characteristics numerous illustrations will be found in these volumes.

Earl Russell had quietly gone to his rest full of years on the 28th of May, 1878. He was in his eighty-sixth year, and, though he was still honoured, he had so long been out of the sphere of practical statemanship that, as the Times said, his death removed from the world the shadow of a great name.

Thiers had died in 1877, and Victor Emmanuel in 1978; and events had been so many and so quick that it seemed but yesterday that Napoleon III. had come in his second exile to England, and had there been laid in the mausoleum at Chislehurst. Thirlwall, the great Liberal bishop, had died in 1575; and the witty, able, and courtly Bishop of Winchester two years before him. In 1870 the sudden death of England's great novelist, Charles Dickens, had brought to thousands of men, women, and children the sense of a personal loss. Lord Lytton, the brilliant speaker and writer of romance, died in January, and John Stuart Mill, the logician and political economist, in November, 1873. Canon 1 Vol. i. p. 320.

once lived in a luminous mental haze of "Christian Socialism," passed into the hand of light and love in the first month of 1×75, In the previous year intelligence of the death of Livingstone had come from Unyanyembe. In 1870-1871 Mr. Stanley, a young and energetic American, was sent out by the proprietor of a New York newspaper to endeavour to discover Livingstone, from whom for a long time nothing had been heard. Mr. Stanley found him at Ujiji, and accompanied him on a journey. Livingstone afterwards went on an expedition to the unexplored regions southwest of Lake Tanganyika. After much tolisome travelling, and having suffered greatly from dysentery, he died on the shore of Lake Bangweolo, May, 1873.

There had been many great and seri us losses beside these. In the ten years with which our record closes, Sir Arthur Heps, Harriet Martineau, Lord Lawrence, Sir Rowland Hill, Lord Westbury, Landseer, Ləri Clarendon; and later George Henry Lewes, George Eliot (Miss Evans), Anthony Troilope, and others whose names have already appeared in the course of this narrative, had left the conflict in which they had borne a part.

No sooner had the new ministry been formed by Mr. Gladstone than it had serious difficulties to contend with. The outrages committed in Ireland drove the government to abandon for the moment all attempts at a policy of conciliation. The remnant of the Ribbonmen, the Fenians, and the Land Leame were manifesting a hostility which could only be put down by that force which it was admitted was not a permanent remedy, but at the same time might be a painfully necessary expedient.

There had been 1253 outrages in the previous year, and most of them in the later months of the year. Houses had been broken into, incendiaries had been at work, cattle had been maimed and tortured, horrible and brutal attacks had been made, not on men only, but on women and children. Tenants who had paid an amount of rent unauth ► rized by the Land League, landlords who

demanded payment or had ejected tenants, occupiers of farms or dwellings from which former tenants had been expelled for nonpayment of rent, and persons who had agreed to work for anybody who had paid his rent or refused to join the League, were liable to assault, or to continued persecution by which life was endangered. None dared to claim compensation for outrages committed on them: no one dared to prosecute. Anarchy was approaching, and only those who defied the law were safe from the bullet of the assassin or the assault of the ruffian.

The government was obliged to act, and to act swiftly and sternly. The remedy was summary: for it was to give power to the lord-lieutenant to issue a warrant for the arrest of any person whom he might suspect of treasonable or agrarian offences, and to detain him as a prisoner without trial till September, 1882. This part of the Protection of Life and Property Bill was, of course, vehemently opposed by the Irish party, while many Liberals advocated the introduction of remedial instead of coercive measures. Mr. Bright (chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) reminded the house, amidst assent from the Home Rulers, that he had formerly stood up for Ireland, and said that he had not at these times thought all the proposed coercive measures necessary, the basis of his hostility to them having been that they were not accompanied by any remedial measures, or even by any admission of grievances; but now a land bill was promised and would be brought in. The state of terrorism in Ireland was made patent to everybody, by letters from all classes of persons, and by the speeches of the leaders of the movement itself, who boasted that the Land Leaguers had superseded the law of parliament. The leaders of the Land League, he declared, had demoralized the Irish people —a statement received, of course, with considerable protests from the Home Rulers. The Irish party had commenced to carry out threats of obstruction, and the house had sat twenty-two hours. The next sitting lasted for forty-one hours, during which motions for adjournment were made over and over again by the Home Rulers, and rejected by the house.

