The outcry raised by Mr O'Connell and his supporters against the landlords, on account of the number of persons "turned out, and left to die by the road-side,"[30] will, we have no doubt, turn out (if possible) to be more unfounded than even his other assertions. The present Commission has ample powers to ascertain this fact at least: and we will venture to assert, that not one instance of starvation will have been proven before it; and that out of the hundreds of thousands who were reported to have been mercilessly turned adrift to perish at the backs of ditches, forty-nine fiftieths will be found well and hearty, and in the occupation of those lands from which they were said to have been expelled. That ejectment-processes were served, and decrees obtained, which, if followed up and enforced, would have put many persons out of possession, we do not deny; but nine-tenths of those are compromised by the payment of part of the rent before the day of trial comes on, and of the decrees obtained, the great majority are never put in execution. Accurate information on this point can easily be obtained from the sheriffs and clerks of the peace for the different counties; those officers have been amongst the first witnesses examined before Lord Devon. We would only ask the public to suspend its judgment, and those well-meaning but mistaken individuals, who, though they reject Mr O'Connell and the priests as authorities on most other subjects, take their assertions on this as proven facts, to reserve their indignation and wrath until the result of this testimony can be known. Ejectment-processes are the most effective and the cheapest means by which the landlord can enforce the payment of the rent due, and as such they are generally had recourse to: before they can be acted on, at least three months must have elapsed after the year's rent (which is the least sum they can be issued for) has become due.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to foment, certainly nothing has assisted more to continue, the agrarian disturbances in Ireland, than the statements, made so flippantly by journalists and pamphleteers, of the great excess of rent exacted in Ireland over that paid by the English tenantry. Those writers have invariably assumed the truth of the assertions made in this particular; yet nothing can be further from the fact.

There is no statistical account of England recently published, that we can discover, which would give us any correct idea of the present average rent of land in this country;[31] but we think, from all the information we have been able to acquire, by enquiries directed to competent and well-informed persons, that it cannot be set down at less than 25s. an acre. From the last Irish census we learn, that Ireland contains 20,399,608 statute acres, and that the estimated rental is L12,715,478—yielding a trifle over 12s. as the average rent.[32] When it is taken into consideration that the English tenant pays tithes—which, in many localities, amount to more than the entire average rent produced by Irish ground; that he pays the poor-rates, and that he is heavily taxed with turnpikes and other local assessments: and that the Irish tenant pays no tithe, and only half the poor-rates; that no turnpikes exist, except solitary ones in the neighbourhood of cities or very large towns; that, in fact, the only tax he pays is the county cess, varying in different counties from tenpence to one and sixpence the acre half-yearly; and that this assessment is being considerably reduced by the new grand-jury enactments, under which the towns and gentlemen's houses are valued and taxed;—when, we say, all those things are taken into consideration, and besides, that the land in Ireland is naturally better and more productive than the English soil, we think we have satisfactorily disposed of one grave charge against the Irish landlords; and that we have shown that it cannot be the exorbitance of the pecuniary burdens under which he groans, that causes the vast difference between the social condition of the Irish and the English occupier.

It will no doubt be said—"Ah, but the English tenant is housed, and his farm kept in repair, by the landlord, while the Irishman is obliged to do all this himself!" This is true; but certainly the outlay of the Irish tenant on his farm, makes but a small addition to his other engagements. Gates and fences he has, comparatively speaking, none; and, if they be erected for him, they are soon suffered to go to ruin. He requires few outhouses; for in the poor and disturbed districts (and it is those which we are now attending to) he uses his domicile as a receptacle for his pig and his cow, as a matter of choice; we say as a matter of choice—for, if he had the inclination, all writers admit he has abundance of unoccupied time to construct habitations for them. Now, though it is a just cause of regret that we do not see better homesteads and better fences in Ireland, still we cannot admit that the tenant's being obliged to keep such as exist in repair, can be any great hardship in a pecuniary point of view, as he lays out scarcely any thing on them: he does not even expend his own labour on their improvement; and his time, which might be profitably occupied in this way, is wasted in useless idleness, in swelling the train, or cheering the ferocious sentiments, of some mercenary agitator.

Having shown, as correctly as it is possible to do, the relative amount of rents paid in England and in Ireland, let us compare the amount of rents paid in each of the Irish provinces. For this purpose we shall take a maritime and an inland county from each.

