We wish to cell special attention to the letter from
Mr. Take, perhaps the most reasonable of all our philanthropists, which will be found in another page. We have never seen the ultimate cause of the Irish land dilleulty stated with such overwhelming force. Englishmen habitually think of Ireland as it appears on the map, and forget that only oue-fourth of it is cultivated or cultivable, and that the atinted part yields little. The island has little coal, no metals, and its fisheries are unworked ; so that five millions of people are trying to live on eighteen millions of acres, which do not yield in gross produce 26 per acre. Of the five millions, moreover, one million, or 200,000 families, have holdings valued under Z4 a year,—that is, raise gross produce worth less than £24 a year. Deduct rent, tithe, and occasional losses from weather, and that is barely a shilling a day per family, a sum utterly insufficient even for safe existence. No system of ownership can alter this, unless, indeed, the Irish Parliament distributes the cultivable land among the cultivating 600,000 families equally, and so reduces all to one dead level of peasants with eight acres apiece. With 200,000 adult males permanently embittered by a struggle with impossible diffi- culties, a Home-rule Government in Ireland will be no safer than a British one, and will yet have to face a social war, founded on a demand for "more land."
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