amation should be carried on by labourers who
would be paid weekly wages and lodged in huts close to their work; and
that when the land had been properly fertilised it should be divided
into farms of forty acres and the men who have worked at reclaiming it
settled upon it with their families, and instructors appointed to
teach them farming. It is no part of the scheme that the land should
be given to the people. On the contrary, a rent should be charged
them, calculated upon the basis of a percentage on the original outlay
in the purchase of the estate and of the amount paid in wages,
together with a small sum to pay off the capital in the course of a
term of years. The occupant would thus in time become a freeholder,
and as much interested in maintaining the law as any other proprietor.
Meanwhile he would, like the Donegal folk mentioned by Mr. Tuke, live
on hopefully under the rule, for the time being, of the Kingdom, as
landlord.

I am far from inclined to detract in any way from the merit of Mr.
Mitchell Henry's project for Imperial reclamation any more than from
his scheme for draining and for improving the internal navigation of
Ireland. Although born in Lancashire he is a thorough-bred Irishman,
and naturally hopeful of his country. But, although I am most
painfully impressed by the fearful degradation into which a part of
the Western people has fallen, I cannot on that account shut my eyes
to their failings any more than to their poverty. Mr. Henry's scheme,
if it deferred actual proprietorship in fee simple till the next
generation, would I hope prove of incalculable benefit to Mayo and
Galway, especially if his excellent idea of appointing agricultural
instructors were carried out faithfully. But I fear from what I have
actually seen and heard from the most trustworthy informants of all
classes, that the forty-acre farmer of this generation would require a
firm hand to guide him. This is no insolent Saxon assumption of
superiority, but is said, after due consideration, sadly and
seriously. The poor people of the West have been brought very low, so
low that even their very virtues have become perverted into faults.
They are affectionate to their kith and kin; but this amiable quality
leads to their huddling together in a curiously gregarious way, and in
some cases has been made the means of extorting money from them. It is
this tendency to live together and thus divide and subdivide whatever
little property th