At home, the elements of activity are not of a
very new kind.
The Irish peasantry show an access of the mania for purchas- ing arms : buying guns when they lack food ! The apologists of the Arms Act will crow. Another curious movement is to be ob- served. O'Connell has seldom got on with the gentry of Ireland : he lately obtruded himself into a meeting of the Irish Agricul- tural Society, probably hoping to make it serve the purpose of his frustrated meeting of country gentlemen in Dublin—a quasi Parliament ; and the result is that the Agricultural Society is virtually broken up. "The Liberator" failing, his rival "the O'Brien" is trying hard to seduce the country gentlemen into joining him against England. Between Agitators and Rockites, the poor landlord can find no haven of rest.
In England, a combined movement to improve the sanatory laws has drawn from Government a promise of bills next session. The progress made by the master-spirits of the movement, Dr. Southwood Smith and Mr. Chadwick, shows what able and ear- nest men can do in working against apathy and obstruction, when they are working on realities.
So much can scarcely be said for the other agitations,—the Short-time, still too much debated to promise immediate results ; the reduction of Tea-duties, a theoretical movement among com- mercial Free-traders ; and the little Anti-Corn-law bustle, got up by a pseudo Cobden without a League, altogether forgetful of &sop's "Frog that burst itself." Lord John Russell has been baited by deputations from nobody—for it is easy to get rip a '4meeting " as a pretext for a prearranged deputation. The Pre- mier has been teased by vulgar importunity and word-catching, intended to bully him into abolishing the residuary duties on corn. He would not be entrapped into unsettling the Corn-laws for the sake of incidentally promoting a Cochrane to be a Cobden, but very decorously hinted to the "deputations" that they might go away.
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