but atrocious on the part of the tenants. But can the landed proprietors
of Ireland plead ignorance or want of education for their neglect and
rapacity, whilst the crimes of the tenants, on the contrary, may in
general be ascribed to both? He who lives--as, perhaps, his forefathers
have done--upon any man's property, and fails from unavoidable calamity,
has as just and clear a light to assistance from the landlord as if the
amount of that aid were a bonded debt. Common policy, common sense, and
common justice, should induce the Irish landlords to lower their rents
according to the market for agricultural produce, otherwise poverty,
famine, crime, and vague political speculations, founded upon idle hopes
of a general transfer of property, will spread over and convulse the
kingdom. Any man who looks into our poverty may see that our landlords
ought to reduce their rents to a standard suitable to the times and to
the ability of the tenant.

But to return. Owen, for another year, struggled on for his family,
without success; his firm spirit was broken; employment he could not
get, and even had it been regular, he would have found it impracticable
to support his helpless wife and children by his labor. The next year
unhappily was also one of sickness and of want; the country was not only
a wide waste of poverty, but overspread with typhus fever. One Saturday
night he and the family found themselves without food; they had not
tasted a morsel for twenty-four hours. There were murmuring and
tears and, finally, a low conversation among them, as if they held
a conference upon some subject which filled them with both grief and
satisfaction. In this alternation of feeling did they pass the time
until the sharp gnawing of hunger was relieved by sleep. A keen December
wind blew with a bitter blast on the following morning; the rain was
borne along upon it with violence, and the cold was chill and piercing.
Owen, his wife, and their six children, issued at day-break out of the
barn in which, ever since their removal from Tubber Derg, they had lived
until then; their miserable fragments of bed-clothes were tied in a
bundle to keep them dry; their pace was slow, need we say sorrowful; all
were in tears. Owen and Kathleen went first, with a child upon the
back, and another in the hand, of each. Their route lay by their former
dwelling, the door of which was open, for it had not been inhabited. On
passing it they stood a moment; then wit