enjoy a profit-rent of nine hundred pounds. Nothing can be better or
fairer. But in Ireland the management was very different. Men there
held tracts of ground, very often at their full value, paying for
them such proportion of rent as a farmer could afford to pay in
England and live. But the Irish tenant would by no means consent to
be a farmer. It was needful to him that he should be a gentleman, and
that his sons should be taught to live and amuse themselves as the
sons of gentlemen--barring any such small trifle as education. They
did live in this way; and to enable them to do so, they underlet
their land in small patches, and at an amount of rent to collect
which took the whole labour of their tenants, and the whole produce
of the small patch, over and above the quantity of potatoes
absolutely necessary to keep that tenant's body and soul together.

And thus a state of things was engendered in Ireland which
discouraged labour, which discouraged improvements in farming,
which discouraged any produce from the land except the potato crop;
which maintained one class of men in what they considered to be the
gentility of idleness, and another class, the people of the country,
in the abjectness of poverty.

It is with thorough rejoicing, almost with triumph, that I declare
that the idle, genteel class has been cut up root and branch, has
been driven forth out of its holding into the wide world, and has
been punished with the penalty of extermination. The poor cotter
suffered sorely under the famine, and under the pestilence which
followed the famine; but he, as a class, has risen from his bed of
suffering a better man. He is thriving as a labourer either in his
own country or in some newer--for him better--land to which he has
emigrated. He, even in Ireland, can now get eight and nine shillings
a week easier and with more constancy than he could get four some
fifteen years since. But the other man has gone, and his place is
left happily vacant.

There are an infinite number of smaller bearings in which this
question of the famine, and of agricultural distress in Ireland, may
be regarded, and should be regarded by those who wish to understand
it. The manner in which the Poor Law was first rejected and then
accepted, and then, if one may say so, swallowed whole by the people;
the way in which emigration has affected them; the difference in the
system of labour there from that here, which in former days was so
strong th