are among the chief causes of the over-population, the degradation, and the misery of the Irish people.

Under such circumstances, we must concede to Mr. Stanley, that the introduction of Poor Laws would not be an effective

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panacea for the social miseries of Ireland. We cannot agree, however, with his reasonings upon this subject; nor is he correct in his data. That the Poor Laws, so long as administered in conformity to the law of Elizabeth, did retard the march of population' in this country, and operate beneficially, is capable of the clearest demonstration. It would lead us too far, to enter into an examination of all Mr. Stanley's objections to Poor Laws in Ireland; in our judgement, not one of them possesses the slightest force. For instance, his first objection is, that a vast portion of Irish misery comes from the social state, or from the acts of man himself;' which we should have deemed a powerful reason for attempting a legislative remedy. Again, 'poorrates will suppress the elective franchise in Ireland';

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we do

not see why; but what if they should? Is that a consideration to be set against doing justice to the claims of the starving poor? A compulsory provision for the poor increases pauperism.' Is there a country under the sun where there is so much pauperism, as in Ireland? The Irish are, to a fault charitable, and to compel charity seems paradoxical.' Are the Irish landlords charitable? This last objection against a poor-law is the most absurd of all, and a cruel insult to the misery of the people. The best answer is to be found in the Evidence received by His Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes *.

Mr. Stanley's volume is self-contradictory throughout: it contains many striking statements, but the reasoning is that of an Irish Bull. Nothing can be more completely at variance than his opinions and those of the Irish Clergyman. The former pleads for the Irish farmer, and defends the Irish landlord, stigmatizing the cottier as the foe to the agriculturist.' The latter represents the Irish farmers as the main supporters of the Rock system of brigandage, and recommends an extension of the cottier system, to separate the peasantry from their dependence on the farmers. Mr. Stanley sees no remedy for the social evils of Ireland, but shipping off the redundant population. Has not Ireland been for these fifty years pouring her superfluous population into this country and the Colonies? Yet, in what respect has emigration bettered the condition of those who are left? We feel compelled there is a heartlessness in Mr. Stanley's manner of treating the whole subject, which renders his opposition to the intro

to say,

* See Eclectic for February last. Art. III.

duction of a legislative provision for the aged and disabled at once suspicious and disgusting.

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We must now turn to Mr. Kennedy's plan for tranquillizing Ireland, by improving its agriculture, and, in order to this, instructing the people. Not only are the agricultural classes in want of the profitable employment which there is the power to 'give them'; but they are unskilful, as compared with neighbouring nations, to a degree that can be accounted for only when we reflect, that a law existed till of late years virtually prohibiting any evidence of agricultural industry, skill, or provi'dence ; a diabolical law, one clause of which prescribed a 'limited period for leases, and that, at every new contract for land, two-thirds of the improved yearly value created by the ' tenant should be exacted as rent by the landlord.

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We know,' continues Mr. Kennedy, that this law (and such a law was probably never enacted by any other Government) affected nearly the whole of the Irish people; and that no adequate effort has been made, either by the Government or the land proprietors, since its repeal, to counteract its fearful effects.

It is necessary to dwell upon this point, not for the mere satisfaction of scolding at by-gone Irish Governments; but as exhibiting in itself a sufficient cause for all that agricultural ignorance, that poverty, improvidence, with the consequent opposition to law, and rebellion against government, so common in Ireland, and which many, from want of reflection, attribute to a constitutionally defective nature in the people themselves. Yet this law was but one of a code, of which every item had a similar tendency; the degradation of the original inhabitants. It was most fortunate that a small favoured class was introduced among them exempt from these persecutions. But for the contrast thus exhibited, they might have remained ignorant of their wrongs, and tamely bent their necks to the yoke. We must at least acknowledge the merit due to their incessant resistance to that injustice and oppression which they had not the power to re

move.

