The first step has been already taken in the enactment of a law--unfortunately delayed till nearly half a century had elapsed after the union with England,--probably imperfect, and brought first into operation at a time of famine, therefore beginning to act in the most unfavourable circumstances possible, but by which the right to relief, under circumstances of destitution, is granted to every description of the poor. By the gradual operation of this law, correcting the habits of vagrancy and mendicity, it maybe expected that the process of degradation hitherto extending among the Irish poor may be corrected, and the same motives which, in other nations, are found to restrain excessive population, will gradually be introduced. But a more immediate effect of the law is on the views and habits of the proprietors. When the aged poor, the sick poor, the widows and orphans, and the unemployed poor, become immediately a charge on the land and capital of the country, it becomes the obvious and undoubted interest of every proprietor and capitalist, first, to throw all obstacles in his power in the way of early marriages, and excessive reproduction of the species; and, secondly, to exert himself to procure for the existing population as much as possible of remunerative employment. Such employment as he would hardly regard as remunerative, with a view only to his own profits, becomes an object of real importance to him, when the alternative is the maintenance of able-bodied labourers in idleness. That these motives are already operating extensively among the Irish proprietors, appears from their general complaint of the hardship of being obliged to maintain the poor in unremunerating employment, and from their increased anxiety to clear their estates of cottars and small crofters, among whom the most rapid redundancy of population shows itself. If the law is firmly and steadily administered, they will not be allowed to rid themselves of the burden of these poor; and the true question will be, Whether they are to maintain them in idleness, or devise for them reproductive labour? Thus it may be hoped that the resources of the country will be gradually developed, and its power of supporting industry be increased contemporaneously with a diminution of vagrancy and mendicity, and an improvement of the habits of the people.