none, I could scarce believe they meant more than that they had not sufficient; but I ascertained that they were literally destitute of any. This may serve to show how little the poverty of the people can be understood by persons viewing it at a distance; when I, their parish priest, living among them, was ignorant of its extent until I made the most scrutinizing personal inquiry. The people would hide their poverty even from me.'

In the same parish Mr. Meredith, chief constable of police, relates that he searched last year fifteen houses for some offenders guilty of an outrage, the object of which was to compel the farmers to lower the price of potatoes during a scarcity. In the whole he found only a few stone of potatoes in the corner of a box. In one instance, on removing a bundle of weeds which stopped a hole, the only entrance to a hovel, and creeping in, he found the man he was in search of lying on bare straw by the side of his pregnant wife. He had to take him from her side, he says, 'to be transported for an offence to which it was evident the fear of impending starvation had driven him.'-p. 387.

But we should never have done were we to continue quoting the scenes of misery which we meet with one after the other as we turn over the leaves of this terrific volume. Every page teems with such as those we have extracted at random. Nor have we yet mentioned half the forms of wretchedness exhibited by the able-bodied labourer of Ireland. In the dearth of proper food the substitutes resorted to are various. They lie in bed all day "to stifle the hunger." Unwholesome shell-fish, weeds, especially the wild mustard or 'pressagh,' a coarse plant which grows amongst the corn, and which turns their skin to a yellow colour' (p. 362), and boiled nettles, are commonly eaten in lieu of, or to eke out an insufficient stock of potatoes. They bleed the cattle, and eat the boiled blood (p. 379). They dig their potatoes before the crop is half ripe, when they get but one stone for three they would have if they could wait till it ripened. Nay, they are even seen, in the beginning of summer, madly pulling up the potato-stalks to get, not the young unformed root, but the old rotten potato that the plant is growing from.'-p. 374.

6

There is no want of industry among this class, as all the witnesses declare. But when they get work, they are often unequal to it from the weakness caused by previous want. Waldron, a Connaught farmer, says,—

The poor are willing to work, but there is no one to employ them. Most of them have so much hunger in their faces, that no one would give them their food for all the work they could do. They are under a compliment of life to any man, and under the lash of the world.'-p. 369. I wanted a labouring man for a day lately, and his wife had to come in the morning for the price of his breakfast beforehand, or

he

he could have done no work that day. . . . . They want and hope for nothing but employment. Hundreds would think it good wages to be made sure of one good meal of potatoes a day to themselves and their families in return for their labour.'-p. 485. A spring-well, if it were all ink,' (says one of the witnesses examined, seeing the Commissioners taking notes,) would not write for you all the miseries they suffer.'-p. 368.

As might be expected, CRIME is occasioned by such fearful want. It is only wonderful that any respect is preserved for property amid such a wholesale, though gradual, destruction of lifeof life, which the law of Ireland seems to think beneath its notice. The habit of pilfering potatoes, chiefly from the pits, which are necessarily exposed, is common. Wool is plucked from the sheep's back. Turf is frequently stolen, and cabbages and turnips where they are grown; though the certainty of suffering from such depredations very generally prevents their being raised.-p. 383-6. The sufferers under these petty thefts do not think of prosecuting the offenders, knowing it is famine drives them to it.'-p. 360. 'It would be a relief to one-half of them to be transported.' The governor of the gaol of the county of Westmeath gave the assistant commissioners the names of twenty-five individuals, mostly young persons of both sexes, who, within the last twelve months, had committed minor offences, chiefly, as he believed, to obtain the shelter and food of the prison.-p. 411. If there was plenty of work, there would be no Terry Alts.'-p. 361. "When a man has nothing to eat, and nothing to do but think of his misery, strange thoughts are apt to come into his head, and it is hard for him to keep them out,' says one of the class.-p. 567. Mr. Nolan knew forty-two families dispossessed of their holdings in the Queen's County, and consequently without resources, five of whom had combined to murder the landlord and his agent, who were to pass by that night. Mr. Nolan went to the wood where they were hid, and persuaded them to give up their fire-arms, or they would certainly have committed the murder. The same witness mentioned another case in which he prevented a man, who was rendered desperate, from shooting his landlord, in a similar way. The labourers constantly, he asserts, through destitution become reckless, and commit crimes of violence.-p. 397.

