each district should be conducted. They should also have power to buy the estate of any landlord who offered to sell it to them, and to pay for it in debentures bearing interest at 4 per cent., and amounting to twenty-two years' purchase of the judicial rent.

On the sale being effected, the holding of the tenant should vest ipso facto with a parliamentary title in the tenant, and the purchasemoney should be distributed administratively by the Land Purchase Commission. This could be done by the Commission much more cheaply than by a Court. A Court would have to satisfy itself as to the absolute truth of every fact before it could take any step. A Commission acting administratively would avoid a large amount of expense necessarily incurred to obtain evidence sufficient to satisfy a Court.

From the moment the holding was vested in the tenant, he might be fairly asked to pay an annuity for the period of fifty-six years of such an amount as would be equal to 4 per cent. on twenty-two years' purchase of the judicial rent. An illustration will show how this arrangement would work. Suppose A. has a farm which B. occupies, paying for it a judicial rent of £100 a-year. A. sells that farm to the Commission, and receives for it £2,200 in debentures, the interest of which amounts to £88 a-year. When the sale was made, B. would become the absolute owner of the farm subject to a rent annuity of £99, or 1 per cent. less than his judicial rent, which would expire in fifty-six years.

Supposing that in all cases the rent annuity were punctually paid, there would be no difficulty in meeting the interest on the land debentures. But although the universal experience on the Continent entitles us to hope there would be no ultimate loss, still a contingent loss must be provided for and provision made to meet it. How is this to be done? There is a tax now paid by England from which Ireland is exempted. This is the inhabited-house tax. It was paid by Ireland up to the year 1825, and it seems not unreasonable to suggest that it should be re-imposed for a special Irish purpose. Considering, however, the small number of Irish houses of the better class, and that good houses are the first signs of the upward movement from barbarism to civilization, it would hardly be politic to impose a tax which might hinder the improvement of dwellinghouses. This remark does not, however, apply to messuages and tenements. The annual value of messuages and tenements assessed for income-tax in Ireland is £3,263,490. A very small taxso small as to be a hardship to no one-put on their value would produce the nucleus of a guarantee fund. This fund should be vested in trustees, and, if it were not required for certain strictly defined purposes connected with the extinction of debentures or meeting interest due upon them, it should be

employed for the purpose of founding agricultural schools throughout the country.

Of course various inducements could be given the tenant to fine down the annuity, and even to extinguish it. Regulations might also be made with a view of moving the existing banks to assist him in so doing, and thereby becoming themselves directly interested in the agrarian settlement of the country.

The return of confidence in Ireland would, it is to be hoped, be followed by the investment of peasant money in land debentures. The experience of the Continent shows that everywhere this kind of security has a peculiar attraction for the peasant; and I cannot but think that this would also be the case in Ireland, where a great quantity of peasant money is now idle or bringing in only 1 per cent. The great body of the people would thereby become at once interested on the side of order, and in the payment of the rent annuity. As for the farmer, he would know very well that every year increased the value of his property, and he would be anything but disposed to risk its loss by not meeting his obligations. If he did default, the rent annuity should be recoverable by a simple proceeding analogous to action in bankruptcy. This would be of itself a most useful reform.

With regard to the collection of the rent annuity, the wisest thing would be to allow the Commission to collect it as might seem desirable according to local circumstances.

It will be observed that I do not recommend any attempt to get a local guarantee for the payment of rent annuities. I feel certain it would be a mistake. The precedents of Russia and of Austria do not apply. In the former case there is a strong executive which can bring an amount of pressure on local authorities unknown to us. With regard to Austria, the great nobility are all-powerful in the provincial Diets, and there never was in Austria anything of that bitterness between classes which exists in Ireland. Any attempt to get collateral security for the payment of the rent annuities from the Irish Boards of Guardians, or other local bodies, would lead to endless discussion, increase friction, and, as everybody who knows the country is well aware, would be really worthless as a guarantee.

It is a matter of prime necessity for the pacification of Ireland to reduce the friction in the working of laws which is caused by the antagonism of classes. Men are loyal in proportion as they enter into the spirit of the political system under which they live. They never will do this if laws are not simple, and do not work with smoothness and ease. Complex legislation produces uncertainty, doubt, and discontent. If it be objected to my scheme that a rate on messuages and tenements would fall unduly on one class in the community, the answer is that the pacification of the country is

of the most vital and pressing interest to all connected with it by property of any kind. It would be scandalous, and, indeed, impossible, to compel the landlords alone to make further sacrifices. But the Irish propertied classes, as a whole, might be fairly called upon to contribute something for the purpose of bringing to a close the era of disorder. Civil war is the greatest material calamity that can befall a nation. It is painful to think what a position Ireland might now occupy in the British empire and among the nations of the earth if her national movements had not always been paralyzed by civil discord, betrayed by self-seeking politicians, distorted and disgraced by demagogues and criminals.

