At Reading, last week, Mr. Shaw Lefevre, in addressing his
.constituents, and making a telling onslaught on the insane foreign policy of the Government, spoke briefly on a subject to which he has given a great deal of special study,—the true remedy for Irish discontent. The .great want of Ireland was, he said, an intermediate class of owners between the large land- owners and the peasantry—such a class as the clauses in the Church Dieestablishment Act for the sale of the glebe lands to tenants, had, in some small degree, succeeded in establishing, though, owing to the deficiency of machinery, the corresponding Bright clauses in the Irish Land Act had proved. a failure. Mr. Lefevre showed that in spite of the discouraging attitude o the Government, the House of Commons had forced it to admit that
the condition of land-ownership in Ireland was unsatisfactory, and required immediate attention and legislation in this sense ; yet nothing had been done, the Government having been too busy with its more mischievous activities, Unquestionably, a Government really in the best sense Conservative, would have had a great chance of sowing broad-cast the most Conserva- tive kind of proprietary feeling in Ireland, by the creation of this intermediate class of land-owners,Only, as Mr. Lefevre justly said, this has not been a Conservative Government, like the late Sir Robert Peel's, but rather a reactionary Government, like that of Lord North. Its policy is not sedative, but one of counter. irritation,—one of incessant blister and. bluster,
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