the body of the people of Ireland. A more moderate and simple judicial establishment, with a brief and complete digest of the law, adapted to every man's capacity, and which every child in the schools should read, ought first to be provided. Along with this every thing-without it little can be achieved.

The use which is made of the mass of the people in Ireland for establishing parliamentary interests, is the next grand cause of the calamities which overspread the country, and which must be reformed, before the people can be improved, or their calamities extinguished. To talk of freedom of choice, in the wretched creatures whom a proprietor of Irish soil manufactures into voters upon his estate, would be a poor and unfeeling piece of derision. He drives them to the hustings, as he drives his hogs to market. By tenures for life of forty shillings, nominal or real, he makes electors almost at will. It is according to the number of his electors that he takes his station in the ranks of Influence and Oligarchy, and shares in the bounty of Government. The number of his electors, therefore, is the grand object of his ambition. He encourages premature marriages, among a people already too numerous for the means of employ ang them. The crop of wretches upon his estate, not of corn, is the grand object of his solicitude.

The system of creating votes in Ireland,' says Mr Wakefield, is carried to an extent, of which the people in England can have no idea. The passion for acquiring political influence prevails throughout the whole country; and it has an overwhelming influence upon the people. To divide, and subdivide, for the purpose of making freeholders, is the great object of every owner of land; and I consider it one of the most pernicious practices that has ever been introduced into the operations of politic machinery. It reduces the elective franchise nearly to universal suffrage, in a population who, by the very instrument by which they are made free, are reduced to the most abject state of personal bondage. I have known freeholders registered among mountain tenantry, whose yearly head-rent did not exceed 2s. 6d.; but, living upon this half-crown tenure, were enabled to swear to a derivative interest of forty shillings per

annum.

The consequences of such a deplorable system as this, are sufficiently apparent. By necessity, it reduces the Government to an Oligarchy, having an interest in the misery and oppression of the people. It has a direct tendency to multiply the num bers of the people, without any regard to their condition; nay, in a manner which reduces their condition to the lowest depth of wretchedness. To raise the qualification for voting, would be but an imperfect remedy; and, besides, would give rise, in the first instance at least, to still more frightful oppressions than VOL. XXI. NO. 42.

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those it was meant to redress; for every land-owner would immediately exert himself to the utmost extent of his power, to parcel out his estate into as many voting possessions as the new rate would allow. To make way for the new race of tenants, the old must be turned out. But they have tenures for life! Why, then, oppression must make them glad to turn out. You would then have, all at once, perhaps not less than a million of unhappy wretches, without houses, without food, and deprived of all prospect of obtaining them any more :-reduced therefore to despair-and animated with all the sentiments which distinguish a people in despair:-You would have a rebellion of a new description; and such as, in all the varieties of human calamity, the world before never witnessed.

With proper precautions, however, some change in the qualification for voting might be beneficially introduced; and another palliative to the great evil complained of, might be found in some scheme for enabling the dependent voters to vote, free from the control of their landlords,-in other words, without their knowledge, or by some process of private balloting ;—a contrivance, to the virtues of which, both in preventing tuinult and evading intimidation, we are surprised to find the people of this country so insensible.

Having said so much on the grand, comprehensive evils of Ireland, we shall be very concise on all inferior points. The list of derivative grievances is no doubt very large; and, as usual, they excite more attention than the fruitful causes from which they are derived. The Catholic penalties,--tythes,-middlemen, want of education,-are all in succession held up as the evils which most imperiously call for redress. But if, like skilful drainers, we can only find out and cut off the springs, we shall speedily clear the land of its bogs. There is not one of these circumstances, the peculiar malignity of which is not derived from the state of judicature, and of parliamentary interest. We have religious disabilities, tythes, middlemen, and ignorance in England; but our laws and our parliamentary interests are differently administered-and our condition is different accordingly.

The Catholic penalties are an evil, as all religious penalties are evils; and the Catholic penalties are an evil proportioned to the extent of the population on whom they operate.. But as they now affect neither property, person, nor industry, and only exclude from some of the highest offices of state, they cannot, of themselves, account for the misery of Ireland; nor would the removal of them, introduce prosperity. Causes still more powerful obstruct prosperity. The removal of Catholic penal tics would not change the condition of forty-shilling voters; it

would neither afford a judge to protect the poor man from injury, nor with healing justice to repress his crimes; and though it might lessen, it would by no means destroy, either the interest or the power of the few, to keep the many in degradation.

Tythes are an obstruction to prosperity. That is not to be denied. But let us not exaggerate. Tythes will not account for the wretchedness of Ireland; nor would the abolition of tythes, to the last potatoe, introduce prosperity. Superior causes exist, amply sufficient to keep full the cup of misery, independent of tythes. In fact, it is only when a country is pro❤ gressive, that tythes are an evil greater than a land-tax. Where there is no additional capital, or labour, ready to be employed upon the land, a tythe operates merely as a tax upon rent; a very inconvenient, and vexatious one, we allow,-but which has no peculiar tendency to restrain production. It is only where there is fresh capital and labour ready to be employed upon the land, that tythes are exorbitantly mischievous, and operate as a tax, often as a prohibition, upon improvement. Where other things are favourable, they will not, as is proved by England, altogether prevent improvement; but they will always make its progress slower. Whatever may be the rate of improvement of any tythed country, it would always be greater were it not for the tythes. When improvement is the most easily obstructed, that is, when it is just beginning, tythes are naturally the most pernicious. In Ireland, therefore, the reason is peculiarly great for substituting a better, to this most impolitic of all imposts.

