gence with
which the report is drawn up, we quote the following passage from the
report:--"By the present practice, when a mesne lessee exercises his
power of redeeming under an ejectment for rent, the landlord may be
required to give up the land to him, without any occupiers upon it; and
it is _suggested_ that cases have occurred in which a mesne tenant has
permitted, or even encouraged, a process of ejectment against himself,
in order to throw upon the landlord the unpleasant task of removing a
number of sub-tenants, so that he himself might, upon redeeming, obtain
entire possession of the land. This requires alteration.

"The defendant, upon redeeming, is only entitled in justice to have the
land restored to him in the same state as to occupiers in which it was
when the ejectment was brought; and we recommend that the law should be
amended in this respect. The possession of the under-tenants, or
occupiers, who were upon the land when the process commenced, should,
for this purpose, be treated as the possession of the lessee."

It is almost unnecessary to say, that the restitution of the interest of
the mesne lessee by redemption, involves as a matter of course, as the
law now stands, the restitution of all the minor interests derived under
him--Who could have "suggested" such nonsense to the commissioners?--In
like manner, the notices which they suggest in cases of ejectment and
distress, are at this moment _absolutely indispensable to render either
proceedings valid_.

Now, in this statement, the learned gentleman has not given even the
particular year in which these evictions are said to have taken place;
neither did he specify the period within which a _third_ of the
population of that county are said to have been displaced; while the
land commissioners themselves admit, that the number of ejectment
decrees obtained in all parts of Ireland, bear no proportion to the
number of processes issued, and that those again are infinitely greater
than the numbers which are executed. This Mr O'Connell well knows to be
the case; because in a country where distress cannot be made available,
the landlords have recourse to ejectment as the only means by which they
can coerce their tenants into payment of the rent. All the assistant
barristers in their evidence bear testimony to this fact, and to the
comparatively few decrees under which possession is taken. Mr Tickell,
one of those gentlemen, states that, according to the cler