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the score of cleaner fields, and of richer manure, arising from a more generous system of feeding to the beasts: and we would also remark that the system of growing two similar crops in succession on the same land is absolutely unknown there.
Though we write from the landlord point of view, we feel no pang of envy of our landlord friends in England with their £2 10s per acre—a price which would pay us right well here even if we did all the building, draining, and so forth for our tenants. But we do feel a pang of regret at the thought that, from whatever cause, so many of our Irish small farmers, in place of being better of with their moderate rents, are worse off; and^ in many respects stand at a lower level of civilization than their fellows in England. The traveller in the present day, when he turns to the pages of Fyne's Morrison's Itinerary," written two centuries and a-half ago, cannot fail to be struck with the fact, that—being then, according to his account, far in arrear of their neighbours—the Irish people have not since made that effort which is requisite to make up the lee way which they have lost.
Earnestly anxious though we are to see every reasonable security given to the Irish tenant-farmer, so that he may have every possible inducement to improve his farm and improve his own position we are as earnestly convinced that in many an individual case, and in many a wide-spread district, such security will be but the mere A B C of national progress. Other means are needed to reform the whole habits of a people. Can Mr. Bright solve this problem?
V.
HOPE FOE IRELAND!
"We Northerns boast ourselves rather vauntingly of our superiority over the Southerns in point of civilization and advancement, but the boast is one we have little right to make. Some people talk of the "Protestant North," some of the "tenant-right system" in the North, some of the admixture of English or Scottish blood in the North; and all these accidents come in in their turn for the credit of Northern prosperity. But, meanwhile, there arises the question:—Is the North so much more prosperous?—Is it, on the whole, more prosperous at all than the Southern portion of this island?
There is good farming in the North, there is good farming in the South; there is bad farming and squalid poverty in^ the South, there is bad farming and squalid poverty in the North
