mighty nation, a vast population, fertility of soil, variety of produce, a mild climate, mineral treasures, abundant fisheries, extraordinary facilities for commerce, and a position which, if properly occupied, would form the link between the New World and the Old. If the happiness and greatness of nations were to be measured by such things as these, Ireland ought to be the happiest upon earth. Instead of this, she is peopled with paupers, crawled over by beggars, annually struck down with famine and fever; her land strewed with ruins from the cabin to the castle; her population haggard, tattered, and broken by want; her fields overgrown with weeds; her fisheries neglected, her harbours deserted; her towns streets of hovels; her hovels sheds which an English farmer would scarcely think a shelter for his pig.

There is another point in which observant travellers in Ireland will find the same agreement. Rarely, if ever, was there a national character containing more elements of good than that of Ireland. It is not true, as men proclaim, who propagate rebellion by slander, that the persons in Ireland most opposed to such a rebellion delight to magnify the crimes of their country. They speak of genuine Irishmen-as Irishmen should speak, and as Englishmen love to hear-as naturally a noble race. They are hasty, impetuous, and want perseverance and prudence; but they are also warm-hearted, affectionate, docile, full of intelligence and courage, and of devotion to the object which engrosses them. They are made for loyalty and religion, though their loyalty, under evil influence, becomes abject subjection to a demagogue, and their religion is soured into superstition. They are, in many points, of a morality singularly pure; grateful, attached to their family and their country, to national institutions-to a false system of religion, because they believe it to be old, and to a priesthood, without a claim on their affection, because they are told it is commissioned from God. Their chief faults are the excesses of virtues; their quick sensibility to justice makes them often litigious and revengeful; their liberality degenerates into extravagance, extravagance produces embarrassment, and embarrassment must end in meanness. So also they are charitable, to the injury both of themselves and of the poor; sociable, often to the neglect of domestic duties; faithful to their engagements, till they become conspirators; compassionate even to malefactors, till they join in screening them from law; imaginative, but without sufficient check of reason; reverent, so as to become abject and ambitious, till it generates ostentation. But he must be a poor observer of human nature who does not see in such a character the germs of a high excellence. With a warm heart

and

and an intelligent head, on one side, and, on the other, to temper these elements, a national spirit, thoughtful and regulated like the English, and a church full of the spirit of sobriety and order, -how is it, we ask again, that Ireland has never yet been a great nation that it is far more a blot upon Europe, with almost every page in its annals, and every spot on its shores, branded with the memory of crime?

There is one answer to this, against which we must protest. There is, in the elements just mentioned, no insurmountable impediment to the creation of a noble character. An Irish gentleman, well born, well educated, and with his natural tendencies modified by English association, is, perhaps, one of the most perfect specimens of civilised human nature. An Irish peasant, taken from the degradation and starvation of his cabin, and trained under proper discipline, becomes the best of soldiers. There is in him the same capacity of moral as of physical development, which a traveller in Ireland must observe, when he compares the famished, desponding, haggard look of the occupier of the soil with the fine body of men employed in the police, or in any other situation which secures them adequate support, and at the same time places them under rule. We have no respect for that materialist fatalism which would place any constitution of human nature under an irrevocable curse. Even with the ordinary influence of a sound education, no man has a right to despair of his fellow-creatures; but least of all when he holds in his hands the powers with which God has invested him through Christianity and his Church. Let us look hopefully and cheerfully even on unhappy Ireland. So far from despair, perhaps the deepest observer of human nature, and of the state of the world at this day, may withdraw his eye in fear from almost every other portion of the globe, and fix it on Ireland as the spot where, covered over with rubbish and ashes, and almost smothered by an oppressive influence, there is still a light burning, such as scarcely exists in any other civilised nation, and without which no nation can be great or good. In Ireland, as yet at least, the spirit of faith is not extinct: and where that still exists, who shall permit himself to despair?

What, then, is the cause of the evils of Ireland? Let us hear the Poor Inquiry Commissioners when they commenced their labours with the same question:

'On every side we were assailed by the theories of those who were born or had long resided in the country, and consequently might be supposed to have possessed good opportunity for ascertaining the soundness of their opinions. One party attributed all the poverty and wretchedness of the country to an asserted extreme use of ardent spirits, and proposed a scheme for repressing illicit distillation, for preventing

smuggling,

smuggling, and substituting beer and coffee. Another party found the cause in the combination amongst workmen, and proposed rigorous laws against trade-unions. Others, again, were equally confident that the reclamation of the bogs and waste lands was the only practicable remedy. A fourth party declared the nature of the existing connexion between landlord and tenant to be the root of all the evil; pawnbroking, redundant population, absence of capital, peculiar religious tenets, and religious differences, political excitement, want of education, the mal-administration of justice, the state of prison discipline, want of manufactures and of inland navigation, with a variety of other circumstances'-[We might add, subletting, the embarrassment of landlords, absenteeism, the use of the potatoe, early marriages, the dependence of the priests' income upon the people, the constant change of governors, Irish imprudence, tithes, rent, or, according to the very profound suggestion of Monsieur Gustave de Beaumont, the very existence of landlords]—were each supported by their various advocates with earnestness and ability, as being, either alone, or jointly with some other, the primary cause of all the evils of society; and loan-funds, emigration, the repression of political excitement, the introduction of manufactures, and the extension of inland navigation, were accordingly proposed, each as the principal means by which the improvement of Ireland could be promoted."

