while I perceive even less bog undergoing reclamation than
in the West. I did not anticipate a tour of pleasure through Ireland,
but the reality is more painful than I anticipated. Of all I have seen
at work in the fields to-day, cutting and carrying turf, hoeing
potatoes, shaking out Hay, &c., at least one-third were women. If I
could believe that their fathers and husbands were in America, clearing
lands and erecting cabins for their future homes, I should not regret
this. But the probability is that only a few of them are there or
hopefully employed anywhere, while hundreds of neglected, weedy,
unpromising patches of cultivation show that, narrow as the holdings
mainly are, they are yet often unskillfully cultivated. The end of this
is of course ejectment, whence the next stage is the Union Work-House.
Alas! unhappy Ireland!

XLIII.

PROSPECTS OF IRELAND.

DUBLIN, Tuesday, August 5, 1851.

Of Irish stagnation, Irish unthrift, Irish destitution, Irish misery,
the world has heard enough. I could not wholly avoid them without giving
an essentially false and deceptive account of what must be painfully
obvious to every traveler in Ireland; yet I have chosen to pass them
over lightly and hurriedly, and shall not recur to them. They are in the
main sufficiently well known to the civilized world, and, apart from
suggestions of amendment, their contemplation can neither be pleasant
nor profitable. I will only add here that though, in spite of Poor Laws
and Union Poor-Houses, there are still much actual want, suffering and
beggary in Ireland, yet the beggars here are by no means so numerous nor
so importunate as in Italy, though the excuses for mendicity are far
greater. What I propose now to bring under hasty review are the
principal plans for the removal of Ireland's woes and the conversion of
her myriads of paupers into independent and comfortable laborers. I
shall speak of these in succession, beginning with the oldest and
closing with the newest that has come under my observation. And first,
then, of

REPEAL.

The hope of obtaining from the British Crown and Parliament the
concession of a separate Legislature of their own seems nearly to have
died out of the hearts of the Irish millions. The death of O'Connell
deprived the measure of its mightiest advocate; Famine and other
disasters followed; and fresher projects of amelioration have since to a
great extent supplanted it in the popular mind. Yet it