mony refers, rapidly increasing; I believe the Irish peasant scarcely ever forms, at least, while he remains at home, an idea of bettering his condition; they are improvident, and either from that improvidence, or the high rents, are seldom able to realize personal property. When a farmer who has a few acres of land (I mention this as an instance) has his children to portion out in the world, and they are about to be married, he has nothing to give them but land. The farm is subdivided; the portions, which each member of that family gets, are in the next generation liable to be again subdivided; and then subdivision of land, and the multiplication of the species, go on pari passu. The increase of population, in a country where land forms the only means of subsistence, has produced, in Ireland, the effect of creating, in my judgment, a perfectly erroneous criterion of the value of land. The value of land in Ireland is regulated, not by what in other countries is considered the criterion of its value, but by the quantity and degree of competition for it; and the principle that a thing is worth what it will bring in the market, which is applicable to every other article, appears to me to be totally false as applied to land; for in stance, a farm of fifty acres, let to one tenant at a certain rent, may be well worth that rent: subdivided into ten tenements, it has then to support a population of ten families; and it appears to me that that subdivision, though it has the actual effect of increasing the rental of the landlord, ought to have the effect of decreasing it; but it has had the effect of increasing the rental of landlords; and all states, head landlords, as we call them, and intermediate ones, have been dealing upon that fallacious principle. Rentals have been formed upon that principle, debts have been contracted upon it, annuities have been sold, and the whole system originating in that error has produced mischief and ruin at this moment in every department of Ireland. Then, again, the temptation to multiply freeholds has, but in a very minor degree, contributed to increase the quantum of the evil.” "The state of the lower orders," said Mr. O'Connell, " is such, that it is astonishing to me how they preserve health, and above all, how they preserve cheerfulness, under the total privation of any thing like comfort, and the existence of a state of things that the inferior animals would scarcely endure, and which they do not endure in this country. The houses are not even called houses, and they ought not to be; they are called cabins; they are built of mud, and covered with thatch partly, and partly with a surface which they call scraws, and any continuance of rain necessarily comes in. In these abodes, there is nothing that can be called furniture; it is a luxury to have a box to put any thing into; it is a luxury to have what they call a dresser for laying a plate upon, or any thing of that kind they may have; they generally have little beyond an iron cast metal-pot, a milk tub, which they call a keeler, over which they put a wickerbasket, in order to throw the potatoes, water, and all into the basket, that the water should run into this keeler. The entire family sleep in the same apartment; they call it a room; there is some division between it and the part where the fire is. They have seldom any bedsteads, and as to neer, had extensive opportunities of accurate observation, gave an equally unfavourable picture of the situation of the Irish peasantry. "I conceive (said Mr. Nimmo) the peasantry of Ireland to be, in general, in almost the lowest state of existence; their cabins are in the most miserable condition, and their food is potatoes with water, very often without any thing else, frequently without even salt; and I have frequently had occasion to meet persons that begged of me on their knees, for the love of God, to give them some promise of employment, that, from the credit of it, they might get the means of supporting themselves for a few months, until I could employ them. "The poor of Ireland are in general left to obtain their subsistence by mendicancy; and according to the best information I have been able to procure on that head, in various parts of the kingdom, the expenditure of every family on the begging poor cannot be averaged at less than a penny per day, or half a stone of pota-. toes, which, for one million of families, would be per annum at least 1,500,000l. Admit that we include in this sum the result of public charities, hospitals, &c.; but add to this the grand jury presentments, which are for poses mostly avoided by the poorrates of England, 750,000l. Independent of an indefinite sum levied in Great Britain every season, by emigrant poor from Ireland, we have raised in the country and on residents alone 2,250,000l. This is more than half the public revenue, double the tithes, a fourth of the land rent, and at least a Mr. Nimmo, who, in the course twentieth part of the entire conof his employment as a civil engi-sumption. The poor of England bour." pur are supported by a rate upon property, which, when at the highest nominal amount, viz., 7,500,000l., was only one-eighth of the public revenue, one-seventh of the rent assessed to it, about one and a half times the tithe, and only one-fourth of the income or consumption. I conclude, therefore, that in the present mode of management, the support of the poor in Ireland, in proportion to other burthens, or to the general income, is double the rate in England. "There is no means of employ ment for an Irish peasant, nor any certainty that he has an existence for another year, nor even for another day, but by getting possession of a portion of land on which he can plant potatoes; and, in consequence of the increase of population, which does not seem to be at all checked by the misery which they undergo, the competition for land has attained an appearance something like the competition for provisions in a besieged town, or in a ship that is out at sea; and as there is no check to the demand which may be made by those who may possess the land, the land appears to have risen to prices far beyond what it is possible for the poor peasants to extract from it in the way in which they cultivate it; and the landlord appears to have-by the word landlord, I mean the persons who have, either by leasehold or by freehold, the property or the right of disposing of the land to the actual occupier,-the landlord has, in the eyes of the peasant, the right, in a summary way, to take from the peasant any thing which he has, if he is unable to execute those covenants which he was obliged to enter into from his dread of starvation. "The tenantry of Ireland are almost universally from six months to twelve months and upwards in arrear. There is a distinction among them between what are called Irish tenants and English tenants. The former, the Irish tenant, is he who, according to the custom, is in arrear and in debt to the landlord; being in debt, it is, I believe, in the power of the landlord legally to drive his cattle, under the form of a distress, to the pound, by way of making him pay his rent; but this form of distress is applied not only to the raising of the rent, but to the doing any thing else which the landlord wants. For example, if I want a parcel of people to work for me at eight-pence a-day, and they insist on being paid tenpence, I complain to the landlord that the