sometimes permanent, as old age, widowhood, or bodily infirmity: sometimes they are only temporary,as sickness, or want of employment. The following classes of persons, who constantly rely on begging for their subsistence, may be traced in the evidence on Vagrancy, recently published by the Irish Poor Com

mission:

1. Wandering beggars, who go from fair to fair, and stand at chapel and church doors, and other places of public resort. They are chiefly cripples, blind, maimed, deformed, men with sore legs, or other ailments calculated to excite compassion. These persons are clamorous and importunate, have regular set phrases, often are abusive, and expect alms to be given them in money. In some cases they are impostors, and they often practise deceptive means to excite compassion: their habits, likewise, are in general dissolute. Mendicants of this description are known by the Irish name of boccahs.

2. Professional strolling beggars, who have no fixed domicile, and live constantly by mendicancy. Some of these call themselves mechanics out of work; chiefly, however, they are not able-bodied, but old persons, sometimes with children. This class is not numerous.

3. Town-beggars, who live by mendicancy, but have a fixed domicile. They are chiefly old men and women past labour; widows with families; and sometimes able-bodied girls from sixteen to nineteen years of age. Those who cannot walk are relieved entirely by the shopkeepers; those who can walk by the shopkeepers and farmers in the neighbourhood. They are generally known by those who relieve them, and their, character is not on the whole very bad.

4. Poor housekeepers, who are relieved by three or four neighbours, to whom their wants are known, but who would not resort to general begging. The letterwriters belong to this class; persons who occasionally present written petitions to the gentry in cases of peculiar distress and suffering.

The persons composing these classes are the most suffering and destitute of the population; they are the outcasts of society, feeble and helpless; there are few able-bodied men among them, and those few take no part in Whiteboy disturbances. In the summer, however, when the stock of old potatoes is exhausted, and the new year's crop is not yet fit for food, the country is covered with swarms of occasional mendicants, being labourers' wives and families, who go about from one farmer's house to another, frequently to a considerable distance from their homes, in order to collect potatoes. When the immediate pressure is over, they cease to beg, which they consider as a disgrace, and to which they are only driven by necessity. The father sometimes joins his family at certain places, but rarely begs in company with them.

This mendicancy of the wives and children of a large part of the agricultural labourers arises from the redundancy of the labouring population, and the consequent want of employment for them. The excess of the number of labourers beyond the demand for their services affects their condition in two ways: first, by keeping their wages at a low rate, and secondly, by making their employment uncertain and irregular. The ordinary rate of labourers' wages over a large part of Ireland is 10d. or 8d. a-day, in some cases even as low as 6d. This rate of wages, however,

though low as compared with the English rates, does not afford the true explanation of the destitute state of the Irish peasant; his habits are so abstemious, he has learnt to live so hard a life, that in general he would consider himself in tolerable prosperity, if he could during the fifty-two weeks of the year earn 4s. a week. It is not the low rate of wages, but the inconstancy of employment which depresses the Irish labourer, and sends his family begging through the country during the summer months; which makes him dependent on his potato-ground, and thus sets all his sympathies on the side of Whiteboyism. We should probably exceed the truth if we said that a third part of the Irish labouring population were employed all the year round. The remaining two-thirds obtain work at the seasons of extraordinary demand, viz., at the potatodigging, and during the harvest. At other times of the year they trust to the produce of their own potatoground for food, whether they rent a small piece of land permanently, or temporarily in the form of conacre. It is this irregularity of employment for hire, and not the low rate of his wages, which is the true cause both of the poverty and turbulence of the Irish peasant. If every labourer in Ireland could earn 8d. a day for 310 days in the year, we should probably never hear of Whiteboy disturbances. It is the impossibility of living by wages, which throws him upon the land*: it is the liability of being ejected from the

