“The desultory habits of the peasantry are likewise remarkable. However urgent the demands for exertion—if, as in the present season, their crops are rotting in the fields from excessive wet, and every moment of sunshine should be taken advantage of—still, if there be a market to attend, a fair, or a funeral, a horse-race, a fight, or a wedding, all else is neglected or forgotten; they hurry off in search of the excitements which abound on such occasions, and with a recklessness hardly to be credited, at the moment that they are complaining of poverty, they take the most certain steps to increase it. Their fondness for ardent spirits is probably one cause of this, and another will be found in their position as occupiers of land. The work required upon their small holdings is easily performed, and may, as they say, ‘be done any day.’ Working for wages is rare and uncertain; and hence arises a disregard of the value of time, a desultory sauntering habit, without industry or steadiness of application. Such is too generally the character, and such the habits, of the Irish peasantry; and it may not be uninstructive to mark the resemblance which these bear to the character and habits of the English peasantry in the pauperised districts, under the abuses of the old Poor Law. Mendicancy and indiscriminate almsgiving have produced in Ireland, results similar to what indiscriminate relief produced in England—the like reckless disregard of the future, the like idle and disorderly conduct, and the same proneness to outrage having then characterised the English pauper labourer, which are now too generally the characteristics of the Irish peasant. An abuse of a good law caused the evil in the one case, and a removal of that abuse is now rapidly effecting a remedy. In the other case, the evil appears to have arisen rather from the want, than the abuse of a law; but the corrective for both will, I believe, be found to be essentially the same.