BAD PRACTICES OF IRISH LANDLORDS.
Times—It is ascertained to be a practice throughout the whole south and central parts of Ireland, for the landlords to exact from the wretched pea- sants a price for small patches of uncultivated land, under the title of con acres, more than it is possible for the produce of that land to repay ; and when
a poor creature has, by indefatigable toil, reclaimed the ground from a state of nature, it is turned over, with similar adjoining fractions, to the more re- sponsible occupier of a larger farm, and the original improver expelled. It is a practice undeniable throughout every part of Ireland, to let an extensive farm to the -highest and often the most desperate bidder, without the least consideration for the old family, who may have held it during forty or fifty years, and who, in a country without commerce, are thus cast out to utter idleness and misery, or driven, as we sometimes see them, to the most atro- cious projects of revenge. It has been since the year 1793, a practice, as is acknowledged, throughout Ireland, to tempt youths into premature anti ruinous marriages, by fixing them on spots of bog or mountain, upon a rack- rent lease of some freeholedescription, that they may give 40$. votes as their landlords order them, and so increase the saleable stock on the estate. It is not a practice, but au instinct, of the Irish landlords, to think of their un- happy peasantry but as of creatures born to mud-cabins—to dry potato diet, diversified by an occasional failure of the potato crop—to rags, degenerat- ineb into frequent nakedness,—to ignorance and servility, and hopelesness ofcoinfort ; and then to exclaim, that " they are used to it, and want nothing better." Of these and similar practices, instincts, and melancholy abuses of a superiority which ought to make itself felt no otherwise than in acts of pa- triarchal benevolence and protection, the fruits are, what we behold. The people are alienated from their natural chiefs who have deserted them. The first political question which arises, is made an easy topic for intiamin,g a previous discontent, the materials of which have been drawn from the per- verted relations of private life, and, morally speaking' a civil conflict may be said to rage perpetually from north to south of Ireland. If there be landlords who are conscious of their own exetnption from the charges thus brought against their body, we wish them to enjoy the full consciousness of such com-
parative virtue.
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