It has been sometimes asked, if labourers who hold land cannot get employment, why do they not employ themselves in the improvement of their own lands? The answer is thus given :- If we showed we were getting better, so much would be immediately added to our rent.' They will not even mend the bye-roads that lead up to their dwellings; they say, if they did, the agent would drive his gig up to the door and raise the rent.' Instances of this

spirit of exaction among the landowners, depressing all exertion in their tenantry, are frequent. M'Cue, a labourer of Erris (Mayo), says, 'I got the promise of a piece of wild mountain for two years rent free. I built a hovel on it, and reclaimed a part, planting it with potatoes, and my children begged till they were fit to dig. We have now got notice to quit, or to pay 30s. rent. We cannot do this out of the land, and must go.'-p. 307. The crop of conacre is often not worth the rent due upon the land. 'In this case the crop is seized, and the tenant processed for the balance,'-so that he not only loses his labour and seed, but finds himself in debt besides. A bailiff declares he has, after seizing and selling the crop on account of others, been often obliged to sue for the balance. His words are, A thousand times I have done it.'-p. 377.

The rent of con-acre is paid out of the earnings of the labourer in harvest, chiefly in England. While away, the wife and children subsist by begging. Many desert their families altogether, finding it utterly impossible to maintain them, and emigrate to England or to America.-p. 401.

The scarcity of employment is daily increasing through the rapidly increasing numbers of the poorer classes. No fact is more universally admitted throughout this Inquiry than that which we have so often urged in opposition to the Malthuses and Martineaus, namely, that early marriages are caused by extreme misery. The uniform answer to the query of the commissioner was, that those who are most wretched marry soonest, as 'knowing they cannot be worse off than they are.' Indeed, no economical fallacy was ever more completely opposed to fact, as well as reasoning, than that which induced so humane a man as the late Mr. Malthus to preach the revolting doctrine that the poor should be left to starve, lest they should propagate their numbers too rapidly. Ireland incontestably demonstrates that it is when they are on the verge of starvation that they multiply the fastest.

It is quite clear that society suffers, at present, in the various ways we have mentioned, far more than it could from any assessment for the relief and employment of the destitute. This seems to be becoming, at last, a general opinion even in Ireland itself. But one of the worst forms of evil engendered by the total neglect of the claims of the poor is yet to be described, viz.—

7. Mendicancy and Vagrancy.-From what precedes it will have been seen that all the poorer classes in Ireland are occasionally driven by destitution to beg. Widows and orphans-the unfortunate mothers of bastard children-the aged, cripples, and the sick—the labourer, the mechanic, and even the farmer in times of distress all are occasionally beggars in turn; and therefore all give alms to beggars, as long as they have anything, lest they may

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be refused themselves when their turn comes. THIS is the source of the so-much-vaunted sympathies of the poor of Ireland for one another. The rich, not being ever pinched with hunger, do not feel the distress of others.' They shut their gates, and escape the beggar's importunities.' The burden falls upon the lower and middle classes the farmers and shopkeepers-but chiefly upon the very poor themselves. The farmers are in general very liberal, yet those who rank lower are in truth more charitable: the farmer does not feel the hunger so often sticking to him as the poor man does.' The relief of the poor falls on us, the real poor.'—p. 522. The poor give away what they are sure to want very shortly themselves. Every one who has a potato will share it.' The very beggar often divides the contents of his wallet with one whose bag is empty. There is an old saying current, Beg from a beggar." A fear of the beggar's curse,' or the wish for his blessing, are some of the motives to this general almsgiving; but the more usual and strongest is the sympathy of the poor for each other, and a sense of the necessity of maintaining the practice for their own sake, against the time when they may be driven to take to the bag.'

