eviction became too frequent; hundreds of families were in this way dispossessed of their holdings. These acts of harshness were certainly to be deplored; but it was almost universally believed that the cottar in Ireland could not live from the land after the failure of almost his only means of subsistence; it must be added that, in this very matter, the conduct of Parliament and the Government was by many degrees more severe. A strict test of destitution had to be applied; a law was passed that, as a condition of obtaining relief, no person possessing more than a quarter of an acre of land should be entitled to support from the State; thousands of families abandoned their homes, through the effects of this measure; for one evicted by a landlord, fifty perhaps were practically evicted by this stern policy. The law was possibly required in the terrible circumstances of the time; but it was condemned by the Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Bessborough, a great Irish peer, and an able man; at all events, it justified, to a considerable extent, all that could be laid to the charge of a few Irish landlords whose acts were most unfairly denounced by many writers, and were falsely described as common to the great body of the class. For the rest, as I have said, the land system was broken up in many districts; and not only the owners but the occupiers of the soil suffered cruelly from the highest to the lowest grade. After the first months of the famine, the immense exodus of the Irish race, as it has fitly been called, began. The population fled from the country in hundreds of thousands; some found a home in England and in our Australian colonies; nine-tenths, probably, in the great Republic of the West. The sufferings of numbers of the emigrants were terribly severe; huddled together in the ill-found vessels of the time, hundreds perished before they beheld the lands they were seeking; that some check was not placed on the greed of the merchants, who subjected these victims to horrors like those of the Middle Passage, was certainly the worst mistake of the Government of the day. During the agony of the famine there was comparatively little crime; the minds of men were engrossed by a dire calamity; but in a few months Whiteboyism had been again aroused; there was a widespread outbreak of agrarian disorder followed by the abortive rising of 1848. The time was now ripe, in the judgment of even leading statesmen, for making another of the great experiments on the Irish land, which had been their policy since the age of the Tudors. Many of the Irish landed gentry had been ruined; the estates of many were heavily charged with debt, in part caused by extravagance in the past, but chiefly by large provisions made for their families in more prosperous times, especially during the period of the high prices of the war.[48] The object of the Government--and Peel concurred--was to make a clean sweep of