men, of any class or party, of hard-heartedness or inhumanity, had
better look at home. In _their_ country we never hear of verdicts of
"death from starvation" being returned by coroners' juries; or of the
weak and the unfortunate being compelled to seek for shelter in the
hollows of decayed trees, or to sleep like brute beasts in the open
parks, exposed to the cold and the inclemency of winter. The gentry may
neglect their duties in other respects: as regards the performance of
charitable acts, they are faultless; the middleman may be exacting--but
he is hospitable; and the men who make those groundless charges, would
be not a little astonished did they see the multitudes that are still
fed (poor-laws notwithstanding) at the BIG House of the Irish gentleman.
We have said that failures of the crops, and scarcity, occur much more
frequently in the densely populated parts of the country than in any
others, and that those failures arise in a great measure from the
neglect of the people themselves. Parts of Mayo, Galway, and Donegal,
are the localities most subject to those visitations. In those counties
the most miserable class of the peasantry exist; and nothing, we think,
can prove more conclusively, that their misfortunes and their
wretchedness cannot with justice be attributed to the misconduct of
their landlords, but rather to their own, _than the undisputed fact,
that in those districts in which the people are worst off, the land is
set at the lowest rent; and that where the greatest quantity of waste
land is unreclaimed, and where that which is under cultivation is worst
managed and least attended to, there, invariably, is to be found the
greatest amount of unemployed labourers_. It may be said they know no
better mode of cultivation than what they practise. They do; those are
the very men who go, and have from their youth been in the habit of
going, to England and Scotland, where they see the benefits arising from
a good system of agriculture. They fully appreciate, but won't practise
it. The truth is--and this is one of the great sources of Irish
misery--that by the constant agitation of which (under one shape or
another) he is almost always the victim, the Irish peasant is induced to
consider himself as the worst treated of God's creatures; by it he is
kept in a continual state of dependence on anticipated events, which
leads him to expect the amelioration of his condition by means of
political convulsions, rather