Maritime.£s.d.Inland.£s.d.
Ulster—Down, average rent,0160Tyrone, average rent, 0146
Munster—Clare,do. do.0110Tipperary,do. do.0178½
Leinster—Wexford, do.0140Longford, do. do.0123
Connaught—Mayo, do.086Roscommon, do.0130

It is well known that the quality of the land in the north of Ireland is far inferior to that in either of the other provinces: yet we see, in the maritime counties, that the rich and fertile lands of Clare and Wexford are let much cheaper than the northern counties; and that Mayo, inhabited by unquestionably the poorest and most miserable population in Ireland, is rented at nearly half the amount paid by the independent yeomanry of Down; while, amongst the inland counties, the splendid plains of Roscommon, and the productive lands of Longford, yield less income than the cold and, comparatively speaking, sterile soil of Tyrone. Now, it is not too much (indeed it is under the mark) to say, that two acres in any of those counties we have quoted, in Leinster, Munster, or Connaught, will feed more cattle, and grow more corn, than three acres in either of the northern ones; and yet the tenantry in the north, who pay those comparatively high rents, are contented, and the landlords are considered good.[34] Those statements are founded not on our own opinions, but on incontrovertible facts; and, after having read them, we would ask any dispassionate man if the disturbed condition of the west and south of Ireland can be, with any justice, attributed to the rents imposed by the landlords. In the north, where the highest rents are charged, the people are well housed and well clothed, the ground well tilled, and the rents as well paid as in any part of England. Here, if a tenant wishes to dispose of his right in even a tenancy-at-will, he gets some ten or twelve years' purchase for it; and the answers to Lord Devon's enquiries were, in many instances, that the interference of the commission was not required. While in the south and west, from whence the loudest complaints against the landowners proceed; where the peasant exists in rags, and the gentlemen in a state of semi-starvation; where the people are idle, and their ground untilled; where squalid misery offends the eye and merciless murders shock the feelings; where the terror of the assassin supersedes the power of the landlord, and protects the tenant against all law; there, in the counties so overwhelmed with poverty and debased by crime, the lands are held on terms (the relative value being taken into consideration) by the half easier than in the prosperous and peaceable province of Ulster.

Dublin, Limerick, Meath, and Tipperary, do average a trifle more than the northern counties; but the one is the metropolitan county, and the quality of the land in the others is so superior to any in England or Ireland, that even at the small advance of two shillings an acre, they may justly be considered as more cheaply rented than any other counties.

To understand a people properly, their national character must be attentively studied; and this can only be done by a long residence and a close connexion with them. We cannot therefore be much surprised, that those who undertake to write on a country which they have never seen, or to prescribe remedies for the defects in the social condition of a people amongst whom they have never resided, should be led into grievous mistakes, and that they should be unsafe guides to direct the enquiries of others. Employment, hard work, large wages, and good living, form the objects of the Englishman and the Scotchman's ardent desire; while coarse food, bad lodging, and half clothing, are quite agreeable to the Irishman, if they be combined with independence—in other words, if by using them he may avoid labour, and enjoy those amusements to which he is passionately addicted, and in which he indulges unrestrainedly. We firmly believe, that if a choice of roast beef and loaf bread, accompanied by the labour necessary to earn them, were offered to "Pat" at home, or potatoes and milk, with liberty to frequent the horse-races, cock-fights, and dances, in his neighbourhood, he would unhesitatingly accept the latter. This may seem strange to an Englishman; but there is no accounting for taste. That the potato is coarse food, cannot be doubted; that it is wholesome, is abundantly proved by the stalwart men who subsist on it, and by the ruddy health of the chubby, merry urchins who have, perhaps, never tasted any thing else. Pity it is that the former should be so negligent of, or so indifferent to, their own advantage; or that the latter should have been (until lately) suffered to grow up in that ignorance which almost secures a continuance in the same courses which proved the bane and misfortune of their fathers. No peasant in Europe devotes so much of his time to amusement as does the Irishman. Go to the places of public amusement, or to the fairs and markets, in the busiest and most hurried seasons, and how many thousands will you see, who have no earthly business there but to meet their friends, to laugh and to chat, and (before Father Mathew reformed them) to drink and to fight!

To suppose, as some influential writers here do, that there is no alternative between the possession of land and absolute starvation, is one of those imaginary fictions often conjured up by those who wish to indulge in what they believe to be powerful, and wish to be pathetic, appeals to the feelings; but it betrays great ignorance of the subject on which they propound their opinions. The condition of the rural labourer, constantly employed by the gentleman or wealthy farmer, is generally much superior to that of the small landholder. Those men are bound by agreements which they must fulfill—they work continually; and although their wages are in some instances nominally very low, and in all much lower than we could wish, still their allowances—in house-rent, grazing, and con-acre—enable them not only to live comfortably, but sometimes to amass considerable sums of money. You always see good pigs, and very often more than two good cows, at their doors. It may not be amiss to say, that, in all instances, they get the feeding of those cows for a rent varying from one guinea per year, when the nominal wages are low, to three shillings a-year, when tenpence a-day is given; thus, at the very highest price, getting for three shillings that accommodation for which Mr Cobden charges his workman twelve pounds! Yet the great object of those men is to get land and become farmers, although they almost invariably suffer by the change. They were before compelled to work to meet their engagements; having become their own masters, they in very many instances neglect their business, and devote the time which ought to be employed in the cultivation of their farms, to the discussion of politics and to the attendance on popular assemblies.