breached by outward attack, and when they, who should serve as its pillars, are seen to rush against each other, and jostle together for their mutual overthrow? Surely, even if there were not so high and holy an authority on the instability of a kingdom and a house thus divided, human calculations would lead us to conclude, that here the government is unstable, and the building unsound.

ART. III.-1. Third Report of the Commissioners for inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland.

2. The Evils of the State of Ireland, their Causes, and their Remedy-A Poor Law. By John Revans.

IT

T would be a needless labour and waste of time, in the present stage of the question, to enter upon a formal inquiry into the necessity of a legislative provision for the Irish poor. That necessity is no longer disputed. The inquiries which have been made, and the reports, founded upon them, which have been laid before the world, have silenced all open opposition to so just and irresistible a cause. A mass of evidence is in the hands of the public, exhibiting such a variety and extent of hitherto unalleviated suffering, such a waste of human life and happiness, such scenes of degradation and despair, that no man, reading those painful recitals, " and having human feelings" about him, can resist the imperative and urgent necessity of a Poor Law.

We are not going to distress the minds of our readers by displaying detached groups, or individual scenes of woe, taken from the frightful panorama of affliction which is spread out before us. The Irish reader needs not to be told of sufferings with which his eye is familiar, and his heart sick and a sufficient publication and exposure of our country's misery has taken place, to awaken the justice and sympathies of the British people. They have heard enough of the multitudes of their fellow subjects, who lie among straw or rushes, upon damp clay floors, without covering enough for warmth or decency. They have heard enough of the annual typhus, and of those "periodical" visitations of famine, to which mighty statesmen find it so easy to inure their sensibilities. They have heard enough of that herb of scarcity, the yellow charlock, which, with nettles and other weeds, often constitutes the summer food of tens of thousands; of the enormous rents paid by the poor for the hovels they inhabit; of the miserable and uncertain pittance of wages they can earn; and of the merci

less and reckless barbarism with which they are frequently turned adrift, to seek shelter and employment on the world's wide waste. These things are now as familiar to the thoughts of English readers, as they are to the observation and experience of those, who cannot go to their doors without seeing abundant proofs that they exist. Why should we repeat them in detail? Why harrass the patience of the public and wear out its pity with "nothing but songs of death?" Such representations have done their work. They have confounded the hard-hearted, awakened the indifferent, and fixed the attention of the humane and wise upon this important question.

And a more important question has not been proposed or submitted to legislative operation, during the present generation. Emancipation, Parliamentary and Municipal Reform, the Abolition of Tithes, are all great questions. By their discussion or effects, they have wrought mighty changes, and still point to events of vast magnitude and moment yet to come. But hitherto society has been more affected by the great principles they involve, than by any matured fruits it has gathered from them. We see Emancipation gradually but slowly smoothing away the inequalities, which an obsolete and unnatural system had raised, to the injury and hindrance of good government. Reform has, as yet, done little more than “ put forth the tender leaves of hope," which the progress of legislation may, and, if the people wills it, must, bring to perfection. By Corporate Reform, we expect and seek nothing more than to share the rank and the rights of citizens in our own towns, where we have been too long treated as serfs and aliens. By the extinction of Tithes, we hope for the restoration of peace between different denominations of Christians, and for a more just and beneficial appropriation of a public impost. The effects of these various measures will not be instantaneous; they must await the course of time, to develop and mature them. But a Poor Law will introduce a principle both new in itself, and productive of immediate results of the utmost consequence. Upon property, upon morality, upon the diverse relations and bonds of society, upon the rights and condition of the poor, and the and power resources of the affluent, it will exercise an influence altogether unknown before.

Nor is the importance of the subject diminished by the consideration, that it is not an experiment in corpore vili, which may be abandoned, should it fail of the expected results. It will admit of no return to the old track: once begun, the trial must go on to an end. It will be competent for future legislation to amend, to alter, to improve; but not absolutely to annul. The subject must be taken up for better or worse. This con

sideration, though no excuse for further delay, in a matter, whose repeated discussion has long since convinced the minds of all men that "something must be done," is nevertheless a very strong motive for cautious deliberation, and painful solicitude, in the choice of a measure. Nor can we see any impediment in the nature of the question, to blind or mislead men as to its real tendencies and relations. It is no party question; and we do most cordially desire, that, throughout the weighty deliberations which must ensue, party feelings may not be suffered to interpose their perverting influences. We hope that men of all political distinctions will approach it, as a question which must outlive contemporary interests, and produce a permanent effect upon the social frame; extending beyond ourselves, and these days in which we live, to the times of our remote descendants, and to periods when the destinies of our country will be swayed by other hands.

As yet, so far as we find ourselves at liberty to judge from appearances, there is a concord of opinion as to the general principle. All parties, or at least the leading and most respectable men of every party, concur in viewing the present condition of the Irish poor as disgraceful to the State, which has so long acquiesced in it, and in demanding its full and speedy amelioration. The extremes of political society meet upon this point. Whether they will agree as well about the means, as they do, or seem to do, upon the principle; whether they will hold together to the end, as cordially as they are disposed to start in company, is a matter about which we are not quite so well satisfied. But supposing all who admit the principle to be equally sincere and singleminded with respect to its development, we cannot now see, how party politics can be brought into the discussion. At all events, it shall be our endeavour to steer wide of such a mischief; to enter upon the inquiry calmly and temperately, and to go through it, if we can answer for ourselves, with perfect impartiality.

