of

no doubt are, men of high honour and humanity; but such exceptions render the cruelty and extortion of the entire class the more conspicuous. The sacred bond which ought to unite the superior and the inferior, the landlord and the tenant, is broken: mere mercenary connexions are all that remain, a thousand of which may be dissolved at once without costing a single thought. This is a system which the middlemen, nay, very often many subordinate ranks of these carnivora, are the ministers, whose sole possible motive is present gain, and whose conduct corresponds with it. The experimental labours of this class are highly beneficial to the whole body of landed proprietors; they can calculate to a nicety how much and how long a little cultivator can endure; and know the precise period when it is best to drive him.' They thus not only act for the absentee, but are a sort of pioneers for the rest of the landlords, and by constantly exercising their instruments of devastation, have certainly cleared the way for those enormously high rents, which, to the great discredit of too many of the proprietors, are extorted from the suffering peasantry of Ireland." When, on a failure of the potato crop, fever creeps like a mist over the land, and thousands of wasted wretches are seen eating grass and sea-weeds-do the absentees hear of the famine? We fear they do. In the calamitous summer of 1822, a subscription was made for the relief of the poor of a certain district by the resident country landowners and clergy-and an application being made to the absentee proprietors, who annually subtracted £83,000, their subscriptions altogether mounted to eighty-three pounds! So much for one district in the province of Benevolence.

Among the resident landowners of Ireland are very many excellent admirable men; and in Ireland there are a great number of charitable institutions. But let us take a glance at its multitudinous beggary. It indeed beggars description. Mr Townsend was disgusted, not without reason, with the snuff, rags, and vermin of the paupers at an English pay-table; but we venture to say, they were all

shabby-genteel, in comparison with the rabble-rout of the Gem of the sea. Thousands on thousands are as nearly naked as indecency and indigence will permit-and the covering of most of them-whatever it be-is certainly not clothes. A beggar's stock of trade is of course a vast number of naked and crying children, many rendered miserable and defórmed to excite compassion, "with sores and ulcers, cultivated, and carefully kept from healing"-and we need not say, that every where among them are great numbers of able-bodied persons of the most vicious character; and the more vicious they are, says Dr Doyle, the more effrontery they have, and the more they extort from the charitable and humane. Mr Ensor, who lives at Armagh, and is an enemy to poor's laws for reasons best known to himself, for we cannot detect any in his evidence before the Committee, says that the relief given by charity in ordinary times is adequate to the existing distress, "and far more than any compulsory relief could effect." But it does not appear to be of a good sort. On going into the market-towns and fairs in that part of Ireland, the most wretched objects are placed on the road side, who seem utterly destitute of all means of support; but those apparently miserable cripples are sometimes worth more than half-a-guinea aday, live sumptuously, and get notoriously drunk. "Were poor's houses to be built for the reception of such inmates," he says, “it would be necessary to chain them, if indifferently fed, because they are exceedingly well fed now." "They afford," he quaintly adds, "the greatest proof of the profligacy of the charity of the people,”-in his own immediate neighbourhood, in the Province of Benevolence.

We shall desist from any attempt to describe the beggars and vagrants of Ireland, and merely ask by whom these wretched beings are kept in life? By the poor. They live upon the small occupiers of land-on the mere cotteirs-on all who have a handful of meal or a potato to spare. Thousands of them are neither more nor less than robbers. Thousands on thousands most vicious-as many more, debased by such contentment

as belongs to the inferior creatures -and innumerable, no doubt, are the real objects of pity-for who shall say, that though not so silent and retiring as Mr Townsend's cottagers, they have not been visited by" unmerited" distress?

put the little place in order, and seek to make it clean; and their expressions of sympathy for the poor creature in disease, are such as console one's heart in the midst of that distress." No question is put to the Doctor about the benevolent and charitable feelings of the higher classes;

these, we presume, were known to the Committee-but he tells what he knows unasked. "When you ascend to a higher class, you find many individuals of great goodness, and singular beneficence and charity; but you find a much greater number who seem to be very anxious to throw the whole burden upon the industrious people, and who seem indifferent to all the wants of the poor."

There is no exaggeration hereall bears the impress of the simple truth. That those who behave thus to the poor, who are to them neither kith nor kin, should be affectionate dutiful parents and children is no more than we should expectand they are so-to a degree even of passionate devotedness at once the glory and disgrace of Ireland.

