hile some hut, the erection of which he _dared not have
prevented_, is described, perhaps sketched and stuck in a book, as an
incontrovertible proof of the miserable condition to which his rapacity
and neglect have reduced his unhappy dependents.

No direct legislation can affect the social condition of Ireland; before
you can hope to benefit the country, _you must establish tranquillity,
and inspire the peasantry with a due respect for the law, and a just
estimate of the rights of private property_. The question is--by what
means are those things to be accomplished? You may give land at a lower
price than it now brings, but you will not thereby cause any perceptible
change in the habits of the people. They may be wealthier, but they will
not be cleanlier. Their rents may be better paid, but the peasant will
still live on the potato. The filthy cabin will exist, and the cow and
the pig will feed at the same board, and occupy the same apartment as
the owner, until you elevate the moral and social feelings of the man,
and teach him to require as a necessary what he now looks on as a
superfluous luxury.

Much of the poverty of the Irish peasantry has been attributed to the
con-acre system. But if this system were not found, by the persons who
practise it, to be more beneficial, and less laborious, than raising
crops from their own land, it would not be persevered in. In those
counties in which con-acres are scarce, the cry is, that the people are
starved, because they can't have them. Where they are abundant, they are
impoverished by the prices they pay for them. The Terryalt system, in
the south, originated in the gentlemen farmers refusing to break up
their land, and in the people assembling in mobs, digging the ground,
thereby rendering it unfit for pasture, and compelling the owners to let
it for potatoes. It may be said, how could they avoid doing this? They
had no land to raise potatoes on, and they must have them or die. This
is not the case. The only persons who could be so circumstanced are the
day-labourers; and to them it must, personally, be a matter of
indifference what land was, or was not broken: for, by their agreements,
those gentlemen and farmers who employ them, are bound to provide them
with potato land; consequently they would not risk their lives to
procure what was already guaranteed them. Those agrarian disturbances
originated with small farmers, whose own farms were not half cultivated;
or tradesm