combination of parties at present arrayed in favour of an Irish poor law, which it would be difficult to resist ; and the circunstances of Ireland, superficially considered, furnish plausible grounds for some such project, by which the rash and the benevolent may be easily deluded. Misery, confessedly, exists to a great extent. It is impossible to look, without compassion, upon a patient, a squalid, and a suffering population, multiplying under privations that would almost extinguish life, and enduring hardships with a resignation that would almost seem a second nature. This, too, in a country fertile beyond many other countries, and from which provisions are annually exported to an amount more than sufficient to supply all its own wauts, if only they could be detained at home for the sustenance of its hardy and industrious people. Absenteeship, also, is felt as a great evil. A drain, of between two and three millions annually, for the support of men, who have delegated their domestic and social duties to hired retain ers, whose duty it is to screw the tenantry, while they spend the produce of their industry in London, or in Italy, or in Paris, must needs be felt as a cause of exhaustion and a source of discontent, by which, while misery is generated, those dispositions and those habitudes are produced and fostered, which lead to crime and to insubordination. Nothing would, at first sight, seem more reasonable, than that the individuals who cause this drain should be taxed to an amount that would remedy, in some measure, the evils that are its consequence; and if nothing more than the justice of such a procedure were to be considered, there would be little reason to stay the hand of righteous and vindictive legislation. But the evil is one which may be more easily seen than readily remedied. However it may be nourished by circumstances, it has its root in the habits of the people. Until a total change take place in these, no remedy which could be devised by the legislator, could prevent a periodical recurrence of the very wretchedness which we have at present to deplore, and which, no matter what the means which may be taken for the relief of existing distress, will still cause the mass of misery to press against the limits of subsistence. It is, therefore, our fixed opinion, that no merely external measures can ever lead to an improved state of soci ety in Ireland. It is not enough to feed the mouths that are hungry, unless we can profitably employ the hands that are idle. A process of that kind, persevered in, would soon convert the whole country into one mighty mendicity institution, until not only the rents, but the profits of trade and of manufactures were absorbed in a relief fund, that would only be productive of universal indigence. In fact, such a system would feed the disease, rather than cure it; and the only good that could come of it would be, that having consumed the funds for the encouragement of industry, it would at last "eat up itself." But, we confine ourselves, at present, to the project of ministers, which we cannot regard as any thing better than a tub to the whale. That something should be done, was, in their apprehension, rendered necessary, by the report of the commissioners appointed to consider the condition of the Irish poor. To use the words of our excellent professor : "A knowledge of the manner of the preparation of the bill may be useful, as a key to understanding, or at least explaining the character of its provisions. Any one acquainted with Ireland must feel, upon perusing this bill, that it has not grown naturally out of a knowledge of the wants and circumstances of the country, but has been framed to meet a particular exigency in legislation. The truth is, that it has been brought in to meet the desire on the part of the public, that some remedial measure should be applied to the destitution which is known to exist in Ireland. The necessity of meeting this desire determined the cabinet to prepare some poor law. On this determination, Mr. Nicholls was sent over to report whether it would be possible to establish the workhouse system in Ireland; and he has reported, as he might have done without going to Ireland at all, that it is possible; and he has accordingly prepared a plan for dotting the country with workhouses, and for regulating and maaging them. But he has not touched question, whether the establishment of indeed he could not touch-upou the vital workhouses would be a remedy for the state of things which leaves a large proportion of our fellow-beings without sufficient food; and makes the condition of the poor of Ireland a disgrace, not only to the British empire, but to humanity. Through the entire bill you may trace the effects of the spirit that mdited it. It is a piece of forced legislation; and in every clause you can discern that it is enacted, more from the impression that so much of an article called legislation must be produced, than from any à priori conviction that a particular provision is in itself expedient. "I need not point out to your lordship the dangerous consequences of such a mode of legislation; but I may remind you, that such legislation is just what we might have expected from the course that, in this instance, was pursued. Mr. Nicholls was directed to frame a system of poor laws for Ireland; his commission extended in fact no further than to adapt the English administration of poor laws to Ireland. He has executed his commission, and the result has been, that he has produced a plan utterly and miserably inefficient as a measure of relief, and just as foreign to the real character and causes of destitution in Ireland, as it is possible for any measure to be. And this just because the plan was not the result of a patient and calm investigation of the nature and causes of the existing distress, but was produced to meet a demand on the part of the house and the ministry for a plan." It is melancholy that the interests of a great empire should thus be at