incidental the forensic and polemic phenomena of Irish politics, with
which they are perhaps only too familiar.

It is as easy to go too far back as it is not to go back far enough in
the study of such a revolutionary movement as that of which Ireland is
just now the arena.

Many and sore are the historical grievances of the Irish people. That
they are historical and not actual grievances would seem to be admitted
by so sympathetic and minutely well-informed a writer as Dr. Sigerson,
when he gives it as his opinion, that after the passage of the Land Act
of 1870, "the concession in principle of the demands of the cultivators
as tenants" had "abolished the class war waged between landlords and
their tenantry."

The class war between the tenantry and their landlords, therefore, which
is now undoubtedly waging in Ireland cannot be attributed to the
historical grievances of the Irish people. The tradition and the memory
of these historical grievances may indeed be used by designing or
hysterical traders in agitation to inflame the present war. But the war
itself is not the old war, nor can it be explained by recurring to the
causes of the old war. It has the characteristics no longer of a
defensive war, nor yet of a war of revenge absolutely, but of an
aggressive war, and of a war of conquest. In his able work on "The Land
Tenure and the Land Classes of Ireland," Dr. Sigerson, writing in 1871,
looked forward to the peaceful co-existence in Ireland of two systems of
land-holding, "whereby the country might enjoy the advantage of what is
good in the 'landlord,' or single middleman system, and in the peasant
proprietary or direct system."