ose which will have them shall keep them at their
own charges, so that the free tenants and farmers be not charged with
them.' And 130 years afterwards, the parliament assembled in Dublin
declared that divers of the English were in the habit of maintaining
sundry thieves, robbers, and rebels, and that they were to be adjudged
traitors for so doing, and suffer accordingly. In 1450, this class
of depredators had increased very much, and by their 'thefts and
manslaughters caused the land to fall into decay, poverty wasting it
every day more and more; whereupon it was ordained that it should
be lawful for every liege man to kill or take notorious thieves, and
thieves found robbing, spoiling, or breaking houses; and that every
man that kills or takes any such thieves shall have one penny of every
plough, and one farthing of every cottage within the barony where the
manslaughter is done, for every thief.' These extracts show a very
barbarous state of society, but Sir George Nicholls remarks that
at the same period the condition of England and Scotland was very
similar, save only that that of Ireland was aggravated by the civil
conflicts between the colonists and the natives. There were some
efforts made in Ireland, by various enactments, to put down this evil,
and to provide employment for the large numbers that were disposed to
prey upon the industry of their neighbours, by robbery, beggary, and
destruction of property. But while there was a legal provision made
for the poor in England, there was none in Ireland, where the people
were, _en masse_, deprived of the means of self-support by the action
of the Government. Hence, so late as the year 1836, the poor-law
commissioners reported to the following effect:--

It appeared that in Great Britain the agricultural families
constituted little more than a fourth, whilst in Ireland they
constituted about two-thirds, of the whole population; that there
were in Great Britain, in 1831, 1,055,982 agricultural labourers;
in Ireland, 1,131,715, although the cultivated land of Great Britain
amounted to about 34,250,000 acres and that of Ireland only to about
14,600,000. So that there were in Ireland about five agricultural
labourers for every two that there were for the same quantity of land
in Great Britain. It further appeared that the agricultural progress
of Great Britain was more than four times that of Ireland; in which
agricultural wages varied from sixpence to one shilling a day