try weddings, markets,
burials, and other the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both
men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting
together." Such, sir, is a description of industrious, sober, civilized,
religious Scotland. Such is a description of what that country was at
the end of the seventeenth century. Dare we, sir, say that the
particular laws--that the particular state of a country--has no
influence; that a country which has been in a perfectly disordered
condition--where robberies have been frequent--where industry has been
interrupted--may not yet become orderly, civilized, and industrious? We
should be unworthy of being members of this British Parliament were we
to give way to despair." To prove that the miseries of Ireland could be
neither attributed to the soil or the people, the Premier said, at the
close of his singularly able and lucid speech: "There is no doubt of the
fertility of the land; that fertility has been the theme of admiration
with writers and travellers of all nations. There is no doubt either, I
must say, of the strength and industry of its inhabitants. The man who
is loitering idly by the mountain-side, in Tipperary or in Derry, whose
potato plot has furnished him merely with occupation for a few days in
the year, whose wages and whose pig have enabled him to pay his rent,
and eke out afterwards a miserable subsistence--that man, I say, may
have a brother in Liverpool, or Glasgow, or London, who, by the sweat of
his brow, from morning to night, is competing with the strongest and
steadiest labourer of England and Scotland, and is earning wages equal
to any of them. I do not, sir, therefore, think that either the
fertility of the soil of Ireland, or the strength and industry of its
inhabitants, is at fault."[201]

During the delivery of the speech here summarized, Lord John Russell
was frequently interrupted with an amount of applause very unusual in
the House of Commons, and at its close he is reported to have sat down
amidst vociferous and continued cheering.

And no wonder, for never did an English Minister touch the grievances of
Ireland with a bolder or truer hand than he did on this occasion; but
amongst his proposals, that which was of the greatest value, the
reclamation of the waste lands, was abandoned,--in fact, was never
brought forward. May we not well ask, Why were not the permanent
measures, now proposed, thought of long before, and passed int