discontent with the actual conditions of life in that country seems to
be felt by people who do not than by people who do live in Ireland. It
is the Irish in America and Australia, who neither sow nor reap in
Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien
oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with
which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the
tameness of the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British
allies of his Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any
striking and sensational resistance to the administration of law in
Ireland. I have printed in this edition[2] an instructive account,
furnished to me by Mr. Tener, of some recent evictions on the
Clanricarde property in Galway, which shows how hard it is for the most
determined "agitators" to keep the Irish tenants up to that high concert
pitch of resistance to the law which alone would meet the wishes of the
true agrarian leaders; and how comparatively easy it is for a just and
resolute man, armed with the power of the law resolutely enforced, to
break up an illegal combination even in some of the most disturbed
regions of Ireland.[3] While this is encouraging to the friends of law
and order in Ireland, it must not be forgotten that it involves also a
certain peril for them. The more successfully the law is enforced in
Ireland, the greater perhaps is the danger that the British
constituencies, upon which, of course, the administrators of the law
depend for their authority, may lose sight and sense of the
Revolutionary forces at work there. History shows that this has more
than once happened in the past. Englishmen and Scotchmen will be better
able than I am to judge how far it is unlikely that it should happen
again in the future.

As to one matter of great moment--the effect of Lord Ashbourne's Act--a
correspondent sends me a statement, which I reproduce here, as it gives