all the requisites of life were abundant in Ireland. In the year 1823, provisions alone, to the amount of more than five millions, were, according to parliamentary returns, exported from that kingdom to England. Whilst these people could not procure employment, it is estimated that one fifth part of Ireland, and a considerable part of that fifth capable of being cultivated to advantage, remains in a most neglected state, or waste and utterly unproductive.

With this superabundant produce of the soil, there ought not to be famine; with large tracts of fertile land lying waste, there ought not to be a want of employment; and when it is evident that the occupation of this numerous people, not only in manufactures and commerce, but in the cultivation of these unproductive lands, would add to the wealth of Ireland by an increased export, and furnish the peasantry with the means to subsist in comfort in their native country, the theory falls to the ground, and the fallacy of the argument becomes manifest.

Much easier would it be to take such measures as would bring these lands into culture, and these people into employ, than by one fell act of arbitrary power, to sweep them from their own shores;-to send them, no one knows where ;-to subsist, no one knows how;-by means not yet discovered, and at a cost not easily sustained.

By those who support this system it has been asserted, that the appalling number of two millions of our fellow-creatures should be exiled for ever; but would they go, if you had the atrocity to attempt compulsion? and could you compel them, if they refused? Of all the dangerous and fallacious plans for remedying an evil, this is the most dangerous and fallacious; it is barbarous in theory; incapable of being carried into effect; and in policy more worthy of the days of Alaric and of Attila, than of the nineteenth century.

But look to other ages and other nations; the Egyptians, the Assyrians, Greece, and Asia Minor, all were great and populous; they are now comparatively powerless, and thinly peopled. Sicily is said once to have had a population of about eight millions; she now has little more than a fourth part of that number: then, that island was called the granary of Rome; at present, they do little more than supply themselves with the grain they require. In the reign of the Emperor Charles V. Spain contained nearly double the number of inhabitants which she does at this day. Was the population of these countries their misery? Have they increased in prosperity as they became depopulated?

It may be said that, in the middle ages, all the northern nations were over peopled, and that, driven by necessity, they poured down those vast hordes which overran the best parts of the

civilized world; but they had neither arts, manufactures, agriculture, commerce, nor civilization, to sustain them at home; hence, their redundant population was the source of their own misery, and the scourge of their neighbors; and in just as much as Ireland is deficient in these essential points to the well-being of a nation, in so much only is her numerous population a misfortune. We must reject the experience of ages, and not look beyond the era in which we live; we must confound the effect with the cause, before we can draw any other inference. Holland, the Netherlands, and other highly-peopled states, are prosperous, because they have ample employment for their inhabitants; an extensive foreign commerce, the proprietors of the soil residing in the country, and in the enjoyment of internal tranquillity.

The arguments adduced, could alone hold good were we to find a country, the whole of which was cultivated, and yet where the produce of the soil would not supply its people with food, and where they could not, from the returns of their manufactures and of their commerce, procure the means of making up the deficiency. But with a people confessedly willing to labor, a superabundance of provisions, and a large proportion of fertile land lying waste, the defect must be in the mismanagement of man, and not in the laws of nature.

Ireland must be taken as she is; the people are there, and they cannot be removed in sufficient numbers, to afford any sensible relief; but does any substantial reason exist why she should not be great, prosperous, and happy? why her abundant population might not be successfully employed in cultivating her fertile soil, in carrying on numerous manufactures, and in spreading her commerce round the globe?

Artificial, not natural causes, continue to plant misery, famine, and bloodshed, in that land, where there ought to be tranquillity, happiness, and abundance. Charge not, then, the present existence of these calamities to the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts: the effects arising from the mal-administration of those days ought long since to have ceased: divide not these evils between the Pope, Luther, and Calvin: religious dissensions may go far to disorganize and ruin a people; but, in addition to the lamentable discords subsisting between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic churches, the privileges, the immunities, and the wealth of the one party, the disqualifications, the exclusions, and the poverty, of the other,—and all the jealousies attendant on the supremacy of the few over the many,-we must look nearer home, to the times in which we live, and to the concurrent effects of other great evils, before we can fully comprehend that undeviating and overwhelming state of anarchy and wretchedness, which presses so heavily on the great bulk of the people of ill-fated Ireland.

Unequal laws, unequally administered ;-an absentee nobility and gentry, draining the produce of industry, and the means of future employment, and expending it in another country;-agents and middle men oppressing and impoverishing the people ;-the lower orders deplorably neglected, uneducated, and unemployed, whilst vast tracts of fertile land remain uncultivated;-all confidence in the tranquillity and prosperity of the kingdom so completely destroyed, by civil and religious discord, that the great capitalists of England, though scarcely able to employ their superabundant wealth, dare not adventure it in Ireland, on plans which otherwise could not fail to give occupation to thousands of almost every class of the inhabitants, and at the same time make ample returns to themselves. To this melancholy catalogue much might be added that these evils exist to their fullest extent can any one deny? and can such a state of things be compatible with prosperity and happiness in any country? It is the bane and the misery of Ireland, even in a time of profound peace; it must be the weakness, and it may be the dismemberment of the Empire, should calamity ever attend us in war.

