whose cause he voiced, but also from the country gentleman's enthusiasm for agriculture and the land, and the Irish landlord's appreciation of the advantages of small spade cultivation. His remedy for the evils of the factory system, as shown in the northern towns, had persistently been to bring the people back to the land. Against the horrors of Manchester and Leeds, as he knew them, he set up the ideal of the Irish land system, not as it was, but as it might be, if the huge rents drawn from the toiling colliers were to be diverted to the benefit of the cultivating class and to buying up fresh estates to be divided into small farms. So early as 1841 he had beguiled his imprisonment in York Castle by writing a series of Letters to Irish Landlords, which must have afforded strange reading to the operatives who devoured the Northern Star.[1] In them he ingenuously exposed to the men of his own class his anxiety to preserve the estates of the landlords from the grasp of the manufacturers, who would soon, he was convinced, use the political monopoly, conferred on them by the Reform Act of 1832, to lay hands upon the landed property of the country gentry. He advised the Irish landlords to provide against this danger by abandoning the system of large farming and high rents, and by allocating a sufficient portion of their estates to peasant holdings. To get the peasant to work zealously at the intensive cultivation of his little plot, he must have security and freedom; but so great are the virtues of the system that the prosperous and active cottier can not only earn a good living but pay a high rent, provided that this rent is yielded in corn actually grown, and not in fixed money payments. If this system is good for Ireland, it is equally good for Britain. Within twenty years of its general adoption twenty million landholding peasants, entrenched on the soil and living in contentment and comfort, tempered only by the idyllic simplicity of happy village life, will be an army which will save Ireland and Britain from the domination of cotton-spinners and iron-masters, and give the land and the gentry their true place in controlling the destinies of a free nation. It is a strange phase of a novel New Englandism; a new physiocracy wherein the land yields its produit net for the benefit of the community.
Between 1841 and 1843 the same note is repeatedly struck with the difference in tone required for an audience of opera-
- ↑ They appeared in the Northern Star between July 10 (No. 1) and August 7 (No. 5), 1841.
