owners, they say, would be compelled either to put them to some use or to part with them to those who would use them.

THE IRISH QUESTION ALWAYS A
LAND QUESTION

THE Irish question, indeed, has always been at bottom a land question. "In the rich pastures of Ireland," said the Congress of the United States in the message of sympathy it sent to the Irish people in 1775, "many hungry parasites are fed, and grow strong to labor for her destruction." The "parasites" whom the fathers had in mind were of that landed class which under the system of land tenure brought from the Continent by the Normans, enabling them to tax the produce of Saxons and Angles, had been transferred bodily to Ireland under the Tudors and the first Stuarts. This landed class betrayed the nation in the Act of Union in 1800 for a bribe of six million dollars, maintained the galling burden that had been imposed on Catholics since 1537, and, until the emancipation wrought by O'Connell, by Grattan, and by Parnell, were themselves sustained by a system of taxation under which the tenant was compelled to renew his lease from year to year, and to pay an enhanced rental for all the improvements he himself had made. From the one injustice they were emancipated in 1829 as the result of the great movement led by O'Connell, from the other by that led by Parnell. His agitation, to say nothing of Davitt's Land League, brought about the land acts of 1881 and 1887, which not only have released the Irish tenant from an intolerable serfdom, but by reacting on England have thus begun to overthrow the old system of the Norman, and these times witness the spectacle of the Irish party in Parliament uniting with the Liberal party to carry out the noble reforms begun many years ago by Gladstone.

These reforms already have so changed and improved Ireland that she is no more the "distressful" country of the old song. The land acts and the various subventions have helped immensely, and the pleasant sanitary little cottages scattered all over the loveliest country in the world have replaced the old cabins. Rural housing conditions have become more tolerable, and in some places generally admirable,

and under this enlightened policy the agriculture, at least about Dublin and in the east and south of the island, is the finest in the world, and down toward the old town of Tarraght there is peace and smiling contentment where forty years ago there were armed uprisings.

But memory persists in recalling with distinctness those narrow, twisted streets of the old quarter where this problem remains unsolved; those cold sidewalks over which patter the bare feet of ragged children, and the dingy doorways through which titled ladies once were shown by link-boys in their braver, finer days, while by them, in the gloom, flit the figures whose poor painted faces show for an instant in the circle of light from the street-lamps. Some of those ancient halls, no doubt, have known the shafts of Swift's wit, or echoed to the singing of Thomas Moore, whose bust in a little niche over a public house will be pointed out to you as marking the house where the Irish poet was born. He was not so much Irish, however, it has always seemed to me, with his career among the great of his time in England, or so much a poet, as that other poorer, sadder man, whose very ghost seems somehow to haunt those tenements, that poet who was so distinctly and implicitly Irish, James Clarence Mangan. One might imagine him, thin and pale and racked by his cough, haunting these nightly ways the nameless one no more,

amid wreck and sorrow,

And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,

He bides in calmness the silent morrow that no ray lights.

THE GROWING HOPE OF HOME RULE

THERE is now a new ray to light the morrow for Ireland, and the figure of Hope on the gilt dome of the customhouse is no longer a mere sardonic mockFor at last, after all these years, ery. home rule is at hand, and all Ireland is thrilling with expectation. It is a modern Ireland that longs to express itself, a new young Ireland, with its reverence for the old traditions, of course, and with the will and the purpose to build on a civilization older than England's the new civilization of our time. This spirit is everywhere manifest, whether in the boys at

the industrial school at Artane, once waifs in the streets of Dublin, who now weave and sew and carpenter and build, and then dance Irish reels and Highland flings; or the luckier lads in the O'Connell schools, advanced in their studies far beyond the boys of their age in our schools; or in the first citizen of Ireland, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, struggling intelligently with the problems of municipal government. It is apparent in the very poise of the members on the Irish benches in the House of Commons, sitting there with their tall hats tilted, while the "Government of Ireland" bill is debated, laughing at some Unionist member praising the royal constabulary, denouncing the "royal and ancient" order of Hibernians, as he calls them, and speaking in awe of the Ulster gasconade, and wholly missing the humor in the threats of a province that still insists on being ruled, and even threatens armed rebellion if set free!

