BOOKS.

LORD DUFFERIN ON IRELAND.t A series of letters on " Irish Emigration " and the " Tenure of Land in Ireland," originally addressed to the Times newspaper, have now been carefully revised, somewhat enlarged, and bound together in what Lord Dufferin, their author, modestly speaks of as a " pamphlet." His work is, in reality, a book of goodly size and value. The appendices, which arc long and elaborate, throw much light on the subjects discussed in the text. Indeed, the re- print, or rather the reproduction—for there is much that is new— is thoroughly justifiable.

We say all this " without prejudice," if we may use a lawyer's phrase, to the general views which the Spectator has held upon the great Irish question, political, social, economic, and religious ; only a part of which Lord Dufferin has here treated. Those views have always been expressed with frankness and freedom ; and this column is not the place, nor this moment the time, to confirm, to modify, or to cancel them. It is an account of Lord Dufferin's book that we here chiefly. wish to give. Very many people who glance over the pages of a weekly review will never care to study in the volume itself, and in considerable detail, the subject taken up by this literary nobleman. They, may how- ever—even the laziest or busiest of them—be sufficiently in- terested in the matter to care to know what are the main grounds of defence held by Lord Dufferin against those who have assailed, somewhat harshly, the character of the Irish land- lord, and assigned the landlords' ill-management and ill-will as the causes of Ireland's misfortunes. It is very possible—as our author himself admits—that the class feeling which is shared more or less by every one, in the world as it is, has made some of his expressions against the assailants of his class stronger than they would other-

* I do not mean to say that they are quantitative. The peculiarity of French 41 that both quantity and accent are with it mostly accidental elements, not as In other languages intrinsic to certain letters, or combinations of letters, so that its metres' can be leAsed neither upon the one nor upon the other. But the pronunciation is quantitative, nevertheless. + Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land Os Ireland. By the Right Hon. Lord Dufferin, K.P. Loudon: Willis, Elotheran, and Co. 1867.

wise have been. But we do not in the least believe that he has improperly attempted to wrest facts to his own ends, and shall follow his narrative and his arguments with the confidence that is his due.

The emigration question is the first that is opened ; and it is sought to show that the exodus of the last score of years has been

a blessing, instead of a carse—a welcome relief to an overloaded

country. Emigration may be occasioned by a calamity, says Lord Dufferin ; it may be followed by disastrous consequences ; but it is in itself a curative process, and " to confound it with the evils to which it affords relief would be as great a blunder as to mistake the distressing accidents of suppuration for symptoms of mortification."

To attribute to the landlord the desire for the population to decrease is, he considers, absurd ; for the landlord is but a trader in land ; and when did a trader complain of having too many customers ?

Again, the landlord is, very often, himself the employer of labour, and the rise in wages, consequent upon continued emigration, he is among the first to feel, and, perhaps, to suffer by. To this it may be answered—and answered with some truth—that as yet no inconvenient diminution of the agricultural population has occur- red ; that is, no diminution inconvenient to the landlord or large tenant. The scale may turn, sooner or later ; and then—it may be argued—the landlord and the large tenant would feel the dis- advantages of a system to which, at least, their active disapproval had never before been given. Emigration, it is said by some, is acquiring a momentum which will carry it beyond all reasonable limits. This is admitted by Lord Dufferin to be a contingency deserving serious attention ; but he thinks the first precaution to be taken is to fix those classes most exposed to the current, in circumstances of such comfort and stability as will allow them to resist its influence. Meanwhile, the transformation of an indigent and disaffected subject into a prosperous foreign customer is a change not wholly for the worst ; and " the industry which has gone forth to till the prairies of the West cheapens the loaf to millions in the old country."

One thing, at all events, is certain. In the progress of every civilized community, the period must arrive when the natural increase of population overtakes the normal rate of production. The true remedy may be to communicate additional fertility to the soil ; but this is sel- dom an immediate possibility. As a consequence, the rate of population must be checked, or its standard of comfort must deteriorate, or its ac- cruing surplus must remove. But the first necessitates au artificial and often an unnatural social system, as is said to prevail in France ; and the next is an alternative which entails the physical degradation we have seen supervene in Ireland. There remains therefore the third,— a course in perfect harmony with the laws of nature, and one which has already established the religion, the language, and the freedom of Eng- land over one-fourth of the habitable globe. To lament the exhibition of so much enterprise, vital energy, and colonizing power in the race to which we belong, seems to me more perverse than to stigmatize as a curse the blessing originally pronounced on those who were first bidden " to go forth, and multiply and replenish the earth."

The second chapter of Lord Dufferin's book is devoted to a de- fence of the landlords, and an elaborate denial of the many charges

brought against them. It is the landlords of the south and west, not those of the north and east, who have been condemned by popular English politicians. If, then, emigration is owing to their oppression, it is argued by Lord Dufferin that Ulster should have enjoyed a comparative immunity from the general depletion.

