estates, there is nothing but drivelling, jobbing, and talking of "aiding local efforts" which are never made; and saying, "what vast good proprietors could do, if they would,"—which no one ever doubted, "but which hundreds of years have proved that they would not do although they could: thus the whole welfare and safety of society are left to depend upon what is known not to exist—the discretion and wisdom of Irish proprietors. This principle has been the destruction of the country for ages; but the principle is a measured one; it does not leave the welfare of the rich dependent on the discretion of the poor: any law required to tie up the conduct of the latter, is quickly enough concocted.

The facility with which well-inclined proprietors could remedy what is wrong, has been at all times admitted in this country: it was not necessary to have the strong proofs of late years exhibited by Lord Headley, in turning a famishing banditti into well fed and well conducted subjects-nor by Lord Clonbrock, in clearing an estate of an over dense population by establishing the surplus number on a waste district, without condemning them to destitution, or forcing them to desperation-nor by Lord Gosford and Colonel Close,-to shew that where there is the inclination, there are the means of instructing ignorant people; and that the knowledge of his art makes the labourer a richer and a happier man than he was when his ignorance prevented his labour from producing sufficient food for his family. It did not require any recent proofs to convince Parliament of these facts. It is nearly sixty years since Arthur Young proved to the world the difference between good and bad Irish proprietors, and pointed out the enormous resources of this country, whilst the people were sunk in the lowest abyss of misery; that one cause of this misery amongst the people was ignorance of their art, which was differently and more profitably exercised in other neighbouring countries; that another cause of the misery was want of employment, whilst he shewed that there were quantities of land waste; that the unemployed were anxious to cultivate these lands, and that their doing so would be profitable both to themselves and the land proprietors; all these things were pointed out as fully and clearly sixty years ago, and proved as satisfactorily as they have since been by all the committees and commissions that have been throwing away time in enquiring, when they ought to have been acting. The whole of the proceedings of these committees and commissions may be termed works of supererogation, which have cost, however, millions to the country, without advancing the pretended object of them one step further towards its completion, and leaving, in the mean time, mischief to propagate mischief in every possible direction and degree. The same story we find told over and over in every successive compilation on the subject, and all reducible to the general short statement-That insubordination and suffering are forced upon the Irish people by the misconduct of the land proprietors!

Our secondary evils absorb all the attention of our rulers, and either there is no time or no inclination to think of the primary one. This assuredly is an error. Civil and religious liberty, equal and just laws, are, no doubt, delicious possessions; and vile indeed must be the heart of that man, or the inhabitants of that nation, incapable of appreci

ating their value. Still, they are but the luxuries of society; luxuries hitherto little known, though earnestly sought, in Ireland. Food is the necessary without which life cannot continue; and therefore the emancipation question, the tithe, the grand jury, and many other gross systems that existed and still exist to the everlasting shame of our former governments, however glaringly in the abstract they may have required correction, sunk into insignificance when compared with the first great evil, and did not merit one moment's consideration, at the cost of delaying the application of a remedy for famine. Yes, Famine! Its certain existence was known to all. Its certain cause was known to all. Its certain remedy was known to all. Yet the cause is permitted progress-the remedy is totally neglected. Let us cease to rail at Turkish Pashas and Venetian oligarchs. The slaves of those iniquitous powers at least had food.' Ib., pp. 18-23.

Mr. Kennedy is very severe in his observations upon the legislative measures which have been from time to time brought forward to remedy the social evils of Ireland. The mixing up the question of tithe with that of rent, by making the landlord a titheproctor, he denounces as a piece of desperate folly. The principles which characterize the stupid Act now in existence, and all Bills hitherto brought forward on the subject, are,' he says,

First, one of extreme injustice towards the clergy in possession of parishes, by robbing them of what they ought to possess during their lives.

Second, a principle of extreme injustice towards all sects in Ireland, not belonging to the established church, by seeking to render permanent a system injurious to them, which ought to be changed.

• Third, a principle most hostile to the progress of the reformed religion, because the professors of other creeds are not sufficiently philosophical to consider the purity of our doctrines, contrasted as they are with the unjust method by which our church and our clergy are supported.