It is time that all party considerations should cease to operate; that we should abandon the pretext of referring the present miseries of Ireland to the transactions of former times alone; they may have been its originating cause; but can the past be undone? Can the acts of our ancestors be retraced? We find a mighty evil desolating a fertile land, and we must not content ourselves with the investigation of its origin only; we must strike at the root and arrest it in its course.

It is a gigantic work, and must be met with fortitude and perseverance; but we cannot arrive at the end, without pursuing the intermediate means. With the many, Catholic emancipation, as it is called, is the grand desideratum : be it so; let this be regarded as an established point; but without going through the details of all the means by which this can be accomplished, will this one great measure, as it were by magic, cure every other evil? Will it give food to those who are perishing from want? Will it give employment to those who are willing to labor, but who cannot find occupation? Will it restore harmony amongst all the discordant bodies of which the population is composed?

The Protestants look with alarm to the consequences which must result from the admission of the Catholics to the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty. The Catholics are irritated, and impatient that this great object of their pursuit should any longer be delayed.

Opinions have long been balanced between these two extremes; and each change of administration has given rise to alternate hopes and fears in the contending parties; not any systematic plan ap

pears to have been adopted, and in the interval, this fluctuation between hope and despair, has kept the country in a worse state than could have resulted from the most decisive measures, whether for or against this long-desired object.

But in these facts, all parties are agreed, that the great mass of the people, in many parts of Ireland, are in a degraded state; uninformed, in abject poverty; without sufficient knowlege of any of the arts of life by which support can be obtained; with minds inflamed against their governors, by the accumulation of those miseries they have so long suffered; and through these causes, prone to violence, and dangerous to their superiors; can man be in a worse, a more deplorable condition? And with nothing to hope, there is nothing to fear; hence arises that readiness to embark in every desperate measure which the ambitious or the designing may hold out. Can we expect attachment to any government, from persons situated as these men are? Destitute, hopeless, in a state of anarchy and starvation: to them any change may produce some good; they are too wretched to fear an increase of evil.

Are men, so circumstanced, prepared, without any accompanying ameliorations, to be released from all restraint? You must civilize those whom you would render capable of the rational enjoyment of civil liberty; you must teach them the relative duties of man to man, before you can give them indiscriminately all the immunities of citizens in a well-organized state: would it otherwise be safe to the community at large, or advantageous to themselves?

In this state of Ireland, the leading members of the RomanCatholic community of that kingdom, would entitle themselves to the gratitude of their country, and at the same time, in the most effectual manner, advance their own cause, by using all the influence they possess, to tranquillize the minds of the lower orders of the people; whilst, by the temperance of their own conduct in all the efforts which they may make for the accomplishment of their views, they would the most clearly demonstrate, that to be relieved from religious disqualifications, and not the undue acquisition of political power, was the primary object of their pursuit. In this manner can they best convince their fellow-subjects, of the safety and the practicability of removing those which yet remain, of the restrictions their ancestors, in more turbulent times, had regarded as necessary to the security of the Protestant church, and the Protestant succession.

But it is deeply to be lamented, that, of late, irritation has again rapidly increased, and thereby overclouded the most favorable opportunity which has ever presented itself to the Catholics of Ireland, for attaining, through amicable measures, this avowed object of their wishes. It is well worthy their deep and serious consideration, what an awful responsibility they will incur to those of

their own faith, and to the empire at large, if, by intemperance and violence, they blast every prospect of consolidating the peace of the country, and, through renewed anarchy and insurrection, lose all they have so long sought, at the very moment when their cause was daily gaining ground, and its final success seemed to have been placed within their reach.

Will, then, the wise, the moderate, and the humane of that community, forego this, perhaps the greatest and the last opportunity which may present itself, to heal the wounds of many ages? Will they, at such a moment, become instruments in the hands of the violent and the ambitious, to close the door on conciliation, and lend their aid to deluge their country in blood? On their present conduct, the amicable attainment of more than their ancestors ever hoped or required, and the lives of tens of thousands of their fellowcitizens will unquestionably depend. Before it be too late, let every true friend of his country pause, ere he take a part in measures which may lead to such fatal results: he cannot be a real friend to Ireland, who would thus rashly and desperately lead her on to destruction.

Must religious discord and civil war again spread devastation and misery over that ill-fated land? Are two nations, formed to be the strength and the support of each other, for ever doomed to be involved in fierce contention and bloodshed, to the derision and triumph of the enemies of both? Can the prosperity or happiness of either kingdom be compatible with such a state of things? But if all better or higher considerations are without avail, in calming the violent feelings which now agitate that country, the utter hopelessness and desperation of an appeal to arms, should make them turn from the thought of such a measure, as one which must inevitably postpone the attainment of all their wishes to an incalculable distance, and seal the fate of those who engage in so unnatural a contest. Can men be found so forgetful of the experience of the past, and so blind to the present state of their country, as to entertain even the most remote expectations of accomplishing those objects which they now seek, by the power of the sword? Has Ireland ever yet found redress from an appeal to arms? Has not every such attempt only furnished ground for witholding those immunities so long and so ardently sought? On the other hand, each succeeding year seemed rapidly to have been wearing away those jealousies and apprehensions which had prevented an amicable and an effectual redress of her grievances, and which, in all human probability, another generation of tranquillity and order would have fully accomplished.

At a period when Great Britain was surrounded by enemies, involved in the most arduous war in which she ever was engaged,