Past and Present State of A(/riciiliiire in Ireland. 430 
the population is sjreatest. The question may naturally here be 
asked — How can this be accounted for? The answer is plain. 
The misery is occasioned not by the excess of the population in 
proportion to the capabilities of the soil, but to the deficiency of 
employment. 
There is no doctrine upon which political economists are more 
agreed than that all the wealth of the world results from the 
labour of man ; and, if so, how is a country to be enriched by ex- 
porting: the labourer ? So far, therefore, from its bein^; the in- 
terest of the country that Government should expend its revenues 
to encourage the export of the population, the rationale of the 
tiling seems to point to a different course, and sug-gest that its 
funds should be employed and its energies exerted to find em- 
ployment at home ; and instead of cultivating the wastes of other 
countries, to cultivate the wastes of our own. But to return from 
this digression, into which I have been inadvertently led, to the 
subject in hand — the first public efi'ort made to excite a spirit of 
agricultural improvement seems to have been the establishment of 
the Farming Society of Ireland, which gave rise to great expecta- 
tions, and certainly was productive of some good in improving the 
breed of stock, particularly swine, but upon the whole proved a 
failure ; and the agriculture of Ireland, such as Mr. Young has 
described it, such it has remained, with very little amendment, 
until within a few years of the present time. It is true that 
in the neighbourhood of towns the proximity of the market, the 
abundance of manure, and the greater extent of capital, has led to 
a greater outlay upon land, and a consequent improvement in its 
general condition and management, whilst the wants of an in- 
creasing population, and the high prices of agricultural produce 
during the war, have combined in the country districts to bring 
more land into cultivation, and the produce of the soil has been 
thereby greatly increased ; but, nevertheless, little improvement 
lias been made until lately in the mode of cultivation, however 
mi\fh the surface under the plough may have been extended : 
still the augmented produce from new land has been an addition to 
the riches of the country, and the additional employment from in- 
creased cultivation has ameliorated the condition of the labourer 
by creating a greater demand for his labour. Such was the state 
of things at the peace of ISI.*! ; soon after this the prices of all 
kinds of agricultural produce began to fall to such an extent that 
the farmers were obliged to pay their rents out of their capitals; 
and this being a source very easily exhausted, the landed proprie- 
tors were in a very short space of time obliged to lower their 
rents, but in general their own necessities obliged them to do this 
with a sparing hand, still clinging to the idea that the existing de- 
pressions would prove but temporary ; contrary, howevei', to these 
