Sir Farrer Hersehell, in an admirable speech at Nottingham on
Tuesday, discussed the assertion that the situation in Ire- land was all due to the advent of the Liberals to office. In 1874, when the Tories came into power, there were but 212 agrarian crimes ; in 1875, they had sunk to 136; then they advanced gradually, but very slightly, till in 1879,—the year of famine,—they numbered 870. In 1880, when the Conservatives were rejected by the country, the state of things was rapidly growing worse, and would have grown worse under the influ- ence of bad seasons and the stimulus of the Land League, what-
ever Government had been in power. The most Conservative politicians in Ireland, Mr. Kavanagh at their head, had re- commended a change in the law in the direction of the Land Act of 1881, though they might not all of them have gone so far. (Some of the most Conservative, by the way, went farther, in the contest for County Londonderry.) Sir Farrer Herschell (who is no violent Radical, and who knows the whole structure and working of the Irish Land Act better, probably, than any other English lawyer), expressed his strong belief that that Act would be found to work well for every section of the Irish community.
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