Here is a description of the diet of a third of the people of the United Kingdom;-milk a luxury, bread a wonder, meat unknown, the very potato only cultivated in its most degenerate, unpalatable, and least nutritive variety! That the Irish peasantry subsist almost exclusively upon the potato, is known wherever the Irish name has reached; but we now learn the further particulars of their wretched lot, that the only potato they can afford to cultivate, or eat, is the vilest description of that vile root, Such, we are assured, is the principal and staple food of the labouring peasantry in the entire of two of the Irish provinces, and throughout the greater part of a third.

All reports, all accounts and narratives of the condition of the poor of Ireland tell the same story. Upon this point there is no discrepancy;-Whig, Tory, Radical, agree perfectly. Men dispute of the causes of the melancholy phenomena exhibited by that country; the phenomena themselves are admitted upon all hands. The political grievances of the Irish people are subjects of altercation; but there is no question about their sufferings and destitution. They are, by unanimous consent, the worst fed, worst clothed, and worst lodged population in Europe. We have seen their diet-let us take a peep at their habitations. The celebrated work of Arthur Young, published fifty years ago, contained, amongst its other illustrations, drawings of the usual abodes of the Irish peasantry. It was hardly credible that those abject huts, made of sods and straw, without doors, windows, chimneys, hearths, beds-without the commonest furniture or rudest utensils affording protection neither against the elements, nor any other violence-answering, scarcely indeed proposing, a single object ordinarily aimed at in human dwellings were designed for animals above the rank of swine; yet these were the habitations of man as he was found in Ireland at that time; and the interval has neither improved their structure nor supplied a single deficiency. The peasant's hut is the same dreary den at this hour-the drawings of Arthur Young's book would illustrate with perfect truth any modern tour through the same portion of the empire. The Irish hut is described by the Rev. Baptist Noel, an enlightened and humane observer, in a late valuable work,* As a mud cabin of the worst description, built of 'sods cut from the bog, with rushes or anything else piled on the 'top for a roof, shocking to the eye. Children and pigs, where there is a pig, come together out of these dismal dens; and in

*Notes of a Short Tour in the Midland Irish Counties.'

'some there seemed to be neither turf-stack nor furniture, nor 'any thing above absolute destitution.'

These are but the natural results of that unthrifty avarice and infatuated ambition, which called into being a population so entirely disproportioned to the means of subsistence. It need scarcely be stated that it is not abundant employment that has reduced them to the lumper for their diet, and the sty for their habitation. The general absence of employment is the worst feature of their condition. Demand for labour there is none, at all commensurate to the supply afforded by a glutted market. Employment comes by fits, at long intervals, and leaves the illpaid workman as improvident and wretched as it found him; no industrious habits formed,-no savings accumulated-no addition made to his comforts. Such employment as exists wants the two main requisites of continuity and fair remuneration. The long gaps of agricultural labour,-nearly half the year,-—are periods of utter idleness, not the vice of the wretched peasantry, but their calamity and curse. The writer whom we have just quoted describes a scene in the town of Tipperary, in the following vivid colours: At least a hundred men in frieze, many of ' them ragged, were standing about. "Is it market-day here?" I somewhat thoughtlessly asked the landlady, as we were changing horses. "Oh no," she answered, "the streets are 'generally as full at this time-they are men who can get no' thing to do."

To the question suggested to Mr Noel by this spectacle, there can be but one reply. Is not this enough to account for all 'the turbulence for which Tipperary is infamous ?'

On the state of the King's County, the theatre of the late atrocity which has excited so much attention, Mr Noel makes the following remarks, which we must also take leave to quote:

We saw no symptoms of improvement in the state of the people, no inhabitants being visible but the worn and ragged tenants of filthy cabins. In this neighbourhood, no less than others, there is a frightful excess of labourers; it appears that, of 1599 labourers in the barony, there are 668, or two-fifths of the whole, who have not regular employment. It is easy to perceive the consequences of this state of things: it must depress wages, and raise the rents of small holdings of land, till nothing is left to the tenant and labourer but potatoes and rags.'

Yet there are men who can discover no solution for the crimes and disorders that deform the face of Ireland, but the missives of M'Hale and the orations of O'Connell. For our part, we concur with the same author, that depths of misery like these,

VOL. LXIX, NO, CXXXIX,

L

'with Mr O'Connell's speeches, or without them, are quite ' enough to account for an enmity to the laws under which the 'people of Ireland endure such hardships.' The marvel is, in \truth, not the occasional outbreaks, but the prevalent and general tranquillity; that we have not counties in rebellion, instead of here and there a disturbed barony. Produce the example, in ancient or modern times, of a population so orderly amidst animal sufferings so intense, in a state of destitution so utter and so desperate. Try the same clothing, the same housing, or the like diet in quantity and quality, with the peasantry of England; try the lumper potato for one day,-who would pledge himself for the order of the most exemplary district in the country? Who would answer for the Queen's peace? Who would guarantee the farmers' ricks against the incendiary, or the houses of the gentry against the burglar? Make the experiment where you will, make it where the lessons of Christian resignation have, we may presume, been best inculcated,-where daily example, we must believe, has taught the duties of patience and abstinence more ably and lastingly than any precepts or any sermons; try it at Fulham, try it with the populace of Lambeth, try it even under the sacred walls of Exeter,--there, even there, where Bloomfield dwells bodily, where Philpots sheds his apostolic influence round about him, make experiment of the lumper diet; -but first give notice to the Horse-Guards, call out the militia, organize a rural police, prepare all the defences of the nation! Nay, we question, were the daily food of the Irish peasantry set before the aforesaid holy bishops themselves, whether the flesh would not mutiny against the spirit, whether peace would reign within their palaces, whether all their Christian panoply would repel the assaults of Satan !

