clearance and large farm would suit Mayo to all intents and purposes, were it not that its wretched paupers are nominally freemen. Sismondi, whose researches on this question are as great as those of any modern writer, thus exposes the effects of the system. After observing that it was during the period of peace and prosperity that the colossal growth of a few fortunes was favoured, he says:

"A single proprietor gradually became possessed of provinces which had furnished the republic with the occasion of decreeing more than one triumph to its generals; while he amassed wealth so disproportionate to the wants of a single man, he CLEARED all the country he got within his grasp of that numerous and respectable class of independent cultivators hitherto so happy in their mediocrity. Where thousands of free citizens had formerly been found ready to defend the soil they tilled with their own hands, nothing was to be seen but slaves. Even this miserable population rapidly diminished, because its labour was too expensive, and the proprietor found it answer better to turn his land into pasture. The fertile fields of Italy ceased to supply food for their inhabitants. The provisioning of Rome depended on fleets which brought corn from Sicily, from Egypt, and from Africa; from the capital to the uttermost provinces depopulation followed in the train of overgrown wealth, and it was in the midst of this universal prosperity, before a single barbarian had crossed the frontiers of the empire, that the difficulty of recruiting the legions began to be felt. In the war against the Quadi and Marcomanni, which was preceded by so long a peace, Marcus Aurelius was reduced to the necessity of enrolling the slaves and the robbers of Rome. The frontier provinces, those most exposed to the attacks of the barbarians, those which suffered the most from the presence and military vexations of the legions, did not suffer so much from the rapid decline of population and of the warlike virtues as the more wealthy provinces of the interior. The levies of troops were no longer made in Rome; they were raised almost exclusively in Northern Gaul, and along the right bank of the Danube. This long Illyrian frontier in particular, for more than two centuries, preserved the reputation of furnishing more soldiers to the empire than all the rest of the provinces combined. This border country had offered little temptation to the cupidity of Roman senators. They cared not to have their property in a province constantly harassed by the enemy. The land which the senators would not buy remained in the possession of the old proprietors; there, consequently, a population numerous, free, and hardy, still maintained itself. It long furnished the army with soldiers; it soon supplied it with chiefs." *

* Vol. i. p. 345. See further on this subject of Roman clearances, the article in the Monthly Chronicle before referred to.

Such were the effects of clearances in Greece and

Rome; the men who conquered the world exterminated by a few landsharks, as the yeomen have been who won Cressy, and Poictiers, and Agincourt, as our Scottish Highland brethren have partly been; and as we most certainly shall be, unless, warned by their fate, we make an effort to save ourselves.

It being clear that our population is not excessive for the available land, and that the greater part of the land is either actually and avowedly waste, or really waste though nominally in pasture, and that the small portion which is in tillage is very badly cultivated, it follows that the obvious remedy for the misery of our millions is, to discourage waste and pasture and to promote tillage. "The directions for Ireland," said Swift, are short and plain, to encourage agriculture and home consumption." Our difficulties turn entirely upon the relative proportions of pasture and tillage which the owners of the soil choose to maintain. A thousand acres of land, which, if tilled with the spade as in Belgium, would give profitable employment to one hundred families; or, with the plough, according to the existing system here, as pointed out by the Poor Law Inquiry Commissioners, to upwards of 142 men, can, if "cleared" and converted into a sheepwalk, be managed by a few herdsmen; and ninety-nine of the hundred families, or 140 of the men, will at once become "superabundant." Spademen and ploughmen would be "surplus" even in America, if a legislature of graziers protected prairies and buffaloes; and so they will be here till we prefer to have the land dug and ploughed, to having it grazed on by sheep and bullocks. Never was there a truer observation than Swift's: "Ajax was mad when he mistook the flock of sheep for his enemies; but we shall never be sober till we have the same way of thinking." The following are a few of the means for encouraging tillage and discouraging pasturage, which are obvious to every plain and sober mind practically acquainted with the subject.