Instead of smiling contemptuously at this rather superficial and empirical view of things, it ought to be received gratefully, as a collection of valuable hints-each correct as a partial suggestion, none satisfactory as a whole.

If we were disposed to complain of the Poor Law Commissioners, it would be for the same defect which prevails in almost every other inquiry into the condition of Ireland. They confess that they commenced their labours without any fixed general principles of political wisdom. They proposed to examine into the circumstances brought before them; but there is no trace of any philosophical plan by which to try both the evils and the remedies. When a patient comes to a physician with a pain in the head, or an inflammation in the eye, it is very easy to apply a local remedy, and remove the disorder for the time. But the wise physician is one who knows not only the temporary cure, but how the whole system should be dealt with, so as to restore it to its soundness. He will scarcely condescend to remove an external evil, which, after all, may only be a symptom. Before we venture on a cure for any social mischief, we ought to look deep into the principles of society itself. Where are the statesmen who have approached Ireland with such principles? And without them, how can we hope for any permanent or radical relief? Now there is one evil on the very surface of Irish affairs,

* Selection of Evidence. By Authority. 1835. p. 6.

which meets us at every step, and on which all parties are agreed -though few seem to understand how deeply its roots are spread under the whole system of things. It is religious dissension. You would introduce capital-but the capital is in the hands of the Protestants, and Protestants dare not risk it in the hands of Romish labourers. You deplore the separation between landlord and tenant-you cannot unite their interests, because one is a Protestant, the other a Romanist. You wish to improve the condition of the poor-they refuse to be guided by you, because they are taught to regard you as the adversary of their religion. You try to educate-but the scheme fails, because a Protestant and a Romish education cannot be carried on together. You would bind Ireland and England together (how can they flourish apart?), and Sassenach and Heretic' are made convertible terms; and immediately between the two countries there opens an impassable gulph. Prison discipline, poor laws, loan funds, charitable institutions, lunatic asylums, hospitals, social intercourse,in all alike the same lamentable schism meets and embarrasses the efforts to do good. You would check political excitementbut political excitement is in Ireland religious excitement, and religion, or rather superstition, is the very atmosphere of the Irish population. Emigration is hindered, for you cannot encourage it wisely, and as a Christian, without ensuring the blessings of religion to those who are removed from their own country. Colonization on waste lands is unsafe, because it only multiplies a population estranged from the Church and the State. The laws cannot be executed, because information is discouraged, where the witnesses are of one religion, and the sufferer or the accuser of another. The whole circle of life is filled with jealousy, and bitterness, and fear, rumours of rebellion, and secret conspiracies, which no art can fathom, because religious associations exist, drawn up in array against each other, each laid under a 'spiritual obligation.'

Thus far the statement is secure against contradiction from any party. Will it bear us out in suggesting that, among all the causes of evil huddled together by the Poor Law Commissioners, there is one more widely spread than all the rest-one which is not superficial-one which bears upon its front signs of being the parent stem-the real source and head of all the rest-without touching which no other cure can take effect-the problem, with the solution of which all other problems will easily be solveda mischief which once cured, the other mischiefs will almost die away of themselves?

How this state of things was produced is a separate question: its existence is all that we are concerned with at present.

But

But let us examine the fact a little more deeply. Would to God the time would come, when men would learn that the government of States, far more than the arts of old, is indeed a mystery; and that without deep and searching thoughts, piercing down to the very foundations of society, he who attempts to save will only destroy them. First, What would be said of a man, who on meeting a naked, starving, infuriated maniac, should proceed to relieve him by putting shoes on his feet, a coat on his back, food into his mouth, and maxims of love into his head, overlooking his one great calamity, disordered reason-forgetting that the mind, and not the body is the man, and that where the mind wants truth, in whatever degree, whether in madness, or error, or ignorance, there to dress up the body, is only, as Bishop Taylor expresses it, to wash the face of the dead.' We ask if religious truth be not the first and most essential of all truths-and whether a nation, of which one large portion at least, without at present deciding which, must be destitute of this truth, is not like the maniac, labouring under a radical disease, which must be cured, before any other remedies can be applied to its ills?

Under this head fall the evils of poverty, ignorance, superstition, ill management, intemperance, excitability, falsehood, and the like, with which Ireland is now afflicted.

Secondly, What would be said of a man, who, seeing an officer of justice struggling with a man for whom he had a warrant, should fall into melancholy lamentations over the anger and animosity excited by the struggle, should endeavour to soothe the feelings of both parties, by texts from Scripture, and exhortations to mutual charity, and amicable association, forgetting that it was the appointed duty of the officer to take the culprit into custody, and the vital interest of the culprit to make his escape; and that while human nature continues, no struggle can be carried on without at times risking violence and heat; but that where the struggle is a matter of duty, violence and heat are far less evils than quiescence and friendship?

Let this be applied to the second class of the evils of Ireland,those which arise from the conflict between the old Catholic Reformed Church, and the schismatic intruders of Popery, and consider whether it be possible, or even allowable, to remove them, till in one way or other the conflict is not suspended but decided, and one party or other is victorious.

Then take the third class of evils-the evils of foreign interference-evils at the present moment only faintly shadowed out in the hints of a connexion with America, and exultation at the prospect of a French war, with which the Irish demagogues and Romish priests have been threatening the government; but which