It manifests itself even in the jarveys, for as we turned into College Green and paused beneath Foley's statue of Goldsmith, my driver drew up the jaunting-car and, pointing proudly with his whip to the columns of the noble façade of the old parliament house, which was loaned to the Bank of Ireland until the hour of Irish freedom, said:

"There 's where the new Irish parliament will sit, your Honor."

"I know," I said, and, recalling a phrase beloved by an old Irish friend at home, I added, 'And more power to them."

"Sure, and a great night that will be," he said, his eye sparkling, his lips smiling in anticipation, "and all the Irish in America coming over for it."

"You'll have to enlarge College Green, then, to hold them," I said. "But no doubt you could move the statue of King Billy yonder."

There was little need, since all the Irish know and hate it, to point up Dame Street to that gilded atrocity of British art which represents King William as a Roman hero on a sway-backed, tun-bellied charger.

"Faith, we could be sparing him, your Honor," the jarvey chuckled.

Yes, the whole land is alive and quivering in anticipation of this new birth, and surely no people with such undying faith, such splendid devotion, such inexhaustible national spirit, could have been kept alive in such amazing vitality through so many centuries of injustice and oppression unless some great and noble purpose was behind it all. And this national spirit awaits the hour to make Dublin over, and as it will make old Ireland new.

IN

IN that part of his autobiography called "Præterita," John Ruskin speculates on the fate of Charles Eliot Norton if the New-Englander had been born "an English Tory, or a Scotch Jacobite, or a French Gentilhomme, or a Savoyard Count." He had already designated him as his "second friend" and "first real tutor."

Norton was twenty-nine years of age and Ruskin thirty-seven when their memorable friendship began, in 1856, on the lake between Vevey and Geneva. The The characteristics then discovered by the Englishman were, with certain ramifications, to dominate the New-Englander's life.

In the Hellenic sense of the word, Norton was an aristocrat, and his joys and sorrows were those of an aristocrat. Even the lights and shadows that fell upon him seemed in a way specialized. Although endowed with a marvelous capacity for work, and exercising that capacity to the full, he never knew what it was to labor for daily bread. A sufficient competency enabled him to enrich his mind by study and travel, and to bring near and make clear to him those things and persons that most appealed to his discriminating and elevated nature. And as he received, so he gave, until he gradually assumed a burden that was constantly augmented by friendships and the obligations imposed on him by them.

He gave the service of friendship, of editorship, of confessor, and of guide to such men as Ruskin, Carlyle, and Clough, to Emerson, Curtis, and Lowell, to a public that could not or would not understand the nature of his gifts and the responsibilities of the recipients.

In early New England the clergy was the aristocracy, and this aristocracy possessed about all the scholarship. Norton received this double inheritance from both sides of the family. His social position. thus assured and his tastes still unformed, foreign travel and social intercourse with the best exerted upon his sensitive nature a rare influence that caught him and ab

sorbed him, and bore him far from the dogmas of his youth. As experience presents material for comparison, his critical sense was thus early and actively stimulated, and ultimately reached a high state of perfection. He became a seer of such amazing prevision that his conceptions both of patriotism and religion were changed and qualified.

Later he characterizes General di Cesnola as a "sweet-natured Italian Gentleman, not of the finest clay, a little too much Americanized"; President Hayes as uneducated, but "educable"; the trustees of the Ashfield Academy as "good men of the village, all of them, the excellent products of democracy"; the bicentennial at Yale, when he received the degree of LL.D., as "a great success as an advertisement"; while one of the evils of democracy he declares to be, when writing to Leslie Stephen as late as 1896, "that everybody thinks he has a right to put what questions he pleases to anybody, and to devastate his day," although two years later, to his son Eliot, he expresses the belief "that as time goes on and the democracy reaches its full development, there may be just as complete gentlemen, in the sense of high-bred men, as in any aristocracy with its long traditions."

But if this attitude toward humanity brought him only in close contact with what was "worth while," his friendships were perhaps all the deeper and more permanent for that very reason. There was in them that element of psychic communion which defied mundane differences, and even thrived on material neglect. The line is long and very wonderful. Away back in the fifties he wrote to Lowell:

It is almost my happiest thought that with all the drawbacks of temperament (of which no one is more conscious than myself) I have never lost a friend.

And this, with one conspicuous exception, in which the fault lay with the other, he could say till the end of his days.