MY DEAR

THIS

HIS is St. Patrick's day, a festival here on which the light hearted and much-enduring Irish drown their shamrocks and their cares in whiskey. Extremes, we are told, meet; thus, as the fine ladies and gentlemen in London take laudanum aud Curaçoa, so do the wretched Irish, whiskey. But these fine ladies and gentlemen upbraid the Irish for their dirt and their drunkenness; and even those who are of a better order seem to consider the Irish as more prone than other races of men to the peculiar vices that misery engenders on the half civilized. I am ready to admit that they are:-the best natures, when perverted, become the worst. This unfortunate country may present an unexampled picture of discord, of recklessness-even of crime; but it undoubtedly does present one of unexampled misery. For myself, however, I am apt to think, paradoxical as it may appear after admitting what I have done, that it also presents more virtue than any other country ever exhibited under circumstances equally deplorable. Other portions of the globe might, perhaps, be pointed out where there exists equal or even greater poverty, with all its attendant sufferings; but none, I think, where the people are equally civilized and equally destitute-and this adds the barb to the sting of misery. Pray observe, I mean only to express that the Irish, however low in the scale of civilization, are exposed to greater misery and poverty than any other people at the same degree of social advance

ment.

It is not my intention to demand why this is the case, nor to enter into any political argument upon the subject; but I am sure that it is sufficient to justify my opinion that they suffer more than any other nation;

The

B- —, 17th March, 1828. and that, suffering more, whatever be the terrible outrages that take place, and the continued disturbed condition of the country, they still endure with a degree of patience and virtue that you in England can form little idea of. The character of the people has been the produce of centuries of discord and injustice. The English found Ireland at war within herself, torn by internal faction; and they have kept her so. I do not intend to blame either party, far less to take the usual course of attributing all the existing evil to one side: my only desire is to draw your attention to the real sufferings of Ireland. Its political evils may partly cause them; but I am sure there are measures which both parties might unite in promoting, that, even without touching upou Emancipation, would lead to some arrangement under which the population might obtain employment and food. Scotch and English are beginning to exclaim that their labouring population will be degraded in their habits, and reduced to a level with the Irish, by the immense numbers that flock over from this country, and undersell their industry. This ought to give some notion of what must be the state of Ireland. Mr. Wilmot Horton proposes emigration; and justly says, that even tranquillity would not, in any great degree, bring over to Ireland sufficient English capital to occupy the superabundant multitude of living souls. Machinery is a cheaper workman than Irishman can prove ;-and the collieries present the natural site for the iron and hardware works, which give employment to such a multitude of hands in England. But whatever may be the difficulties of the case, it is one that imperatively demands to be investigated. Politicians, and political economists are, I fear, too

even the

prone to argue with something of the temper of the Cardinal Mazarin, who, when a poor man, appealing to him, said, "Sir, I must exist," is reported to have replied, that he did not see any necessity that he should. Society depends upon the principle that all shall live. I sicken when I listen to the owners of thousands making speeches upon the impropriety of early marriages, and the multiplication of the poor in Ireland, as though, instead of a fertile land, the country was a besieged town, where policy might propose some scheme "to vent their musty superfluity." Prudence and humauity may wish to restrain the birth of beggars-but the North American savage, who is condemned to a life of misery by her stronger husband, whose toils and privations are such as often to induce her to put to death her female offspring, that they may not live to endure the hardships of her lot, goes only a short step far ther than these legislators, who, instead of removing the causes of poverty, sternly denounce it as the just and necessary consequence of youthful unions and, unmindful of the strongest impulses and the tenderest feelings of the heart, desire the poor to remain unwedded till the brightest season of life has passed away. I doubt if, in every view of the question, they are not mistaken; and, I believe, the only effect their doctrine produces is that of hardening the hearts of the rich, and turning men's thoughts from devising means for alleviating that which they prefer declaring irremediable. I believe there has not been one unit the less in the increasing number of our population, for all that Mr. Malthus and his followers have written.