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To have a clear idea of the mischief of such a law, we have only to reflect, how even skilful agriculturists act toward the end of their leases, when they have not confidence in the liberality or justice of their landlords. That is, when there is even a chance of that which this law made inevitable. We have to recollect how the old tithe-law acted as a check to improvement, by levying a direct, though small tax upon the improver, proportionate to his success; and how, at length, the general conviction of its evil effects produced the tithecomposition act.

.

We have to recollect how of late years lessees of Church lands have retarded the improvement of their properties, lest such improvements should be valued against themselves in renewals or purchases.

We have to observe the wise caution with which that able man, Lord Kaimes, sought to improve the state of his country and of his

countrymen, whether proprietors or tillers of the land, by urging the landlord to secure to the cultivator the certain value of his improvements, under all circumstances, instead of forcing the greater portion of that value from him, as was the effect of this law.

If we reflect fully upon these cases, and upon the general sound principle, that men's energies can only be directed to useful or to beneficial objects, by giving them an interest in the result of their exertions thus directed; it cannot afford any cause of astonishment, that the Irish nation, having been deprived by law, of such useful incitements, should be in the state we find it at the present day.' Kennedy, pp. 5, 6.

Mr. Kennedy boldly charges the destitution and consequent insubordination of the Irish peasantry upon the landed proprietors; and he is right. Who were to blame for the sufferings of the slaves in our West India Colonies? First and immediately, the planters and their agents; and next, the Government that protected and favoured them in their iniquity. Now without feeling the slightest disposition to apologize for the Jamaica planters, we are by no means sure that, all things considered, their conduct has been more selfish, oppressive, and criminal in the sight of Heaven, than that of the majority of Irish landlords. The noble exceptions to their general character serve but as lights in a picture, to deepen the shadows. Of the direct share which they have had in fostering, from political motives, the pauperism of the country, a Tory journal gives the following revolting picture; and making every allowance for the prejudices of a party writer, there is, we fear, too much truth in it.

'It was because the Roman Catholics were in that debased state, that they were preferred as tenants by Irish landlords, so long as the landlords could count upon their tranquillity and upon their votes at elections. The reason of the preference is obvious. The greater the number of these miserable creatures that could be maintained upon an estate, the greater the political influence of the master of that estate; and political influence was all in all, in a country which, wanting commerce, presented scarcely any other opportunities of a decent establishment than such as were afforded by the public service. The Protestant population, educated to a certain point, and, by the influence of tradition, possibly by the instinctive Saxon spirit, unfitted to enter into a rivalship of degradation with their Celtic competitors, would not descend to occupy tenures of acres, or half-acres, or to bind themselves to rents which they could pay only by living in community with their swine. The Protestant tenantry were of course rejected, and they emigrated. That such would be the case, was foretold by Lord Rosse, then Sir Lawrence Parsons, in his speech in the Irish House of Commons, just forty-three years ago; every line of which speech may now be read as fulfilled prophecy. The arguments, indeed, of the Roman Catholics, by which they obtained the elective franchise in 1793, was the supposed preference of Protestant tenantry :-the argument by

which they prevailed upon the landlords, was a promise of higher rents, and a more abject political compliance; and, to do them justice, this promise was pretty generally observed. We are not the apologists of the Irish landlords: they have committed as many errors, and almost as many crimes, against themselves and their country, as they well could. But it is justice to the majority of them to say, that the circircumstances of their country without commerce, the utter degradation of the Roman Catholic peasantry, and the opportunities which the miserable Act of 1793 placed in the hands of every landholder to turn that degradation to the account of political influence, in a manner compelled the Irish landlords all to pursue the one unhappy course. is obvious that, if the proprietor of 1000 acres would choose to cut up his property into, say 500 or 1000 tenements, he would run away with the political influence of the possessors of fifty times as much property letting their lands in fairly-sized farms.

