promptitude, the annual repayments of purchase money. Mr. Godley, the efficient and capable secretary of the Irish Church Commission, bore testimony to their conduct for probity, punctuality and industry. Mr. Tuke, whose well- known philanthropy never blinds his keen Yorkshire common sense, visited those struggling communities in the depth of their trouble, and yet was so favourably impressed with the air of comfort displayed, the spirit of exertion manifested, that he contributed to the Nineteenth Century for August, 1880, a very interesting article upon them, entitled—'Peasant Proprietors at Home.' From that I take the liberty of collecting the few pregnant passages that follow:—
'These men had good stock and horses. They employed one or two labourers. They were fully determined to have no subdivision, and the air of content and sense of the position obtained was all that could be desired. There I found out that tenants who had risen in the morning Radicals and discontented, went to bed Conservatives and contented, the evening they became landed proprietors. The remarkable result of the Church Act, that 5,000 or 6,000 proprietors, chiefly working their own land, have been added to the 19,547 owners in Ireland, cannot be regarded as otherwise than a great benefit in a country almost wholly agricultural. Multiply these little centres of content and satisfaction, which have been shown to exist, extend throughout the whole of Ireland instances like those recorded at Erganagh, near Omagh, where, by the combined labour of twenty tenants alone, 200 acres of land were in course of reclamation from the mountain, and you will go far to solve the loud and dangerous cry for fixity of tenure and "no landlords," and prevent the distress and destitution from which they spring. The privilege of all others Ireland most desires is that of being permitted to work and cultivate her vast wildernesses.'
To deal directly with some of Mr. Morice's arguments, it may be noted that, with regard to Count Jacini's report on the condition of the agricultural classes in Italy, of which Mr. Moricc makes such a strong point, that in any and about Florence there prevails a tenure almost peculiar to Italy, known as the 'métayer' system, and frequently, though incorrectly, represented as peasant proprietary. The principle is, that the labourer or peasant
