en charges his workman
twelve pounds! Yet the great object of those men is to get land and
become farmers, although they almost invariably suffer by the change.
They were before compelled to work to meet their engagements; having
become their own masters, they in very many instances neglect their
business, and devote the time which ought to be employed in the
cultivation of their farms, to the discussion of politics and to the
attendance on popular assemblies.

To say that the Irish are unemployed, not from inclination, but from
necessity, is absurd;[35] this may sometimes be the case in the towns
where the worst class of agricultural labourers reside--men who will not
be employed while others can be had. A stranger meets able-bodied men
walking about; he is told, and he sees, that there are no resident
gentry in the neighbourhood to afford them work; he compassionates their
condition; concocts a paragraph, and imputes the misery he witnesses to
absenteeism. Let them accompany the idler to his home, and inspect his
farm: he will find, out of a holding of from three to four Irish acres,
perhaps an acre on which there was no attempt made at all to raise a
crop, independent of untilled headlands, amounting to at least fifth of
the ground under cultivation in each field. Why does he not employ
himself on this land? If he has a lease, there can be no excuse; but
even supposing him but tenant-at-will, it can in this instance be no
justification. The land unused is not waste land, requiring an
expenditure of labour and money, for which he might afterwards reap no
advantage from the cupidity of his landlord. This is no such land: it is
good, sound, arable land--perhaps the very best he has; and waste,
purely and solely for the want of expending on it the labour necessary
to prepare it for crop. He pays for it--yet he won't work it: he
complains of want of employment, and he walks about with plenty to
engage him beneficially for his own interests at home: he takes
con-acre, for which he pays high, while he could raise his food on his
own farm, if he only took the trouble of collecting manure, or devoting
his time to its improvement.

Adjoining mountains and bogs, where the poorest class of the population
generally reside, and where there is abundance of ground attached
rent-free to each farm, and capable of being rendered profitable at a
very little expense--in fact, without any other outlay than the labour
required to open dr