Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/42

39 in the conviction that any surplus he could by any effort produce, beyond the barest necessaries of subsistence, would go to his landlord, not to him*' self.

Hence the wretched cultivation of the greater part of Ireland. Hence the almost total want of farm-buildings. Hence the miserable hovels, in which the farmer's family and bestial stock often herd together. Hence, also» the largest proportion of agrarian outrages, which are sanctioned by the sympathy of the great bulk of the tenantry, as maintaining that system of intimidation which they consider necessary to protect them (in the absence of any legal security) in the occupation of the poor tenement and meagre livelihood they do possess.

It is an idle dream to suppose that this state of things can be put an end to, except by giving to the peasant farmers of Ireland—those who have possession of the land, and from whom it is hopeless to expect to get it away—however small their holdings, or seemingly deficient their means of improved cultivation, that {{sc|motive]} to industry which consists in the certainty of being allowed to enjoy its fruits. Without this, vain will be the model farms, and agricultural societies, or lectures from Mr. Huxtable or Mr. Blacker themselves. Vain even your alternate lectures and loans to landlords, or the stimulus of the poor-rate,—unless the occupiers of the soil are raised from that slough of despond in which they now waste their existence, by the legal