it. Most people feel towards them as the backwoodsman in America feels towards the skunk, or the Englishman towards a garrotter; and begin to doubt whether treason is not too great and high a name to bestow upon the stupid crimes of such poor creatures, and whether the gallows, as an instrument of punishment and deterrance, might not be advantageously preceded by the cat-o'-nine-tails.

An immense amount both of sense and nonsense has been said and written, and will continue to be said and written, about the wrongs and miseries, real or supposed, of the Irish people-notably of the Celtic and Milesian, or pure Irish of the south and west, as distinguished from the mixed or AngloSaxon Irish of the north. Quite as much or more has been said, and will continue to be said, of the remedies for these wrongs-if wrongs they be-and of the proper measures to be adopted for the alleviation of hardships and sufferings which are but too real and indisputable. The Irish assert that their miseries flow from political, and therefore remediable, causes. The English, for the most part, deny the fact or the assumption; and assert, on the contrary, that the miseries and privations of the Irish people on their own soil, though greater than those of the English and Scotch in their respective sections of the Empire, are almost wholly the results of physical and natural causes -such as over-population, the great prevalence of bog-lands, and the absence of coal and iron- - which legislation can neither prevent nor remedy; and that such political grievances as do exist-the Irish Protestant Church Establishment among the number-would, if removed by legislative action from the category of Irish complaint, leave the real sources of Irish misery exactly where they were. Who are right in this never-ending controversy-the Irish or the English? The Irish, by dint of the most obstin

ate reiteration through the mouths of oratorical demagogues who love to hear the sound of their own voices, and through the pens of literary demagogues who think that the fine flavour of sedition adds grace to the style, pungency to the wit, and cogency to the argument, have succeeded in persuading foreigners, especially the French and Americans, that Ireland is a kind of British Poland, governed by the bayonet and the cannon-ball; that Irishmen have no political, and scarcely any social, rights; that they are mere pariahs in our aristrocratic civilisation; that their religion is under ban and excommunication; and that if Ireland were but left to itself, to be governed by Irishmen, and released from the "odious thraldom" of the Saxon, all the miseries of the people would disappear as rapidly as the shades of night at the rising of the sun. Were this end accomplished, they think that the country would immediately start on a race of improvement, and become, as nature meant, and as British connection alone forbids, "great, glorious, and free, first flower of the earth," and all the rest that poets have predicted; a country in which every peasant would live on beef, bread, and beer, instead of on potatoes and water; in which he would cultivate his own freehold, and sit, when his labour was done, in the shadow of his own oak-tree, with no harsh landlord or tax-collector, no merciless tithe-proctor, and no brutal Sassenach to make him afraid. This is the notion which the imaginative agitators of the Green Isle, and such of them as leave Ireland for their own and Ireland's good, though not perhaps to that of the new lands to which they betake themselves, endeavour to instil into the minds of all who will listen, and which they persuade a good many inconsiderate and credulous people to believe.

The English version of the story is very different. Ireland, say such

Englishmen and Scotchmen as have travelled in it, and such political and social economists as have studied the subject of the chronic poverty and discontent of the people, is a small and mainly agricultural country, with a very large population. Its climate is moist; and many districts are better adapted for pasturage, employing but few persons, than for the raising of cereal or other crops for the support of a greater number of families. There is neither coal nor iron in the country for the profitable establishment of manufactures, such as have enriched Staffordshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Lanarkshire. The people are not only very poor, but they are very prolific; and have little taste or inclination for manufactures, even if these could be successfully established-for the fisheries, which invite their energies in vain or for any pursuits but those of agriculture and trade. The chief good, the summum bonum of happiness in the mind of the Irish peasant, is the possession of a piece of land; and if every Irish peasant could gratify this darling wish, Ireland would be divided and subdivided into as many agricultural holdings as there are heads of families. Political economy, as well as experience, teaches that if this could be done, and the system maintained, a further subdivision would become imperative in the next generation, and in the next again after that; and that if the people continued to be as prolific under these altered circumstances as they are at present, and they all remained upon the land, instead of emigrating to America or elsewhere, there might be increased production; but that the production, however great, would not keep pace with the wants of the population, and that the standard of living would be lowered to the starvation-point, or little above it.

