DIGEST OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE HER MAJESTY'S COMMISSIONERS OF INQUIRY INTO THE STATE OF THE LAW AND PRACTICE IN RESPECT TO THE OCCUPATION OF LAND IN IRELAND. PART II. LONDON: BIGG AND SON, PARLIAMENT-STREET. DUBLIN: HODGES AND SMITH, GRAFTON-STREET. 1848. ODLE LIBRARY PRINTED BY ALEXANDER THOM, 87, ABBEY-STREET, DUBLIN, FOR HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE. NOTICE. crop IN offering the concluding part of the Digest, it may be well to explain, that although the evidence to which it refers was taken prior to the failure of the potato in 1845-6, the summaries preceding the extracts in the several chapters have been generally framed so as to keep before the reader's mind the additional considerations which the consequences of that visitation might appear to demand. The physical and social condition of Ireland has been so materially altered from what it was at the time the Commissioners reported, that the consideration of the evidence in reference to this altered state of things seemed quite essential, in order to enable the reader to arrive at any useful conclusions from the data. The analysis of one very important branch of public interest connected with the general subject of this work is necessarily excluded from it-that which bears upon the operation and effects of the extended Poor Law. As this measure was enacted subsequently to the close of the Land Commission, and as some of the essential details of the Poor Law are the subjects of an investigation before a Special Commission now sitting, it would be out of place and premature to deal with them in a work of this nature; at the same time it is necessary thus to show that the omission of a subject so important is not from inadvertence. The original Report of the Land Commissioners will be found in full at the end of the present part. |