movement, and to get the principal men in his society to act with him. On his return from London, on a bootless deputation to the Government, he became my guest for a time. We had anxious consultations, and came to an understanding which produced memorable results. He signed the requisition for the proposed conference, and promised to bring to it a solid body of the Presbyterian clergy. When their attendance was announced in the newspapers the promise was smiled at by experienced politicians. But when the conference projected for June had to be postponed until August, to enable Presbyterian ministers otherwise engaged with the General Assembly of their Church to be present, a livelier interest began to prevail. This interval was not wasted. The men who projected the conference employed it in preparing the necessary agenda, and the Press was busy debating the principles on which the Land Question ought to be settled, and the method by which these principles could best be established. Plans and projects were nearly as plentiful as in Paris between the summons and the assembly of the Tiers État in '89. I took occasion to specify the policy of the Nation in the premisses, all the more because the claim of the tenants for complete justice had been first formulated by the Nation eight years earlier. There ought to be a plan, I contended, so just and adequate that it could be accepted by North and South, and might become the Tenants' Charter. It must provide, once for all, perpetuity of tenure.
"Over three-fourths of Europe (I said) the tenant is as immovable as the landlord, where landlords are not altogether unknown. From the British Channel to the Sea of Azof the tiller of the soil sits firm. Even under the British flag in Guernsey and the Channel Islands 'no one can divorce him from the land. This fixed tenure turned the rocks of Switzerland and the harsh sands of Belgium into cornfields. It would turn the spectral graveyard of Skibbereen into the cheerful and prosperous home of men. It is the custom of the civilised world on both sides of the equator. Here, then, the Irish tenant is entitled to take his stand."
The second essential point in a tenants' charter was a just rent. To fix a just rent it was necessary that the land should