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Members of each party came in detachments to relieve those who had carried on the struggle. It was an absurd and monstrous spectacle, to see a few men, by merely technical opposition, wilfully preventing legislation and delaying the entire work of the session against the great majority of the house. At length the speaker declared, amidst the support of the majority, that a new and exceptional course of procedure was imperatively demanded, and that he was satisfied he should carry out the wishes of the house if he declined to call on any more members to speak. The question was then put, amidst cries of privilege from the Home Rulers, who were vehement in demanding all the privileges of precedent, protection, and law, to enable them to defy and deride all law and order. Leave was then given to bring in the bill.

The tactics of exasperation were continued, and were borne with exemplary patience until they grew beyond endurance, when it became necessary to adopt those rules of procedure without which the Land Leaguers would have coerced the House of Commons as they and their followers had coerced honest and law-abiding people in Ireland. Premeditated efforts to delay and frustrate the business of the country were diversified by premeditated insults to the prime minister, and shameless accusations against members of the government, or anyone who ventured to differ from the extreme Irish party.

The reports of all the commissions, with one exception, agreed that it was of vital importance to establish a court for the purpose of dealing with the differences between landlord and tenant, and for the protection of tenants against arbitrary increase of rent. But it was also necessary to maintain the right of assignment or sale of tenant-right, the old law of the country recognizing the right of the tenant to sell whatever interest he possessed in his tenancy, which by the act of 1870 had become something considerable; so that the commissioners had recommended a recognition of it, and that it might be enforced without injustice to the landlord. The cardinal feature of the bill, then, would be the court, to which, however, an appeal would not be com

pulsory but optional. This court, which would also act as a land commission and regulate all the proceedings of the local courts, would consist of three members, one of whom must always be a judge or an ex-judge of the Supreme Court, and it would have power to appoint assistant commissioners and sub-commissioners to sit in the provinces. Every tenant would be entitled to go to the court to have fixed for his holding a "judicial rent," which would endure for fifteen years, during which there could be no eviction of the tenant except for specific breach of certain specific covenants or nonpayment of rent. There would be no power of resumption on the part of the landlord during this time, and his remedy would have to take the form of a compulsory sale of the tenant-right. After the fifteen years had expired application might be made to the court for a renewal of tenancy toties quoties. The conditions as to eviction would remain if the tenancy were renewed, but the landlord would have a pre-emption of the tenant's right if the latter wished to sell. The court, in fixing the rents, would control the unlimited growth of rental and of tenant-right. There were other provisions of the bill which protected tenants and extended the advantages of the rules of the court even to those who were under the Ulster custom, or who did not choose to apply to the court itself.

By the second part of the bill the Land Commission would be enabled to realize a scheme for supplying landlords ready to sell and tenants desiring to purchase their holdings. In such cases the commissioners would have power to advance, to tenants intending to purchase, three-fourths of the purchasemoney, or one-half of the purchase - money when the tenant agreed to pay a price to the landlord and to hold from him at a fee farm rent. The rest of the purchase-money might be borrowed elsewhere, and purchasing tenants would be indemnified against encumbered estates or defective titles. The Land Commission could purchase an estate and resell it in small lots to the tenants if three-fourths of them, paying not less than three-fourths of the total rent, desired to become holders. Advances for this and other purposes were to

be charged at the rate of 3 per cent, and repayable in thirty-five years. Advances might be made for agricultural improvements for the reclamation of waste lands: when state aid was met by a corresponding outlay of private capital, or in cases where there was a baronial guarantee, the Treasury would advance three-fourths of the cost of projected improvements. Advances to be determined by parliament were also to be made to assist emigration. The result of the bill would be to restrain the increase of rent by certain rules, to regulate compensation for disturbance, to establish the right of the tenant to sell his interest, to prevent evictions except for default, and to forbid resumption by the landlord except for grave and reasonable causes, which might be brought in question before the court. We need not follow the distracting and protracted debates and obstructions amidst which the bill went through committee, and, with several modifications, became law. It passed at last; and though Lord Salisbury endeavoured to introduce changes which would have made some of the clauses in favour of the tenant nugatory, and other alterations of a cancelling character were proposed, the measure was at last completed, and at the outset began to work well, in spite of the efforts of agitators to discredit the courts and the government.

