Violence, indeed, was the only efficient lever in Ireland for any but secondary reforms until the last fifteen years of the century, when a remedial policy was spontaneously adopted, with the general consent of British statesmen and parties.  Fear inspired the Emancipation Act of 1829, which was recommended to Parliament by the Duke of Wellington as a measure wrong in itself, but necessary to avert an organized rebellion in Ireland.  Tithes, the unjust burden of a century and a half, were only commuted in 1838, after a Seven Years’ War revolting in its incidents.  Mr. Gladstone admitted, and no one who studies the course of events can deny, that without the Fenianism of the sixties, and the light thrown thereby on the condition of Ireland, it would have been impossible to carry the Act—­again overdue by a century—­for the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, or the Land Act, timid and ineffectual as it was, of 1870.  Without the organized lawlessness of the Land League it would have been equally impossible to bring about those more drastic changes in Irish land tenure which, amidst storms of protest from vested interests affected, were initiated under the great Land Act of 1881, and, after another miserable decade of crime and secret conspiracy, extended by the Acts of 1887, 1891, and 1896.

Briefly, the effect of these Acts was to establish three principles:  a fair rent, fixed by a judicial tribunal, the Land Commission, and revisable every fifteen years; fixity of tenure as long as the rent is paid; and free sale of the tenant-right.

The remedy eventually brought widespread relief, but, from a social and economic standpoint, it was not the right remedy.  There is no security for good legislation unless it be framed by those who are to live under it.  Constructive thought in Ireland for the solution of her own difficulties and the harmonizing of her own discordant elements had been systematically dammed, or diverted into revolutionary excesses, which, in the traditional spirit of Fitzgibbonism, were made the pretext for more stupid torture.  Thus, O’Connell, whose attachment to law was so strong that in 1843, when the Repeal agitation had reached seemingly irresistible proportions, he deliberately restrained it, was tried for sedition.  So, too, were dissipated the brilliant talents of the Young Ireland group and the grave statesmanship of Isaac Butt.  Fits intervened of a penitent and bungling philanthropy which has left its traces on nearly all Irish institutions.  For example, it was decided in 1830 that the Irish must be educated, and a system was set up which was deliberately designed to anglicize Ireland and extirpate Roman Catholicism.  Four years later, in defiance of Irish opinion, a Poor Law pedantically copied from the English model was applied to Ireland.  The railway system also was grossly mismanaged.  And so with the land.  When reform eventually came, the evil had gone too far, and it was beyond the art of the ablest and noblest