Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/9

 PREFACE.

The greater portion of the contents of the following pages, appeared originally in the form of letters to the Times.

Those letters were written in the hopes of inducing my fellow-countrymen to pause, before adopting without further investigation a theory with regard to Irish emigration and what has been called "the exterminating policy of Irish Landlords," which, after having been for years industriously propagated in Ireland, had at last received the imprimatur of one or two influential Members of Parliament.

But though hastily committed to paper, the views I thus submitted to the public were the result of diligent enquiry, and long-continued observation of the changing phases of our national existence. Nothing but an uncontrollable conviction of the injustice of the accusations with which the landed proprietors of Ireland are assailed, and of the gross incorrectness of the data on which those accusations are founded, would have induced me to embark in so uncongenial a controversy,—my natural repugnance to which