Mr. Charles Buxton told a curious stlry of Irish agriculture
at a meeting at North Walsh= on Thursday. He bought a small Irish estate, containing very rich land, soon after the famine of 1847, near Dingle, at the very low rate of 3/. an acre,—bought it under a sale in the Encumbered Estates' Court. He found it cut up into plots divided by huge banks, which took up a sixth of the arable land ; and each tenant had a lot of little bits scattered about at a distance from each other, to which he had access over the similar fractions of his neighbours. The land, which was a rich vegetable mould, was quite uudrained, and such a quagmire that the weeds and rushes were a caution to see. The customs were so queer as to the use of the farm implements that he could quite believe a statement of Lord George Hill's, that three Irish tenants, possessing a horse amongst them, undertook to see after the shoe- ing of one foot each ; but as there was no one to look after the fourth foot; that foot was always unshod, and the horse always lame. So he bought them all out, let it to a Scotch farmer to whom he lent capital, and who, of course, soon doubled the pro- duce,—to the great material advantage of the country, says Mr. Buxton. Doubtless ; but if after etarting afresh he could have made an experiment in the effect of the "magic of property" on small proprietors, instead, by allowing them to buy him out in a certain fixed number of years, it might have been less to the eco- nomical, but surely more to the political advantage of the country ?
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