the mercy of sciolism and incapacity; and that our rulers should feel it actually incumbent upon them to legislate upon clamorous requisition or crude and hasty views, respecting matters in which the interests of millions are involved, and by which the condition of unborn "I generations may be determined. never," says Swift, "knew what the English beggars did with their cast-off clothes, until I came to Ireland." Nothing can better illustrate the manner in which we are at present treated by the commissioners of poor laws. In Englaud the system has been felt to be a crying evil. It has constituted a burrowing ulcer, by which both the morals and the property of the country have been undermined. We should, perhaps, rather confine ourselves to the abuse of the law, which was, until of late, in operation, and by which what may be called malingering pauperisın was created, to an extent that was perfectly alarming. Well; an effort is made it may be a clumsy and a harsh and an imperfect effort, to get rid of this great evil, by rendering the right of the English pauper to parish relief so worthless, that it would only be enforced in cases of extreme and hopeless destitution. And, forthwith, before the experiment has been tried, before venture to the most sanguine can The following citation from a little pamphlet which has been put into our hands, will serve to show the monstrous folly of legislating on this subject for the one country as though it were identical in character and circumstances with the other: "The English system, as it existed till within these three years, may be briefly thus described. A right was given to every pauper, whatever might be the cause of his poverty, to obtain relief from the parish. The parish authorities were empowered to set him to work if he were able to work; but if they could not find work for him, they were obliged to feed, clothe, and lodge him without working. The all-important distinction between those kinds of distress which cannot or will not be assumed for the purpose of obtaining relief, and those kinds of distress which may be assumed, and which the administration of relief is calculated to increase, namely, those which arise from improvidency and disinclination to labour, was utterly disregarded. A man might present himself to the overseers and assert that he could not get work, or could not earn sufficiently by his work to support himself and family comfortably, and might demand relief from the parish. If the overseers should offer him work and wages for it, he might further say that he had a bad head-ache, a pain in his back, or a weakness in his limbs, or a whoreson tingling' at his fingers-ends, which disa Strictures on the proposed Poor Law for Ireland, as recommended in the RePort of George Nicholls, Esq." London, Ridgway and Sons, Picadilly, 1837. bled him from working, and therefore that he must be provided for by the parish. And thus the most idle, worthless, and profligate were placed on a footing of perfect equality with those who were in distress by the visitation of God-the blind, the lame, the insane, or the bereaved widow and her fatherless children. "The English poor law,' says Mr. Nicholls, page 14, recognizes destitution alone as the ground of relief.' "The effects of a system so utterly reckless might easily have been anticipated. An immense proportion of the labouring poor were seduced by it from their indus trious habits to cast themselves upon this ample provision for their maintenance. Nothing could be more commodious than to have power secured to them by law to be fed upon the property or the earnings of their industrious neighbours, instead of being industrious themselves. Even at the present moment, notwithstanding the operation of the poor law amendment act, it appears from the reports of the English commissioners, that one-eleventh of the population of England, the richest country in the world, is pauperised by it. And the result, in point of expenditure, has been, that in one year upwards of £7,000,000 were squandered in this mad attempt to counteract the decrees of Providence, which irrevocably determine that want and misery shall be the consequence of idleness and profligacy. "But this enormous expenditure formed but a small portion of the evils resulting from this system. All private charity was blasted and withered by it; all those feelings of kindness that arise between those who give freely of their abundance, and those who receive thankfully, were superseded by exactions grudgingly paid, and the clamorous demands, not for relief, but for comfortable subsistence, yielded to as a traveller yields his purse to a highA man who, in the exercise of wayman. compassion for the distressed, opened his heart and his hand liberally, was laughed at as a fool, who was unnecessarily relieving his rich niggardly neighbours from contributing their share to the maintenance of all paupers. The wretched persons who were seduced from their industry by the deceitful offer of relief were utterly ruined in mind, body, and estate. Families were broken up-fathers became careless about providing for their children, because the parish was bound to provide for them -children refused to contribute to the support of their parents, because they might apply to the parish-nay, daughters were found refusing to attend the sick beds of their own mothers, unless the parish should remunerate them for their trouble. Husbands traded upon the infamy of their own wives, by claiming parish relief for their illegitimate children. Fathers scrupled not to profit by the prostitution of their daughters, because the parish then became bound to provide for them and their bastards. In short, a thoroughly pauperized district of England presented as frightful an exhibition of moral deformity as the imagination of Crabbe himself could embody in language. "But we shall be told that all this was indeed true of the old poor law, but that these evils have all been removed by the new poor law bill, and