Does not the gross system employed in Ireland, amply account for the little progress hitherto made by the pure principles of the reformed church? the doctrines of which, however admirable in themselves, are but too often exhibited to our Roman-Catholic brethren in bitter revilings, and in the incessant exertions of the expounders of those doctrines, to get from them money. The natural consequence is, that instead of either joining our church, or quietly contributing to its support, these people immediately draw a contrast between the practice of our clergy, and the principles inculcated by their Divine Master, and come to the conclusion, that neither our church, our clergy, nor ourselves have any thing to do with Christianity.

The fourth characteristic principle is one of exceeding injustice and peril towards the landlords, by pretending to give to them a power to recover tithe, which it is impossible for them to carry through, but which they will try to exert, and will thereby transfer to themselves, as landlords, the resistance which has succeeded against the clergy; thus shaking to its foundation a right which is in all countries considered the most permanent and certain-that in landed property.

The fifth characteristic is that of tending to educate the people to resist government, and to substitute mob-law for the law of the landbecause it tries to effect that which is unjust, that which a large majority of the people are unanimously and determinedly combined to resist, and that which the government has already proved itself unable to enforce.

'The signal success of this mob-law against tithes, ought to have induced the government and land proprietors to reflect deeply on the subject, with a view to prevent its extension. They would have seen that it was produced by injustice, and that injustice also exists in the management of land, well calculated to produce a similar exercise of it, against rent owners, even without any additional incentive. They would have seen that the system of land management is nearly as odious to the tenantry of Ireland, as the Established Church system is to the Roman-Catholics; and that the mob-law is as applicable in the resistance to tithe paying; with a much stronger inducement however, and much more experience in applying it, than there was when tithe was first resisted. These facts ought to have struck the legislatureand the additional fact, that the only way to avoid this impending danger was to make the land proprietors just and useful to the unhappy people made wretched by their conduct, instead of putting them forward as scape-goats, to bear even a greater quantity of public odium than they had earned. The legislature are still in time to avert this second application of mob-law, the growing taste for which is natural, and the limits to which it may extend, immeasurable. Nothing but injustice and folly could have produced it ;-nothing but excessive justice and wisdom in our government can now arrest its progress.' Ib., pp. 40-43.

Mr. Kennedy's plan is essentially the same as that which is advocated by the philanthropic Author of the pamphlet entitled, "Colonies at Home;" first published in the year 1827. The beneficial results of Mr. Allen's experimental establishment at Lindfield, strikingly shew what may be achieved by even a benevolent individual, and under many disadvantages. The soil of Ireland is admirably adapted to similar experiments; and, in the words of one who has every claim to be listened to, the nobility of that country have it in their power, without any injury to themselves, but to their unspeakable advantage, to provide an 'effectual remedy for the present disgraceful state of things in that unhappy portion of the empire. We cannot refrain from transcribing Mr. Kennedy's energetic appeal to the lords of the ́ soil', the real authors of the crimes and miseries of Ireland.

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If it be not the duty of a proprietor of land to manage it as a trustee for the advantage of his labouring countrymen, whose existence depends upon the land, as well as for his own, then the proprietors must have a clear right to condemn to any degree of misery and destitution or starvation they think fit, the whole labouring population. If they have not the right to produce the destruction of the whole labouring population, neither have they the right to destroy a portion of it.

Their turning the labourers off the whole of their lands, would produce the first result. Their turning the labourers partially out of their lands, or keeping any portion of their lands waste or unproductive, when there are numbers of labourers starving for want of employment, is attended with the second. If proprietors will reflect, they may perceive that the giving a right of property in land to any individual could only have been permitted by a community for objects beneficial to the community. It has been done, not as acknowledging any inherent right in any individual to a particular portion of land originally, but because land in common could not be made very productive or useful to the community. It is because ten labourers, each receiving the exclusive privilege of tilling a piece of land proportioned to his strength, can make these ten pieces of land produce a hundred times as much food, and therefore confer a hundred times as much benefit upon the community, as if those ten pieces of land were common to the ten labourers.