people are demanding exorbitant wages; that we cannot go on; we will not pay them those wages; the landlord, whose interest it is to have the work go on, in order that money may be paid to his tenantry for the purpose of paying his rent, again sends instant notice, that unless they go to the work on the road at eight-pence a-day, all their cattle will be driven to the pound. Now, I conceive, the object being not to pay rent, but to do the road, this is an illegal use of their power; and, supposing the landlord wished them not to work on the road for me, they would have a like notice for that. Notice has been sent to a man, that if he went to work on the road, his cattle should be driven the next morning to the pound; consequently, he may be made to do any thing the landlord pleases. "I conceive there exists no check to the power of the landlord! It appears to me that under colour of law, the landlord may convert that power to any purpose he pleases; the consequence is, that when he wishes he can extract from the peasant every shilling beyond bare existence, which can be produced by him from the land. The lower orders of peasantry in Ireland can never acquire any thing like property; they are always in a state of beggary; and the landlord, or the middle-man, who is the principal person in those cases, at the least reverse of prices which disables the actual occupier to pay what he may have previously promised, has it in his power, and does come and seize his cow, his bed, and his potatoes in the ground, and every thing he has; and without referring to any tribunal which might perhaps justify resistance, or the impossibility of paying all instantly, can dispose of his property at any price. I have known a cow sold for a few shillings; nobody would buy, and the driver bought it himself; and this power seems to me to be carried to an absurd extent. In the town of Kilkee, in the county of Clare, when I was passing through it in the time of the distress in the year 1822, the people were in a group at the side of the pound, receiving meal in the way of charity, and at the same time the pound was choke-full of cattle; of course the milk of those catttle would have been worth something, if it could have been obtained." he shall have to pay for the erop that he has produced; in the next place, the valuator is liable to be influenced by his partialities or his dislikes in increasing the demand upon the person who pays it; he goes at a certain period of the year, I believe rather towards autumn, when the crop has a good appearance, and makes his valuation, which he gives to his employer; the employer has a meeting convened of the parishioners, at a period subsequent to that, and also subsequent to the harvest, and then sets his tithe, as it is called, that is, makes a bargain with each particular farmer for that year; but it is to be observed that at that time the farmer is quite in his power, because he can scarcely avoid being guilty of subtraction of tithe, by housing his corn or consuming some of his potatoes; if he has taken of his potatoes, however small the quantity, he is liable to a charge for subtraction of tithe." "The Irish acts," said Mr. O'Connell," enable the peasant to hold a kind of battle with the tithe owner upon every thing but potatoes; with other things he can serve a notice to draw, but with potatoes it is not so; there is no statute provision respecting the potatoe; and then if the peasant begins to dig his potatoes, he is completely at the mercy of the tithe owner; and it is right to say, that he is, in general, not very harshly dealt with where the clergyman has the tithes himself; but when they are in the hands of laymen, and frequently persons of "The tithe," said Mr. Becher, the same persuasion with himself, a member of the House of Com- is very badly dealt with; if he mons, "is not a fixed payment; begins to dig, he has no mode the person who pays it does not afterwards of defending himself know till the end of the year what against the demand." The operation of the system of tithes in augmenting the distresses of the country, was illustrated by many of the witnesses. • "I believe," said Mr. Newenham, "that it is much the wish of the tithe farmer to get the tenant what he calls into his books; the consequence of which is, that when he comes to make his valuation, perhaps three years hence, he raises the sum for having been out of his money for the two years preceding. I have seen corn lying or stacked on the ground near to Christmas, with the corn growing green upon the top of it; I have asked why it was, and they said that the man was not able to make his agreement with the tithe farmer. The corn is diminished in value to all parties, for this man will not take less than a certain sum, as he knows he has him (the owner of the corn) in his power, for he has been in debt to him for two or three years, and the unfortunate tenant is aware that if he does not accede to this valuation that the tithe farmer has put upon him, he (the tithe farmer) comes down upon him for the two or three years, which is enough to ruin him." The mode in which the abuse of legal proceedings tended to the oppression and degradation of the peasantry and small farmers, was stated clearly and forcibly by Mr. O'Connell. In this respect, he conceived the operation of the act of 1817, which gave lessors a power of distraining the growing crops, to have been very mischievous. "That statute," said he, " has contributed extremely to the disturbances in the south, because in all cases of subletting, it gave to every one of those individuals (the intermediate lessors) the power of distraining the growing crop, that growing crop being the subsistence for the family of the peasant; and if he can forbear from digging the po tatoe himself, he cannot restrain his wife and children. I have known numerous instances, where informations, as for a felony, were sworn before a magistrate, and the wretch was committed to a jail for two or three or four months, till the ensuing assizes, when it was discovered it could not be a felony; but then the wretch had lain in jail during that time, and his family of course excessively ill off. The worst crimes of the south, I attribute a great deal to that act of parliament." He was equally strong in his condemnation of the Civil-bill Ejectment. 66 That act altered and took away the exceptions which formerly existed from the ejectment; there were some excepted cases, in which an ejectment for non-payment of rents did not lie at all, as a case of infancy, coverture, and imprisonment; that act took away those exceptions totally; it also, according to my recollection, gave ejectment against absconding tenants, as they were called; where the premises were left vacant, it gave to two magistrates the power of declaring that vacancy; and any thing that increases the power of the magistracy in Ireland, I take to be a great alteration, not for the better, but for the worse.— -The stampduties (added Mr. O'Connell) with respect to the tenure of land, of course, are paid by the tenant; and with respect to a peasant, the amount of stamp duty would be more money than he possibly could command; the consequence of which is, that he deals in general upon parole, or upon a contract written upon an unstamped paper. The effect of that is, that it gives the landlord a constant power of breaking through the contract, without any remedy. Not even a |