"Heu! quantum potuit pelagi terræque parari

Hoc quem civiles hauserunt sanguine dextræ !"

ROWLAND BLENNERHASSETT.

CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND THOUGHT IN

THE UNITED STATES.

THE

HE World's Exposition at New Orleans has very naturally turned the eyes of Americans as well as the eyes of not a few Europeans towards that vast region of the United States which we call the South. Embracing all the territory stretching away from the sunny side of Washington to the Gulf of Mexico, it consists of no less than about 887,480 square miles, an expanse nearly equal in extent to the whole of Europe lying west of Russia. The population of this vast region, according to the census of 1880, numbered only 17,425,575; it follows, consequently, that if three times the present number of all the people in the United States were to be added to the population of the South, the region would still not be so closely crowded as are the leading countries of Europe. These impressive facts are enough to show that the South is at least a region of enormous possibilities. They also show that before 1880 the growth of the South had been comparatively slow.

The reasons for this tardy development, when once mentioned, are too obvious to need explanation. The advantages of superior soil and climate were, until the war, far more than counterbalanced by the presence of an institution which made free labour disreputable, and which therefore presented no attractions to the European emigrant. Virginia and the Carolinas were what were called old States when the first settlers began to establish homes in the region of the Great Lakes; but the entire valuation of those two States in 1880 was less than what had been the increment to the value of the two States of Illinois and Michigan during the years between 1870 and 1880. Still more noteworthy is the fact that, while the entire valuation of the sixteen Southern States, as revealed by the last census, was only 3,470 millions of dollars, the mere increase in the valuation of the ten North-western States was no less than 2,503 millions. In other words, the increment in twenty years of the value of the North-western States was more than two-thirds of the total value of all the sixteen States of the South.

This comparative poverty of the region south of Washington is of

course largely the direct result of the war. The emancipation of the slaves impoverished the slaveowners by about 800 millions, and the freedmen as yet have accumulated very little that can fairly be set over against this enormous debit. Then, too, the devastations of moving armies were, with a very trifling exception, entirely confined to the same unfortunate region: the manufactures of the country were almost exclusively in the North. While, therefore, on the one side the industries flourished through the extra demands made upon them and the high prices that prevailed; on the other the armies of North and South alike were gratuitously appropriating to their own uses whatever could be made to subserve either their necessities or their convenience.

But there was still another cause, and one of much greater significance. Society in the South was disorganized in far more than the ordinary sense of that term. At the outbreak of the war all its institutions, while having a democratic form, were as strictly aristocratic in fact as those to be found in any country of Europe. The control of all the activities of organized society was in the hands of a rich patrician class, well educated, proud as mediæval barons, given to a charming hospitality, and devoted to the management of social and political affairs. The war like a cyclone swept off the whole upper story of Southern society. Many a slaveowner who had safely left the care of his vast estates in lands and slaves to his agents found himself reduced to the necessity of beginning anew at the common level; and many a proud matron, who had been as dependent on her slaves as were the Cornelias and the Livias at Rome, was obliged to cast about for the means of earning her own subsistence. And what was there in the place of that which had been swept away? In the first place, there were five millions of freedmen, without property, for the most part without knowledge, the easy prey of all the vices, with the loose moral fibre that was the result partly of their primitive barbarism and partly of their subsequent bondage, and with a religion. that was largely if not chiefly a pagan superstition. These people were raised by the fiat of war to the obligations of full citizenship, including not only the duties of legislation, but also a share in the administering of the various offices of honour and trust. And by the side of these was another class known as "the poor whites," the counterpart of the Roman proletariat. Attention has often been called to the fact that the saddest result of human slavery is its depressing effect on the humbler classes of the free. From a political, though probably not from a humanitarian point of view, such was certainly the case in antiquity. Still more emphatically was such the result in the United States. Probably the relation of master and slave was not so bad as it has often been painted. After all is said that can truthfully be declared in regard to the separation of families and the occasional cruelty of masters and slavedrivers, it remains nevertheless true that the condition of the negro in American slavery was better than his condition had been in Africa. This is equivalent to saying that in America he has undergone a gradual process of elevation, and that the negro of to-day is in a less abject condition of ignorance and degradation than were his ancestors who were stolen from Africa one or two hundred years ago. But while the condition of the negro has