I live within nineteen miles of Dublin, and personally know nothing of the most wretched parts of Ireland; yet what I see here you would

You

scarcely credit. This is quite a corn district, which, of course, is favourable in affording employment; the neighbouring fishing towns, although they have but few boats in comparison to what you might suppose their proximity to the Dublin market would support, still maintain a considerable number of families, so that anything I can relate to you will, in fact, convey no sample of what really is the degree of suffering poverty in Ireland. I believe some political economists say that the Roman Catholic religion is productive of mendicity; whether it is so or not I shall not examine; but it most undoubtedly fosters a degree of charity which is equally striking as the want which it relieves. I am told nearly all the families of the men who go to England and Scotland for the harvest, live, during the absence of their husbands and fathers, by begging-and I can well credit it from what I see here. will meet a woman with scarcely any other clothes than a patched and ragged cloak, followed by three or four children-generally, indeed, with one of them on her back-a tin kettle and a small sack carried by the biggest ;-she tells you her hus band "is gone to look work; she has tired out her own people; or she has none to look to her; and she is walking the world, begging her bit, for God's sake ;' and she will often return at night to the tempora ry lodging she has secured, with her sack full of potatoes, which may have been collected from the small farmers, or by twos and threes at the houses of the poorest inhabitants. I know several widows who have, for a constancy, entirely existed, toget her with their children, on the benevolence of their neighbours. "Looking their bit," is a regular phrase to denote this way of living. But imagine what it is!—the scanty meal of cold potatoes, or the wretch

ed fire, which is made of "sprigs," (that is, bits of furze pulled from the few fences that offer even that,) and morsels of manure, which have been dried to supply the fuel necessary to boil the small refuse potatoes which they glean, if I may so term it, from the general digging of the neighbouring crops! Think of such a family, on a winter's day, wandering along the country with not always the degree of covering necessary for decency, never that sufficient for warmth ;-look at the bare legs, mottled blue with cold, and scarred with burns which they have scarcely felt, when, in their eagerness to profit by the permission to warm themselves, they have almost put their limbs into the fire! The mother deploring the existence of her children, and looking with double sadness at the inclemency of a day of storm, when they must remain within their cabin, destitute both of food and warmth their bed, on which they try to sleep away some of the hours of misery, a heap of worn-out straw, without other covering than the tattered cloak, a piece of an old sack, or, may be, the remains of a blanket, which you would think too vile a rag to hang out amongst your peas as a scarecrow! This is no fancy-drawn picture-I know several families equally destitute.

We have heard much of late of the evils of sub-letting, and a bill, I believe, is in force to remedy some of them. It has not fallen within my means generally to investigate the tenures on which the poor inhabitants hold their mud cabins; for, where I cannot relieve, I shrink from questioning the poor-their wretchedness I respect. But I know the great majority tell me they "live under a poor man ;" they often give, as rent, the heap of manure which they have collected and made with a diligence and success that you English could not comprehend might be achieved, where the proprietor of this source of profit possesses no animals but a few hens, or perhaps a pig. This dunghill, which, there37 ATHENEUM, VOL. 9, 2d series.

fore, you need not wonder is placed at their door, for it is their riches, will frequently procure them land on which to set potatoes, that will chiefly support them through the year. Farmers give their worn-out quarter or half-quarter of an acre of land to those who can manure it; and if, by labour and the sale of the pig, the rent of the cabin has been paid, and enough potatoes procured for seed, the man is in a thriving state, and his family, though, in the spring of the year, they may have subsisted on one meal a day, and are never halfclad, may still be considered very well off.

The scantiness or abundance of the potatoe crop is the chief criterion of the degree of starvation which is to be the lot of the majority. The farmers give in proportion; and the poor who have them of their own, or who purchase them, equally depend for comfortable subsistence on their abundance. In years where they have failed, I have known families, of which the father enjoys constant employment every day in the year, reduced to one meal in the twenty-four hours. What, then, is the degree of starvation of those who in scanty seasons depend on charity? Last spring, though there had not been an absolute failure of potatoes, they were very dear; and I will give you one instance of the sufferings endured by a family consisting of a man, his wife, and five children, the eldest a girl about twelve years old. The man, whose name is Donough, usually works with a farmer who feeds him, and gives him sevenpence a day; but in the scarcest part of the spring, the farmer diminished his number of labourers, and this poor man could find no employment. He left home to seek for work, and at the end of three weeks returned scarcely able, through weakness from want of food, to crawl to his door. His wife was not in a much better condition;-they begged from the neighbours, but what they got was only sufficient to preserve them from actual famine ;-they constantly pass

