Does anybody know, with anything like exactness, what the Irish
labourers are really asking? Their petition is coining to the front, but nobody yet seems willing to define it. The Cork Farmers' Club, for example, have resolved " unanimously " that .Mr. Gladstone's attention be called to the necessity of providing a three-roomed cottage and an acre for each labourer ; and the Tralee Board of Guardians resolve that the Land Bill ought to secure the labourers dwellings " with small allotments" on " fair terms." 'What are fair terms ? It might be possible to direct the Land Court to consider that a tenant who had made such arrange- ments had made a wise improvement, to be counted to his credit ; but it would be excessively difficult to draw the clause so as not to make the labourer a tenant too, and so bind him as ascriptus glebm to the soil. He would be tied more tightly than by the wretched Settlement Law. It would be better to leave the labourer question alone, more especially as a large number of them are tenants' sons, sharing their feelings. The farmers seem wholly unaware of the endless difficulties in the way of Government.
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