Ireland said that the Establishment too must go; and, with the echoed menace of Fenianism ringing in his ears, Mr Gladstone hauled down the official blazon of Ascendancy.  “Ulster” did not fight.  But the fierce struggle for the land affords the crucial test.  Landlordism of that most savage type which held for its whole gospel that a man may do what he likes with his own was conceived to be the very corner-stone of British rule in Ireland.  It controlled Parliament, the judiciary, the schools, the Press, and possessed in the Royal Irish Constabulary an incomparable watch-dog.  It had resisted the criticism and attack loosened against it by the scandal of the Great Famine.  Then suddenly Ireland took the business in hand.  On a certain day in October 1879, some thirty men met in a small hotel in Dublin and, under the inspiration of Michael Davitt, founded the Land League.  To the programme then formulated, the expropriation of the landlords at twenty years’ purchase of their rents, England as usual said No!  The proposal was thundered against as confiscation, communism, naked and shameful.  To any student, with patience sufficient for the task, the contemporary files of such journals as the Times will furnish an exquisite chapter in the literature of obtuseness.  England sustained her No! with batons, bullets, plank-beds, Coercion courts, and an occasional halter; Ireland her Yes! with “agitation.”  Is it necessary to ask who won?  Is it necessary to trace step by step the complete surrender of the last ditchers of those days?  The fantastic and wicked dreams of the agitators have in thirty years translated themselves into Statute Law and solid fact.  An English statesman of the period, say Mr Balfour or Mr Wyndham, is fortunate if, with a few odd rags pilfered from the Land League wardrobe, he can conceal from history his utter poverty of ideas.

This, then, is the essential wisdom of Irish history:  Ireland has won all along the line.  The Normans did not normanise her.  The Tudors did not exterminate her.  She has undone the Confiscations, and drawn a cancelling pen through the Penal Laws.  The Act of Union, so far from suppressing her individuality or overwhelming it, has actually brought it to that full self-consciousness which constitutes the coming of age of a nation.  Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are due; if there be anyone with tears at command he may shed them, with great fitness, and with no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of Ireland.  But let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before he goes on to apply to her that other line which speaks of human hopes defeated and overthrown.  No other people in the world has held so staunchly to its inner vision; none other has, with such fiery patience, repelled the hostility of circumstances, and in the end reshaped them after the desire of her heart.  Hats off to success, gentlemen!  Your modern God may well be troubled at sight of this enigmatic Ireland which at once despises