The Irish land question has given birth to a literature of its own in the last half-century; legislation on the Irish land system has been extraordinarily active. With respect to the first, reference may be made to 'Two Centuries of Irish History,' _ante_, and to Mr. Barry O'Brien's works, _ante_; to 'Emigration and the Tenure of Irish Land,' by Lord Dufferin; to John Stuart Mill's 'The Irish Land Question;' to 'The Irish People and the Irish Land,' by Butt; to Sir George Campbell's 'The Irish Land,' a very good little book; to Judge Longfield's essay on the Irish land in 'Systems of Land Tenure;' and to my own 'Letters on the Land Question of Ireland,' republished from the _Times_. I am happy to think that, on this subject, I have always 'pitched my Whiggery low;' my first essay was on the Encumbered Estates Act; when fresh from Oxford I condemned that scheme of confiscation as unequivocally as, in the present and other works, I have condemned Irish agrarian legislation since 1880-81. Other books contain passages on the Irish land system that may be read with profit; see the 'Recollections and Suggestions' of Earl Russell; 'Ireland in 1868,' by Gerald Fitzgibbon; 'Ireland,' by Lord Grey; 'Journals, Conversations, and Essays relating to Ireland,' by Nassau Senior; and 'New Views on Ireland,' by Lord Russell of Killowen. As regards recent legislation on the Irish Land, from 1870 to 1896, the Acts passed by Parliament must of course be studied, and also the important debates reported in Hansard. Butt wrote a very able volume on the Land Act of 1870; I contributed a short treatise; an exhaustive and technical work of great value, on all the Irish Land Acts, has been produced by Messrs. Cherry and Wakely; this, with the Irish Reports, supplies ample professional, and even general, information. With respect to the administration of the Irish Land Acts, see the Report of the Committee of the House of Lords, and the evidence published in 1872; the Report of, and the evidence collected by, the Bessborough Commission of 1880-81; the Report of a Committee of the House of Lords on the working of the Land Act of 1881, published, with the evidence, in 1882; the Report, with the evidence, of the Cowper Commission, 1888-89; the Report, with the evidence, of the Morley Commission, 1894-1895; and, especially, the Report of Sir Edward Fry's Commission of 1897, with the important evidence it has put together. Mr. Lecky, in his 'Democracy and Liberty,' vol. i. ch. ii., has criticised, almost as severely as I have done, recent Irish agrarian legislation; no serious defence of it has ever been made or attempted.