It is not, however, because political economists condemn the system of a too minute subdivision of the agricultural lands of any

country that the experiment cannot be tried in Ireland, but because the lands of Ireland are not the property of the State, like the unoccupied lands of America, but the property of individuals, like the settled lands of New York and Canada, as well as of England and Scotland; and that the owners of these lands claim the right to hold them in their own families if they please, to sell them if so disposed, or to let them for such rental as they can get. Under these circumstances every Irish peasant cannot be accommodated with the little farm which he covets, unless by an act of confiscation and social revolution, opposed alike to the honesty and the common sense of mankind. The Irish peasantry know this very well; and those among them who possess energy, enterprise, and the few pounds necessary to carry them across the Atlantic, very often contrive to become the owners of farms in America hundreds of times larger, and thrice as fertile, as any farm that, under the most fortunate circumstances, they could purchase or become tenants of in their own country. Those among them who have not sufficient energy or means to emigrate remain at home, and compete with each other for the possession of land, often paying for it a much higher rental than it is fairly worth; and only gaining by the hardest of hard work a very miserable sustenance out of it. They are poor, because the land is more limited than their numbers; they are discontented, because they are poor; and disaffected towards the Government, because they are discontented with their physical condition. They are taught by charlatans and demagogues that it is the Law which causes their misery, and they set themselves against the Law as a natural consequence. The Legislature, which Irish agitators assert to be anti-Irish, is as freely open to Irishmen as to Englishmen and Scotchmen. No political,

social, or religious disabilities prevent the Irishman from taking his share in the government not merely of Ireland, but of England and Scotland, and of the British Colonies in every part of the world. An Irishman can sit for an English or Scottish borough or county, if he can persuade a constituency to elect him; and Ireland herself returns to Parliament nearly twice as many members as Scotland-more, in fact, than her equitable share in the representation, if representation were based upon property as well as upon numbers. Whatever grievances may affect Ireland, any Irish or other member can discuss in Parliament and in the press; and there is not wanting a large class of English members, as well as of English politicians out of Parliament, who take the greatest possible interest in Irish affairs, and who would aid in the repeal of any law proved to work injuriously to the Irish people, socially, politically, industrially, commercially, or religiously. The only Irish grievance over which the British Parliament has any control is a religious one, and consists in the existence of the Protestant Church Establishment, and in the partial disability still affecting the Roman Catholics, which forbids any person holding that religious faith from exercising the functions of Lord High Chancellor, or sitting upon the throne of Great Britain. But it is not at all clear to the mind of any reasonable person that Ireland would be sensibly the better by the disendowment of the Protestant Church, or the nomination of a Papist Lord Chancellor; unless, indeed, the fact that the Parliament of the United Kingdom had conceded these points should put the Irish people in better humour, and eliminate from their chronic discontent that element which is poetical and sentimental, rather than real and practical.

Irishmen are not naturally a thriftless and discontented people.

There is nothing in their character which should produce an antagonism of race between them and the English. Their grievances, political and religious, real and ideal, practical and sentimental, historical or contemporaneous, past and present, are mainly traceable to their poverty, their fecundity, their preference of the agricultural to every other mode of life, and the impossibility under which they labour in their own little country of making its limited and not overfertile soil sustain them in comfort, or sustain them at all, except by their reduction to the very lowest and least nutritious diet on which it is possible to maintain human life the potato. The civilised world remembers with horror the calamities that befell the Irish from 1846 to 1848, when that staple food of millions suddenly failed, when the awful famine was succeeded by a still more awful pestilence, when the two combined carried to untimely graves about one-fourth of the whole population, and when all the young and strong who had a few pounds in their pockets rushed out of the country as if the curse of God was upon it, and sought a refuge in America. not wanting agitators in those days, mad or wicked enough to tell the Irish that the famine and the plague were the necessary results of the British connection, and fools in abundance were found to believe them. How noble was the charity or the beneficence of Great Britain and the British people on that occasion, and what wholesome results were the speedy consequence of the liberation of much of the Irish soil from the ownership of a bankrupt proprietary, mostly Irishmen, no one has forgotten except the Irish. The people of the Western Isles and Highlands of Scotland have suffered, and still suffer, from the same causes which produce the poverty of Ireland; but as among them there are no political agitators or theological malcontents to stir up

