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The Country Gcntlcmaiis Magazine 



have an innate opposition to it. The round 

 man is in the square hole \ he is ill at ease ; he 

 neither pleases himself nor his master ; he is 

 dissatisfied not because he has not employ- 

 ment and fair wages, for he has both, but 

 because he reads, and is told that he was 

 born for better things; that the blood of 

 the O'Hagan or O'Flaherty flows in his veins, 

 and that "when right and justice to Ireland 



are established, every man will have his acre 

 to enjoy. From his position he has all to 

 gain, nothing to lose, so that any proposi- 

 tion put before him, no matter how mon- 

 strous or impracticable, which has for its 

 text the overthrow of his superiors, at once 

 enlists his sympathies, in the hope that some 

 day or other something may come of it to his 

 advantage. 



THE RECLAMATION AND LUPROVEMENT OF LAND. 



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RIBBED, cabined, and confined" 

 V_^ within the narrow bounds of our 

 "tight little islands," with the national family 

 increasing daily, and imposing increasing de- 

 mands on the national pantry, one would 

 imagine that every available acre of our 

 limited space would be made to produce the 

 greatest possible amount which it is capable 

 of yielding, in order thereby to contribute 

 in some shape or other to the supplies of food 

 required for the use of our teeming popula- 

 tion. That such is not the case, however, is 

 evident to any one wlio travels through the 

 British Islands, and look at things with a 

 farmer's eye. He will see plenty of land 

 lying waste, which only requires the judicious 

 expenditure of capital to bring it into profit- 

 able cultivation ; and what is worse, he will 

 also see much that has become so reduced in 

 point of fertility, through mismanagement, that 

 it may justly be considered as even a more 

 disheartening and intractable subject to deal 

 with than those lands which have lain since 

 the flood in a natural state. 



It is true, there are extensive mountain dis- 

 tricts, such as we find in the Highlands of 

 Scotland and similar regions, where reclama- 

 tion, in the usual sense of the term, is an 

 utter impossibility. These may, indeed, be 

 improved to a considerable extent by drain- 

 ing, which has been done with great eff'ect in 

 a vast number of cases, and some ameliora- 

 tion may also be effected in the climate 

 through the medium of extensive plantations, 



but beyond these points the improvement of 

 such tracts of land cannot, for the most part, 

 proceed. Yet these help to swell the total 

 "waste" acreage of the kingdom, although 

 the heath - covered acres of the High- 

 lands cannot be so designated, while such 

 maintain thousands of valuable sheep — 

 and we have occasionally read and heard 

 some very specious but very fallacious argu- 

 ments on increasing the home supply of 

 food, founded, apparently, on the supposi- 

 tion that it is possible to grow turnips on 

 Ben Nevis and Avheat on Snowdon. Such 

 reasoning, or rather such assertions, are not 

 merely useless but mischievous, especially 

 when employed to excite the passions of those 

 who are ignorant of the real merits of the 

 case, but who feel the pressure upon their 

 energies and resources arising from the neces- 

 sity of providing, with limited earnings, the 

 daily bread required by their families. When 

 we find the " unreclaimed" land in the kingdom 

 estimated at from 30,000,000 to 38,000,000 of 

 acres, we must always be prepared to make 

 a large deduction on account of those dis- 

 tricts which are irreclaimable in a culturable 

 sense. Still, with all the deductions we can 

 make, there is unquestionably a considerable 

 margin left, which may profitably be rendered 

 more productive than it can be in its natural 

 state, and, therefore, the reclamation of waste 

 land is a subject which possesses features of 

 much interest to the owners of such land, to 

 farmers generally, and to the community. 



