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16 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
insurrection arising out of that agitation. When Mr.
Parnell and other Irish Members were arrested in
October last year [1881J, and the Land League sup-
pressed, there was hardly even. a fractional fall in
consols. Forty, fifty, eighty years ago, things were
entirely different, the Irish difficulty being incessantly
spoken of as most menacing, which indeed it was.
The present calmness and the former apprehension are
obviously due very much to a mere change in popula-
tion numbers. Ireland, at the beginning of the century,
held about one-third Q.f the population of the United
Kingdom i as late as 1840 it still held very nearly one-
third; now its population is only one-seventh. Apart
from all relative changes in the wealth of the popula-
tions, these changes in numbers make a vast difference
in the Irish difficulty. It becomes easier for us on the
one hand to bear the idea of an alien State like Ireland
in our close neighbourhood, wholly independent, or
possessing Home Rule like the Isle of Man or the
Channel Islands: the power of mischief of such a com-
munity is less to be feared by a State of England's
greatness than was the power of a separate Ireland
fifty or eighty years ago, by the England of that time.
A separate Ireland then might have been used by
France against the very existence of the English
Empire and the independence of England itself. Now
this would hardly be possible either to France or to
any other State. On the other hand, any possible in-
surrection in Ireland is as nothing to the power of the
United Kingdom compared with what it would have
been when Ireland held a third of the whole population.
Hence the calmness of recent years in comparison with
the agitation of a former period, and which is all the
more remarkable because the agitated memories sur-
vive and colour a good deal of the thought about the
Irish difficulty still. A still more careful examination
would show, I think, that the difficulty has diminished
in intensity-that it is the alien part of Ireland which
has most diminished in numbers, while the loyal part-