roads, abundant markets; and yet the one is half ruined in his
house and the other wholly beggared in his hovel--each averring that
the cause lies in the tithes, the tariff, the poor-rate, or popery,
the agent or the agitation: in fact, it is something or other which
one favours and the other opposes--some system or sect, some party or
measure, which one advocates and the other denounces; and no matter
though its influence should not, in the remotest way, enter into the
main question, there is a grievance--that's something; and as Sir
Lucius says, "it's a mighty pretty quarrel as it stands"--not the
less, that certain partizans on either side assist in the _melee_, and
the House of Commons or the Association Hall interfere with their
influence.

If, then, the Commissioners can see their way here, they are smart
fellows, and no small praise is due to them. There are difficulties
enough to puzzle long heads; and I only hope they may be equal to the
task. Meanwhile, depopulation goes on briskly--landlords are shot
every week in Tipperary; and if the report be but delayed for some few
months longer, a new element will appear in the question--for however
there may remain some pretenders to perpetuity of tenure, the
landlords will not be there to grant the leases. Let the
Commissioners, then, keep a look-out a-head--much of the embarrassment
of the inquiry will be obviated by only biding their time; and if they
but delay their report till next November, there will be but one party
to legislate for in the island.

A NUT FOR THE HUMANE SOCIETY.

If my reader will permit me to refer to my own labours, I would wish
to remind him of an old "Nut" of mine, in which I endeavoured to
demonstrate the defective morality and economy of our penal code--a
system, by which the smallest delinquent is made to cost the state
several hundreds of pounds, for an offence frequently of some few
pennies in value; and a theft of a loaf is, by the geometrical scale
of progressive aggrandisement, gradually swelled into a most expensive
process, in which policemen, station-houses, inspectors, magistrates,
sessions, assizes, judges, crown prosecutors, gaols, turnkeys, and
transports, all figure; and the nation is left to pay the cost of this
terrible array, for the punishment of a crime the prevention of which
might, perhaps, have been effected for two-pence.

I do not now intend to go over the beaten track of this argument; my
intention is