t? Does he wish their houses to be in
such a condition, or encourage them to keep their own persons and those
of their children in such a state of dirt and nastiness? Not at all. He
does his best to prevail on them to adopt a different system; but his
interference in their domestic matters is always looked on as an
unjustifiable intrusion; in short, as a sort of minor grievance, and a
petty act of oppression. Perhaps it is to be attributed to their
poverty? Water, at least, is cheap and abundant in Ireland.

Such is a true and accurate account of the "tenor of those men's lives"
and habits; and it is a continuance of this state of things that those
who attack the Irish landlords so indiscriminately are, in reality,
advocating.

Now, let us suppose that a tract of two thousand acres, set perhaps by
the grandfather of the preset owner, and inhabited by a class of
tenantry such as we have described, comes on a landlord's hands. It has
been let and relet--tied up in settlements--and, until the termination
of the lease, there may have been three or four intermediate landlords
between the occupant and the proprietor. The present possessor comes to
deal with an estate, ruined and almost worthless from mismanagement,
over which he could exercise no control, and peopled by a pauper and
surplus tenantry, for whose creation he is in noways accountable. This
is exactly the condition of those estates, and the position of those
landlords, whose treatment and whose acts have been latterly so much
commented on. And we will now ask those who blame others so much,
candidly to tell us what they would advise to be done--what, if placed
in such a situation, they would do themselves. They will, no doubt, at
once say, "Remove some, give them the means of going to the colonies,
and make the rest comfortable." Why, that is exactly what the landlords
have been endeavouring to do, and for which they have been denounced.
This is just what Lord Lorton, Colonel Windham, and others, did; and for
doing which they were designated "miscreants." If the tenantry were
removed, even to better their own condition, the dues of the priest, and
the physical force at the command of the agitator, would be
lessened--and this would never answer. "Well, then, if this mode of
management be not popular, leave all on the land, build them comfortable
houses, and insist on a proper mode of cultivation. In Belgium and
France men live on smaller portions of land in comfor