of the motives which deter and the difficulties which beset all improvers and benefactors of the country :

"You would not then (I asked) fear to buy more land in Ireland?" "Mere political fears (he answered) would not deter me, if I thought the investment sufficiently profitable. But the profit must be very great, for profit is the only motive for buying land here. In England one may wish to live among one's tenants, to be useful to them, to enjoy the rank and position of a proprietor. These motives do not exist in Ireland, except in the case of a purchase on a very large scale. If I were to buy an estate of 5001. or 600l. a-year in Ireland, I could not reside on it. I should find no society; I should be hated by my tenants, calumniated by the priest, and perhaps expose my wife and children to danger if ever I went out with them. Such at least would be my fate, unless I consented to let my tenants have their own way, mismanage and subdivide the land, and multiply into a swarm of wretched prolétaires.

"There are three ways (he continued) of dealing with land in Ireland. One is the laisser aller system: to take to the old rents, submit to the old arrears, and leave the tenants to themselves; it ruins the property, and it degrades the people, but it is the only popular system. Another is to exact as large rents as you can, and require them to be punctually paid; but, subject thereto, to allow the people to treat the land as they like. This conduct is not popular : but it is tolerated. In fact, it is expedient. The third course is to stimulate the tenants by exacting the full value of the land, but to return to the soil a large portion of those rents in the form of roadmaking, main-drainage, lime-burning, consolidation of farms, introduction of good breeding-stock; in short, to be an improver.

"This is not tolerated. It may be done by an active agent, well acquainted with the country and the people, who knows how far he can go in each particular case, and what are the precautions to be taken. Even to him it is a service of danger; but it is a danger which he foresaw when he adopted that profession, and he runs the risk. I do not think that a stranger to the country, still less an Englishman, could do it; and I am sure that the profit would not be worth the risk. If I were a purchaser, therefore, I should be an absentee. And then the question would arise, whether the profit or the investment was such as to tempt me to become the owner of an estate in which I must perform the duties of a landlord by deputy."' -Journal of 1858.

Mr. Senior and his interlocutors treat of several other subjects, which want of space compels us to omit,―of the absolute necessity of equality before the law of the two religions and their adherents as a condition of harmony and a dictate of justice; of the interior working of the national system of education, and the systematic attempts made to overthrow it; of the Lord Lieutenancy, which all agree in wishing to abolish; of the constabulary,

stabulary, which nearly all join in condemning as utterly inefficient for the detection or prevention of crime, though excellent for suppressing riot and rebellion; of agrarian assassination, the mode of guarding against it, and the trivial motives for which, and the levity of temper in which, it is undertaken. The work

as a whole will enable England to understand Ireland as she has never done before, and will show us how much hitherto we have been alike legislating, sympathising, and declaiming in the dark. The general impressions and conclusions that can scarcely fail to be left by the perusal are indisputably the correct ones; that the Irish are a peculiar people, not zealous of good works,' and that it is idle to speak of them or deal with them as a mere collection of ordinary or abstract human beings; that they are not only a singular race, widely different from ourselves, and endowed with curious characteristics of marked saliency and persistence, but in an utterly distinct phase and grade of civilisation; that in consequence it is a mistake, and a fatal one, to fancy that they can be governed in the same way, or by quite the same motives, or under quite the same laws and institutions as the Scotch or English; that they are full of qualities and capacities which it is deplorable to see so misunderstood, wasted and mismanaged as they have been, and yet that, till both their admirers and their detractors study and comprehend them more fully than they have hitherto done, waste and mismanagement will go on; and, finally, that the worst remedy that could be applied to Irish wants and woes is that which is the favourite one just now, viz., to let the Irish have their way, simply because it is their way.

6

"I was standing one day on the paddle-box of a steamer, near Melbourne, and was struck by the voice of a man near me. • You are a Clare man?' I said.-'Sure I am,' he answered.-' Do you know the hill of Kilmadee?'--'I ought to know it,' he replied, for I spent the coldest night that I ever passed on its side.'- Sheep-stealing?' I asked.- Guess again,' he answered.- How can I guess,' I said, 'what such a vagabond as you were about? Perhaps it was poaching?''No,' he said, ' at least not for birds. I was watching to shoot Colonel N. What had he done to you?' I asked.-'Nothing whatever,' he answered, nor do I justly know what he had done to anybody else; but there was a talk of his having emigrated some people, and drowned them on their passage. I never heard the rights of it, but we drew lots who should shoot him, and the lot fell on me. But he did not come that night, and he did not come another night when we expected him; so I fancied that somebody must have split, and got out of the country.'-'You must be very glad,' I said, 'to have escaped such a sin? Faith,' he answered, 'It was not the sin that I cared for, but the fear of being split upon.'"-Journal, 1862.

