people, it will be said that in many cases advances of seed and implements would be required.

It is true. But advances only. Give the new occupier a proper tenure; and his success and your re-payment is not doubtful. Your assistance will give you a right to insist on the discontinuance, beyond certain limits, of precarious crops, like the potatoe. You will soon have a superabundant supply of corn, not from the Baltic or the Black Sea, but from your own Irish soil.

Many districts would soon be able to employ more than their own proportion of hands. They would thu relieve others, without necessarily disturbing the chargeability of the poor man to his original district.

But the Irish poor-law has not only failed by reaso of its own inadequate provisions, but because of th measures of a different kind, which accompanied followed it.

Under any system it is proposed to burthen th land with the support of the poor. That burthen i borne for the sake of the public at large. On th public at large, that burthen ought, as far as possibli to fall.

It is equally unjust and impolitic to expose th land-owner thus burthened, or deprived of portions his estate, to an unfair competition with foreign grower who are subject to no such burthens or losses. It unnecessary for the land of Ireland, when but mode

ately cultivated, will produce an enormous superfluity. In taxing foreign corn, there is no injustice to the public, whom the land will have relieved of so heavy a burthen.

The Irish poor-law has failed for another reason also. There is not in the cities and towns of Ireland the employment which there ought to be, and might be, and under a different system will be.*

Whence is Ireland's salvation to come?

From a parliament? From a popular assembly, English or Irish?

Alas! perorating' members, 'wind-bags of parliamentary eloquence' as Mr. Carlyle calls them, are poor saviours. A popular assembly is a legislative make-shift for ordinary occasions; and long debates are good for this reason-that the more the members talk, the less they do. But the just and clear views, the unfettered and decisive action of a single mind, must make or save a nation.

Thus, Peter the Great laid the deep and strong foundations of modern Russia. So Napoleon brought the new order and enlightened legislation of modern France out of the chaos of the Revolution.

Who laid the foundation of Anglo Saxon greatness? Not a popular assembly, but Royal Alfred. Not the less Royal that his incessant and self-sacrificing labors were prosecuted in a palace that we should call a * See observations on this subject,—infrà.

hovel. We are told that the wind and drafts, that whistled through, made his candles gutter; so that he was obliged to read and write by a horn lantern. There in gloom, and pain, and sickness, sat the Lycur gus of the Great Anglo Saxon race. The legislator of a thousand years. Illustrious man! before whom the pageantry of all the potentates, and the eloquence of all the parliaments of Europe shrink into insignificance.

What would an Irish Alfred now say to poor disorganized Ireland? To its millions of acres of waste, but cultivable land. To its ruined commerce and manufactures. To its people crying for work, but idle and starving. Some flying for their lives from their native country. Others shut up in workhouses to be really put to death. To its aristocracy and gentry plundered and beggared. What would he say to counsellors, who should try and persuade him that active and instant measures would infringe some let alone or free-trade theory. That this frightful and universal ruin was therefore the inevitable condition of the most fertile of all lands.

We know not what he would say. Peradventure he might think there was no more time for saying. But we know that he would ACT: act instantly, act in spite of all obstacles, act effectually, and change at once and for ever the whole state of the country.

When are we to see this Irish Alfred?

When Queen, Lords and Commons shall consent to

arm, for a season, some dictator for Ireland with legisHe must be a man of rank and wealth,

lative power.

to exempt him from envy and distrust-of tried integrity, of experience in public business-of judgment that has towered above the mist of those theories, which have lately arisen to blind rulers, as well as people.

God Almighty send him, speed him, and hasten his coming!

CHAPTER XVII.

"The currency should vary, as it would vary, if it were entirely metallic.”

HERE we have the principle of the Act of 1844. Here also we have the old fallacy, that a natural state of things is necessarily good; that it is to be imitated, not to be corrected and improved.

Men talk glibly of variations in the currency. Few reflect on the awful extent, to which such changes affect the prosperity of all ranks. The labourer, the pauper, and the beggar, are as much interested in the currency-question, as the manufacturer, the shopkeeper, or the great proprietor of land or funds, and

even more.

Alterations in the amount and value of the circulating medium, are at best, transfers of property-gigantic robberies--they are often much worse; they involve wanton destruction of immense property, and stoppage of industry. The standard of value should be as fixed and immutable as human art can make it. The Act of 1844 makes it variable as the wind.

The cure provided by the Act of 1844, for an adverse balance of trade, and for every export, or tendency to