After thus enumerating the several heads or divisions under which their investigations were conducted, the commissioners proceed to state— 1st.—The difficulties they had to encounter from the extensive and complicated nature of the subject, and the peculiar social condition of the Irish people. 2ndly.—The course they pursued in collecting information, “showing how far it is full and impartial, and therefore how far worthy of confidence.” And 3rdly.—The reasons why they are not yet able to report—“Whether any and what further remedial measures appear to be requisite to ameliorate the condition of the Irish poor, or any of them.” These points are all largely dwelt upon, especially the first. On every side, the commissioners say, they were assailed by the theories of persons who might be supposed to possess means of forming a sound judgment—“one party attributed all the poverty and wretchedness of the country to an asserted extreme use of ardent spirits, and proposed a system for repressing illicit distillation, for preventing smuggling, and for substituting beer and coffee. Another party found the cause in the combination among workmen, and proposed rigorous laws against trades unions. Others again were equally confident, that the reclamation of the bogs and waste lands was the only practicable remedy. A fourth party declared the nature of the existing connexion between landlord and tenant to be the root of all the evil. Pawnbroking, redundant population, absence of capital, peculiar religious tenets and religious differences, political excitement, want of education, the maladministration of justice, the state of prison discipline, want of manufactures and of inland navigation, with a variety of other circumstances, were each supported by their various advocates with earnestness and ability, as being either alone, or jointly with some other, the primary cause of all the evils of society; and loan funds, emigration, the repression of political excitement, the introduction of manufactures, and the extension of inland navigation, were accordingly proposed each as the principal means by which the improvement of Ireland could be promoted.” The commissioners abstain from expressing their opinion upon any of these propositions, but they determine “that the inquiry should embrace every subject to which importance seemed to be attached by any large number of persons.”