There is, no doubt, a great deal of distress in one or another part of Ireland, though it has not been my fortune to come upon any outward and visible signs of such grinding misery as forces itself upon you in certain of the richest provinces of that independent, busy, prosperous, Roman Catholic kingdom of Belgium, which on a territory little more than one-third as large as the territory of Ireland, maintains nearly a million more inhabitants, and adds to its population, on an average, in round numbers, as many people in four years as Ireland loses in five.
I have seen peasant proprietors in Flanders and Brabant who could give the ideal Irish agent of the Nationalist newspapers lessons in rack-renting, though I am not at all sure that they might not get a hint or two themselves from some of the small farmers who came in my way in Ireland.
Like all countries, mainly agricultural, too, Ireland has suffered a great deal of late years from the fall in prices following upon a period of intoxicating prosperity.

Whether she has suffered more relatively than we should have suffered from the same cause in America, had we been foolish enough to imitate the monometallic policy of Germany in 1873, is however open to question; and I have an impression, which it will require evidence to remove, that the actual organisation known as the National Land League could never have been called into being had the British Government devoted to action upon the Currency Question, before 1879, the time and energy which it has expended before and since that date in unsettling the principles of free contract, and tinkering at the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland.
But I am trenching upon inquiries here beyond the province of this book.
Fortunately it is not necessary to my object in printing these volumes that I should either form or formulate any positive opinions as to the origin of the existing crisis in Ireland.

Nor need I volunteer any suggestions of my own as to the methods by which order may best be maintained and civil government carried on in Ireland.

It suffices for me that I close this self-imposed survey of men and things in that country with a conviction, as positive as it is melancholy, that the work which Mr.Redmond, M.P., informed us at Chicago that he and his Nationalist colleagues had undertaken, of "making the government of Ireland by England impossible," has been so far achieved, and by such methods as to make it extremely doubtful whether Ireland can be governed by anybody at all in accordance with any of the systems of government hitherto recognised in or adopted for that country.

I certainly can see nothing in the organisation and conduct, down to this time, of the party known as the party of the Irish Nationalists, I will not say to encourage, but even to excuse, a belief that Ireland could be governed as a civilised country were it turned over to-morrow to their control.