A new stage _has been reached in 'the disastrous progress
of Ireland. The order of the Treasury to begin the discontinuance of employment on public works has been promulgated, and the process has commenced. Thus far it does not promise to be uni- formly facile or uniformly felicitous. According to the minute of " my-Lords," 140,000 labourers—representing, say, half a mil- lion of seuls—were to be discharged.; the expectation being that some would at once transfer their labour to the land, and that others would be supported, at least in part, by the new modes of relief without labour. But the new modes were not yet in operation : even the soup-kitchens were not fully at work. And although the untilled land is clamorous for labour, the process of employment at wages is not easy to, set going. Numbers of those who hold land have no money Wherewithal to pay wages; confidence in conacre has been destroyed by the potato-blight, and that peculiar currency is as much depreciated as the French assignats were. Of those who do possess some means, many are emigrating; leaving Ireland untilled to seek the Colonies, where healthier systems of industry offer rewards more certain. It is even asserted that the discharge of labourers has in some cases prevented the tillage of land ; the discharged labourers of the farming class having flown to the stores of seed for immediate sustenance. And in various places where new modes of relief were not in activity, the im- mediate discharge of men from public works was declared to be equivalent to sentence of death. Some contumacy has been shown : discharged labourers have gone in turbulent masses de- manding relief; Magistrates have threatened to throw up their commissions if the order were enforced ; even public officers have ventured to transgress their instructions rather than press the execution of the order.
In the midst of all this social anarchy, the active Stipendiary Magistrate of Liverpool has succeeded in tracing to its main source the invasion of Great Britain by Irish paupers: he has brought it home to the ejectments by certain Irish landlords—a class whose representatives in Parliament are very clamorous in professions of regard for their poor countrymen. Mr. Rush- ton's researches corroborate the charges recently brought against Irish landlords by the Irish priests.