Yet it is not in the dismal dens' which they tenant in common with the swine-in the loathsome diet, miscalled subsistence in the rags that constitute their only wear-nor in the disease that ever dogs the heels of nakedness and hunger, we are to seek the springs of the disorders, which, though for party objects much exaggerated, still, to a great extent, disfigure the face of Ireland. The plummet must sink lower, before the entire depth of misery be fathomed-before we reach the true immediate cause of agrarian crime. That cause is insecurity !—the precarious tenure of their hovels and their rags, the uncertain fruition of the very swine's leavings! Not until the quiet possession of their very wretchedness is wrested from them, do the peasantry of this distempered country raise their hands against the law. Far the greater part of the offences that occupy the public

tribunals, and characterise the rural population of Ireland, originate, we are firmly assured, in the reckless exercise of what are speciously called the rights of property. Newly awakened to the madness of their former system, the Irish landlords have been following, of late years, a reverse process. Consolidation has succeeded to subdivision; a change sound in principle-a change not only salutary but necessary-affording the only hope of a thorough reformation of the social state of Ireland; but, unhappily, it has been attempted, in too many instances, with the characteristic selfishness and violence of the Irish aristocracy. As the future was formerly sacrificed to the present, so the present has of late been sacrificed too commonly to the future. Avarice and intolerance are now, as avarice and ambition were before, the motives. A system of ejectment, described by its advocates as a plan of extermination, has opened to the view of its harassed victims an abyss of destitution, compared with which their habitual condition was comfort itself.

And in the lowest depth, a lower deep,

Still threatening to devour them, opens wide,
To which the hell they suffer seems a heaven.'

Still, although it is most true that the revolution in the management of Irish estates, now in progress, has been too generally attended with circumstances of great cruelty, and bitter aggravations of the distress of the rural population-although the lords of the soil have hitherto prosecuted, and must, we fear, be still expected to pursue their selfish interests, alike regardless of the wretchedness occasioned by their measures and the crime and turbulence of which that wretchedness is the parent- still we are thoroughly convinced that the principle now in operation is the sound one; and carries in its womb the ultimate improvement and prosperity of Ireland. Again and again we have pressed upon the landlords of that country, that the excessive subdivision of the soil is its bane and curse; and that, until their estates shall be cleared of the superfluous tenantry, and consolidated into farms more capable of being properly managed, Ireland must necessarily continue to be overspread with crime and misery. From this opinion (always protesting against the injustice and cruelty of turning swarms of helpless families adrift, without asylum or resource), we do not recede. Saving the sacred rights of humanity, the system of consolidation ought to be persevered in; and the clamour against it upon general grounds should be utterly disregarded and discountenanced. Already has the progress it has made been productive of the best

results to agriculture, attested by the improved aspect of the country; and it is only to be deplored that the condition of the people has not been changed for the better also. It is, however, beyond dispute that this condition has deteriorated as the new system has advanced; the gentleman has improved his estate, but the lot of the peasant has become more destitute than ever. The fact might have been foreseen. Indeed it was foreseen. The first steps of the transition through which the peasantry of Ireland have to pass from the state of the mendicant landholder to that of the remunerated labourer must necessarily be attended with great hardships. Expelled from their hovels and potatogrounds, before society has provided them with refuge or provision, they are driven to seek for labour in a market already glutted with that commodity. The price of labour accordingly diminishes, and the entire mass of the labouring population experiences a new depression. The evil, too, is one which must necessarily be progressive, for the cause from which it springs must continue active. The system of dispossession must still go forward; hourly multiplying the clamourers for labour, and augmenting the demand upon a decreasing fund for its employment. The change is therefore undeniably accompanied by evils of great magnitude; and the question is, shall we arrest the movement, or address ourselves to mitigate the hardships attendant on it? Can a means of mitigating those hardships be devised? Can a course of policy be struck out, by which, while a revolution essential to the future welfare of the country is supported and promoted, we may alleviate, or even avert the sufferings and derangements incidental to the process? To reconcile ultimate and lasting good with the least amount of present misery and disturbance, ought of course to be the statesman's object.

In the following passage, which we quote for the admirable union it exhibits of strict principle with humane feeling, the Irish Railway Commissioners state, in language the most forcible, the claims of the landlords on one hand, and the tenantry upon the other-the claims of the landlords to support while prosecuting durable improvements, and of the tenantry to protection in the perils and hardships to which they are consequently exposed.

This change cannot much longer be delayed with safety. It is not possible to avoid it by any other alternative than that of permitting a state of society, pregnant with all the elements of disorder and confusion, to go on unchecked, until it forces the whole population down to the lowest depths of misery and degradation.

The proprietors of estates claim public support, in their endeavours