§ VI. (1.) But new lights have burst upon us on this important subject; the enlarged and philanthropic views of generations of the patriots and legislators of Ireland are all at once deemed "darkness visible;" books have been composed and lectures delivered, to prove that absenteeism is no evil whatsoever, and parliament itself has called forth and published this opinion. Let us, therefore, examine a little this strange position, which contradicts without the least ceremony the common sense and feelings of mankind, and is, most unhappily, at variance with the bitter experience of the country in question. I shall not contend the matter with a system which, though all head, has no heart, and "not Hercules himself could knock out its brains, for it has none;" but address myself to the plain sense of my readers.

Let us, in order to see this subject more clearly, present it as individually exemplified. Ireland is, strictly speaking, an agricultural country; even its linen manufacture, as fabricated from produce grown by the peasants on the patches they occupy, partakes, in this dreadful period of universal distress, was, on the faith of the representations which were made of its existence, seconded by personal applications, administered to their suffering and dying dependents, by these absentees. But I had just risen from the attentive perusal of Drs. Baker and Cheyne's history of that afflicting period; and whoever will follow me in that task will excuse me in having come to that conclusion. Candour, however, obliges me to say that it is not strictly correct. "In the calamitous summer of 1822," I find that "a subscription was made for the relief of the poor of a certain district, by the resident gentry, landowners, and clergy. Application was made to the absentee proprietors, who annually abstracted from that country £83,000. Their subscriptions altogether amounted to eighty-three pounds'!" I am perfectly willing to admit this interesting fact, while thus recording the evils of absenteeism.

1 Bishop of Limerick's Speech, p. 74. (June 10th, 1824.)

in some sort, of that character. Let us imagine, then, this agricultural population, as represented by a single farmer, under a single landlord, and that landlord an absentee; and not to confuse the subject by long and needless definitions about rent, value, &c., which add not a particle of practical information to the man that attends to them, let us suppose the farmer to be what was called a metayer, or, in other words, one who gives to the owner a certain proportion of the produce of his cultivation in kind, for the usufruct of the land he occupies; and this every farmer does, either directly (as is still the case in many parts of the continent, and almost universally throughout Italy,) or indirectly, when he pays to the landlord the estimated value of his share in money, having then to sell produce for that purpose, a far more convenient, though perhaps less precise, mode of adjusting their respective interests. I ought to have premised, that as the wants agricultural labour supplies are not the only necessities of human beings, especially as society advances in civilization; so it is wisely ordained that agricultural labour does not demand, nor can it employ, an entire population: a certain, and indeed a large proportion are left to answer other necessary demands, and pursue different avocations. Reverting then to the Irish farmer: he has a large family; his crime, according to the new school, and too often in the estimation of his landlord, who is positively so blinded by interest as not to see that it is to this very cause (the prolificness of human beings) that the increasing value of his product is solely owing. But let this pass. Part of the farmer's family remain totally idle,

or the whole partially so, and have to experience the penury and suffering which idleness inevitably entails, and for precisely this reason:-the landlord is an absentee, and is, for example, in Naples. His share of the produce (and we have seen how large a one it is in Ireland) is transmitted to him thither, at all events it leaves the island for that special purpose, the farmer having little or nothing else to send; and this is all that concerns the argument, which has not the least to do with the various exchanges or profits, to which his produce is subjected after it leaves his own shores, till, either in bulk or value, it reaches his landlord. Ireland, therefore, is not only deprived of the produce which its suffering population too often stands in absolute need of, but of that profitable labour which the consumption of it by the landlord in his own country would necessarily call into action. To the landlord it may, perhaps, appear "all the same," though I think this will admit of reasonable doubt in the upshot. He obtains by these remittances the services of the Neapolitan coachmaker, tailor, shoemaker, servant, or whatever assistance he may stand in need of; but who does not see that, if he stayed in the country from which his revenues are derived, part of the farmer's family would be his coachmaker, tailor, shoemaker, servant; in a word, be employed in rendering him all the assistance which wealth demands from labour, and for which labour is remunerated? Political economy pronounces this to be all one, or rather decides in favour of absenteeism; but common sense, confirmed by the melancholy experience of ages,

proves the difference to be that between a population comfortably sustained and well employed, and consequently advancing in prosperity and happiness, and one idle and wretched, always in want, and often on the verge of starvation, and sinking into still lower depths of misery and degradation.

Even were these absentees to return and become residents, still retaining their unnatural predilection for articles of foreign industry, that part of the revenues expended upon such would, I contend, be lost in great measure to such a country as Ireland, which, having little or nothing to export but provisions, with a half-fed and less than half-employed population, would be starved, as well as impoverished, just so far as this practice prevailed. The Dublin Society proved, by an exact calculation, that they might maintain twenty poor families for a whole year, with the quantity of beef and mutton which they exported for buying a lady's head-dress'. It may be true, perhaps, that as many families, though perhaps not quite so poor, were fed at Brussels by the importation of this cap; but on no imaginable ground can such a change be "all one". to the twenty poor Irish families; nor can political economy prove it to be so, on any other ground than that of a citizenship of the world, upon which principle I have heard, of late, many of the notions of that "science, falsely so called," boldly avowed and defended, and which, I begin to think, is the stultifera navis in which the whole school are embarked. If it be so, it is high time they should hoist their true co'Spirit of Legislation, p. 248.

lours they are not British; nor will Britain much longer harbour those who show her no preference, excepting where they have to be paid and victualled.

(2.) But further: if the modern notion concerning absenteeship is true as it regards Ireland, it is true as it respects all other countries: if it be true at all, it is true universally. Let us apply it then, for a moment, to Great Britain. Suppose the same rage for deserting the country were to prevail here that does there (it does indeed prevail to a certain degree, and is so far, I maintain, pernicious and productive of more of our national difficulties than many are aware of, or, knowing, will acknowledge); bearing in mind that the ownership of landed property, in almost all cases, practically resolves itself into the right of receiving annually a certain share of the produce of lands cultivated by others, it is plain that, if the landlords of Great Britain were to desert the island universally, it would not matter a jot, as it respects the point at issue, if such absent owners were instantly, one and all, metamorphosed into foreigners: the mere circumstance of their having been born and registered in this country cannot, surely, affect the question. If Ireland, then, is not impoverished by absenteeism, neither would England and Scotland; and, if expending the owner's share of the produce out of the country does not impoverish it, the united kingdom would not be a whit the

poorer, if every acre of its surface, and all under its surface, were the fee-simple of foreign landlords,— French, for instance,-never visiting this country, but expending their share of its products in giving employment and its remuneration to the inhabitants of