ncreased from 6,801,827 in 1821 to
7,767,401 in 1831, and the increase, unlike that in England, had been
almost exclusively in the agricultural districts. While the political
motive for multiplying small freeholds had ceased, the motives for
multiplying small tenancies were as strong as ever, and were felt by
landlords no less than by cottiers. This class, often inhabiting huts
like those of savage tribes and living in a squalor hardly to be seen
elsewhere in western Europe, chiefly depended for their subsistence on
potatoes--the most uncertain and the least nutritious of the crops used
for human food. Many hundred thousands of them had no employment in
their own country and no means of livelihood except the produce of the
scanty patches around their own turf cabins. Tens of thousands flocked
to England annually seeking harvest work, and a small number emigrated
to Canada or the United States, the passage money for an emigrant being
then almost prohibitive. Those who could not pay rent were liable to
eviction, and eviction was a more cruel fate then than now, since there
was no poor law in Ireland. Fever was rife in their miserable abodes,
following in the steps of hunger, and for relief of any kind they could
rely only on the mercy of their landlords or the charity of their
neighbours. Under such conditions of life crime and disaffection could
not but flourish, and the Irish peasant could hardly be blamed if he
listened eagerly to the counsels of O'Connell. For him catholic
emancipation had no meaning except so far as it gave him a hope that
parliament, swayed by the great Irish demagogue, would abolish tithes,
if not rent, and find some means of making Irishmen happy in their own
country.

[Pageheading: _ANGLESEY LORD LIEUTENANT OF IRELAND._]

Had O'Connell been a true patriot, or even an honest politician, he
would have devoted his vast powers and influence to practical schemes
for the good of Ireland, and specially to a solution of the agrarian
question. Unhappily, smarting under a not unfounded sense of injustice,
when he was disabled from taking his seat for Clare, he threw his whole
energy into a new campaign for the repeal of the union, which occupied
the rest of his life. So far from acknowledging any gratitude to the
whigs, through whose support emancipation had been carried, he exhausted
all the resources of his scurrilous rhetoric upon them, lavishing the
epithets "base, brutal, and bloody," with something