ains, and level it--we see scarcely any efforts made
at improvement. A Scotchman, or an Englishman, would consider the
possession of the land rent-free for three or five years, according to
the difficulty of the undertaking, as a sufficient recompense for his
trouble; although his time is much more valuable, on account of the
higher rate of wages paid him. But an Irishman will consider a
twenty-one years' lease as too short a tenure, to justify him in
expending the time which he wastes gossiping with his neighbours, or
sunning himself at the backs of the ditches, in the profitable
employment of adding to what ought to be, if he had industry, his
already too small holding. Here is a case in which we conceive
legislation might operate much good. If every man who reclaimed ground
which did not before pay rent, was guaranteed its possession by law for
ten years after the first crop, at a nominal rent of one shilling the
acre, it might be an inducement to the tenant to labour: it could be no
loss to the landlord, as, if still left in a state of nature it would be
useless to him, and after the expiration of the time guaranteed the
tenant as remuneration for his trouble, the benefit would be his
exclusively. In the case of a tenant-at-will, an arrangement could
easily be effected, by which the tenant, if removed from the farm before
the expiration of the stipulated term, might receive a just and
reasonable compensation for the improvements which he had effected, or
an allowance for the loss of the crops which, had he remained, he would
still have been entitled to: and thus, without any government outlay,
encouragement would be given for the reclamation of that part of the
Irish waste lands which would be worth the trouble or expense of
cultivation.

We are gravely told, in well-rounded and high-sounding sentences, that
"in Ireland famine urges men to take land at any price--they must have
it or die;" and that, "when a piece of ground falls out of lease, it
becomes a bone of contention amongst some twenty or thirty miserable
competitors, who outbid each other, to the great delight and profit of
the ruthless and exulting landlord, and to their own utter ruin." If any
one takes time to reflect on what he reads in every day's newspaper, he
must at once perceive that this statement can have no foundation in
fact; if a landlord remove a tenant for non-payment of rent, he finds it
difficult to get another to succeed him, (in the dist