whole difference between a prudent and an imprudent management of the public expenditure, should fall on the class who both vote the public money into the Exchequer, and afterwards direct its disbursement.

In a country so miserably circumstanced as Ireland, it is very evident that almost the whole of such a tax would fall on landlords. It would also fall the heaviest on absentee landlords: which would be just, as the operation of such a tax would be to aid the operation of poor laws, in compelling landlords, whose sympathies have unhappily stopped short in the first stage of production, to care for the well-being of their tenants ;-which leads to the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER XVII.

POOR LAWS FOR POOR IRELAND.

And God said, behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

SHALL Ireland have Poor Laws? See Inglis' Travels in Ireland in 1834; see his account of a "town in the county of Kilkenny called Callen," and the question, shall Ireland have poor laws, will have had its reply.

The sooner, no doubt, that just legislation can cause the necessity for parish relief to disappear every where the better; but the starving man, the while, must not, any where, be without some resource!

Is it not a cruel mockery! Nay, an awful blasphemy an insult to the God of justice, and of truth, to talk of "rights"-" vested rights"

rights of property," and under the cloak of these prostituted terms dare to legalize an artificial social system, by the sanction of which five thousand human beings, without one claim (allowed by man) upon the soil on which they were born, in a country where there is no market for their only commodity, their labour; unfed, unhoused, unclothed, uninstructed, (for life or for eternity) from year to year, and from generation to generation; scarcely alive, literally crawl through a miserable, degraded existence, on that portion of the county of Kilkenny, which such laws have set apart for the sole maintenance of an individual called Lord Clifden; the occupation, the while, of these five thousand of God's rational creatures being to scrape from the earth, by incessant, nerveless toil, on terms which do not always afford them even a bare subsistence on dry potatoes-twenty thousand pounds per year, to be sent to England to this Lord Clifden and by him expended in the pomp and glitter of ostentatious absenteeism. While, in addition to this rack-rent of twenty thousand pounds a year, this christian landlord is said (it scarcely seems credible) to have the callousness of heart, to wring two hundred and fifty pounds per annum more, from these his famishing fellow creatures, in the shape of a toll on all the potatoes and buttermilk, which enter among the ranges of mud hovels, in many instances only holes in a bank of mud, without one wooden stool for furniture, called the town of Callen, and not

one shilling of which toll money is spent on, or in the town.*

Are these then the "vested rights”—the "sacred (sacred indeed!!!) rights of property"-this the happy and prosperous state of things preserved to us by our invaluable constitution," which the susceptible consciences of members of Parliament tremble at the mention of interference with? Ye timid of heart, be reassured! For, until a new prophet shall descend from on high, and shall inform us, that the Eternal One has abdicated the Throne of Heaven, and that henceforth the laws of men shall supersede the laws of God, Injustice can never be a Right!!!

When indeed, there shall have been fixed a fair rate of rent, established under ameliorated national circumstances; not wrung from the imperious necessities of a people, who being without manufacturing employment have no varied means of obtaining a livelihood, and are therefore obliged to promise as rent whatever terms the extortioner + requires, that they may, as already noticed in a former chapter, have the opportunity afforded them, while tilling the ground, of eating a few of the

*See Inglis' Travels in Ireland, in 1834.

+ Generally middlemen, who renting the land themselves from landlords, underlet it to labourers. In an instance on the property of a member of the writer's own family, land in the county of Limerick, not in the vicinity of any town, was let by the landlord at the moderate rent of two pounds per acre, and under-let by the middleman at the exorbitant rent of ten guineas per acre, to poor creatures to grow potatoes. Chapter XIII.

potatoes it yields to their labour, though at the risk of being driven out of their wretched huts to die on the road side, if the remainder of the crop will not pay the said promised rent.

And when the establishment of poor rates for Ireland shall have compelled landlords to live at home, and look to the welfare of their tenants, or have no surplus coming to themselves as rent, and that, in consequence, the five thousand inhabitants of Callen have comfortable houses, commodious furniture, decent clothing, wholesome food, and rational education, let the residue of the above named twenty thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds a year, be the "vested right" of Lord Clifden, or whoever may then be his representative. Three things, in short, Ireland must have! Extensive manufactures, to put an end to the ruinous competition for land just described.*

Poor laws to compel landlords to act, if not to feel like christians.

And relief from the oppressions of the Church of Rathcormac, with its widows' houses steeped in blood for altars; its widows' sons, slain on their mother's hearths, for human sacrifices; its dragoons for ministering high priests, and the eternal fast it imposes on the poor, to furnish forth an ever. lasting feast of pomps and vanities for the rich.

* Why then, does Lord Waterford throw every obstacle in the way of the successful Cotton Factory of the enterprising Mr. Malcomson.-See Inglis' Travels in Ireland, in 1834.