houses. If this luxury be allowed, I do not see why the pauper should not claim a pint of Port-or at all events, a bottle of Stout, after his dinner. The fact is, that a separation is indispensable, on moral as well as economical grounds.

The third objection-to the food, is most preposterous and false. Every beggar has the ready lie in his mouth, that the poor are actually starved in the workhouse. When I have met this mendacious assertion, by stating that I had myself seen the poor fed in the workhouse, the observation was-"Ach, your honour, they jist gave the miserable crathurs something to ate while you were there; but fed them on potatoe-skins and skilligolee all the rest of the time."

As to tobacco, if this were allowed, the houses would soon be burnt down by the live-turf carried about to light their pipes. The compulsion to sit on forms and stools, is another ground of complaint. Why do you dislike to sit high, I would ask. "Oh, your honour cannot form an idea of the pleasure of smoking a pipe and sitting on your hunkers."

In fine, the objections urged against workhouses by the paupers themselves, are almost all futile-mere excuses for their preference of a wild, erratic, and free exercise of their profession—MENDICANCY-over confinement in Bastilles. The disposition of the Irish people to supply the wants of the beggars, from a superstitious, though amiable credence in the rewards which they will therefore meet in Heaven, offers an almost insuperable bar to the working of the poor-law system in Ireland. They have thus a double tax imposed on them daily-alms at home, and the payment of heavy taxes for half-empty workhouses. Like many others, on both sides of the Channel, they consider poverty as misfortune, whereas, in nine cases out of ten, adversity is the natural punishment of culpable negligence or heedless extravagance!

RATE-PAYER'S OBJECTIONS.

These are formidable. taxed heavily for the erection and support of workhouses, into which the mendicants will not enter, and whom they have to feed in increased numbers since the Act passed. Part of this grievance is their own voluntary faults; and part that of the Legislature, in not enacting a Vagrant Act. But their greatest and most reasonable objection is, the expense of the establishments, as compared with the good obtained. Thus, suppose a workhouse to contain a medium number of paupers. The expense, per head, will be about one shilling and four-pence per day. Now, upon an average calculation, one shilling of this sum is expended on the house and establishment, and the four-pence goes for the food of the poor! If the head or heads of a family are unable to support themselves and their children, the whole family must enter the workhouse, and thus a heavy expense is incurred by the parish. The rate-payers then argue thus:-" A single individual in the house costs ls. 4d. per diem-and a family of five costs 6s. 8d. If half this sum were distributed to the sick, the poor, and the aged, at their own homes, they would be able to live well on their favourite food, the potatoe, without the necessity of going to the workhouse at all." As the matter now stands, the rate-payers have to find the 1s. 4d. to the tax-gatherer, and feed a whole army of mendicants at their own doors besides !* Nor is it easy to see one's way out of this perplexing dilemma. There is almost as great a mania for alms-giving as for alms-begging; so

The rate-payers complain that they are

* In no other country except Ireland, where the poor, from habit as well as necessity, are accustomed to live on potatoes, and sleep in a hovel on a wisp of straw, would the system of out-door relief be likely to succeed. Less than half of the workhouse cost would keep a man, his wife, and a couple of children at home. When a whole family is driven to the workhouse, by

that if a Vagrant Act were passed to-morrow, it would not half cure the evil. Besides, the great expense is incurred in the erection of the buildings; the interest of the capital sunk amounting to more than half of the sixteen-pence!

Still, a vagrant act is absolutely necessary. To erect asylums for mendicants without prohibiting mendicancy itself, is not merely ridiculous but injurious. It gives the beggar two strings to his bow-private and parochial charity-on the former of which he will be sure to play till it breaks, when he will have recourse to the latter.

But neither the Poor-law, nor the Vagrant Act, will afford a radical cure for pauperism—which, unfortunately, is incurable! WORK alone, and that outside the prison walls, can mitigate the evils of mendicity, by directing it into the channels of industry. There is scope for labour in the cultivation of waste-lands in Ireland, and, if mendicity was prohibited, the poor would greatly prefer liberty with labour to the Bastille with food. I see no other way of turning a portion of the torrent of pauperism into safe and useful channels.

Open and unchecked mendicity does infinite mischief in Ireland. These peripatetics are active agents in the dissemination of lies, sedition, and misrepresentation, as well as of the contagion of typhus, and the more fatal and poisonous example of laziness and dirt! They are the greatest of all pests to the traveller, on account of their ubiquity and tenacity. Their humour and wit are certainly amusing; but they are dearly paid for. The information they pick up is sometimes startling. While passing through TUAM, one day, the mail stopped for a few

the present law, some enter the establishment, who would be able to eke out a small out-door existence.-N.B. Mr. Wiggins supposes, that the foregoing estimate gives too much for the support of the workhouse, and too little for the provision of the inmates.

minutes at the inn door, when straight a mob of twenty or thirty mendicants besieged the coach. I was sitting on the box-seat, contemplating the scene, when I was roused from my reverie by a gaunt Meg Merrillies, who roared out, with stentorian lungs— Och, and will Dr. Johnson, of all men, pass through Tuam without throwing a half-crown to the poor crathurs that are starving here." I certainly was electrified by the unexpected argumentum ad hominem, and not the less so, when she pointed her bare and brawny arm towards me, and continued—“ Aye, there he sits, with his fur cap, and his honest countenance, beaming with charity, though a little burnt by the sun! Ah! its not he, indeed, who knows so well the miseries of the poor, that will leave TUAM, without earning the blessing of Heaven, by giving something to the blind and the lame-the widow and the orphan —the naked, the houseless, and the hungry, that he sees around him."

I had travelled from Castlebar that day without exchanging a word with any of the passengers. I had made no acquaintance at Castlebar, excepting with the master of the jail, in whose book I entered a well-earned tribute of approbation to the merits of the establishment, which I minutely examined. But how the big beggar-woman was able to recognize me, I am to this day ignorant.

I learnt from various sources, during my tour, that the mendicants themselves have been smitten a good deal by the hydromania of Father Mathew, and have lost much of the poignancy of their wit and humour; but still, they are as much superior, in this respect, to the bungling beggars of other countries, as the meridian sun of Italy outshines the Bude-light in Waterloo Place.

RATE OF THE PROGRESS OF POPULATION.

FORMERLY, and perhaps for centuries, the rate of increase in the population of Ireland, was much greater than in England. This was attributed to the POTATOE, " that root of laziness," as Cobbett called it, whose facility of cultivation enabled the Irish to marry earlier, and sustain a brood of brats much more easily than their neighbours the English. But during the last ten, fifteen, or twenty years, the rate of increase in the population has decreased in Ireland, and is now only one-third of the rate of increment in England! Yet the potatoe is as well cultivated as ever. The immigration into England, of Irish poor, cannot entirely account for this remarkable revolution, and it is clear, therefore, that the cause is not solely in the potatoe. But when it is remembered, that the decrease in whiskey-drinking, bears a tolerably exact ratio to the decrease in the rate at which population formely marched, we have, then, some clue to the phenomenon. Whiskey-drinking swelled and accelerated the stream of population, not by making the people more productive, but by rendering them less prudent, less wise, less cautious in the contracting of early and improvident marriages. Moore, their own poet, explains this harmoniously

"A bargain then with Love I knock'd,

To hold the pleasing Gypsy

When wise, to keep my bosom lock'd,

But turn the key when TIPSY."

FATHER MATHEW appears to have turned the key in a very different direction from that of the poet-" when tipsy "-for, in prohibiting the "mountain dew,” he has thrown a monstrous deal of cold water on the little naked God of Love! Not only has his bow been relaxed by the water-system; but it is highly probable