where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were left
to die of hunger by the roadside. The lands the potato blight spared
were desolated by the adoption of free trade. The exploitation of the
virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands
of Ireland from tillage into grass. A series of bad harvests aggravated
the evil. The landlords and the farmers of Ireland were divided into two
political camps, and, instead of uniting for their common welfare, each
attempted to cast upon the other the burden of the economic catastrophe.
To sum up in the words of Mr. Amery--

"The evils of economic Separatism, aggravated by social evils
surviving from the Separatism of an earlier age, united to revive a
demand for the extension and renewal of the very cause of those
evils."

The political demand for the repeal of the Act of Union, which had lain
dormant for so many years, was revived by the energies of Isaac Butt. He
found in the Irish landlords, smarting under the disestablishment of the
Irish Church, a certain amount of sympathy and assistance, but the
"engine" for which Finton Lalor had asked in order to draw the "repeal
train," was not discovered until Parnell linked the growing agrarian
unrest to the Home Rule Campaign. This is not the place to tell again
the weary story of the land war or to show how the Irish Nationalists
exploited the grievances of the Irish tenants in order to encourage
crime and foment disloyalty in the country. It is sufficient to say that
this conflict--the conduct of which reflects little credit either upon
the Irish protagonists or the British Government which alternately
pampered and opposed it--was ended, for the time at least, by the
passing of Mr. Wyndham's Land Act. We look forward in perfect confidence
to the time when that great measure shall achieve its full result in