Want of Gradation in Irish Society. 205 



number of them out of employ. An actual 

 advance in the wages of labor can alone afford 

 them relief; and were it not that the people of 

 Ireland are content to exist on potatoes, this 

 must have been conceded on the land becom- 

 ing trebled in its value, and a rise in the same 

 proportion, in the rest of the immediate re- 

 quisites of their existence. 



A want of gradation in the scale of society 

 the existence of the high and the low the rich 

 and the poor only, in any great community, 

 must be fatal to its general interests, and de- 

 structive of the happiness of the individuals of 

 which it is composed. Those who with perfect 

 unconcern are constantly looking down from 

 the eminence of wealth, misconceive the size of 

 the objects beneath them, which poverty has 

 depressed, while those who are looking up with 

 painful solicitude perceive indistinctly what is 

 too far elevated for their dispassionate com- 

 prehension ; a want of estimation in one class 

 begets a total indifference, if not a smothered 

 aversion, in the other. This is a most dan- 

 gerous suppression of feeling, a suffocated vol- 

 cano, that wants but a spark to operate its 

 eruption. Yet is it not such a calamity as to 

 be without its preventitive and antidote sti* 



