[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR. "]
SIR,—What your correspondents call the depopulation of Ireland is the reduction of the density of its population to about that of France or Germany. The consolidation of farms and the emigration of the dense rural populations to cities or to new countries, so far from being signs of anything specially wrong in Ireland, are processes which are going on over a great part of the civilised world, even in the United States, where what Irish agitators and sentimentalists call "the curse of landlordism" never existed. I have lately met with the statement that in New England farms are being deserted and houses left ruinous by men who are abandoning farms of forty acres in their native States for farms of one -hundred and sixty acres in the West.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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