I am far from inclined to detract in any way from the merit of Mr. Mitchell Henry's project for Imperial reclamation any more than from his scheme for draining and for improving the internal navigation of Ireland. Although born in Lancashire he is a thorough-bred Irishman, and naturally hopeful of his country. But, although I am most painfully impressed by the fearful degradation into which a part of the Western people has fallen, I cannot on that account shut my eyes to their failings any more than to their poverty. Mr. Henry's scheme, if it deferred actual proprietorship in fee simple till the next generation, would I hope prove of incalculable benefit to Mayo and Galway, especially if his excellent idea of appointing agricultural instructors were carried out faithfully. But I fear from what I have actually seen and heard from the most trustworthy informants of all classes, that the forty-acre farmer of this generation would require a firm hand to guide him. This is no insolent Saxon assumption of superiority, but is said, after due consideration, sadly and seriously. The poor people of the West have been brought very low, so low that even their very virtues have become perverted into faults. They are affectionate to their kith and kin; but this amiable quality leads to their huddling together in a curiously gregarious way, and in some cases has been made the means of extorting money from them. It is this tendency to live together and thus divide and subdivide whatever little property they may have, which will require to be most strenuously guarded against. It is of no use assigning to a man forty acres of land to get a living out of, if he immediately sublets some of it to a less fortunate friend, or takes all his remotest relations into partnership. It requires no prophet's eye to discern that the instant the tenant's son got married he would bring his wife home to his father's roof, and that if the energies of the united family did not suffice to cultivate the whole of the forty acres, part would be let at "conacre," that is, for the period of one harvest, to a man with or without a holding of his own. The tendency to bring several families together in one cabin is almost irresistible, and has, as mentioned above, not been wisely and firmly met by proprietors, but taken a mean advantage of to wring money out of tenants.