But what, he asks, is the fact ?-

Although immediately after the famine the emigration from the South was, for obvious reasons, in excess, though not very largely, of that from the North, the first wave of emigration that ever left the shores of Ireland proceeded from Ulster, and during tho last fourteen years Ulster's con- tribution to the general emigration has been greater than that of either Connaught or Leinster, and in the ratio of twenty-three to twenty- seven as compared with the average of the three provinces.

If the greater density of the population of Ulster be suggested in mitigation of this comparison, Lord Dufferiu would answer that such a consideration scarcely alters the result ; the ratio of emi- gration from Ulster to the population of that province having been as great as the ratio of emigration to population from Leinster and Connaught, though less than that from Munster in the proportion of 1 to 2. Further to exempt the land- lords from unmerited blame, the author of the work before

us goes into statistics upon the subject of evictions. The total emigration from Ireland during the last seven years has averaged about 90,000 a year. The average of evictions during the same period, as compared with the number of emigrants, has been at the rate of about two to every 100, scarcely 1,500 evictions having been executed, for example, in 1865. In Munster, the pro- vince from whence the largest emigration has taken place, the evictions have been fewest, and of the total number throughout all Ireland two-thirds were for the non-payment of rent. We may remark, en passant, upon the extraordinary disproportion between

the evictions executed in the country and in the towns. A very great difference was, of course, to be looked for, but it is more

enormous than we should have expected ; thirteen hundred and thirty-four evictions having been made in counties, and only sixty- nine in " counties of cities and counties of towns," during the year 1865.

In his third chapter, which has been to us the most interesting, and is possibly also the most valuable, Lord Dufferin gives a retro- spect of the economical history of Ireland, and in the main he re- fers Ireland's misfortunes to the unjust laws which are as lead upon her feet. She has had to complain, not only of the " protective" tendency of English agriculture, but of English trade. Manches- ter manufacturers have been her enemies, no less than the farmers of the grazing districts. By an Act of the 20th of Elizabeth Irish cattle were declared a " nuisance," and their importation was prohibited. The Irish then sent over cured provisions instead.

A second Act of Parliament imposed prohibitory duties on salted meata. The hides of the animals still remained, but the same influence soon put a stop to the importation of leather. Our cattle trade abolished, we tried sheep-farming. The sheep-breeders of England immediately took alarm, and Irish wool was declared contraband by a Parliament of Charles II. Headed in this direction, we tried to work up the raw material at home, but this crested the greatest outcry of all. Every maker of fustian, flannel, and broad-cloth in the country rose up in arms, and by an Act of William III. the woollen industry of Ireland was extinguished, and 20,000 manufacturers left the island.

Afterwards, the silk business was tried, but the silk manufac- turers of England were as watchful of their own interests as the woolstaplers. The cotton manufacturer, the sugar refiner, and the soap and candlemaker were up in arms in their turn. The colonial trade was in a manner open ; but it was, as Lord Dufferin shows, only " in a manner." The'consequence of such a system, pursued towards Ireland for two hundred and fifty years, is, according to our author, this,—" that the entire nation flung itself upon the land with as fatal an impulse as when a river whose cur-

rent is suddenly impeded rolls back and drowns the valley it once fertilized." The remedy, it is argued, is to be found in the steady encouragement of trade and manufactures, which may afford profitable employment to a large population ; and may draw off from the small farms the younger sons, who,—if the old system were continued—would subdivide them into allotments so small as to be practically useless.

This takes us on to the next branch of the subject,—the question

of la petite culture. Some persons, holding other views than Lord

Dufferin's, believe that though this system is attended with some disadvantages, it may yet be made profitable by industry and

minute labour, as it is, they say, in Belgium. But Belgium pre- sents to the minute cultivator some advantages which Ireland can- not hope to present for several hundred years, and some which she can never present. Close to the garden farms of Flanders are a

cluster of populous cities, with a constant demand for agricultural produce. In Flanders, too, though the climate is pretty generally moist, it is never absolutely damp ; having nothing like the rain-

fall of Ireland. The sun, too, has much power there ; and second crops are raised habitually in many districts. But this could not be done in Ireland.

The proportion of cultivators to the soil is greater in Ireland than in any country except Belgium ; and Lord Dufferin dwells upon this fact, regarding it as an evil which emigration does something to remedy. He further devotes considerable space to a review of various proposals for the alteration of the tenure of land in Ireland; but we do not intend to consider these proposals in a notice of his book. No one, we think, can be master of the Irish question, from whatever side he looks at it, without having given some attention to the very readable and instructive book which Lord Dufferiu has written.