Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/18

15 acre cleared on the average by the transaction," in addition to an increase of permanent value equal to 7s. per acre. The expenditure on these and other permanent improvements of the estate is, in the opinion of Mr. Kennedy, certain to pay a profit of at least ten per cent, on an outlay of £5. per acre. And the result of what has been already done is that the same population which was formerly crowded on a few tracts of old arable land, in numbers far beyond what its produce could maintain, is now comfortably located, each man on his own conveniently-arranged farm. Actually a want of hands is now experienced for the cultivation of a district, half of whose inhabitants were previously idle through the greater part of the year from deficiency of employment!—(See Digest, p. 586, &c.)

I proceed next to the case of an entire county. I take the one which of all the counties of Ireland, is generally referred to as the most over-peopled, the most incapable of affording a maintenance to its population—the county of Mayo. Mayo obtained a shocking pre-eminence last year in the starvation of its inhabitants. It was from Mayo chiefly that Liverpool was invaded by hordes of fevered and famished outcasts. It was in Mayo that ejectments and civil bill processes, having clearance for their object, were most numerous. It is in Mayo of all Irish counties, that the population will be found to have suffered most from these combined causes, when the dreadful reckoning of last year's depo-