relieving the people of Ireland from the grinding oppression and shocking misery they now endure, you will erelong find many friends of humanity advocate and justify a division of the lands of the country among its inhabitants, as fraught with less evil than the continuance of the present frightful state of society there.

My advice to the landlords of Ireland is, to "set their house in order," in preparation for what may happen. Secure, at least, the masses in support of law and order, by an act of bare justice, that ought never to have been denied to them that should have formed a primary element in your judicial code-by affording them a legal guarantee for existence on the surface of their native land.' *

Mr Scrope's doctrine is just this-That it is the duty of the landlords of a country, to provide employment and subsistence for all whom they find on the surface of their land. It does not matter whether their residence there be useful or mischievous, whether their number be adequate or excessive, whether they be prudent or improvident, frugal or wasteful, industrious or idle. It does not matter whether their presence have been invited or connived at, or even forbidden, by the person who chooses to call himself owner of the soil. They may have multiplied there while the land was in the hands of a middleman, or have been introduced in defiance of covenants against subletting, or may be mere squatters without a pretence to title. But they are there; and 'the due maintenance of the population is a primary ⚫ condition inherent in the principle of the law under which the owners of landed property hold their estates.' It may be impossible to find for them remunerative employment. Then, let them be employed on what is not remunerative, piers, harbours, and public buildings. The expense of maintaining them swallows up the whole rent. Then, let the estate be divided among them. The people are to be fed and employed. If the landlords have the power and the will to perform this duty, well. "If they will not do it, or cannot do it, or have not done it, the State must step in and compel them to do it, or do it for them ⚫ at their expense. If the State refuse or neglect to perform this office, the people must right themselves by a Revolution.' Doctrines more subversive of property, and therefore more subversive of government-of civilization, and of human morality and happiness, were never proclaimed by Fourrier or by Owen, by Robespierre or by Babeuf.

We do not accuse Mr Scrope of being consciously an anarchist. We believe him, indeed we know him, to be a man whose

intentions are excellent; and whose views and opinions on subjects unconnected with Poor-Laws are enlightened. But living among the abuses of the English poor-laws has pauperized his mind. He belongs to the class described by the English Commissioners of Inquiry as unfitted, by their familiarity with the vices of the English system, to understand the principles on which a Poor-Law ought to be based.

To suppose,' (say the Commissioners,) that the poor are the proper managers of their own concerns; that a man's wages ought to depend on his services, not on his wants; that the earnings of an ordinary labourer are naturally equal to the support of an ordinary family; that the welfare of that family naturally depends on his conduct; that he is bound to exercise any sort of prudence or economy; that any thing is to be hoped from voluntary charity ;-these are views which many of those who have long resided in pauperised districts seem to reject as too absurd for formal refutation."

It may be said, however, that there is a mode of extending the Irish Poor-Law, to which the objections which we have opposed to Mr Scrope's scheme do not apply. Some of those who admit that to give a right to relief would be ruinous, think that a discretionary power to afford out-door relief, out of the rates, might be entrusted to the guardians. It is true that the objections to this plan and to Mr Scrope's are not the same; but though different in kind, they are not less in degree. If we had to choose between the two, we had rather, on the whole, pass an act embodying Mr Scrope's proposal. The mischief of such a law would be apparent the instant it was attempted to be executed. Rates of fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound, must immediately be levied. Improvement would cease, farms would be given up, those who now pay rates would have to receive relief instead of contributing to it, voluntary employment would be at an end, estates would be abandoned, the Boards of Guardians would be besieged, like Mr Jeston at Cholesbury, by the applicants for food-numbered not by hundreds but by thousands, demanding it not as a favour but as a right-and, after a period of misery, and probably of riot and outrage, such as even Ireland has never suffered, the law would be repealed by acclamation. The evils of a discretionary power of out-door relief would be gradual. They would advance in Ireland, as they did in England, by steps, with this difference only, that their progress would be far more rapid. But though comparatively rapid, the progress would be slow enough to render the mischief irremediable. The disease would have time to become organic before it became alarming.

The difficult problem-How public relief may be best afforded,

has exercised the minds of all reflecting men, for the last two hundred years. On no question in political science have the facts been so abundant, or so carefully collected and arranged, or made matter of such diligent comment. The subject is far from exhausted; but a few leading principles have been established. One is, that public and private charity must be governed by rules, so different as to have little in common. Both indeed may be misdirected, but only one of them can be corrupt. A man who gives from his own purse may be mistaken: he may be too indolent, or too busy, to enquire as to the facts which form the case of the applicant, or too ignorant to know how to deal with them; but his motives at least must be pure. All that he gives is taken from his own means of enjoyment. The man who gives out of his neighbour's purse, makes no sacrifice whatever. He indulges his sympathy without expense. It is obvious that this alone may be the source of unbounded profuseness. Nemo tam parcus quin prodigus ex alieno. But other motives soon step in. He finds that popularity and influence can be obtained; that his dependents or relations can be provided for; that his tenants and debtors may be rendered solvent; that his customers may be supplied with funds, and his labourers with wages. Hence came the mal-administration which brought England to the brink of ruin. Experience has now taught us a further principle, namely, that the check must be imposed, not on the giver but on the receiver; that the extension of relief to unfit objects must be prevented, by requiring it to be accompanied by conditions to which none but fit objects will submit; and for this purpose, that public relief must be so administered as to render the situation of its recipient less eligible than independence.

