minute and temporary lettings, so injurious to the soil, and for which such incredibly large sums are exacted1; and which contribute to keep so great a number of the peasantry in constant poverty and fluctuation. To the same source is to be attributed, I am persuaded, those exactions, cruelties, and "drivings," to which that unhappy race are constantly subjected. The infection of cruel selfishness is to be traced to absenteeism; and once introduced, such, alas is our nature, wherever interest is concerned, we are predisposed to take the contagion, which thus spreads like a leprosy through a whole country, and fills it with suffering, and sorrow, and destitution.

crease of the inhabitants simply, as increasing the competition for land, has little to do with the matter.

Edmund Spenser says, "The landlords there most shamefully rack their tenants."-(State of Ireland, Works, vol. vi. p. 33.)

Dean Swift, "Rents, squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars."-(View of the State of Ireland, Works, vol. vi. p. 159.)

Archbishop Boulter, "Here the tenant, I fear, has hardly ever more than one third for his share, and too often but a fourth or a fifth part.”—(Letters, vol. i. p. 292.) Hear this, ye great English monopolizing tenants, who tell your landlords none but a large farmer can pay them good rents!

Right Honourable John Fitzgibbon, At.-Gen. "The peasantry are ground down to powder by enormous rents."-(Speech, 1787.) "Exorbitant rents.' -(Gordon's Hist. of Ireland, vol. ii. p. 241.) "Exorbitant rents.". (Newenham's Inquiry, &c. p. 15.) "Exorbitant rents."-(Argument for the Support of the Poor; Dr. Woodward, p. 15.)

"Exorbitant rents.'

Ireland, vol. ii. 32.)

(Curwen, Observations on the State of

"Exorbitant rents."-(First Report on the State of Ireland, 1825, p 38.) See pp. 59, 307, 413, 414, 638, &c. &c.

"It is an undoubted fact that, as landlords, they exact more from their tenants, than the same class of men in any other country."-(Wakefield, Account of Ireland, vol. ii. p. 795.)

Conacres, which are generally let up to " ten guineas an acre." -Report of the Select Committee on the State of Ireland, i. p. 50 ; ii. p. 414; iv. p. 638, &c.

E

(6.) That the extreme poverty thus introduced, with its unhappy associate, idleness, are invariably connected with ignorance, and too often with crime, needs little proof. I would have added to these melancholy consequences, those commotions which have so fre quently agitated the country, with the guilt of which, at least negatively, absenteeism stands chargeable; only that I shall probably again touch upon this point hereafter.

(7.) But, to pass over many of the minor evils of absenteeism unnoticed, let us, lastly, show its character in a still more awful point of view-namely, its heartless conduct in times of general sickness and distress, which are but too common in Ireland, and, in no slight degree, attributable to this, its unnatural desertion. Such was, doubtless, the case in the late dreadful fever in Ireland. Its historians record, amongst other circumstances which occasioned it, "the high price of land, artificially created by land-jobbers," (the middle people previously alluded to, the accomplices of absenteeism,)" and the vast income drawn from the country by absentees, THE DEADLIEST FOES OF IRELAND. These are causes, amongst many others, which have reduced countless numbers to want, and converted a considerable part of our population into mendicants"." Another medical report in the same work says, "The great proprietors of extensive estates in the neighbourhood and in every part of the country are absentees, with the exception of one or two. They draw out of this remote and impoverished

1 Drs. Baker and Cheyne, Account of the Fever in Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 98. 125. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 405.

country" (round Tralee) "about £160,000 a year, at a rough calculation; of which not one shilling is spent in it-hinc illa lachrymæ." Surely this physician can never have read Professor Macculloch! But the subject, alas! is too serious to blend up with a laugh at political economy. These desertions necessarily caused that want of employment, that poverty, and that despondency and dejection of mind", which are declared to have been the predisposing causes of the infection; the last of which rendered it, it is said, almost invariably fatal'. The resident gentry, indeed, covered themselves with immortal honour on the trying occasion: they very generally gave " employment as far as possible to all the poor that applied for it, and fed multitudes who must otherwise have perished";" but these, alas! were few, and often at great distances, and in that case the suffering was greatly heightened 10. Thus, it appears, that absenteeism was often the direct cause of the calamity, which it always aggravated.

Leaving, then, wholly out of our consideration the more apparent and constantly operating evils of this pest of Ireland; that mass of poverty which is created, that distress which is unrelieved; that idleness which is unemployed; that ignorance which is uninstructed; together with all the crime and suffering from which

'Drs. Baker and Cheyne, Account of the Fever in Ireland, vol. ii. P. 168.

* Ibid. vol. i. p. 99; vol. ii. pp. 17, 38, 41, 140, 145, 158, 165.