Ireland,

Ireland, though so passionately wedded to the past, has no golden age there to look back upon; the things that her sons most cherish because they belong to the old times, are just the things most fatal to progress and to peace; her hopes lie in that gradual change of ideas which comes with instruction, with guidance, and with intercourse, under the beneficent control of just but inflexible and cogent laws; her golden age lies in the future. But that there are elements in the Irish character and resources in the Irish soil which, if dealt with in a spirit of intelligence, sagacity, and firmness, might render Ireland the gem of our dominions we cannot doubt, any more than that hitherto English philanthropists and Irish patriots have by their rival wrong-headedness combined indefinitely to retard the advent of that happier day.

ART.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. Royal Commission on Railways. Report of the Commissioners, with Minutes of Evidence taken before the Commissioners. 1867.

2. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inspect the Accounts and examine the Works of Railways in Ireland, made by the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury. 1868. 3. Railway Traffic Returns, 1866. Parliamentary Paper, No. 516. Session 1867.

W ITHIN the life of a generation railways have become adopted as the principal means of internal communication in all civilised countries. Not quite forty years have elapsed since the first locomotive line was opened for the conveyance of goods and passengers between Liverpool and Manchester; and since then an amount of capital has been expended on the construction of railways in Great Britain alone, amounting to more than half the National Debt.

When the committee of Liverpool merchants first went to Parliament in 1825, and asked permission to make a railroad for the purpose of procuring a more expeditious mode of conveyance between the towns of Liverpool and Manchester,' *the principal object contemplated by them was the carriage of merchandise, more particularly of corn, cotton, and timber. The conveyance of passengers by railway was as yet scarcely dreamt of. It was thought too hazardous to travel in the wake of an 'explosive machine,' as the locomotive was then described to be; and the carriage of passengers, therefore, formed no part of the parliamentary case.

Forty years ago, the canals furnished the principal means for the conveyance of heavy merchandise inland. Though there were three of such water routes between Liverpool and Manchester, and they were sometimes so overcrowded with traffic that it took a month to get the cotton forwarded from the seaport to the manufacturing towns in the interior, yet the

* Case of the promoters of the Bill, Session 1825. Vol. 125.- No. 250.

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whole

whole amount of merchandise passing between Liverpool and Manchester did not amount to more than about 1200 tons a day. The carriage, also, was dear, averaging about 18s. a ton; though it was not on the ground of expense that the merchants and manufacturers complained, but of the obstructions to trade occasioned by delays in the transit of the raw material on the one hand, and of manufactured commodities on the other.

The first application for the Bill failed, but the second succeeded; and permission was at length given to the Liverpool and Manchester men to expend about 820,000l. in constructing a railway between the two towns. It was opened in 1830, and the results of the working fully justified the anticipations of its projectors. During the first six months, 42,697 tons of merchandise were carried over the line, principally between Liverpool and Manchester, at an average cost of 10s. 3d. a ton, of which, however, only 2s. 8d. per ton was profit, the difference of 7s. 7d. being absorbed by working expenses. But with greater experience and increased traffic, the working of the line was gradually improved and economised.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway did not long remain a detached and independent line of communication. Its immediate and decisive success was followed by the extension of railways in all directions at home, and, shortly after, by their construction in Belgium and the United States. The original Liverpool and Manchester line of about thirty miles became connected by other milways with every town of importance in Britain, until now it forms part of a network of lines, the property of one company, nearly fourteen hundred miles in extent, representing a capital invested in railway works and plant of about fifty millions sterling.

The effects of the construction and working of railways on the population and industry of the district in which they were first tried, have been of a very remarkable character. They have been followed by the most extraordinary development of trade and manufactures all over South Lancashire that has probably ever been known. The population of Liverpool has increased from 164,000 in 1824, to more than half-a-million in 1868, while that of Manchester has kept nearly equal pace. The tonnage of Liverpool inwards and outwards during the same time has been more than quadrupled. Its foreign merchandise traffic far surpasses that of every other British port, being nearly double that of London, and exceeding that of all the other ports of England combined.

The original Liverpool and Manchester Railway being found inadequate for the accommodation of the enormous traffic inland,

new