THE REAL STATE OF IRELAND IN 1827.*

* Murray, London.

as for the Whigs of England-such of them, that is to say, as have obtained office-why, it requires no Sphinx to propound the enigma-to give the solution, no Edipus.

But how have these few Whigs obtained office? Not surely, he says, by the triumph of the principles which for so long a time they have been advocating. To say that they had obtained office by the desertion of their principles, would perhaps be too harsh an expression; but undoubtedly they are in possession, on condition of supporting a Government, which distinctly says it will not adopt the policy which they for the last twenty years have been continually asserting that any Government worthy their confidence, and that of the country, should adopt. What triumph is there here? Ay, well may he or any other honest man put that question to himself or the world. Why, my dear sir, would it perhaps be too harsh an expression to say that the Whigs had obtained office by the desertion of their principles? Tierney, one of the ablest men in England, would laugh in your face at that "perhaps," and Brougham, and Mackintosh, and Abercromby, would smirk" their nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles," to hear you add, "there was always some amongst the Whigs clever enough to have obtained office had they chosen to become Tories, and something very like this they now profess to do." Not one of the four who has not already sacrificed any pretension to political principle, and who will not yet, if suffered to remain in or about office, set the world agape by still more astounding delinquencies.

Passing from the Preface, let us into the body of the pamphlet. Are all the seven millions of Irishmen, now idle for want of capital, but still busily employed in doubling the population in twenty years-are they, or are they not, the most miserable of mankind? That most respectably-connected man, Mr Wakefield, land-surveyor, and after him, that truly originalminded man, Mr M'Culloch, who, after having stolen everything he could strip off other writers, began pilfering from himself, maintain the universal misery of Irishmen. Ourselves, the Doctor, and all Trinity College, Dublin, lean towards the other extreme, that Pat is in Paradise. The author

of this pamphlet, being of the In-Medio-tutissimus-ibis School of Poetry, Politics, and Philosophy, expresseth himself thus

"That a tolerably large sum of priva tion and distress does exist in Ireland, is indeed undeniable; but since I have re sided in the country, and have become minutely acquainted with the facts, I have satisfied myself that the suffering, taken absolutely, is considerably less than has been generally supposed; that, compared with the hardships endured by the population of England, its excess is not so very great, and that this excess, such nish altogether, even without the aid of as it is, will gradually diminish till it vaany new express enactments on the subject. In saying this, I am not speaking of the beggars of the two countries, but of the general population. In England, privileged by the laws to live at the expaupers are a peculiarly favoured people, ty: in Ireland we have not yet arrived pense of all who are possessed of properto such a pitch of refinement, and those in exchange for food, are obliged to trust who will give neither money nor labour to the savage virtues of hospitality and generosity, or to the uncontrolled influence of the Christian religion, for their preservation from dying of hunger; but this subject, however important in itself, is foreign to the present inquiry.

"I have heard men, who could talk on most subjects with an ordinary degree of sanity, assert, that the majority of the working classes in Ireland live, or rather starve, upon potatoes and water as their only means of sustenance; and that their only clothing consists of the coarsest rags, so torn that they are never taken off at night, because the owner must despair of again finding his way into them, should he at any time incautiously doff them from his person. These, and many such things, I heard, and partly I believed them;

but now I know that these things are not true. The race of very small farmers (I

do not mean in person, for they are com monly tall varlets) is indeed much more

numerous here than in England, or than it is at all desirable it should be anywhere; but it very rarely happens that these men, holding as they do from six up to sixty acres of land, Irish measurement, fail to procure moderately good food and raiment wherewith they can be content. It is true, that very little money circulates among them; I myself have known repeated instances of twelve such farmers being unable to club together five pounds at a time when they earnestly desired to do so; nor is this so

entitled to pride themselves on their personal cleanliness. Having thus summarily disposed of Irish moral degradation and filth-let us attend to their misery. Does it consist (we have an eye chiefly to the men) in having enormous calfs to their legs? In being able, one man with another, to eat half-a-bushel of potatoes, and drink a gallon of potheen at a sitting? In making love to Sheelah, and in the calm of the evening sitting at the mouth of a cabin among the mountains of Wicklow, with an enormous organ of philoprogenitiveness at the back of your head, and your body murmuring with children, like a tree with leaves? Moral degradation, filth, and misery being thus all swept away -what should be said about ignorance, superstition, and intellectual bondage? At present this much-let Mr Wakefield or Mr M'Culloch challenge the Roman Catholic peasantry, as Mr Pope lately challenged the Roman Catholic Priesthood, to argue the great Potatoe question, and a champion will leap out of the first bog to give both Economists the squabash.

Talking of potatoes, our sentiments of that root are congenial with those of our worthy pamphleteer:

"There is a strong outcry against potatoes, as if they were the bane of Ireland; in my opinion nothing can be more absurd. Political economists all agree in this, (if, indeed, they agree in anything,) that the man who invents some new machine whereby a great deal of animal labour is saved, confers a benefit on his country and on mankind. Now, I have no difficulty in concluding, a fortiori, that the introduction of a new kind of food, which enables us, with a given quantity of land and labour, to produce a greater quantity of wholesome nutriment for human beings than we could do before, is still more beneficial, inasmuch as this is accomplishing immediately that which the other but remotely tends to. Some, indeed, have been found to say, that the use of bread food is advantageous to a country, because bread is made of flour, and flour requires a miller, and the miller a carpenter and smith, and that so a whole train of arts and artizans is introduced; but this remark scarcely needs confutation at this time of day, and we have only to ask whether or not it would be more desirable that the agriculturist could cause his corn to be come bread by simple volition, "digitorum percussione," by the snapping of his

fingers, as Marcus Tullius saith, in order to see the absurdity of this proposition. We have enough, and more, for the manufacturer and capitalist to do usefully and profitably, without employing him in grinding wheat or oats for the peasantry.