Of the recent horrible assassinations in Phoenix Park, Dublin, and the attempts to destroy life or property by dynamite, nothing will be said here. Those who advocate, promote, or cause them may profess to be representative Irishmen, but they are doing their worst to remove Ireland from the sympathy or the regard of mankind.

In noticing offences against the law, and especially crimes of violence, it should be remarked that according to the statistics issued the number of indictable offences within the last ten years in England, Wales, and Ireland indicate a slight increase of crime in recent years, both absolutely and relatively to population. The number of crimes reported to have been committed was uniformly smaller in Ireland than in England and Wales. The ten years from 1871 to 1880 included five years of great

prosperity of trade and high wages, and five years of decline of trade and lower wages. The average of the two periods of five years had been, per 1000, England and Wales from 1875, 198; Ireland, 1:36; from 1876 to 1880, England and Wales, 2·09; Ireland, 1:37. Indictable offences were thus shown to have been greater in number during the five good years. As to Ireland, the larger number of crimes at the commencement and end of the periods 1871-72 and 1879-80 was clearly due to the relations between landlords and tenants. Although during the last ten years there had been a slight increase of crime, the number of persons committed for trial had diminished in every part of the United Kingdom, which points to the fact that the graver crimes had diminished in number. In Scotland and Ireland the proportion of committals was uniformly greater than in England and Wales. On an average of ten years the percentage of convictions was 78 per cent in England and Wales, 76 per cent in Scotland, and 55 per cent in Ireland; in 1880 the proportion in Ireland was only 50 per cent. This is suggestive, especially as in Ireland the proportion of convictions in cases of offences against property was considerably greater than in offences against the person. In England, in 1880, 72 persons were apprehended for murder; of these 13 were discharged for want of evidence or want of prosecution, or 18 per cent of the whole, and 59 committed for trial, or 82 per cent. In Ireland in the same year 53 persons were apprehended for murder; 37, or 69 per cent, were discharged for want of evidence, and 16, or only 30 per cent, committed for trial. Of 61 committed for trial in England, 28, or 46 per cent, were convicted; of 35 committed for murder in Ireland, only 3, or 8 per cent, were convicted. In proportion to the population the offences against public order were 5.13 to the thousand in Scotland against 1·16 in England. The offences against morals were in the proportion of 0.21 to the thousand in England, against 0.04 in Ireland. Offences against the person were 11:58 to the thousand in Scotland, against 2.82 in England; and the offences against property 66 per thousand in Scotland, against

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227 in Ireland. Drunkenness was worst in Ireland, being 16:60 per thousand, against 677 in England and 7:26 in Scotland. But for drunkenness and small crimes the criminal statistics were favourable to Ireland. What aggravated the state of crime in Ireland was the recurrence of political offences, and agrarian crime was seldom absent from Irish criminal jurisprudence; but no criminal was brought to justice although the offences were often grave. In lawlessness and drunkenness Dublin and Edinburgh were much worse than Middlesex. Generally the agricultural counties had less crime than the manufacturing and mining counties. The deposits in savingsbank, &c., as a rule showed greater where crime and drunkenness were least. The bulk of criminals were illiterate. It was not easy to define to what extent drunkenness was the direct or indirect cause of crime.

In education Ireland compares unfavourably with England and Scotland. One quarter of the population is unable to read and write. The progress in education made in the last fifty years has, however, been great, for in 1841 the proportion of illiterates to the population was 53 per cent. In 1851 it had fallen to 47, in 1861 to 39, in 1871 to 33, and in 1881 to 25. The eastern and northern provinces stand on an equality in regard to education, the proportion of illiterates in each being 20 per cent, but Leinster has made rather the greater progress, the proportion there having been 44 in 1841, while in Ulster it was but 40. In Munster there are 29 persons out of every 100 unable to read or write, and in Connaught 38. Forty years ago the percentage of illiterates in the western province was as high as 72. The untaught are distributed among the religious denominations in the following proportions:-Roman Catholics, 30′1 per cent; Episcopalians, 109; Presbyterians, 71; and Methodists, 55. The greatest progress as regards primary education seems to have been made among the Roman Catholics. But the number of Protestant Episcopalian children attending the National Schools has increased in ten years by 54 per cent, and this is regarded as a proof of the subsidence of re