Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/128

 1 1 8 Reviews of Books as in the past is wholly medieval in its influence. " An Irish peasant lad, having been intellectually secluded for seven years at Maynooth, comes out proof against the intellectual influences and advancing science of his time" (p. 219). (d) Under the Restoration Irish interests began to be systematically sacrificed to English commercial greed. " Protectionism was the creed of that dark age" (p. 82). Cut off from manufactures and from trade by English laws made in English interests, the wretched people of Ireland were thrown back for subsistence wholly upon the land, for which they competed with the eagerness of despair, undertaking to pay for their little lots impossible rents. The chapters which follow on Ireland in the eighteenth century, — the Penal Code, the cotter's unutter- able misery, the Whiteboy outrages, and the corruption, selfishness, and subserviency of the Irish Parliament before and after 1782, — are the best part of the book. An occasional ray of cheer lights up the general gloom. " Dublin was gay, mansions rose, claret flowed, wit sparkled, the dance went round" (p. 125). Mr. Smith makes no pretense at original research. His authorities are Bagwell, Froude, and Lecky and half a dozen others whom he men- tions in the preface, but whose conclusions he does not always follow. In a book of such brief compass and effective contrasts there are some exaggerations of statement. Grattan's Parliament is condemned too unqualifiedly, and Burke, Wolfe Tone, and O'Connell judged too severely. Overpopulation, due partly to the Church's " inculcation of early mar- riages, the effects of which may be morally good but are economically perilous" (p. 219), is reiterated (pp. 192, 211) as the chief of Ireland's economic ills. It is not, however, general overpopulation, but the con- gestion of population in certain districts which is the great evil. No mention is made of the recent attempts to relieve this congestion. In fact Mr. Smith's whole account of the last forty years is very disap- pointing. It was some forty years ago that he visited Ireland and wrote a book on Irish History and Irish Character ; it would seem that he has no special interest in, and has made no special study of, Ireland since that day. Gladstone's Home Rule bills, with which he has no sympathy, he dismisses in a few ironical sentences. He tells practically nothing of the great agrarian questions, of England's new solicitude for Ireland, of the substance and working of the great Irish Land acts; nothing of Sir Horace Plunkett's activity and optimism for Ireland in the New Century, nor of his efforts to turn the sentimental Irishman from polit- ical agitation back to practical agriculture. Yet these are the very ques- tions of which the student of Irish history and Irish questions will be most anxious to know, and upon which he ought to be informed. Con- scious perhaps of this deficiency, Mr. Smith has appended " An Accoimt of the Irish Land Code, by Hugh J. McCann, B.L.," but this is altogether unsatisfactory. It consists for the most part of ill-digested verbatim extracts from the various Land Purchase Acts and the Dunraven Con- ference; it is legal but not lucid; it lacks the economic point of view