ed two days without food-their children would, as she expressed it to me, "get megrims in their heads through emptiness, and then they would fall down on the floor, and sleep-but they would groan in their sleep, and their father would cry out, 'Well, thank God, they will die, and be out of their pain before morning, and I shall not hear those heartbreaking moans any longer."" The father could scarcely endure his home where he witnessed such things. What did the mother feel? She regretted that she was a wife and mother, and all the fond overflowing warm feelings of nature, the best emotions of the heart, were turned to bitterness and despair ;-she wished to stand alone in the world, she hugged her infants in agony, and prayed God would take them! But they lived through their sufferings. Summer came, and with it employment; hay-making, gleaning, and, above all, the potatoes. They lived through their sufferings, to endure them probably again, or, if not equal misery, something very nearly approaching to it. At this moment, I am supporting a family where the father is in the ague, and the wife lying-in of her sixth child. You would think their cabin not good enough for a cow-shed ;-the bed the poor woman lies on is not as warm as the litter in your dog-kennel. Their landlord is a man who holds an acre and a half of ground, and finds it difficult enough to support his own family; yet he is very patient for their rent, a pound a year, which I cannot imagine how they ever pay. You would scarcely take this woman to belong to the United Kingdom; her hair hangs in the jagged locks which you see represented in prints of, the Esquimaux women-filth begrimes her, till her naturally fair complexion is imperceptible-her large blue eyes look wild and haggard with misery-her tone is that of hopelessness. You cannot imagine the dead sad tone of voice which accompanies this state of destitution.

The women suffer far more than the men; they are worse clad, though exposed equally to the hardships of the weather; for, if they do not la bour for the farmer, they are employed in collecting fuel—in making up the heap of dung-in begging. And the toil of bringing up their children adds to their physical suffering, as much as to their moral: they generally suckle their children for upwards of two years. I have never met any human beings that moved my compassion so much as the female peasantry of this country; their appearance often excites disgust; nor can you wonder that misery should be careless of arranging rags that no care could make decent. Cold and wretchedness must produce dirt and neglect; their features quickly ac quire the sharp hard lines of habitual suffering, their persons all the tokens of squalor, their characters the recklessness of despair. Yet have they warmer feelings of relationship than any other people. I have found what might even be termed senti. mental delicacy of feeling, amongst those who have only not been reduced to the last stage of living by "begging their bit." I have known the wife hide her illness and suffering from her husband, “ that he might not fret," or spend his money in trying to get her bread, when she was unable to swallow potatoes. I have known them give up the likelihood of permanent employment in a distant part of the country, in order to stay and watch the last years of their helpless parents-as my poor woman at Balrothery said to me," Sure I would not leave my mother, if the paving stones of the road were made of sil ver;" and I have seen an old miserable half blind hen cherished more than the "laying pullet" whose eggs were to purchase the only new clothing that was to cover the child,-I have seen this hen helped to her perch near the fire, because it had been the mother's hen-the last remaining token of the parent who had been buried ten years ago!

What must be the hearts of ped

internal condition of a country, leav ing individuals to take care of their own concerns. But, in my opinion of the poverty and misery of Ireland, it demands interference. The political grievances are rather symptoms than causes: they aggravate the malady no doubt, and demand instant attention-but, considered as partyquestions,-in which light they appear to me alone ever to be considered, they strike not at the root of the evil. I wish to call your attention to Ireland, as a humane and philosophical man, not as a political partisan of any school. I fear my letter is too tedious to propitiate you

but I know your good heart, and I assure you it would bleed if you saw what I daily witness.

ON N my arrival at Kioff* from Moscow, Count Miloradowitch,t the Governor-General of the province, received me with that hospitable politeness which so eminently distinguishes the Russian nation. He was that day to give a dinner, in honour of the Emperor's birth-day, which I was invited to attend.

At five o'clock, I proceeded to the Government palace. This is a fine residence, and at the period here referred to, it had been furnished in most elegant style by Count Miloradowitch. The gardens, which were beautifully laid out, were open as a promenade to the inhabitants of Kioff. The dinner presented a specimen of the Count's munificent taste, and there was profusion without confusion. I had the good for tune to be seated next to Madame

Aglaée Davidoff, (before her marriage, Mademoiselle de Grammont,) and I thus escaped the dulness which so frequently attends a dinner of ceremony. We conversed about her family, who were known to me, and the fate of her uncles, Counts Armand and Jules de Polignac, who then excited general interest. We soon became intimate. We were both young and far from our native country, and fond recollectious, common to us both, supplied the place of previous acquaintance.

Opposite to us, on the right hand of the Governor, there sat a young lady, whose beauty attracted my notice. The paleness of her interesting countenance was heightened by the contrast of her luxuriant dark hair, which descended in clustering ringlets on her neck. Her long eye