This is one of the points on which private and public charity most remarkably differ. Private charity strives to prevent its gifts from occasioning pain. It hides them from the world, and even from the object himself. It disguises them in the form of loan, or of employment. It wishes him to believe that what is really a gift is a payment, the result not of his poverty, but of his industry and good conduct. When it neglects or fails to do this, and makes mere indigence the notorious ground of relief, it produces many of the evil results of ill-administered public charity. It offers a premium for indigence, and therefore for the idleness, waste, and improvidence, which are the principal causes of indigence. It creates more destitution than it relieves.

Public charity, on the contrary, must necessarily be open and avowed. Its distributors deal with other men's property; they are the guardians of a public fund. To escape the grossest jobbing and partiality, they must act on fixed principles. Their

duty is not to reward industry or good conduct, but to relieve indigence. In attempting to perform this duty, they incur two great dangers. First, that indigence will be simulated; and secondly, that when real, it will have been occasioned or promoted by the prospect of relief.

The labouring population of every country is condemned by nature to a life, which is one struggle against want.

Si brachia forte remisit

Ast illum in præceps proni fert alveus amnis.'

Hunger and cold are the punishments by which she represses improvidence and sloth. If we remove those punishments, we must substitute other means of repression. The pauper must purchase by some other sacrifice his immunity from the ordinary obligations of life; or, in other words, we repeat it, his situation must be rendered less eligible than that of the independent labourer. It is obvious that this is not done, if the relief is afforded to him as a supplement to his other means of subsistence. If the Union pay the rent of his cottage, or give him allowance in aid of his wages, or head-money for his children, such relief is all pure gain to him. Without adverting to its other fatal consequences, it is sufficient to say that it renders his situation, instead of less eligible, more eligible than that of the independent labourer. The union, therefore, must take possession of him. It cannot allow him to be a farmer or a labourer on his own account. It must provide, therefore, for his whole maintenance, and that of his family. And that maintenance cannot even in England be less abundant than that of an average labourer. In Ireland, public opinion would require it to be even more abundant. The standard of wants, to which the low civilization of the Irish labourer has accustomed him, is so depressed, that the guardians would be execrated if they used it as a scale. What other modes then remain, by which the object may be effected? only two have been suggested-Confinement in a Workhouse, and Public Labour.

The propriety of enabling the guardians, at their discretion, to afford relief to the able-bodied and their families in the workhouse, need not now be considered. They have that power by the existing law. The question is, can they, without sacrificing the principle that relief must be made less eligible than independence, be allowed to relieve them on the terms of their being employed on public labour. To render that labour less eligible than independence, it must be worse paid, or more severe, or degrading. Worse paid we have shown that it cannot be. More severe it may be made in a few instances. A tailor may be easily fatigued by setting him to break stones, or a weaver by forcing

him to dig; but an agricultural labourer, and such are the bulk of the Irish poor, cannot be forced to work for the public harder than he works for a master, or so hard. Even the convicts in our dockyards, who laboured under the eye of vigilant superintendents, and with the lash always before them, never did more than one-third of the work which would have been performed by workmen stimulated by wages. Degrading, without doubt, the employment might be made. The paupers might be harnessed, as our own were, to carts; they might be sent, as our own were, ten miles to carry an ear of wheat and bring back an ear of barley; they might be set to dig holes and fill them up again; but are these the terms on which a nation ought to offer its charity? If it were morally right, would it be safe, would it be practicable, to do so in Ireland? We know that it was not safe to do so in England. If it were safe, would it be justifiable? We have shown that parish employment under any form is corrupting. What must it be when it is intentionally an instrument of degradation ?

In fact, the experiment of providing relief by public labour, has recently been tried in Ireland. The late government endeavoured to provide against the failure of the potato crop, by issuing a large sum of money to local relief Committees to be expended in employing on public works those who could be proved to have no other means of subsistence; the wages in every case to be fixed below the usual rate of wages in the neighbourhood.

We have now before us an extract from a Treasury Minute of the 21st July 1846. It states that the ordinary resort of Irish labourers to England, for the purpose of participating in the high wages consequent on the getting in of the hay and corn harvest, has been in some parts of the country suspended; that the great public works for the improvement of the Shannon, and for the drainage of the country, have, to a considerable extent, been left without workmen; and that the people employed on the relief works have indulged in habits of indolence-preferring the receipt of an eleemosynary allowance, under the name of wages, to higher wages proportioned to the labour performed.

The alarm of the Treasury, as the following passage will show, was not without foundation:*

We have delightful summer weather since Wednesday last, and the fast ripening crops of grain are bending in all the fields around us under their glorious burden. Many acres of corn are ripe for the sickle, which

*We copy this passage from the Limerick Chronicle, of the first week of August last.