It

Thus it was that landlords were all compelled into the one vicious track; and the country was overwhelmed with the pauper population described by Dr. Clarke, in a great measure to the exclusion of the Protestant population," the reverse in all respects." Forty years ago, and ever since, the Roman Catholic population were, and are, just what Dr. Clarke describes ; but until within seven or eight years, this did not affect the landlord. He commanded his tenant's vote as before, and received his rents with tolerable regularity. The exciseman or the titheowner, the active magistrate or the clergyman, was occasionally knocked in the head; but this affected not the landlord, as landlord. He could still bring up his corps of electors to vote according to his pleasure, and no organized conspiracy had yet approached the sacred confines of rent. The last seven or eight years, however, have opened new and instructive views to the Irish land-owners. The priests have relieved them from the care of directing their tenants' votes. The anti-tithe conspiracy has, in many cases, passed into an anti-rent conspiracy also. The patronage of the country has, in consequence of the defection of electors, passed from the landlords to the priests, and their parliamentary representative, Mr. O'Connell. The landlords have, therefore, now no longer their former motive for preferring a tenantry " readily employed in acts the most desperate, and schemes the most preposterous," a tenantry barbarous, improvident, squalid.'

Standard, Feb. 22, 1836.

Hence the barbarous wholesale ejectments of which Mr. Stanley affects to be incredulous; and which are still more disgraceful to the landlords, than their former selfish encouragement of the system which has ruined their country.

But let us now hear Mr. Kennedy's evidence as to what might have been done for the peasantry by this vile aristocracy.

That the condition of the Irish agriculturists can be improved in a very short time by a well-judging land proprietor, Lord Gosford and Colonel Close have fully proved. If ever men deserved well of any country, assuredly Lord Gosford, Colonel Close, and Mr. Blacker de serve well of Ireland. Lord Headley and Lord Clonbrock have shewn,

that the power of improving is not confined to the people of the North of Ireland, as some pretend; they have been equally successful in the most disturbed parts of the Centre and South-West. These gentlemen, and a very few others, have proved that Irish landlords and agents can be found, who are instruments of good instead of evil to their dependants. They have proved that it is a gross calumny (though a common one) to call the Irish labouring class a refractory people, opposed to all improvement. They have shewn, on the contrary, by extensive expe→ riments, that the Irish are peculiarly open to receive judicious improvements; by proving that in three years they could be induced to abandon the wretched style of tillage in which they had been reared, (and which it had required the ingenious malevolence of a succession of Irish governments and bad landlords to prolong,) and to adopt in its stead a system that was new to them, not exactly the Scotch or the Belgian, but one uniting the excellencies of both. Here are no indications of the refractory opposition to improvement attributed to the Irish labourers by their maligners; but proofs of aptness and facility in their national character to which few nations can produce a parallel. Here, too, are examples which Irish proprietors would do well to follow; and here are samples of a change which the Irish Government has the power of making general.' Kennedy, pp. 12, 13.

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In Ireland, all are agriculturists, and all are ignorant of agri'culture. This ignorance must be removed. The best authorities prove, that increased agricultural skill would enable the average of Irish cultivators to derive three times the present produce from their land. But the kind of instruction advocated by Mr. Kennedy, must be adopted, he maintains, in concert with a measure that shall give additional employment by bringing the waste lands into cultivation; otherwise it will be attended with little comparative advantage.

'It would, without this, only have the effect of making the rich man richer, and would not alleviate the condition of the poor. Because, so long as the present unnaturally forced competition for land continues, the land proprietors will swallow up every thing but what barely keeps the producer alive; and this competition must continue until the natural and abundant means existing in the country be taken advantage of for the employment of the surplus number of agriculturists. The necessity of the two measures here urged has been proved in a hundred forms by the proceedings of the above-mentioned Parliamentary Committee. Every one agrees in their importance, but Parliament never can get over the distaste which it has to constrain great men to perform their duties. We are shewn the astonishing effect of Lord Headley's conduct upon an entire district in the wildest part of Ireland; a district which previous mismanagement had allowed to arrive at such a state, that the laws had become a dead letter and the people savages. We find it proved to Parliament, that the moment the proprietor sets to work as a proprietor should do, this desperate state of society is changed into tranquillity and prosperity; but, instead of this admirable lesson having any effect, it is lost. Instead of immediately forcing all proprietors to imitate Lord Headley's example in managing their