3 Ibid.

Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 38, 65, 71, 79, 87, 93, 165, &c. &c.

5 Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 98, 125.

Ibid. vol. ii. p. 100.

• Ibid. vol. i. 338.

Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 76, 89, 95, 157. Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 76, 125, 138.· 10 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 35.

such a state of things is inseparable; what is, lastly, its conduct in regard to its victims in the extremity of nature, when disease is added to poverty, multiplying its sorrows in a ratio of which wealth can have no adequate conception? when the desertion, as it respects such sufferers, is irreparable and final? when those last duties, which the humane heart will not allow itself to perform by proxy, are not performed at all? In that awful season, from every quarter of Ireland, there came from the death-bed-bed, did I say from the scanty straw which spread the cold ground in many a temporary shed'; in such as which, were

!

"A volume might be filled with instances, in proof of the distress occasioned by this visitation of fever, amongst a people already exhausted by the privations consequent on want of employment, and scarcity of food.-Fever huts: these were wretched structures of mud or stone, not exceeding four or five feet in height, erected at the road sides, or in the corners of fields, for the purpose of receiving persons attacked with fever, either members of a family, removed there for the purpose of preventing an extension of sickness, or wretched wanderers in search of food and employment, thus compelled to struggle with a formidable disease on the damp ground, with little covering but the miserable clothing worn by day, and scarcely protected from the inclemency of the weather by the shed of straw or boughs, which formed the roof of this wretched habitation.”—(Drs. Baker and Cheyne, vol. i. pp. 63, 64.)

Dr. O'Leary says, in his report inserted in the above work, "Three or four patients have literally died in the streets, or by the side of the ditches, for many were obliged to sleep in the fields. Fever huts were erected on the passage to the church, either on or near all the public roads, and on the fair field. I have gone into a hut, where, owing to the lowness of the entrance, I could only feel the pulse of the four inmates, a father and three children of the name of Staunton. There were also two grown-up daughters, who were obliged to remain several nights in the open air, not having room in the hut till the father died; when the stronger of the two girls forced herself into his place. On the road leading to Cork, within a mile of this town, I visited a woman of the name of Vaughan, labouring under typhus; on her left lay a child very ill, at the foot of the bed another child, just able to crawl about, and on her right the corpse of a third child, who had died two days previously, and which the unhappy mother could not get removed."-(Ibid. vol. i.

the pampered beast of many a proud absentee put for a single night, he would probably make the air ring

p. 65.) Numbers of cases succeed, quite of as distressing a kind. I shall only further quote another from Mr. Nolan: "Ellen Fagan, a young woman, whose husband was obliged, in order to seek employment, to leave her almost destitute, in a miserable cabin, with three children-caught the disease," in having, poor as she was herself, administered charity to another; "and from the terror and alarm created in the neighbourhood, was with her three children deserted, except that some persons left a little water and milk at the window for the children, one about four, the other three years old, the third an infant at her breast. In this way she continued for a week, when a neighbour heard of her distress, and sent her a loaf of bread, which was left in the window. Four days after this he grew uneasy about her, and one night he prepared some tea and bread, and taking a female servant with him, set off to her relief. When he arrived, the following scene presented itself: in the window lay the loaf where it had been deposited four days previously; in one corner of the cabin, on a little straw, without covering of any kind, lay the wretched mother actually dying; her infant dead by her side for want of that sustenance she had not to give; on the floor lay two children, to appearance dying also of cold or hunger; at first they refused to take anything, and he had to force a little liquid down their throats; in a short time they revived, and with the cautious administration of food, they recovered the effects of their suffering. The woman expired before the visitor left the house, who, I am happy to add, did not suffer from his humanity," (vol. i. p. 66.) I am irresistibly impelled to bring Mr. Malthus's doctrines to the touchstone of this awful scene. In order to support a wretched system of population, inevitably connected with, and indeed productive of, vice and suffering, matrimony, which Christianity declares "honourable in all," and his church pronounces necessary as well as "holy," is to be degraded into a selfish gratification, which, were it true, this uncovering of the nakedness of our common parent, Nature, exhibits a far greater indecency than it exposes. But further; to such who have not those "clear prospects" which not one poor man in a thousand has, it is denounced as a clearly immoral act'," this partial morality, therefore, cuts him off from all that solace and assistance so necessary to a poor labourer under all circumstances, but especially in those afflictions to which he is peculiarly exposed. When sufferings like those we have been describing befal such a man, when, without employment, or food, or health, he sinks the most wretched being in nature, what is it that this precious system recommends, upon principle, regarding him? "To the punishment of nature he

66

Malthus, Essay, p. 539.

* Report on Bettering the Condition of the Poor, vol. ii. p. 325. See Dr. Halley on the Marriages of the Poor.