to

The bounty on pasturage, in the shape of the present heavy duties on foreign beef, mutton, pork, cheese, butter, and live stock, ought be at once repealed. Now, that the corn laws are abolished, there is no pretence for maintaining them. Why should English artisans pay for the encouragement of Irish clearances by duties amounting to a third or a fourth part of the market prices of their butter, cheese, beef, and mutton? The law in this respect should obviously be uniform, and present no longer a bounty to clearers and graziers. So the laws should be repealed which prohibit the culture of tobacco. When it was cultivated here, it was found to give employment to great numbers, to habituate the people to a scientific treatment of the soil, and to produce a profit of £50 or £60 per acre. Its cultivation is prohibited in consequence of the difficulty of collecting the duty. But why should not the Government do here with regard to it what they do in England with regard to hops-employ excisemen to watch the produce and collect the duty? When the owners of the land are deprived of protection, they ought to be freed from all restrictions, and to be left at liberty, like the other members of the community, to turn their property to the best advantage. Why should land alone be made the scapegoat of free trade? So also the laws prohibiting the manufacture of sugar from beet-root ought to be abolished. While England was protecting the West Indies, she might be excused for preventing us from making our own sugar; but that prohibition ought not to be continued for the benefit of foreign slave dealers. Clearances should be at once and rigorously repressed, by the enforcement of the common law against depopulation, and the revival and extension to this country of the English Husbandry Statutes, by the repeal of the several acts recently passed for facilitating the process of ejectment through the medium of the Assistant Barristers' Courts, by the abolition of the Gregory clause, and the adoption of the English law of parish settlement in its entirety. Our present system is an outrage on every principle of humanity and justice, encouraging the extermination of the people, and making distant districts pay for the relief of the poor who are cleared off by merciless landlords. Strict justice requires that every country and every parish should maintain its own poor. That principle would have been adopted when the Poor Law was originally proposed, but that the landlords persuaded the Legislature that there was some "peculiarity" in Celtic paupers which rendered its application unsuitable to them. It is on the ground of some such mysterious and indescribable peculiarity that we are denied the protection of every wise and benevolent principle of the common or statute law of England. Had the system of parish settlement been adopted, then the country would be spared the frightful scenes of depopulation which have been since spreading ruin and desolation through the island, as the landlords would have known, that by "clearing" they would be increasing instead of diminishing the burthens on their property, and injuring themselves as well as the industrious people whom they were driving to beggary, exile, and death. There was a modification of this peculiarity proposed last Session, by a Bill regulating the relief and removal of our paupers in and from England. That measure, however, proposed to introduce other peculiarities in practice, all which are decidedly objectionable. In the legislation on this subject, there should be no pedling peculiarities tolerated. We should be treated precisely as if we were Cockneys, or "Men of Kent;" each of our parishes should be made to support its own poor, and pay for their support wherever relieved, and the officers of English parishes and unions should deal with the officers of our unions just as if this island were the Isle of Wight, or the Isle of Thanet, or the Isle of Dogs.

An alteration is also absolutely required in the mode of levying and collecting the rates, in order to guarantee the permanent existence of the people, and save the whole community from pauperism. The operation of the present law is this: certain proportions of the rate are by law due from the landlord, and certain proportions from the occupying tenant, but all are levied in the first instance off the latter, he being entitled to deduct the landlord's share from his rent; but as few tenants can now pay their rents in full, the entire rate falls virtually on him. The effect of this arrangement is most ruinous. Suppose the tenant has by the first of November paid his Michaelmas rent; he has then between that and the next harvest, to meet three or four rates of five, or ten, or possibly (as happens in many unions) eighteen shillings in the pound. If he have no ready money to fall back upon, his stock and everything else he has on earth are seized and sold, and long before the next Michaelmas comes round he is a workhouse pauper, or an exile, or a corpse. The same thing happens in towns. The accounts in the provincial papers of the seizure of the bedding, and pots, and pans, and fire-irons of the poor, who have struggled to keep out of the workhouse, are quite shocking and disheartening.

We think that the occupying tenant should be liable only for his own share of the rates, and that on the sameė principles on which the common law forbid the seizure of a workman's tools or beasts of the plough for rent, the cattle and instruments necessary for tilling the land, implements of trade, and all articles of absolute domestic necessity, should be exempt from seizure even for his share, and that the landlord's share should be recoverable in the manner we are about to suggest. By the present system, the rate is levied off such lands and houses only as have some distrainable goods upon or in them. Off others it cannot be levied at all, except by going to law with the owners; and where they have "cleared" and made the devastation complete, so that they need not identify themselves with the land by any act of ownership, it is doubtful whether it can be recovered even by an action at law. We wrote lately to one of the ablest Vice-Guardians in Connaught, asking simply how they recovered rates off lands that had been "cleared?" and his answer was, "We are endeavouring to get the rates of such premises from the landlords. Where any act of ownership has been exercised, such as making up fences, taking away the remains of cabins, or appointing care-takers, we do not anticipate much difficulty; but where nothing of this nature has been done by the landlord, we fear payment will be resisted, and I do not think that any court of competent jurisdiction has yet given a decision as to whether or not he is liable." Take, as an instance, the conduct of one J. Walsh, an esquire and justice of the peace, who, according to Mr. Scrope and Mr. Tuke, razed in 1845, near Belmullet, in the county of Mayo, an entire village, (with the exception of six houses)

"In two neighbouring villages, 50 houses were levelled. All this in mid winter! 40 miles from the nearest workhouse! And no less than 140 families out of those thus dispossessed are now receiving relief from the Union, while the proprietor who evicted them has not paid the rates due from him, though sued at law for them."*

* A Plea for the Rights, &c., p. 78.