that it is the new system, and not the old one, which it is proposed should be introduced into Ireland. It is necessary, therefore, to attend to the nature of the amendments that have been introduced by the late act of the legislature. These amount simply to this, that the managers of the poor fund are now empowered to offer to all applicants for relief the alternative of going into a workhouse or receiving nothing; and they are not only empowered to do so, but a central board is established, the object of which is to bring the whole kingdom under that regulation. workhouses are purposely rendered so irksome, that able-bodied persons will rather betake themselves to labour than enter them, or remain in them. They are thus employed as a test of destitution. These The governing principle of the workhouse system is this,' says Mr. Nicholls, page 13, that the support which is afforded at the public charge in the workhouse shall be, on the whole, less desirable than the support to be obtained by independent exertion. The inmates of an English workhouse are as well clothed, and generally better lodged, and better fed, than the agricultural labourer and his family; yet the irksomeness of the labour, discipline, and confinement, and the privation of certain enjoyments which the independent labourer possesses, produce such disinclination to enter the workhouse, that experience warrants the fullest assurance, that nothing short of absolute necessity-of that necessity which the law contemplates as the ground of affording relief, will induce the ablebodied labourers to seek refuge therein.'" Now granting, for, argument sake, that this amendment may correct the evils of a bad system in one country— why should it therefore be presumed, and that, anterior to all experience of See Evils of the State of Ireland, their causes and their remedy- -a Poor Law, by John Revans, page 144. its efficacy, to be capable of removing evils which have no connection with any such system in the other? And it is thus that our Whig-radical government propose to do "justice to Ireland !” We are, ourselves, not persuaded that the poor inquiry commission has furnished any such data respecting Irish statistics, as might, in themselves, be a secure foundation for any remedial measures of a permanent nature, which may be intended for the good of the people. But, a vast deal of information it has supplied, which the enlightened politician will find highly useful; nor is this our opinion in the least disturbed because Mr. Nicholls, in his self-sufficiency, has thought fit to set at nought the result of their enquiry. Upon this part of the subject, Professor Butt, in his letter to Lord Morpeth, well ob serves: Mr. “Now, my lord, it is quite one thing to reject an opinion, and quite another to disregard the statement of a fact. Nicholls may or may not have been correct in disregarding the inferences which the commissioners themselves drew from the mass of evidence they collected, but certainly he must have reasons which do not appear on the face of his report reasons, too, of which the most remote hint has not been given-to warrant him in throwing aside altogether the testimony borne by them to the actual state of the country, and framing a plan without the slightest reference to the information they had collected as to the nature, the extent, and the probable causes of destitution. "Nor does it appear, in rejecting the data furnished to him by the labours of the commissioners, what information he bas substituted as the ground-work of his plan. It is quite idle to suppose, that in a hurried circuit through some of the towns of Ireland, he could personally obtain the knowledge of the country which would enable him to supersede the information furnished by the commission. Indeed, upon the most essential pointthe extent of distress-he has no more accurate notion than what he derives from a vague analogy between Ireland and some counties in England, which he terms among the most highly pauperized;' from which he infers, that workhouse accommodation may occasionally be required for 80,000 persons,' being one per cent. on the population; and this vague analogy an analogy which every inhabitant of Ireland knows to be completely deceptive is all that he puts in place of the proofs offered by the commissioners, that there are out of work and in distress, during thirty weeks in the year, not less than 585,000 persons, which, with those depending on them, will make a total of 2,385,000 persons requiring support for thirty weeks in the year.' "Mr. Nicholls's grand and fatal mistake is this-he started on the assumption that he must deal with destitution in Ireland as if it were the accident of individuals, instead of considering it as the essential and general condition of a class. It is this which has led him to propose, as a remedial measure, workhouses where one out of every 100 of the population might occasionally be relieved; instead of suggesting some measure by which we might endeavour to find sufficient food for onethird of the population who have not enough to eat. "No two objects can be more perfectly distinct, than a provision for those who may occasionally fall into want, through any of those contingencies, to which, even in the most prosperous countries, all classes are liable, and an attempt generally to raise above penury the condition of a great mass of the inhabitants of a country. It is a very different thing whether we have to deal with destitution as the exception, or, unfortunately, are compelled to consider it as the general rule. "Now, my lord, the evidence collected by the poor inquiry commission, if it prove any thing, proves this, that generally penury, and almost starvation, are the throughout whole districts of Ireland, general condition of those classes who are called, by a mockery of their misery, the labouring classes which means the classes that are willing to labour, and can get no employment: it that the labourer proves cannot, by the utmost