"It is contended, however, that potatoes are a lower, that is, a worse species of food than human beings had heretofore been satisfied with, and that if the quantity of sustenance be increased, the quality is proportionably, or more than proportionably, diminished. I think this is altogether untrue. On the Continent, flesh, and in part of the north of England I know, the lower orders eat scarcely any and Wales the peasantry live on bread, cheese, and onions; they very rarely get any butcher meat. I am not sufficiently well acquainted with their condition in the other parts to be able to say whether they fare more sumptuously, but I can affirm, of my own knowledge, that the corre sponding class in Ireland, who live on potatoes with salt and sour milk, would think it a very great hardship to be obliged to exchange this diet of theirs for the English bread and cheese, and not without reason. I have tried the experiment of living on potatoes and buttermilk myself, and found it to succeed admirably. I never enjoyed better health or spirits than whilst rigidly adhering to this diet, though I am not apt, thank God, to be at any time deficient in either particular. Five or six pounds of hot potatoes impart a genial warmth to a man's inside of a winter's day, a thousand times more comfortable than cold stale bread, even though garnished with such delectable condiment as onions or a modicum of cheese; and, in fact, when we attempted to introduce the bread and broth system into our prisons, the rogues mutinied for potatoes, and swore we meant to starve them. I remember to have read somewhere, that when potatoes were first introduced at the tables of the great, they were denied to the young, on the same principle as we now refuse them ragouts and high-seasoned dishes, because physicians pronounced them heating and provocative. Has this, think you, anything to do with the solution of the problem of our seven millions? It is an idle objection, that cooking the potatoes takes up a great deal of time of the woman of the house. Sorry am I to say, that that time could be turned to very little account were it entirely at her command; and, at all events, her time must, in any case, be less valuable than that of the miller and his men who should grind the corn; but, besides, the Irish who,

from their habit of eating potatoes, have learned how to boil them, never allow that process to occupy more than forty minutes; and, as they eat but two meals a-day, the time devoted even to cookery does not very much exceed that réquisite in an English cottage, especially if the English woman make, as she should do, a mess of pottage of her bread and cheese and onions. Mr Cobbett has, I fear, had some success in prejudicing the minds of the vulgar in England against this our favourite species of food. This clever person writes about all things with an appearance of minute particularity, which naturally has an amazingly imposing ef fect on the uninformed populace; but the fact is, that he is grossly ignorant on this as well as many other topics, (such as politics and the planting of trees,) on which he yet adventures his crude though very positive opinions to the public. As sneering and ridicule operate more power fully than reasoning on the class of persons who are likely to be influenced by Mr Cobbett's writings, I wish to acquaint them with the fact, that the lower orders of this country, who are infinitely better skilled in the arts of ridicule and sneering than themselves, feel and express quite as much contempt for John Bull's bread and cheese, as he can do for Paddy's potatoes. I do not say this in any unkindness, but only to correct a false impression of superiority which the boors dwelling on the east side of the Channel sometimes arrogate to themselves over the farming labourers of Ireland; whilst, in reality, they are, in everything requiring the exertion of quickness and acuteness of intellect, greatly inferior to the least informed class in this country.

"The gentry, indeed, of England are, I think, generally speaking, possessed of more plain sound sense, though not of more refinement, than the same class in Ireland; and the men of business, from the lowest to the highest, perform their duties better and more becomingly, and are in every way incomparably better fitted for their stations in life than ours yet are; but in the lowest class, the superiority in point of intelligence and readiness, and all the minor qualities, which form the excellency of social and civilized life, lies entirely with our people."

There is a life and spirit-as well as truth in the above passage, which may in vain be looked for through all the heavy pages of the prosing Economists-the absurdity of whose doc

trines is a minor evil, to the heaviness of their style, which is enough to break the back of a common reader has, we believe, greatly increased the number of diseases in the spine, and we have reason to know, proved fatal indeed in several cases, during the discussion on the Corn Question. Which of them all could express himself so easily and earnestly, as our friend does in the following passage?—

"Driving for the first time through almost any part of England is quite a treat; but bere, instead of the rich verdure, plantation on plantation, and hedge-row upon hedge-row, you had been accustomed everywhere to meet with, the general surface of the soil looks arid and sad-coloured; plantations are but thinly scattered, generally young, and not unfre quently have a stunted appearance, as if half neglected; the lands seem divided into a prodigious number of compartments, and that too in most cases not by hedges, but ditches or bleak-looking stone walls. In the country towns the beggars are numerous, noisy, and squalid, And instead of the neat comfortablelooking villages of England, you meet with thatched cabins, scattered at intervals along the road, often decaying, and always dirty in their external appearance. This is the aspect of the country generally; yet wherever improvements have been made, the vivid green of the pasture, and the visible combination of utility and ornament in the minor details of the landscape, abundantly demonstrate that we possess all the same capabilities of comfort and neatness as our brethren, were they but called into operation by the same favourable circumstances which have stimulated exertion and diffused happiness elsewhere. The soil of England is brought to an uniform beauty of surface that is quite astonishing; that the soil of Ireland is equally capable of such an improvement, and that it would amply repay the expenditure of labour and capital requisite to effect the change, is indisputably true. It is really vexatious to see field after field look brown and bare, and hill after hill naked and rugged, when one certainly knows that the fields might be bright green, and the hills made to wave with stately woods, with great and permanent profit to the proprietors. Would that men were wise, and considered this! Yet we have great reason to rejoice that they are gradually growing wiser, and that improvement is at this moment advancing with giant