be the cause of the poverty of the
people, or the bad cultivation of the land; but that, in point of fact,
it has directly the contrary effect. Almost the whole of Earl
Fitzwilliam's tenantry hold at will; and Mr Furlong, the agent, swears
that _two-thirds_ of the Devon estate "is set from year to year;" if
this be a bad system, why do those noblemen practise it?--if a good one,
why condemn others for acting as they do themselves?

By the agitators, the deplorable state of the Irish people is, on all
occasions, attributed to the want of security in possession, and to the
exorbitance of the rents. We have already, we trust, disposed of the
former, more particularly as regards the disturbed counties. We shall
now apply ourselves to ascertain the truth of the latter assertion; and
the evidence taken before Lord Devon's Committee, strange as it may
appear from the nature of the report, proves to a demonstration, that in
those parts of the country _where the land is worst and highest rented,
the people live in contentment and affluence; and that those parts in
which the rents are lowest, and the soil richest, are stained with the
commission of the most abominable atrocities_; and yet, with those facts
staring them in the face, we find the government ready to adopt the
suggestions of men who live by levying tribute on the people whose
wretchedness they affect to deplore, because the opinions of those
persons happen to be backed by a report _utterly at variance with the
evidence on which it purports to be founded_.

As if there must be blunders in every thing connected with Ireland, Mr
Griffith, the government engineer, was sent forth to make his valuation,
according to a scale of prices furnished him, of the principal
agricultural productions of the country, from which two of the most
important--namely, flax and wool--were altogether omitted; and by this
means he found himself obliged to exclude from his consideration the
staple crop of the country when he was valuing the land in the north,
and the clip of the grazier when he was estimating the rich pastures of
the west. "Previous to commencing the valuation of the counties of Derry
and Antrim, in the year 1830," (says Mr Griffith in his examination,) "I
ascertained that the general average prices for agricultural produce
throughout the principal markets of Ireland, for the preceding five
years, _were one-eighth, or two-and-sixpence in the pound, higher than
those contained