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amation should be carried on by labourers who would be paid weekly wages and lodged in huts close to their work; and that when the land had been properly fertilised it should be divided into farms of forty acres and the men who have worked at reclaiming it settled upon it with their families, and instructors appointed to teach them farming. It is no part of the scheme that the land should be given to the people. On the contrary, a rent should be charged them, calculated upon the basis of a percentage on the original outlay in the purchase of the estate and of the amount paid in wages, together with a small sum to pay off the capital in the course of a term of years. The occupant would thus in time become a freeholder, and as much interested in maintaining the law as any other proprietor. Meanwhile he would, like the Donegal folk mentioned by Mr. Tuke, live on hopefully under the rule, for the time being, of the Kingdom, as landlord. I am far from inclined to detract in any way from the merit of Mr. Mitchell Henry's project for Imperial reclamation any more than from his scheme for draining and for improving the internal navigation of Ireland. Although born in Lancashire he is a thorough-bred Irishman, and naturally hopeful of his country. But, although I am most painfully impressed by the fearful degradation into which a part of the Western people has fallen, I cannot on that account shut my eyes to their failings any more than to their poverty. Mr. Henry's scheme, if it deferred actual proprietorship in fee simple till the next generation, would I hope prove of incalculable benefit to Mayo and Galway, especially if his excellent idea of appointing agricultural instructors were carried out faithfully. But I fear from what I have actually seen and heard from the most trustworthy informants of all classes, that the forty-acre farmer of this generation would require a firm hand to guide him. This is no insolent Saxon assumption of superiority, but is said, after due consideration, sadly and seriously. The poor people of the West have been brought very low, so low that even their very virtues have become perverted into faults. They are affectionate to their kith and kin; but this amiable quality leads to their huddling together in a curiously gregarious way, and in some cases has been made the means of extorting money from them. It is this tendency to live together and thus divide and subdivide whatever little property th
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