25751 THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. VOLUME LXXXI. JANUARY-APFIL, 1885. PHILADELPHIA: LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION COMPANY, 1104 WALNUT STREET. ART. I.-The Present State of the Irish Question. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates (Ireland). 1880-84. a THE time has arrived to examine carefully the condition of Ireland and her future prospects. The anarchy and disorder which few months ago prevailed in the three Southern provinces have disappeared to a great extent, and the lawabiding people of this large district-unhappily a small minority only-no longer trembles under a Reign of Terror, distinctly resembling its French prototype. The confederacies of blood which, until lately, were absolutely supreme in many counties, have either been broken up or suppressed; and the arm of justice, too long paralyzed through the fears, the sympathies, or the guilt of juries, has reached a number of notorious criminals, and has widely enforced obedience to law. Even the organization which had for its object the subversion in Ireland of imperial rule, and appealed successfully to attain this end to the necessities and the greed of a distressed peasantry, has lost much of its formidable power; it is distracted by divisions from within, and, what is more important, it has changed its front, and for the present directs against the Irish Government, and the official classes connected with it, the attacks it had concentrated on the Irish landlords. It would be, indeed, a mistake to imagine that any large part of the cultivators of the soil in the South, |