The Marquis of Waterford yesterday week opened another aristocratic attack
on the Irish Land Act, by a speech in which he assumed that the Lords' Committee,—who had examined the Chief Commissioners and a few Sub-Commissioners, one gentleman who had acted as counsel for the tenants, and thirty- two gentlemen who were either landlords, or landlords' agents, or landlords' solicitors, or landlords' counsel,—had conducted a perfectly fair inquiry, which might be taken as representing adequately the true working of the Act. Of course, the Marquis
of Waterford's attack was echoed on all sides by Tory land- lords, and replied to chiefly by the members of the Government and one or two independent Peers, like Lord Emly, who made a good speech, and Lord Fitzgerald, who exposed with great force the onesidedness of the Lords' inquiry and the partisan character of the history by which their Lordships' views were coloured. The tilting against the Land Act came to an end, of course, with- out result,— or rather, with the only result intended, the casting of Tory mud at a piece of legislation which has pacified Ireland, and supplied a tardy reparation to the work of centuries of injustice.
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