Those who are driven to beg occasionally rarely do so, through shame, in the neighbourhood where they are known. They go to a distance, and become therefore vagrants, or wandering mendicants. The number of these at all times strolling through the country is immense.' 'One hundred and twenty beggars will call at my house in a day,' says Mr. D'Arcy. In small towns, from two to three hundred beggars are spoken of as being constantly about the streets. Mendicancy is everywhere described as being much on the increase, owing to the ruin brought on farmers by the low prices of produce, and the numerous ejectments which have happened of late years. The tax actually levied in this way must be enormous, though not easily calculated. No one ever thinks of reckoning or considering the quantity he gives away. Meal and potatoes are given by the handful to every one who asks. Most farmers certainly give away what would well maintain an additional labourer through the year. It seems the general opinion, that a farmer, holding ten acres of land, gives away from half a stone to a stone of potatoes a day on the average of the year. The average value of a stone is 3d., so that if this proportion were preserved through Ireland, where there are twelve millions of acres under cultivation, the poor-tax actually paid by the landholders alone, at present, (not to reckon the shopkeepers and middle classes in towns, nor the gentry,) would reach to three millions sterling a year!-at which sum, indeed, it was calculated long since by Sir R. Wilmot Horton. In towns, to which the beggars

naturally

naturally flock from the country, the burthen falls heavily on the shopkeepers. In the little town of Ballina, county Mayo, the witnesses concurred in estimating the cost of relieving the impor tunate beggars that crowd round their doors to be an average of 51. per annum-many less than that, but some 71. or 10l.' Mr. Loftus knows more than one that it must cost from 20l. to 30l. a year.'-p. 496. Is it not evident from all this, that a tax methodically raised and prudently administered would be infinitely less burdensome than the wholesale tribute which is now exacted in so painful, disgusting, and pernicious a manner?

As an example of the mode of life of a labourer's family forced from want of employment to subsist by mendicancy, we extract the story told by Mary Hanley, which the witnesses present agreed might be taken as illustrative of the condition of the class :

'My husband is a labourer, but does not get sufficient employment to support his family, so I must beg with my children for the most part of the year. I have six children, and have been fifteen years married. I have been begging for eleven of them. My husband never begged himself. The days he is employed we never beg: he gives me his wages to buy food for the family. The days he has no work (and that is most days) I and the children go out and beg for ourselves and him. We live in a deserted cabin, shifting our bed from side to side according as the wind blows, or as the rain falls from the roof; and that sort of lying has left my eldest child, a girl fourteen years old, a cripple that she cannot stir out; she was a healthy child at first; but from the damp and cold she took pains in her arms and legs, and she is a cripple to-day. Myself and my children are so naked, that when we go out to beg, I must take the blanket out to cover us; the wetter the day the more we want it, and when we come home at night we have nothing else to lie under. We would use three stone of potatoes a-day if we could get them. I am seldom able to get more than a stone and a half by begging. I get nothing else but a drop of broth perhaps, seldom any milk, and perhaps three halfpence or twopence a-week in halfpence; often no halfpence at all. In summer, when potatoes are scarce, I have often been days that I did not gather half a stone a-day. Where would we get it all of us that are looking for it then? I have often made five parts of a potato to divide it with my children. I am relieved principally by the shopkeepers, and I have often got potatoes from the labourer that has been forced to send his own family to beg the week afterwards. That man beyond,' (pointing to Walsh, a labourer present,) has often brought my children the potatoes, boiled and raw, when he was buying them himself, and had not the employment to buy enough of them for himself." ['I did,' says Walsh, divide my dinner with her, and remain. hungry myself; I would rather do it than that her children should go to bed without food." And she herself,' says Fitzstephen, a brokendown labourer, likewise present, has given me, when I went into

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her