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forest, build their log shanties, and till the fertile soil, their condition remains as miserable as it was in Ireland. They consort together in filthy back-slums and alleys, as they do in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow; and fall into the evil habit of drunkenness, when all chance of their progress in life is destroyed for ever. "All the Irish who come here can do well," said a gentleman of long and varied experience to Mr Maguire when in Halifax, Nova Scotia, "if they abstain from drink, or will only drink in moderation. Drink is the ruin of men here, just as it is in the old country. No matter how a man starts-though he may not have a cent in his pocket, he can make money, provided he is well conducted and does not drink." Mr Maguire quotes, as a striking proof of the comfortable condition of his countrymen in Nova Scotia, to which the great majority had emigrated under the most unfavourable circumstances, the fact that, of the two thousand Roman Catholic voters in the city and county of Halifax, all, or nearly all, owned above £50 worth of real estate, and voted as proprietors, not as tenants. Of Prince Edward Islandin which there had been a long dispute about the land - tenure, now happily concluded to the satisfaction of all the parties interestedMr Maguire reports as favourably as of Nova Scotia. He particularly describes the Irish settlement of Monaghan as a specimen of what the Irish can do with freehold land if they can purchase it at a small price.

"The Monaghan settlers, to use the expression of one who knew them well, had not a sixpence in their pockets when they landed. But they took greenwood farms, or tracts of land entirely covered with forest, not a rood of which was cleared when they entered into their occupation. Selecting the most convenient position for his future home, the adventurous settler erected his little log. cabin, and having secured that shelter

for himself and his family, he began to chop away at the trees which overshadowed his lonely dwelling, until the in the forest-studded with tree-stumps, semblance of a field-rather an opening rewarded his industry, and stimulated him to greater efforts. By working occasionally for the nearest farmers, the settlers were enabled to purchase provisions and other necessaries during the first months of their arduous struggle. which they had previously cut down, The next year they burned the timber and used the ashes for manure; and round the stumps of what had previously been monarchs of the forest they planted their first crop of potatoes. The following year wheat was added to their harvest, and in a few years they began to have a farm-not, it is true, without hard work, and occasionally bitter pri vations. But the prize-glorious independence-was well worth contending for. These same men, who, as a rule, began without a sixpence in their pockets, were" (at the time of Mr Maguire's visit) "in the possession of a hundred acres of land each, with from fifty to seventy acres cleared; much of the land not exhibiting the faintest trace of a tree ever having grown upon it. The settlers had long passed the log-cabin stage, and were occupying substantial and commodious farmhouses; and most of them could drive to church on Sunday in a well-appointed waggon, with a good horse, or a pair of good horses; and probably had what they would call 'a little money laid by in the bank.' rule, admitting only of a rare exception, I did not for the entire day, during a habitation that was not decent in apcircuit of nearly sixty miles, see a single pearance, or that did not evince an air of neatness and comfort. All were constructed of timber, but they were well glazed, well roofed, and kept as white and clean as lime and paint could render them. We must have seen hundreds of farmhouses during our ten hours' tour, but I can safely assert that

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I did not see more than half-a-dozen which betrayed poverty or indicated an appearance of squalor; and these, I am happy to say, were not occupied by the Irish." "While I was on the island," adds Mr Maguire, "an Irishman, who had come out as a labourer not many years previously, sold a farm for £1000, retaining another worth double that amount. I came out here with little in my pocket,' said another from Munster, on the borders of Cork and Tipperary; and, I thank God, I am now worth over