Book I. AGRICULTURE IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 137 



week. The best butter is made in Carlow; the worst in Limerick and Meath. 

 Generally speaking, the Irish are very clean in making this article ; and it is exported to 

 England, the East and West Indies, and Portugal. {Wakejield,i. 325., etseq.) The 

 art of salting butter, Chaptal observes, is better known in Ireland than in any other 

 country. (Chiniie appliguS a V agriculture.) The grazing of Ireland is not, as in 

 England, a part of the regular rotation of crops, but is carried on in a country exclusively 

 devoted to the breeding of cattle, like the highlands of Scotland. Great tracts of the 

 country also are devoted to the grazing of sheep. Roscommon, Galway, Clare, Limerick, 

 and Tipperary are the chief breeding counties for sheep ; and Galway, Clare, Roscommon, 

 Tipperary, and Meath, are the places where they are fattened. The sheep are of the 

 long-wooled kind, and very large : they are never kept in sheep-folds, and hardly ever 

 fed on turnips ; wliich is chiefly owing to the very limited demand for mutton among the 

 labouring people. [Ibid.i. 341.) 



830. The depressed slate of the agriculture of Ireland is considered as proceeding from 

 the depressed state of the people. The main cause of their sufferings is traced by most 

 writers (Youngs Dewar, Newenham, Wakefield y Curwen, &c.) to the redundancy of 

 population. In 1791, the population of the whole kingdom amounted to 4,200,000 per- 

 sons, and it increases at the rate of one forty-sixth part per annum ; or, in other words, 

 it doubles itself every forty-six years. As might be expected in a country where the 

 increase in the number of mankind has so far outstripped the progress of its wealth, and 

 the increase of its industry, the condition of the people is in every department marked by 

 extreme indigence. {^Dewar, 91 ; Young, ii. 123.) The houses in which they dwell, 

 the furniture in their interior, their clothing, food, and general way of life, all equally 

 indicate the poverty of the country. The dress of the people is so wretched, that, to 

 a person who has not visited the country, it is almost inconceivable. The Irish poor, 

 indeed, have no conception of the comforts of life ; and if they felt their full value, they 

 could not afford them, for though necessaries are cheap, conveniences of all sorts are very 

 dear. 



831. But while the Irish poor are in general destitute of all the accommodations, they 

 hardly ever, except in years of extraordinary distress, know what it is to want the absolute 

 necessaries of life. The unsparing meal of potatoes, at which the beggar, the pig, the 

 dog, the poultry, and the children, seem equally welcome,^ seldom fails the Irish 

 laborer. 



832. Hence the laziness of the lower Irish. Limited as their wants are to the mere sup- 

 port of animal life, they do not engage in labor with that persevering industry which 

 artificial desires inspire ; and the mode in which they are often paid, that is, the giving 

 them a piece of potatoe land by the year, at once furnishes the means of subsistence, and 

 takes away every stimulus to farther exertion. The farm-servants of the English or 

 Scotch farmers, who carry on agriculture upon the improved system, are constantly em- 

 ployed in some species of labor ; but after the potatoes of the Irish cottar are planted, 

 there is hardly any thing to be done about his little croft till the season of digging ar- 

 rives. During a great portion of the year he is doomed to idleness, and the habits he 

 acquires during the long'periods of almost total inaction, are too strong to be overcome 

 when he is transferred to a more regular occupation. Such is the condition of the 

 laboring classes. 



833. Ireland exhibits an assemblage of the most contradictory circumstances. It is a 

 country in which, under the most distressing circumstances, population has advanced 

 with the most rapid pace, in which cultivation has advanced without wealth, and education 

 without diffusing knowledge ; where the peasantry are more depressed, and yet can ob- 

 tain subsistence with greater facility, than in any other country of Europe. Their 

 miserable condition will not appear surprising when the numerous oppressions to which 

 they are subject are taken into consideration. 



834. In the foremost rank of their many grievances, the general prevalence of middle- 

 men must be placed. It is difficult to estimate the extent of the misery which the system 

 of letting and subletting land has brought upon the Irish cultivators. Middlemen have, 

 in every country, been the inseparable attendants of absent proprietors : and in such a 

 country as Ireland, where there are numbers of disaffected persons in every quarter, the 

 vigilant eye of a superior inspector is more particularly required. 



S35. The system of under-letting lands often proves a great evil in Ireland. By the law of England, the 

 landlord is entitled to distrain for payment of rent, not only the stocking which belongs to his immediate 

 tenant, but the crop or stocking of a subtenant; on the principle, that whatever grows on the soil ought 

 to be a security to the landlord for his rent ; and in Scotland the same rule holds where the landlord has 

 not authorized the subtack ; but if he has, the subtenant is free when he has paid to the principal tenant. 

 There is little hardship in such a rule in England, where the practice of subletting is, generally speaking, 

 rare ; but when applied to Ireland, where middlemen are universal, it becomes the source of infinite in- 

 justice ; for the cultivator being liable to have his crop and stocking distrained on account of the tenant 

 from whom he holds, and there being often many tenants interposed between him and the landlord, he 

 is thus perpetually liable to be distrained for arrears not his own. The tenant, in a word, can never be 

 secure, though he has faithfully {wid his rent to his immediate superior ; because he is still liable to have 

 every thing which he has in the world swept off" by an execution for arrears due by any of the many lease- 