The blame, however, should not fall on the wrong place. The clergy are not materially in fault. They take, as any other men would take, the provision which the law appoints for them; and they are in general obliged to content themselves with much less than the law allows them. It is merely an illusion, or imposition of the imagination, from which one might expect that it would not be very difficult to wean the clergy, which makes them sticklers for the perpetuity of tythes, in which they have no interest. To the existing generation of clergymen, beyond the period of their own lives, the benefit of tythes does not extend. They leave them not to their heirs. It is the existence of a certain income for life, which is the interest of the existing clergy; and that, on every principle of justice, ought to be secured to them.

The matter of fact is, and not a fact of little importance, that the Church, that is, the riches, the emoluments of the Church, are the patrimony of the Oligarchy, among the relatives and de pendants of whom they are, for the purposes of Influence, from

age to age, distributed. In Influence and Oligarchy is lodged the fee-simple; in the clergy, only a life interest, on the payment of a rent ;-a rent of which the payment is pretty well secured-a rent of servility and dependence. The emoluments of the Church, when properly considered, will appear only as a great instrument in the hands of the Oligarchy, which they work for the confirmation of their own dominion, that is, for the degradation of the people. Abolish the usurpation of the Oligarchy, and a beneficent composition with the Church, a composition for the benefit of all parties, will be easily arranged. Of the opposition which is now presented by the clergy to that arrangement, a small proportion arises from their clerical character or interests; it arises from them as the tools and organs of their political factions. The opposition of existing clergymen, who have no interest in the perpetuity of tythes, is the opposition of Influence and Oligarchy, to whom, and to whom solely, every particle of the benefit accrues.

We have long doubted whether Middlemen are intrinsically any greater evil in Ireland than in England; and some of the most careful of the late observers in Ireland-Mr Wakefield for example-share in our doubts. We remember when one class of middlemen, those who come between the grower of corn and the consumer, were as unpopular in England as the middlemen in Ireland. In a wholesome state of the country, it would be the interest of the middleman to encourage, not to oppress, the occupiers of his land. It is not the middlemen, to whom the unwholesomeness of that state is owing. Higher causes must be found. The body being full of corruption, the middlemen and the tythe-proctors are only irritable spots, upon which the eruption most conspicuously appears. Drive it back from these spots, without cleansing the constitution; and you only force it to appear in another part, or to mix itself more intimately with the system, and increase the malignity of the disorder.

Of the land of England, suppose that as great a proportion as of that of Ireland were let to middlemen, would it be in the power of these middlemen to lower the condition of the people of England? We can hardly believe that any one will say so. The case is then decided. The misery of the Irish is not the result of their having middlemen. The effect in England, were any middleman to adopt a system of oppression, would immediately be, to deprive him of tenants. In England, the country is not overstocked with a needy population; and the competition of land for cultivators is as great as that of cultivators for the land. Under an efficient administration of law, it would

be easy to secure the rights of the inferior cultivators, and render them as independent of the middlemen, as any other order of lessees are of their lessors. Without this grand security, all other proposals are ridiculous. In Ireland, however, to produce independence, to produce it any where, is the object, of all others, the most assured of desperate resistance. To produce independence, is to shake the pillars of the system. For the support of the system, the chain of dependence, of the Cotter upon the Middleman, and the Middleman on the Lord, is absolutely necessary. The consequences are--what the world beholds. The cure, so long as that chain remains unbroken, is a moral impossibility,

The ignorance of Irishmen, and its consequences, form a subject upon which we should have been well pleased to have had more time and space to bestow. We are well assured, that the ignorance of a people, and its attendant evils, subjugation to superstition, and abandonment to the priest, are the natural fruit of poverty and degradation. In the natural order of things, ignorance is an effect of misery, before it is a cause. Place any race of men in comfortable circumstances, and dependent, for their comfortable circumstances, upon their own works alone, and they will seek knowledge, as the eye seeks for light. As soon as you make the Irish happy, you will break the charm of the priest. Nothing is so effectual as the enjoyments of the present life for weakening the influence of those who pretend to a 'power over the character of a future one. Never yet was a very comfortable people found to be a very superstitious one; never was a very wretched one found to be otherwise.

But

Under the pressure of the circumstances which now tend to corrupt and debase the population of Ireland, we cannot flatter ourselves that the effects of artificial education would be very conspicuous. If the force of these circumstances was broken, artificial education would accelerate the progress of cure. if the unhappy circumstances of that people have overcome the still more important faculties of speech, and of reason, and have rendered them almost an useless possession, what can we expect from the comparatively feeble endowments of reading and writing? Not that we think any exertion should be forborne to promote these acquirements. They are always something gained; and when the time arrives (which, sooner or later, must arrive), when the chains which bind Ireland from improving shall be taken away, the faculties of reading and writing will then be of primary importance; they are essential to the right exercise of the elective franchise, and, with a due knowledge of the nature of the art, should be rendered indispensable.