is said that, in the hands
of small farmers, proprietorship leads to endless subdivision; that
long leases generally cause bad husbandry; that tenants-at-will often
feel themselves more secure and safe than a contract could make them;
that families have lived on the same farm for generations without a
scrape of a pen except the receipt for rent. On the other hand, there
is the general cry of 'want of tenure;' there is the custom of serving
notices to quit, sometimes for other reasons than non-payment of rent;
there are occasional barbarities in the levelling of villages, and
dragging the aged and the sick from the old roof-tree, the parting
from which rends their heart-strings; and, above all, there is the
feeling among the peasantry which makes them look without horror on
the murder of a landlord or an agent who was a kind and benevolent
neighbour; and, lastly, the paramount consideration for the
legislature, that a large portion of the people are disaffected to
the State, and ready to join its enemies, and this almost solely on
account of the state of the law relating to land. Hence the necessity
of settling the question as speedily as possible, and the duty of all
who have the means to contribute something towards that most desirable
consummation, which seems to be all that is wanted to make Irishmen of
every class work together earnestly for the welfare of their country.
It is admitted that no class of men in the world has improved more
than the Irish landlords during the last twenty years. Let the
legislature restore confidence between them and the people by taking
away all ground for the suspicion that they wish to extirpate the
Celtic race.

Nor was this suspicion without cause, as the following history will
too clearly prove. A very able English writer has said: 'The policy
of all the successive swarms of settlers was to extirpate the native
Celtic race, but every effort made to break up the old framework
of society failed, for the new-comers soon became blended with and
undistinguishable from the mass of the people--being obliged to ally
themselves with the native chieftains, rather than live hemmed in by a
fiery ring of angry septs and exposed to perpetual war with everything
around them. Merged in the great Celtic mass, they adopted Irish
manners and names, yet proscribed and insulted the native inhabitants
as an inferior race. Everything liberal towards them is intercepted in
its progress.

'The past his