at Liverpool. With the blessing of
absenteeism, houses in London would be built as fast, and would bring
as high rents; trade would be as brisk, artizans of all sorts as well
paid, life as happy, and the Londoners as well content. The Irish,
however, have, in their ignorance of political economy, conceived the
idea, that if the millions sterling sent annually out of the country
to London were spent among those by whose labour the money is made,
there would be more employment for all sorts of tradesmen, more
business for the shopkeepers, more opportunities of advancement for
the farmers' sons, more houses built, more trees planted, more land
reclaimed, more factories established, more money stirring, more
wealth, more life, more enjoyment, an immense increase of national
prosperity. The agents say that this is all a delusion.

4. The next principle of the new agents is this--and to carry it out
is the aim of all their improvements--that their mission is to produce
the greatest amount of rent from the smallest number of tenants.

5. To reduce the population by _emigration_ or other means until there
is barely a sufficient number of labourers to attend the agricultural
machines, and herd the cattle.

6. To discourage _marriage_ in every possible way, and to diminish
pauperism till there shall be no further use of the workhouses but to
serve as lying-in hospitals for the thrifty spinsters, as they do
in Cumberland and Westmoreland--where the arrangement seems the
most natural thing in the world. It is certainly not an unnatural
consequence of the practice of men and women sleeping in the same
apartment.

Now let us see the working of this new system in Ireland; for it is at
work more or less extensively in all the four provinces. The rules
of the estate, when rigidly enforced, as they generally are by the
improving agents, tend steadily, powerfully, to break down the small
farmers. They are disappearing by thousands every year. Some take
their chance across the Atlantic. Others fall into the condition of
labourers, and may earn 2 s. a day on the estate. This will last for
awhile until the land is drained, manured, and turned into permanent
pasture. Then their occupation is gone. There is nothing more for them
to do. There is no place for them, no room, no support in their native
land. The grass will grow without their labour, and the bullocks will
fatten without their care.

We are constantly hearing of the immense ri