must lose the difference; or if the Church property, after its resumption by the State, yielded a surplus beyond what is required for the secular education of the people, the remainder could not be better applied to the benefit of Ireland than in this manner.
We are told by many (I am sorry that Lord Stanley is one of them) that in a generation after such a change, the land of Ireland would be overcrowded by the growth of population, would be sublet and subdivided, and things would be as bad as before the famine. Just in the same manner we were told that after a generation or two of peasant proprietorship, the whole rural territory of France would be a pauper warren, and its inhabitants would be engaged in "dividing, by logarithms, infinitesimal inheritances." How have these predictions been fulfilled? The complaint now is that the population of France scarcely increases at all, and the rural population diminishes. And, in spite of the compulsory division of inheritances by the Code Civil, the reunions of small properties by marriage and inheritance fully balance the subdivisions. The obsolete school of English political economists, whom I may call the Tory school, because they were the friends of entail, primogeniture, high rents, great landed properties, and aristocratic institutions generally, predicted that peasant proprietorships would lead not only to excessive population, but to the wretchedest possible agriculture. What has the fact proved? I will not refer to the standard work on this subject, Mr. W. T. Thornton's "Plea for Peasant Proprietors," or to Mr. Kay's "Social Condition of the People in England and Europe," or to the multitude of authorities cited in my own Political