In such a spirit we take up the third Report of the Commissioners for inquiring into the condition of the Irish poor, the result of a laborious and diligent inquiry of two years, setting forth the plans of those eminent persons, or of the major part of them, for relieving the sufferings, which, in their previous reports, had been so truly, and minutely depicted. It is an able and well-digested report, indicating as well the intelligence and care which have been bestowed upon it, as the sympathy of the compilers with the poor sufferers who had been committed to their inspection. But our admiration of the talent and benevolence, displayed in the Report, will not carry us so far as to

induce us to concur in the plan which the Commissioners propose for adoption. This is too complicated and involved for practical effect in its endeavours to shun a great and formidable necessity, it flies to numerous expedients, perplexing enough in themselves, uncertain in their tendency, and, in the aggregate, presenting difficulties and embarrassments far exceeding those which they are designed to obviate.

The main difficulty of this subject lies in the vast number of men, who are able to work, but who cannot now obtain, in Ireland, sufficient employment to maintain themselves, and the families who depend upon their exertions for subsistence. Of this class it is stated, that five hundred and eighty-five thousand able bodied men, having besides one million eight hundred thousand persons dependent upon them, are out of work and in distress, during thirty weeks of the year! Such an army of paupers, by whatever means collected, might well strike dismay into the hearts of those, who were commissioned to devise means to provide for them. They seem as the multitude in the wilderness, fainting by the way, and having no prospect of relief from human resources. The Commissioners, with their hundred pennyworth of bread, shrink from the arduous task of attempting to feed them. They are afraid to undertake it, and want faith to make the attempt in the only way in which it can be successful.

They are told of the English system; but they cannot recommend that for Ireland, because "the circumstances of the two countries differ widely." There is no doubt of that. The circumstances of Ireland are very different from those of England: But why are they so? what constitutes the wide difference? Not surely the "narrow frith" that parts them. No-but they differ, because the laws of England have given rights and privileges to the people of that country, which no law, as yet, has given to the people of Ireland. Before the act of the 43d of Elizabeth was passed, the circumstances of the English peasantry were exactly similar to those of the Irish peasantry in the Georgian Era. There was, as Mr. Revans, in his excellent pamphlet, observes, "the same extreme desire to obtain land, and, consequently, the same willingness to submit to exorbitant rents, which now characterise the Irish peasantry. The practice of ejecting the peasantry from their dwellings, of destroying them, and joining the small tillage farms, and laying them down in grass, seems then to have been as common in England as it is now in Ireland."

The resemblance also holds good as to the riotous and lawless conduct which naturally flowed from such a state of things. Agrarian tumults and insurrections broke out in the rural and

populous districts, so exactly similar, in character and in design, to the Rockite outrages, that this intelligent writer declares, that, when reading the accounts of them, "it is difficult to prevent the impression that they refer to the outrages, committed a few years since, by the Terry Alts in the county Clare. The nature of the outrages, and the causes of them, are so very similar." And, to complete the parallel, we find, from statements in the preambles of several acts passed in that reign, that " England was, at that period, as Ireland is now, infested by hordes of wandering beggars." No wonder if the circumstances of the two countries now materially differ; for a timely remedy was applied, with a steady and fearless hand, to the evils which afflicted England, while the plague has been left to work its wasting way, to the present moment, in the vitals of Ireland. England has ceased to be the scene of warfare between the landlord and the tenant. There is no stripping of roofs, or turning out upon the highways; no consequent vagrancy, or disaffection, or bloodshed. "After the passing of the 43d of Elizabeth," says Mr. Revans, "which gave to the destitute able-bodied a right to relief, I find no further mention of Agrarian outrages, of extensive misery among the peasantry, or of the nuisance caused by large bodies of vagrants." And are we then still to be deterred, by the "different circumstances" of the two countries, from applying the same mode of relief to Ireland, which proved so eminently successful in raising the condition of the English peasantry, from misery and insubordination, to a state of security, and peace, and comfort? Surely there is nothing in the constitution, or the idiosyncrasy of the Irish patient, to render him callous to the same method of treatment!

Oh, but "the circumstances" of the country, say the Commissioners, will not admit of the application of the Poor Law, now existing in England, to the poor of Ireland; and they ground this opinion on three distinct considerations. First, the English system is chiefly directed to put the able-bodied upon their own resources, and force them, when they cannot find employment at home, to seek it elsewhere, through migration. Now, the Irish peasant wants no stimulus to urge him to this; for he is as anxious to procure employment at or near home, as, failing that, he is ready to seek it by emigration to distant settlements. It is not the unwillingness to work, therefore, but the impossibility of obtaining work, which the legislature has to combat in Ireland. This is quite true, in the present state of the country; but there is a remedy for it, and that remedy is as simple, as, we have no doubt we shall prove it, adequate, before we have done with the subject.