are too much exhausted by toil to seek for recreation in intellectual exertion. The civilisation of the lower orders of society can scarcely originate amongst themselves, but must rather descend from the ranks above. The rich are too often unmindful of their duties, but they have an important office to discharge. To them it belongs to encourage science, literature, and art, to diffuse the blessings of knowledge, to exhibit in their own persons the advantages of mental cultivation, and to set examples of intelligence, delicacy, liberality, and good taste. These are their peculiar functions, the discharge of which is scarcely less necessary for the attainment of the legitimate objects of human society than the performance of the labours by which it is fed and clothed; but the fulfilment of these duties is impossible unless the rich are intermixed with the other classes, and if a class so numerous as the agricultural is isolated from the rest, and consists wholly of members who must work with their own hands. But this is an arrangement of society very different from that which it is the object of these pages to recommend. By the preceding vindication of small farmers and small proprietors, it was not implied that all farms and all estates should be small. Very little reflection will show that disparity of ranks and fortunes is. essential to the welfare of mankind. If a community in which there are many indigent, cannot properly

be called happy, the happiness of a community in which there are none rich enough to command and to avail themselves of leisure, cannot be of a much more exalted character than that of cattle. To secure the welfare of agricultural labourers, it seems indispensable that they should not be entirely dependent on the hire of their services, but should be owners or tenants of pieces of land sufficient to afford them occupation and subsistence when they cannot procure employment elsewhere. It is also desirable, at least, that of the holdings large enough to be entitled farms, some should be small enough to lie within reach of a mere labourer's ambition, and stimulate him to exertion by offering him hopes of rising above his actual station. But it is not less desirable that there should also be many farms so extensive as to require the superintendence of men of considerable wealth and proportionate instruction, who would avail themselves of the discoveries of science, and effect improvements in agriculture, and would also serve as models for their humbler neighbours in their modes of life and general habits of thinking, as well as in the conduct of their business. All peasants should be landholders, but all landholders should not be peasants. In the agricultural, as in all other classes, the interests of the members would be best promoted by a just gradation of ranks,

CHAPTER V.

IRELAND; PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.

IRELAND, even more commonly, and with more confidence than France, is appealed to as testifying strongly against small farms and small properties. The "cottage system," it is said, has there been tried on a very extensive scale, and has utterly and lamentably failed. Five-sixths of all the farms in the island are less than fifteen acres in extent, and nearly one-half are less than five acres; yet in no part of Europe is agriculture more defective, nor the peasantry more idle and thoughtless, or so miserable and ill-disposed. What reply can be made to a statement, the truth of which is too notorious to be disputed? Simply, that to Irish farms are wanting certain conditions, without which no farms, whether small or great, nor their occupiers, can be expected to flourish. There are no bounds to the tenant's liabilities, and no security against his ejection. That Irish holdings should have been supposed capable of furnishing any argument against peasant properties, is only one among many examples of the profound

ignorance which prevails respecting Irish affairs. Ireland is one of the few countries in which there neither are, nor ever were, peasant properties. From the earliest appropriation of the soil, down to the present day, estates have always been of considerable size, and though these estates are now cut up into many small holdings, the actual occupiers of the soil, far from being landowners, are not even leaseholders, but are rackrented tenants at will. In this single phrase may be found a complete explanation of all the evils of their condition, and all the defects of their character. They are indolent, because they have no inducement to work after they have obtained from their labour wherewithal to pay their rent, and to save themselves from starvation. Whatever additional produce they might raise, would only subject them to further exactions. They are careless of the future, because they cannot, by taking thought, improve the gloomy prospects of the morrow; they are reduced to the verge of destitution, because they are permitted to retain no more of the fruits of their labour than will barely suffice for their subsistence; and they set at naught all other laws, divine or human, partly in obedience to the first law of nature, that of self-preservation, and partly because familiarity with misery has rendered them desperate.

Before we proceed further, it may be well to

inquire how it is that Irish cottears are unable to make better bargains with their landlords. In other countries, in which the property of the soil is not vested in the peasantry, the latter nevertheless obtain possession of it without submitting to terms altogether unreasonable. Leases may not perhaps be granted to them, but they do not suffer the landlord to fix his own rent. They will not consent to pay more than the land is worth, as a means of employing their capital and labour. But in Ireland they do not venture to reject any demands, however outrageous. Whatever rent may be asked, they readily agree to pay, perfectly heedless whether they shall be able to fulfil engagements which the necessities of their situation leave them no choice but to undertake. In a country in which farms are in general too small to afford employment for hired labour, a peasant has scarcely a chance of being able to gain a livelihood, unless he obtain possession of land; and in Ireland the competitors for land are so numerous, that the price paid for the use of it has reached a degree of exorbitancy unheard of elsewhere. Such keen competition clearly shows that population is excessive; that is to say, that the labouring class is too numerous in proportion to the amount of employment for it; but it would be a mistake to regard this redundancy of population as a consequence of the prevalence of small farms. The