should go to the State. Ten per cent of the receipts of all exhibitions should be paid to the State. The railroads and bank and insurance departments of the State should be self-supporting. We should charge travelling agents from other States the same as those States charge our own. The foregoing would produce money enough to run the State government; but if it should not, then the remaining sum needed should be assessed to each town in proportion to its assessment list.

9. This is a practical age. The great question of the hour is an economic political question. It is the problem how to distribute the burdens of society in the easiest and fairest way. This is the task that confronts the legislator everywhere, and is rising into prominence in all the States of the Union. It is the question of tariff, of revenue, of taxation, and of finance that is to engage the thoughtful attention of the American voter for the next ten years.

IO. No man knows it all.

give his best thoughts to it.

Every man should

These are mine

to-day. Discussion may change them. The wise man sometimes changes his mind; the fool,

never.

Respectfully submitted,

HARTFORD, CONN., Dec. 24, 1880.

RATCLIFFE HICKS.

ADDRESS

On the Irish Land League, delivered at Hartford, February 28, 1881.

MR. PRESIDENT:

I AM here to-night to do what I can to explain the cause of the Land League agitation in Ireland, and to place it upon such high grounds that every man in whose bosom burns one spark of human love every man who fears his God will give at least his sympathies and prayers to the downtrodden people of Ireland. In order that I may speak with brevity and exactness, and may cover many important facts, I have written out what I wish to say.

The one great question that is to-day agitating the minds of the English-speaking race all round the inhabited globe is the problem presented by the Land League of Ireland. Thinking men, the wide world over, are turning their thoughts to this question.

The history of Ireland for two hundred years has been a history of agitation and turmoil. I shall not attempt, in the short time I have allotted to myself to-night, to review its sad history. In

passing, I can only say that it is a history crowded with crime, persecution, and suffering; and it is a history that ought to mantle with shame the face of every Englishman as he reads it. Who can remain unmoved at "the sight of those long and fruitless struggles of a poetic, ardent, inconsolable race"? The great Irish orator and lawyer, Henry Grattan, aptly described the English policy towards Ireland as one "than which you would hardly find a worse if you went to Hell for your principles, and to Bedlam for your discretion."

You are all, doubtless, familiar with the commencement of those outrages committed by Englishmen, which two hundred years ago laid the foundation of Ireland's misfortunes. It is a page in the world's history which for two centuries has cried to heaven for vengeance. It is the prayer of every liberty-loving soul on this whirling planet that the hour of Ireland's deliverance be brought to pass, and that the wrongs of centuries be righted forever. This question breaks over all national barriers. There is no man, be he Jew or Gentile, American or Asiatic, but feels in this question a personal interest. Ireland is to-day keeping the camp-fires of liberty. The sons of Ireland are sounding the tocsin of liberty, and every man born of woman should extend at least a brother's sympathy to these fellow-creatures struggling for liberty.

And, above all other men on God's footstool,

this question ought to arouse the sympathy of every true American. In the dawn of American

liberty, one man, an Irishman, Edmund Burke, stood up in the British parliament and pleaded for the rights of America in those matchless words that have never been surpassed in sixty centuries, and that to-day stand as the highest effort of human genius. From the opening battle of Bennington down to the last skirmish on the far-off Western prairies, there has not been one battle fought to establish and perpetuate the liberties of America where Irish blood has not flowed, and where Irishmen have not laid down their lives to save for us and our children the free institutions of America. We, then, above all other men, basking, as we are to-day, in the sun of American liberty, ought not to forget this people who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.

Ireland has been called the English poorhouse, supported by the people of the United States. For half a century the American people have supported millions of paupers made by the Irish land system. We have sent millions and millions of dollars to Ireland to keep the breath of life in her poor people, and to fill eventually the coffers of her landlords. We, then, have a personal interest in the final and permanent settlement of the Irish land question. If, however, there is any American here to-night who feels no interest in this question, let him go to some strange and inhospitable shore

where his language is not spoken, but where, perchance, he may hear, even though it be from a stranger, and an Irishman at that, a few words of his own magnetic language, his mother tongue; and then for the first time in his life, perhaps, he will realize how near and dear to him is every man who speaks the master language of the age, our own good Saxon English.

Some people are so uncharitable as to charge Ireland's misfortunes to her own people. They say they are to be attributed either to the religion, the ignorance, or the slothful habits of the Irish Let us examine these charges.

race.

Does any man dare to tell me that it is the Catholic religion that has brought these misfortunes upon the Irish race? I tell him he is a poor student of history. I tell him that the wealthiest nation to-day- the one where there are more men retired and living on a competence, where there is more thrift and more saving than anywhere else is Catholic France. I wonder if in three hundred years, with all the unmeasured resources of this magnificent country of America, we have not been able to reach the wealth of France, if ten generations have come and gone, and we still lag behind, how many more generations must come and go before we stand on a level in wealth with Catholic France. God only knows!

It was Catholic France that built the most