*"Mr. Sheehan states that many persons, having nothing to look to but the possession of land for subsistence, are induced to bid inordinate rents far beyond what they will ever be enabled to pay. The desperate competition makes men ready to grasp at farms on any terms, and landlords, who are frequently in great want of money, are blinded to their own interests by the temptation of a larger offer. This system is injurious

land and the consciousness that he has no other resource, which makes him a Whiteboy. If the Irish peasant was as utterly reckless and improvident as he is said to be, he would not commit crimes in order to protect the occupant of the soil: he would not see that his own interest was bound up with that of his class in preventing the ejection of tenants. It is his foresight which prompts him to crime: it is his wish to obtain some guarantee for his future subsistence which drives him to Whiteboy outrage. In these disturbances it is not a question of more or less gain: his very existence is at stake.

Neque enim levia aut ludicra petuntur

Præmia, sed Turni de vitâ et sanguine certant.

It is well known that the soil of Europe after the invasion of the Germanic races, and the abolition of the Roman system of slavery, was for many ages cultivated by serfs or villeins, who lived in houses of their own, and raised from the soil the means of subsistence for themselves and families, but were bound to perform any service required by their lord. By degrees, however, these services were commuted for a rent, and the villeins were enfranchised. Their passage from the servile to the free state appears nevertheless to have

to all parties. Adventurers take farms, and after a single season disapappear without paying any rent; those who remain are driven into overcropping. They make every effort to obtain a sufficient return for the present season; permanent improvement is lost sight of; the land is insufficiently manured, and is every year deteriorated; hedges and fences are broken down, and houses suffered to fall into a state of dilapidation from an inability or an unwillingness to go to the expense of repairs."Report of Irish Poor Commission, Appendix A., p. 428. It may be observed, that if an Irish landlord resist the temptation of a high offer, and lets his land at what he considers a fair rent, he often creates a set of intermediate tenants, who make a profit rent, by subletting the ground to persons who live in the extreme of misery.

been gradual; and the mode of cultivating the soil in large divisions by means of paid labourers was slowly introduced. The free peasant still continued to cultivate a small portion of ground for the support of himself and family, and to render occasional services to his landlord, who allowed for the work so done at a low rate of wages in settling with him for the rent of his land. The peasants of England probably passed out of this state of quasi-villenage in the sixteenth century*; and the troubles in Edward the VIth's reign may be viewed as a symptom of the transition; but in

* On the advantages resulting from the decay of cottiers in Elizabeth's reign, see Eden's History of the Poor, vol. i., p. 115. And for the improvement of farmers in the course of the sixteenth century, ib., pp. 119, 20.

"The causes of

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, B. i., C. 21, says, these disturbances were divers and sundry. Some were papists, and required the restoration of their old religion. Some were anabaptists and libertines, and would have all things common. And a third sort of mutineers were certain poor men that sought to have their commons again by force and power taken from them, and that a regulation might be made according to law of arable lands turned into pasture, and desired a redress of the great dearth, and abatement of the price of victuals." "As for inclosures (he continues) they were not now newly begun, but three-score years before pastures were inclosed, and they and their fathers hitherto had lived quietly under them." He then proceeds to say of the inclosers that they were great graziers and sheepmasters that ceased tilling the ground and sowing of corn, pulling down houses, and destroying whole towns, that so they might have the more land for grazing, and the less charge of poor tenants who had dependence on them, as their plowmen and husbandmen. Whereby the poor countrymen being driven to great poverty, began thus to show their discontents." Statements will be found with respect to the ejection of tenants and the demolition of cottages in the document printed in Strype's Repository, Q. "Depopulation (says Harrison in his Description of England, p. 193) is growing by incroaching and joining of house to house, and laying land to land, whereby the inhabitants of many places of our country are devoured and eaten up, and their houses either altogether pulled down or suffered to decay by little and little." It is clear, however, that this destruction of houses arose not from depopulation, but from a change in the mode of cultivating the soil; nobody can suppose that the general prosperity and