Meanwhile we cannot imagine a more egregious impolicy than to have conjured up a new Poor-law for the occasion; or, in order to meet the exigencies of a passing and rare disaster, instead of a temporary make-shift, to have devised a thing of permanent institution, and ordained it to be of perpetual force and operation in all time coming. It was right to set up in every locality of Ireland a gateway of relief for the people from the destitution of this most extraordinary year. But it was not right, it is most grievously and we fear irreparably wrong, to tell the people that this is the very gateway by which they are to seek and to find relief in every future year which lies before them. It is not possible to conceive a likelier expedient for the wholesale initiation of a people into the worst of habits, or for plunging the country instanter, and from one end to the other of it, into a universal and inveterate pauperism. Verily, England has not yet gotten her own legislation for the poor into such a state of settlement and perfection as at all entitles her to palm it upon us; or to distemper, as she has done, the social systems both of Scotland and Ireland, by the contagion of her own inveterate malady. The method of relief for the present should have been made as peculiar as the emergency itself is peculiar— mainly we hold at the expense of Government, as say in the [roportion of two to one; but partly at the expense of the landowners, and which if they are not able to pay at the time, should be charged in the form of a mortgage upon their estates. Meanwhile all changes and improvements on the ordinary poor-law should have been kept in abeyance-so that every injurious effect would disappear, after that the special visitation had passed away, and the temporary as well as special apparatus raised to provide for it had been taken down and removed from the eyes of the people.

all gone where it was intended, to feed the really destitute and keep them from perishing of hunger, the prices would have risen more than they did, and we should have rejoiced in a rise proceeding from such a cause. Had the distilleries been stopped, and money to purchase the grain now consumed by them been transferred for the relief of hunger, prices would have been unchanged; and the simple unembarrassed question is this-Whether it be better that grain should have been consumed in distilleries, or consumed in the houses and by the families of the destitute! By the way, it must be gratifying to Mr. Trevelyan, who at an early part of the Correspondence reasoned so ably on the benefits of a high price, to observe the practical triumph of his argument in the magnificent importations since of food from America—to a tenfold greater extent than ever Government could have achieved. It remains, however, to be seen whether even these importations will make good an adequate supply for us.

It might perhaps reconcile Mr. Ferguson to a free trade in corn, were he to examine the Liverpool Tables issued from the Corn Exchange there. In one week last month taken at random there were exported from Ireland to Liverpool 381 quarters of wheat; but to balance this, there were exported from Liverpool to Ireland in the same week 4869 quarters.

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Nevertheless our proposed Commission should, among their other labours, be tasked with the duty of fully preparing themselves on the question of a Poor-law. And most assuredly if either Ireland or Scotland is to be bettered by their inquiries and lucubrations on such a topic, England will receive a benefit from them also as little independent as either of these countries of the further lights which experience or principle might cast upon the subject. This is a topic on which we would reserve ourselves for the ample opportunities that will occur for the discussion of it in future Numbers of this work. We would rather append any view or opinion of ours to the Report of a Commission than to the debates of a senate-house; and were men only content to wait the slow processes of diligent investigation, and of earnest patient thought, it would save us from a world of crude legislation in Parliament, as well as of crude and hasty speculation out of doors.

But one word more of this Commission-the only effectual sort of machinery, we do think, if but well put together and well worked, for effecting an extrication from our present difficulties by leading to the establishment of a right economic state both in Ireland and our own Highlands. We in the first place would have it invested with an ample sufficiency of means, whether present or prospective, and in the conscious possession of these so as not to shrink, as do all our Government offices at present, from every proposal which involves in it the least expenditure of money; but, with the feeling that its vocation is to work out reforms on a large scale, not to be startled by the magnitude of any scheme, or with sensitive alarm to throw it overboard, and without investigation, if at all likely to yield the money's worth for the money bestowed on it. But in the second place, we would have it armed with sufficient resolution and sufficient strength to put down the clamour and the cupidity, and it may be the occasional violence, excited by the imagination of its unbounded resources, and of the facility with which it might give way to every application. We hope that it would soon show itself to have no such facility; and that while conscious of the greatness of its means, it was alike conscious of the great things which it had to do with them. In the third place, we would have it ever to acquit itself as the resolute protector of the most helpless, both against the upper classes on the one hand, and against those of the lower classes who are not so helpless as they,-and this that not a human creature shall perish from want, an object on which the hearts of our rulers have been set from the first, but in which they have been thwarted by difficulties that we trust they will now know how to overcome. And lastly, as the reward of its perseverance in a right and reasonable way, we should calculate that the public respect and the public confidence

would at length go along with them, till they arrived at their landing place, the great terminus ad quem of their appointmentto relieve the countries on which they operate from the pressure that now lies upon them, and to effect such adjustments between the various orders of society, and more especially between landlords and tenants, as that, raised from the state of beggary and dependence, they might in all time coming be a well-conditioned and self-sustaining people.

