This establishes, of course, a return current westward, which is as necessary to he watched, and is as much neglected by American as the original eastward current is by British public men.
In this letter of 1868 to Earl Grey, the Archbishop of Westminster desiring, as an Englishman, to counteract, if possible, this influence which was drawing Ireland away from the British monarchy, and towards the American Republic, maintained that by two things the "heart of Ireland" might be won, and her affections enlisted with her interests in the support of the unity, solidity, and prosperity of the British Empire.

One of these two things was "perfect religious equality between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland." The other was that the Imperial Legislature should by statute make it impossible for any landlord in Ireland to commit three wrongs,--"first, the wrong of abusing his rights by arbitrary eviction; secondly, by exacting an exorbitant rent; thirdly, by appropriating to his own use the improvements effected by the industry of his tenants." Perfect religious equality has since been established between the Catholics and the Protestants of Ireland.

The three wrongs which the Archbishop called upon the Imperial Legislature to make impossible to Irish landlords have since been made impossible by Statute.
Yet it is on all hands admitted that the "unity, solidity, and prosperity" of the British Empire have never been so seriously threatened in Ireland as during the last ten years.

Was the Archbishop wrong, therefore, in his estimate of the situation in 1868?
Or has the centripetal influence of remedial British legislation since 1868 failed to check a centrifugal advance "by leaps and bounds," in the "assimilating power" of America upon Ireland?
IV.
Just ten years ago, in 1878, Mr.Michael Davitt and Mr.John Devoy (the latter of whom had been commissioned in 1865 by the Fenian leader Stephens, as "chief organiser of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the British army"), being then together in America, promulgated, Mr.Davitt in a speech at Boston, and Mr.Devoy in a letter sent to the _Freeman's Journal_ in Dublin, the outlines of a scheme for overthrowing British rule in Ireland by revolutionising the ownership of land in that country.
The basis of this scheme had been laid thirty years before, in 1848, by Finton Lalor, John Mitchel, and the present Archbishop of Cashel, then a simple curate.
It was thus stated by Lalor in his paper, the _Irish Felon_:-- "The entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre of the earth, is vested, as of right, in the people of Ireland.

The soil of the country belongs as of right to the entire people of the country, not to any one class, but to the nation." This was a distinct denial of the right of private property in land.