Now, what think ye was the secret aim of all this questioning by the Committee? Here it comes out. "How do you conceive that these kindly feelings, and the good works consequent on them, would be acted on by a system of parochial relief?" "Do you think there would be the same necessity for their exercise ?" "Do you think the same impulse would act under a lesser necessity for its exercise ?" "Supposing aid were provided by parochial assessment, would there be the same necessity for its exercise?"

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To one and all of those foolish, and more than foolish questions, Dr Doyle gives the calmest, most decisive, and most satisfactory answers"By the system I have had the honour of submitting to the Committee, I do not think those feelings would be in any sensible degree diminished." "I do not think the same necessity would exist; but I think the poor are prompted by a kindly feeling, which is not so much the fruit of reflection as the impulse of nature. When the Irish, who are a warm-hearted people, find distress near them, they approach to it, and seek to relieve it.' "There might

The character which Dr Doyle gives of the farmers who chiefly support their paupers, does one's heart good to read; their feelings, -he says truly-are of the best description. Though paying high rents, they plant sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three acres of potatoes, which, from the time of planting, they destine for the support of the poor; and he has seen farmers holding from 200 to 300 acres of land, distributing, of a morning, with their own hands, assisted by a servant maid, stirabout to upwards of forty or fifty paupers, and doing so, not for one day, or two, but regularly during a whole season of distress. He knew a farmer in Kildare, who not only continued that practice, and distributed the milk of twenty or thirty cows, almost every day, to relieve mendicants; but at Christmas had a bullock killed, and given to the people. "I could not, were I to speak till the sun went down, convey a just picture of the benevolence prevailing in the minds and hearts of the middling class in Ireland; but it is sufficiently proved by this, that the poor are now supported almost entirely by them, although they form a class not over numerous, and a class subject to great pressure; for, of the million and a half, or two millions, now intended to support the Irish poor, nearly the entire falls upon the farmers, and other industrious classes." Dr Doyle then speaks with much feeling of the charity of the poor to the poor. "You cannot," he says, "be among them for a day, without witnessing the exercise of it in the most touching manner. In visiting a poor creature in a hovel, when sickness and misery prevail, you find the poor creature surrounded by poor neighbours,-one of whom brings him a little bread or meal, another a little meat, or a little broth or soup, and they all comfort him with their conversation and society. If the clergyman be invited, they

be some drawback from it; but then the proposed relief would only afford assistance to the people."

It is not easy to keep one's temper on seeing the drift of the examiner. We have much respect for the talents of Mr Spring Rice; but his understanding must have got a sad twist before he could have put such a string of silly or rather senseless questions to such a man as Dr Doyle. That charity may be kept alive, a statesman would choose to keep up beggary! Because men of moderate or small means are willing to relieve misery, nothing must be done to do away with the misery itself! This is purchasing the cultivation of the province of Benevolence at too high a price, and neglecting altogether the province of Justice. It is no deduction from the goodness of the farmer, who for months together gave abundance daily to forty or fifty paupers, and the milk of twenty or thirty cows, and a bullock at Christmas, to say that in spite of the gratification his kind and warm heart must have derived from the sight of assuaged distress, he must have felt such destruction of his property a severe hardship; and with all sincere respect for Mr Rice, we beg to say that the man (not he) who could seriously wish the continuance of such a state of things, must be a heartless and a brainless blockhead.

The examination of Dr Doyle was next day resumed on the moral nature of man and his natural affections. He is requested to solve this problem-" Do you think the parental and filial affections could exist in their present strength, or be proved by the same acts and sacrifices, were a provision to be made by law, either for the young or for the old, in a state of destitution?" How could any full-grown man, not drunk, ask such a question? Why, the same acts and sacrifices in the changed condition supposed, would not be required-they would not be rightfor the misery would be relievedand parents and children would not have to hug one another in a passion of love, grief, anguish, and tribulation. Why so anxiously seek sacrifices from poor people? Are they thus cockered by a conservative system of misery among ourselves? How dare

we demand of them a vehemence of parental or filial affection, and a corresponding severity of suffering in the discharge of its duties, which we never dreamt of exacting from our own easy hearts and idle hands, and yet have not been slow, perhaps, to pride ourselves on our piety? But folly brought out wisdom-and we are grateful to the questioner for Dr Doyle's reply. "I think the feelings of men bear a very intimate relation to the state of society which they at any particular period compose; and it may happen that in a population, rude and undisciplined as the poor population of Ireland at present is, there may be exhibitions of feelings at the present time, which would not appear if society were better formed, if men generally had more comforts, and with it a greater degree of selfishness, which in every community grows up in a ratio with domestic comfort. In reply to the question, I should think that if you had a well-organized system of relief for the poor, you might not witness exhibitions of charity and kindness, exactly similar to those which are seen now, but I have no doubt that there would be at all times in Ireland a display of neighbourly affection and parental kindness as great as would be desirable in any well-ordered community."

