shment at the condition of the people. I do most firmly
believe that in no other country under the sun are there to be
found men so wretched in every respect.... All along the West
coast, from North to South, there has been allowed to accumulate on
land utterly unable to support them a dense population, the only
functions of whose lives have been to produce rent and children.
Generation after generation have grown up in ignorance and misery,
while those who lived upon the product of their labours have
laughed and rioted through life as though they had not known that
from them alone could light and civilization descend upon these
poor wretches. I had often heard, as every one has, of the evils of
absenteeism, but till I came and saw its effects I had no notion
how great a crime it is.... They [the absentee landowners] thought
only of themselves and their own enjoyments, they left their people
to grow up and multiply like brute beasts, they stifled in them by
their tyranny all hope and independence and desire of advancement,
they made them cowards and liars, and have now left them to die off
from the face of the earth. Neither can any one living at a
distance have any notion of the utter absence of all public spirit
among the upper classes.... Legislation can do nothing when there
is nothing for it to act upon. Parliament to Ireland is what a
galvanic battery is to a dead body, and it is in vain to make laws
when there is no machinery to work them. A people must be worked up
to a certain point in their dispositions and understandings before
they can be affected by highly civilized legislation.... It is only
individual exertions, and the personal superintendence of wise and
good men, that can ever drill the Irish people into a legislatable
state.... One or two things, however, seem to me pretty certain--

1. That under proper management the Irish peasant can be made
anything of.

2. That, generally speaking, the present class of proprietors must
and will be swept from off the surface of the earth.

3. That in the extreme West the surface is overcrowded, but not at
all so a few miles inland.

4. That reclaiming waste lands and bogs at present is to throw
money away.

I begin to fear I have written a strange rigmarole, but still I
will send it, for though Irish matters canno