There is one question on which grieved and outraged humanity seeks to be appeased, and demands satisfaction. Why is it that, on the one hand, there should be such numerous deaths by starvation, while, on the other, there is such abundance of means, and along with it the most earnest and longing desire that this fearful calamity should be mitigated to the uttermost? Several reasons might be adduced for this most perplexing and piteous phenomenon; but we shall only state two. First, the dispensers of benevolence from without, including Government among the number, are most naturally and justifiably afraid lest the benevolence from within should be at all slackened or superseded, or that in virtue of their interference the operation of home duties and home charities should at all be suspended,-while, on the other hand, there is a mighty, and we should even call it a natural it may be a pardonable disposition among the people themselves, to overrate the magnitude of what is doing, or to be done for them from abroad. Between this fear on the one hand, and this delusion on the other, thousands of lives have been sacrificed; and yet we are not prepared to say, but that if the fear had not operated so as to make Government wary in their proceedings, there might not have been ten deaths by hunger, for every one that is now recorded. Let us just imagine that they had made gratuitous distribution of their stores at Schull and Skibereen; and we have only to conceive the paralyzing effect which the report of this generosity would have had, not on the home charity alone, but on the home and inland trade* of Ireland, after it had gone abroad that Government, with its inexhaustible treasury and its magnificent depôts, would overtake all and provide for all. There is no Government on earth that possesses the wealth and the power, and above all, the ubiquity, which might enable it to countervail the mischief of so ruinous a dependence, if it once pervaded, and among all ranks too, the entire mass of a country's population. But there is a single sentence in the last Report of the Friends, these noble-heart

*In the Longford Journal of January the 16th, we read that in the neighbourhood of Castle-town" the report of a Government depot to be established, kept back the commercial people, and the whole district is now without food."

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ed men of undoubted Christian worth, but of wisdom along with it, which throws a flood of light upon this question. No one will suspect them who went forth months ago on their pilgrimage of charity, and traversed the whole extent of Ireland-none will suspect them of hard-heartedness, or of callous indifference to the sufferings of their fellow-men; and yet let us hear their explanation of the fact, that of the forty thousand pounds which they had raised, augmented if we understand them aright, by twelve thousand more, the sum of twenty-four thousand pounds had been all that was expended-and this while hundreds were dying. "We cannot close this brief Report without expressing the satisfaction that we have in contemplating the proceedings of the Dublin Committee. We believe that if they had hastily distributed the money which had been committed to their charge, it would have been incalculably less useful. Some of those who have contributed money for a time have felt uneasy because their liberality has been husbanded, whilst hundreds of their fellow-creatures were dropping into the grave, but we believe that the larger the acquaintance they have with Ireland, her wants, and her national character, the more reason they will have to rejoice in the intervention of a committee, who, while they have known how to give, have known also how, by withholding for a time, to open the legitimate springs of assistance, which otherwise might have remained sealed, to the necessities of a famishing people." Had all the springs of assistance flowed as they ought, and if the opening of one had not had the effect, as if by some sort of moral machinery, of shutting another, the whole even of this stupendous calamity might have been fully overtaken.

The second reason, which we shall only state, without commenting on it, is the want of sufficient local agencies in Ireland -the effect of which is that though adequate funds were raised, they might prove unavailable for the adequate supply and distribution of food, and this over whole breadths of country where, each family living on their own half acre of potatoes, all marketing for victuals was in a great measure unknown. This alone accounts for a great number of the starvations. It is well brought out in an extract given below from a letter of the Rev. F. F. Trench of Clough-Jordan after a visit to the parish of Schull.*

*The date of the letter is March 22, 1847. The following is but a small portion of it :" Take for example the one parish of Schull, (and there are many like it.) Here there are scarcely any gentry, and none rich. What can one physician do amongst 18,000 people in such a state (and oats for his horse dear)? What can the ordinary number of local clergy do in such an extensive district? They cannot visit one-tenth part of the sick, even if they had horses, and oats to feed them, which some of them have not. Can Dr. Traill be expected to carry meal to the people in the mountains across the pummel of his saddle, as he has done? Can Mr. M'Cabe, the curate, be expected to push in the door and look for a vessel, and wash

We confess it to be in this last reason especially that we read the prognostication and the omen of future, and perhaps heavier disasters, than ever yet have fallen upon poor unhappy Ireland! It is easy for Parliament to ordain Relief Committees throughout all its localities; but do there exist everywhere materials for their formation, and still more for the vigorous and effectual working of them? Is not there room to apprehend a failure here; and that from this cause alone, unless we become callous—itself the most grievous moral calamity which can befall a nation-we might still continue between this and the coming harvest to be agonized as heretofore by these hideous starvations? It is true that no single Government is responsible for such a want of local agencies, proceeding as it does from a state of society which is the result of the misgovernment of many centuries! But has nothing been done even in our present session of Parliament to aggravate the evil? Whether have they taken the right method to invite or to repel the willing co-operation of the most important class, and the best able by their position and influence to lend the readiest and the greatest service in this trying emergency-the landed proprietors of Ireland? Was it the likeliest way for engaging them heart and hand in the work, thus to assimilate as has been done, the methods of temporary relief with the ordinary and permanent methods for the relief of the poor in all time comingand this contemporaneously with the passing of a measure by which to accelerate ten-fold the growth and increase of an all-absorbing pauperism? It is not only compelling them to vote away their own money, but to dispose of it so that it shall become the germ of a growing and gathering mischief—a deadly upas, which in a few years will be sure to spread its poison and shed its malignant influences over the whole land. But it is thus that England is ever for imposing on the dependent territories around her, her own wretched poor-law-as if this were the grand panacea for all our moral and social disorders, instead of being what it truly is, a distempering and disturbing influence wherewith to complicate and derange whatever it comes in contact with. It will indeed form a most instructive result, if in France without a

the vessel previous to putting a drink into it for the sick, who were unable to rise, as he has done? But let there be provided a sufficient staff of fit men to prescribe for the sick, and to place cooked food within the reach of the poor, and I feel confident that the supply of money that the public have proved themselves ready to give would pay for all, and so prevent absolute starvation, and restore health in many instances."

In a subsequent letter of Mr. Trench it appears that his appeal was quite effectual as far as the money was concerned; but the staff of fit men still remained a desideratum. Conceive some hundreds of such localities in Ireland; and we need not wonder if in a country so circumstanced, there should have occurred so many starvations.