, would not be used in
their defence?

The outcry raised by Mr O'Connell and his supporters against the
landlords, on account of the number of persons "turned out, and left to
die by the road-side,"[30] will, we have no doubt, turn out (if
possible) to be more unfounded than even his other assertions. The
present Commission has ample powers to ascertain this fact at least: and
we will venture to assert, that not one instance of starvation will have
been proven before it; and that out of the hundreds of thousands who
were reported to have been mercilessly turned adrift to perish at the
backs of ditches, forty-nine fiftieths will be found well and hearty,
and in the occupation of those lands from which they were said to have
been expelled. That ejectment-processes were served, and decrees
obtained, which, if followed up and enforced, would have put many
persons out of possession, we do not deny; but nine-tenths of those are
compromised by the payment of part of the rent before the day of trial
comes on, and of the decrees obtained, the great majority are never put
in execution. Accurate information on this point can easily be obtained
from the sheriffs and clerks of the peace for the different counties;
those officers have been amongst the first witnesses examined before
Lord Devon. We would only ask the public to suspend its judgment, and
those well-meaning but mistaken individuals, who, though they reject Mr
O'Connell and the priests as authorities on most other subjects, take
their assertions on this as proven facts, to reserve their indignation
and wrath until the result of this testimony can be known.
Ejectment-processes are the most effective and the cheapest means by
which the landlord can enforce the payment of the rent due, and as such
they are generally had recourse to: before they can be acted on, _at
least three months_ must have elapsed after the year's rent (which is
the least sum they can be issued for) has become due.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to foment, certainly nothing has
assisted more to continue, the agrarian disturbances in Ireland, than
the statements, made so flippantly by journalists and pamphleteers, of
the great excess of rent exacted in Ireland over that paid by the
English tenantry. Those writers have invariably assumed the truth of the
assertions made in this particular; yet nothing can be further from the
fact.

There is no statistical account of England recently published, t