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The appropriation of land conveys the obligation of making that land subservient to the wants of the population, to any required degree of which it is susceptible; and the keeping of lands waste, or unproductive, is only sufferable as long as there is enough of land without them to supply the demand for employment. Anything beyond this, is oppression on the part of the proprietors, whether it originate in apathy, ignorance, or self-indulgence, and tends to force people to the consideration of primitive rights, which is an awkward subject for the privileged classes. It is thus difficult to calculate the dreadful consequences that may result from the present misapplication of land-proprietors' power in the British Islands. These consequences would be prevented by a vigorous and just government intervening and saving the proprietors, by forcing them to act with consideration for the people, and with some reference to those principles of reason and justice, upon which alone the right to certain beneficial interests in land is preserved to them. What must be the reflections of an English traveller upon human governments, as he passes mile after mile of waste, finding at long intervals a fine field of wheat, which proves to him the extensive unemployed resources of his country, whilst his countrymen are suffered to pine in misery. How his indignation rises as he journeys along the interminable park wall of some proprietor, perhaps a legislator, who, instead of seeking to remedy the sufferings that his class has caused, would follow with the utmost rigour of unjust laws, the poor man who ventures across this sacred boundary-a boundary depriving wretched Englishmen of the finest portion of that land which was created for their support, that its proprietor may enjoy the barbarous delight of expertly butchering with his own hands harmless animals that have cost him much previous care and expense to foster. Yet, with these things before our eyes, we are told that there are too many people in the land; that the poor should be left to their own resources, labour thus withheld being their only resource ;-that it is necessary to transport them to foreign climes; that we must not interfere with gentlemen in the management of their properties. Hosts of such atrocious doctrines are advanced and acted upon, until the suffering mass is driven to desperation. Ib., pp. 111-113..

And now, can we find words adequate to reprobate the blindness or baseness of the No Popery' agitators, the partizans of this same selfish oligarchy, who, to divert the public indignation from their own crimes, or to protect the sinecures of the ecclesiastical gentry, would enlist the religious prejudices and alarms of English people against the long oppressed population of the sister island? When it is asked, what has the Roman Catholic religion done for the Irish peasantry, how justly may it be retorted, What has Protestantism done for them, or for their landlords? The spread of Popery is, in Ireland, the crime of Protestantism; and by a just retribution it has become its scourge. The Irish aristocracy and the Irish Church have abandoned the people to the Romish priests, and now they quarrel with the fool's harvest which their heartless neglect has sown. If the Popery of the lower orders of Irish be little better than heathenism, how much better is the political Protestantism of the higher orders, than a masked infidelity? From the Religion of the Gospel, the oppressor and the oppressed stand at an equal remove; and the pure doctrines of the dominant Church serve but to aggravate the culpability of those who have left others to feed the flocks they have fleeced, and have employed the weapons of violence and extortion to propagate the faith of Christ. It has, indeed, been avowed as the purpose of the Protestant hierarchy, not to convert, but to garrison the country; and the empty churches of the Establishment stand as melancholy fortresses in the midst of the moral waste. The Established Church, the Church of the aristocracy, if it has not caused, has but mocked the misery and ignorance of the people. The blame rests not with the clergy,—not with the resident clergy, who have done all that men could do, in numerous instances, to counteract the evil influence of the system; and who have suffered still more from the injustice of Protestant landlords, and Protestant dignitaries and sinecurists, than from the machinations of Popish agitators. We speak of the hierarchy-the feudalism of the Church-the tithe system, aggravated to the last degree of extortion and impolicy by the subdivision of land and the pauperism of the tenantry, and, till very lately, attended by the still more hateful oppression of the cess; a system based upon arbitrary power, and characterized throughout by frightful injustice. All that the pious zeal of the Irish clergy has accomplished, has been in spite of this system, to which with self-denying infatuation they attribute even the good effects of their own ill-requited labours. When will Christian men, educated in colleges, be wise enough to perceive, that a political institution cannot be a Church, and that an Establishment is the only proper name for that secular arrangement, of which property is the only object? When that property shall have been wholly annihilated or secularized, then, and not perhaps till then, under the schooling of Divine Providence,