north, where the highest
rents are charged, the people are well housed and well clothed, the
ground well tilled, and the rents as well paid as in any part of
England. Here, if a tenant wishes to dispose of his right in even a
tenancy-at-will, he gets some ten or twelve years' purchase for it; and
the answers to Lord Devon's enquiries were, in many instances, that the
interference of the commission was not required. While in the south and
west, from whence the loudest complaints against the landowners proceed;
where the peasant exists in rags, and the gentlemen in a state of
semi-starvation; where the people are idle, and their ground untilled;
where squalid misery offends the eye and merciless murders shock the
feelings; where the terror of the assassin supersedes the power of the
landlord, and protects the tenant against all law; there, in the
counties so overwhelmed with poverty and debased by crime, the lands
are held on terms (the relative value being taken into consideration) by
_the half easier_ than in the prosperous and peaceable province of
Ulster.

Dublin, Limerick, Meath, and Tipperary, do average a trifle more than
the northern counties; but the one is the metropolitan county, and the
quality of the land in the others is so superior to any in England or
Ireland, that even at the small advance of two shillings an acre, they
may justly be considered as more cheaply rented than any other counties.

To understand a people properly, their national character must be
attentively studied; and this can only be done by a long residence and a
close connexion with them. We cannot therefore be much surprised, that
those who undertake to write on a country which they have never seen, or
to prescribe remedies for the defects in the social condition of a
people amongst whom they have never resided, should be led into grievous
mistakes, and that they should be unsafe guides to direct the enquiries
of others. Employment, hard work, large wages, and good living, form the
objects of the Englishman and the Scotchman's ardent desire; while
coarse food, bad lodging, and half clothing, are quite agreeable to the
Irishman, if they be combined with independence--in other words, if by
using them he may avoid labour, and enjoy those amusements to which he
is passionately addicted, and in which he indulges unrestrainedly. We
firmly believe, that if a choice of roast beef and loaf bread,
accompanied by the labour necessary to earn them,