Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/33

 agriculture. The tenant having 110 vote, the landlord's sole object was to obtain a good rent, and have his land improved. Hence leases for nineteen, twenty-one, or more years; hence the security of the tenant during the period of his lease; hence his intelligence, his skill, and his quickness in turning every circumstance to account; so that, if, at the end of his lease, a new tenant were preferred to him, he might be amply recompensed for his outlay.

The case of Ireland has been lamentably different. The small farmer, for centuries past, having no resource in Cork or Kilkenny similar to that of the English agricultural population in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and the Lancashire and Yorkshire towns, sought his livelihood from the land alone. If he obtained a lease, he divided his farm among his sons and sons-in-law, his brothers and brothers-in-law. This practice no doubt tended neither to the improvement of the land, nor to the comfortable and respectable position of the tenants. But the English legislators, whose ancestors had shut him out from the woollen manufacture, from trade to the East and West Indies, and even from the exportation of cattle to England, and thus cut off all inducement to improve his condition by learning to weave cloth, or engage in commerce, have no right to blame him if jealousy and injustice have produced idleness and improvidence.

There was another source of evil for the tenantry of Ireland the political franchises, instead of being too restricted as in Scotland, were too far extended.

Hence, after the admission of Roman Catholics to