eat, and be filled, and go his way, without being
questioned who he was, without being asked for a _pauper ticket_ to
admit him, without being obliged or compelled to lead a life of
celibacy, or running the risk of his soul's salvation, to keep his body
from perishing of hunger.

In a word, when Brian Boru expelled the Danes from Ireland, when Hugh
O'Niel triumphed over the troops of Elizabeth, as well as when Dathi
held the sceptre, or Nial of the hostages planted his colors on the
Alps, there was enough to feed the poor of Ireland. There was no
necessity for a poorhouse; and there is no need of it now, says the
Irish peasant, if justice was done to Ireland. "Give us back our
monasteries and abbeys, and we will bestow you the poorhouses."

Besides these considerations, the English poorhouse has this advantage
over the Irish one--that the former is conducted and presided over by
Englishmen, who have a sympathy for, or at least are of, the same blood,
religion, and race with its inmates. But in Ireland the case is
different. The poorhouses, prison-like edifices, in Elizabethan style of
architecture, presided over by Englishmen, generally, and nominees of
the crown, are a monument of conquest and tyranny.

The inmates being principally "mere Irish," and the cost of their
support derived chiefly from the land, the landlords consider their
health, comfort, or life of only secondary importance. Hence we find the
number of deaths in these charnel houses averaging that of years of
plague; and each pauper is allowed far less weekly for his support than
the lord of the soil allows the meanest dog in his kennel. Add to these
the separation of man and wife, the isolation of members of the same
family, the dangers of perversion and proselytism to the thinning ranks
of the "law church;" and then, if you can, blame the poor Irishman for
his horror of the dreadful poorhouse of England. He saw hundreds of his
neighbors enter the gates of the poorhouse, but he never saw one return
back. Less active imaginations than that of the Irish peasant would be
worked on so as to conclude that some means more _active_ than sickness
or old age were had recourse to, for the purpose of lessening the taxes
on land, by getting rid of the poor.

In truth, the British poorhouse is a great government establishment,
where the sons of the low squirearchy are provided for--a terrible mill,
where the bodies and souls of Irishmen and women are ground up an