exertion of his industry, procure sufficient to support himself and his family throughout the year; that he can make no attempt to supply them with comforts, since he has with a sufficiency of necessaries; and that not even wherewithal to supply them the result of this state of things is a hideous and appalling mass of misery and destitution, amid which human beings, degraded by wretchedness to almost the scale of savage life, barely drag out a precarious existence,in hovels that can scarcely be said to shelter them from the rains and winds of heaven." Such is truly the nature of the case to be relieved, and nothing more can be necessary to show the rank empyricism of the present political projector. But if any thing further were necessary, it has been admirably done, in two or three sentences, by the writer of "The Strictures." The mode in which the sapient Mr. Nicholls considered the subject was this: first, to inquire whe ther the workhouse system could be established in Ireland, and if it could, whether it might be relied on as a test of destitution; and secondly, whether means exist, generally or partially, of forming unions and creating such local machinery for their government, as has been established in the English unions, under the poor law amendment act. "But this," observes the writer of the Strictures, "is precisely as if a Sangrado, practised in bleeding and blistering and nothing else, on visiting a patient, instead of endeavouring to ascertain the nature and causes of his disease, that he might prescribe accordingly, should limit his inquiry to these two points I. Whether the patient would submit to bleeding and blistering, no matter what the disease might be; and, ་་ II. Whether any person could be found to bleed and blister him, when Sangrado himself was absent." The subject, however, is far too serious even for the enlightened sportiveness by which the nostrum of this state quack is thus exposed. The following indignant and eloquent passage, from the professor's pamphlet, is more in accordance with the feeling which we entertain, and well calculated to suggest grave reflections : -: "But I do not wish now to pursue these considerations. My object has been simply to contrast this paltry bill of Mr. Nicholls with the state of things for which it is offered as a remedy. It does not touch upon the evils of Ireland, or if it touch upon them, it is only to aggravate them. How much more food will it cause to be in the country? This, perhaps, is the best test of its real utility. If it leaves the entire quantity of food which is allotted to the consumption of the Irish people the same as before, while it takes nothing from the number of the mouths that are to eat of it, it can not well increase the average share that falls to each. Literally, we ask for bread, and you give us a stone: we want an increase of the quantity of eatables in the country, and you build work houses. "Why, my Lord, I ask again, has the Report of the Commissioners been held as nought? It is not worth while to ask why Mr. Nicholls has disregarded every opinion they have given; but surely it is worth while to know why all the clear and laboriously collated evidence they have offered is contemptuously and scornfully laid aside. If that evidence be correct, this bill is an unparalleled delusion. The Commission of Inquiry has cost much; it has been a dram upon the national treasury for three years: there is no one to complain of this application of money, if it were attended with any practical good to the poor of Ireland; but there are very many who would think it a very misplaced outlay, if all we purchase with it is such a bill as this. Perhaps there is but one instance on record of an equally lavish expenditure with an equally silly result-"We threw our gold in the fire," said the children of Israel, "and there came out this calf." "The relief you offer is a mockery, whether we are to consider its kind or its extent. You take 80,000 out of 2,500,000; you confine them in workhouses, where it is your avowed policy to make their lives as uncomfortable as you can; you adopt all the regulations of your English prison-houses; for you have revived the language of the ancients-like the Romans, we shall want but one word to express a workhouse and a dungeon. Believe me, my Lord, Mr. Nicholls is in error when he tells you that these provisions are suited to the Irish poor. God forbid they were! No; whatever be their faults or their crimes, the Irish are a people of generous susceptibilities and of warm affections. There is no nation under heaven among whom the ties of home are stronger-by whom the sacredness of domestic endearments is more reverenced. They will not understand the philosophy by which you separate families; they will not be thankful for the relief which is doled out reluctantly and with rigour. They will regard your workhouses as only a specious contrivance for immuring them in prisons without compelling them to go through the formality of a crime. 66 I know that it is very unphilosophical and very unfashionable to talk thus of the feelings of the poor. The cold sneer of a heartless philosophy may be directed against the person who believes that sentiments such as these should have their place in the calculations of the politician. But that frigid philosophy has not yet chilled, in its cold shadow, the heart of the Irish peasant; he loves his home although it be a hovel; he has no fireside to love; but even in poverty and destitution, his attachment to those who should smile on his fireside lives with a depth and tenderness that many of those that are at ease might envy. The charities of home still glow in that atmosphere of poverty in which you might imagine they would die; they cheer him even in his hopeless misery; they almost beautify his destitution. Do not call this declamation. Take your opinion of the people, not from the assumptions of Mr. Nicholls-he, or I, or any man, may assume, the more groundlessly, perhaps, the more confi |