Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/22

19 be found masses of people in want of food, or of wages to purchase food."

But to all this there are objectors who oppose the doubt whether the reclamation of these wastes would really pay, and the doubt is rested on the very fact that they have not been reclaimed. "Private enterprise," it is said, "would already have effected their reclamation if it were profitable." And to private enterprise they would still leave the process of effecting it. Such seems to be the feeling of many, who on this plausible primâ facie objection refuse to listen to any proposal for the interference of the Legislature in the matter, and forgetful of the momentous importance of the subject, treat with scorn and ridicule the notion of cultivating Irish bogs!

Yet those same incredulous venters of bad jokes against this proposal, have probably often admired, as they were whirled over Chatmoss on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the magnificent crops of every kind of produce which are now yearly raised upon a black bog worse in its unreclaimed state than three-fourths of the Irish bogs.

Mr. Baines, writing from Barton Grange, in Lancashire, "a house standing in the midst of a tract of 2,000 acres of peat moss, within a few years past as wet and barren as any morass in Ireland, but now covered with luxuriant crops," estimates the sum expended in reclaiming the Lancashire piosses at about ten pounds per acre on the average