Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/30

27 on no light rumours, but because, even last session, after you had publicly proclaimed your intention of bringing forward a measure of the kind, you were compelled by their opposition to renounce it. It seems that the Poor-law alone was as much as that interest could be brought to swallow on compulsion in one year. Thus the favourable opportunity for commencing on a large scale the reclamation of the Irish wastes, which was afforded by the necessity of expending several millions of public money in the employment of Irish labour, has been lost! In lieu of this the people were demoralized by a kind of employment of doubtful utility, to say the least, which they knew to be adopted only as a sort of roll-call, not for its promise of future advantage. And the extent of cultivated land, instead of being increased to meet the necessity of a larger production of grain to supply the deficiency of the potato, was considerably reduced by the quantity spoiled by the new roads! English capital has been sunk on works of so little value to Ireland, that the very landed proprietors who selected them refuse, on the ground of their utter worthlessness, to repay any portion of the expenditure I And the Irish capital, that would have been so eagerly drawn from its hiding-places to cultivate the reclaimed lands, has been driven across the Atlantic.

And, now I ask you if this year likewise a similar course is to be pursued? Is the infatuated resistance of the legal owners of millions of acres of