security should be given
that the work would be immediately proceeded with.

Mr. Fagan would ask no pecuniary aid from the Government to carry out
his plan; he would meet the expenses of it by an agency tax, that is, a
tax upon house and land agencies, and upon all agencies. In saying this
he must have meant, that he would not ask money out of the Consolidated
Fund; for he could not but have seen that in carrying it out by a tax of
any kind, he would be doing so by the aid of the Government. The effect
of Mr. Fagan's plan would have been, to create, to a certain extent, a
peasant proprietary.

Mr. Poulett Scrope, then representing the borough of Stroud in
Parliament, took much interest in Irish questions, more especially
during the Famine; at which time he, in a series of letters addressed to
Lord John Russell, put forward his views on the legislation which he
considered necessary under the existing circumstances of this country.
Three Bills in his opinion, should have been at once proceeded with in
Parliament; one to facilitate the sale of encumbered estates; one to
improve the relations between landlord and tenant; and the third for
commencing without delay the reclamation of the waste lands. This last
he considered as of the most pressing urgency. Strange enough, that
since Mr. Scrope wrote, laws have been passed on the two former
subjects, whilst the one considered by him the most necessary, still
remains unlegislated on. His great object was, he said, to create
employment, and to create it in the production of food, if possible.
Surely, says Mr. Scrope, if this can be created for the people at home,
it is much better, for a thousand reasons, than to attempt to find it
for them in America. "I cannot refrain," he writes, "from expressing
astonishment at the degree to which the almost inexhaustible resources
offered by the waste lands of Ireland for the production of employment
of the wretched and unwillingly idle labourers of that country, have
been overlooked and neglected, no less by statesmen than individual
proprietors."[255]

From whatever cause, Irish landowners did not, to any considerable
extent, take up, in earnest, the question of the reclamation of waste
lands. Roused by the pressure of the times and the impending poor-rate,
the majority of them looked, says Mr. Scrope, "for salvation" to other
means--to the eviction of their numerous tenantry--the clearing of their
estates from the seemingly superfluo