Sir James Stephen is writing again in the Times on
the Home-rule Question, and in the letter published on Thursday insisted specially that Mr. Gladstone had completely failed to establish his contention that it is the "foreign garb " in which English law presents itself to the Irish, which renders then' so lawless. Almost all the law, says Sir James Stephen, in force in Ireland is practically of English origin, but "no part of it is the subject of complaint except the law relative to land, and in that case it is not really the law, but the distribution of property which has grown up under the law, which is objected to." As to Sir Charles Russell's contention that the Act of Union has failed, Sir James Stephen denies the fact. It would be easy, he says, to show that all the grievances of which, at the time of the Union, Ireland most bitterly com- plained, have been removed; that a good education law has been passed ; that Ireland has grown in wealth at least as rapidly as any other large section of the United Kingdom ; and that the great calamity of the century, the famine of 1847, must have happened just as certainly under Grattan's Parliament, or any other political system, as under our own. That is all perfectly true. But it is also true that discontent has advanced in Ireland pari passe with all those changes for the better. We do not in the least believe that Home-rule will remove that discontent,— probably it will enormously increase it,—but neither do we believe that any other remedy for it has been discovered.
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