Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/35

32 successful revolutions, by which dynasties have been overthrown, whole races of landowners summarily dispossessed, not of their wastes only, but of their entire estates; and the many made proprietors—happy and comfortable proprietors—of the soil, instead of the few. Will you wait for some similar convulsion in Ireland before you appropriate the lands of the island—the people's farm— to the use of the people?

The measure I advise is no new and startling proposal. It is nearly the same which Mr. Brownlow recommended to Parliament in 1828, and your own Poor Inquiry Commissioners in 1836, The latter expressly recommended "a Commission empowered to make a survey, valuation, and partition of the waste lands of Ireland." I cannot conclude better than in their own words, embodying the very same arguments I have been urging upon you:—

"When the immense importance of bringing into a productive state five millions of acres, now lying waste, is considered, it cannot but be a subject of regret and surprise that no greater progress in this undertaking has as yet been made. If this work can be accomplished, not only would it afford a transitory, but a permanent demand for productive labour, accompanied by a corresponding rise of wages and improvement in the condition of the poor; opportunities would also be afforded for the settlement of the peasantry, now superabundant in