What more could the Chairman desire Dr Doyle to say? Yet he is not satisfied-and requires farther information. We should like to have heard the Doctor examining him on filial and parental affection-for a sad mess of the matter would he have made, and spoken like a whimsical and barren bachelor, who had been born, what, in Ireland, is called a posthumous child. "Do you not think that those feelings are called forth in proportion as a necessity for their active exercise arises; that, for instance, the feeling of a child for a parent is more called forth according as the age of that parent advances, as the difficulty of providing for that parent increases, and as the period of life makes him more unprotected, and more exposed to vicissitude and suffering?" How did it happen, we wonder, to escape occurring to the thought of the wor thy and most inquisitive chairman, that that state of things cannot be the

a

parish-table," should either have nothing to eat at all, or prey upon the scanty means of persons almost as poor as themselves? Are the rich doing all they ought now for the poor? Is their charity so pure and powerful that we must beware of polluting or impairing it by any systematic plan of ours for helping them to feed the famished? And the poor, they, in case of an established provision, "would excuse themselves from charity!" And why not? The excuse would be held a good one in any court of conscience in Christendom. It is wicked-ay, very wicked-to lay a heavy burden of charity on the backs of the poor. It is abhorrent from right reason. Mr Bicheno speaks of " good state of society." But the question regards the worst state of society in Europe. "The virtuous exercise of the social feelings," forsooth! a mingled mass of mendicancy and charitable indigence all in motion with misery-laughing, weeping, groaning, blissing, despairing, dying, robbing, cursing, and murdering and by no means to be "broken up," because of "vital importance" to a good state of society!" Well says Mr Scrope, "that the sentimentalists, who are so fearful of deadening the condition of the poor, forget that extreme sympathy with the miserable, is liable to take the direction of revenge upon their oppressors, real or supposed; that the transition is not very unnatural from pitying the famished agonies of the expelled tenant, to burning his successor in his bed; that the passions are never so easily turned to violence as when strongly excited with the glow of pity. This should be recollected, at the present moment especially, when outrages on life and property have become so terrifically frequent, as to be considered by the Government and Legislature to require the suspension of the law and the constitution, and the establishment of arbitrary power throughout Ireland. It is acknowledged by the opposers of poor's laws; nay, as has been seen, it is even advanced by them, as one of their most forcible arguments, that the lower Irish are characterised by feelings of compassion and kindness towards each other of the strongest nature. And yet we see, too plainly,

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that they are in the habit of committing towards each other multiplied atrocities of the most unexampled character. The inconsistency is only in appearance. It is the very force of their sympathy which urges them to acts of dreadful revenge upon those whom they consider agents in the oppression of their friends and connexions. Is a family ejected from the small farm which forms their sole chance of subsistence - their sympathizing neighbours join them in forcibly intimidating the succeeding tenant, and, if he refuses to give way to intimidation, in executing their sanguinary threats upon him. And is it for the sake of keeping up this excited feeling at its full pitch of intensity, that we are called on to refrain from interfering with the exclusive right of the poor to relieve each other?"

And now we come to look at the subject in its most dismal light. Grant at once that the consolidation of many small farms-and portions of land that have no title to the name even of "pelting" farnis-bits of potato-ground, each with its hovel -is for the good of Ireland. The system may be carried too farto the extinction of much that is valuable in the mind, morals, and manners of a people-and consequently to the detriment of the State. But such infinite subdivision as had taken place in Ireland was on many accounts to be lamented, and the source of many evils. We shall not enter upon any enquiry into the causes that led to it. They were various; but it is allowed on all hands, that the larger landowners encouraged it from cupidity, just as the smaller did from necessity, and that there was a vast increase of population. We say from cupidity; for there was no other motive but a mercenary one with most of the absentees in accumulating tenantry; and to them chiefly belongs the merit of having created the class of middlemen. The same system was pursued by the resident gentry; and by them, too, carried much too far; though their humanity, we doubt not, was often ready to alleviate the wretchedness which was daily submitted to their eyes all over their hereditary estates. We shall never bring ourselves to heap indiscriminate 3 H