policy of clearing the land for cultivators of a capitalist class, able to occupy and do justice to large farms, was generally advocated in high places; more than one Lord-Lieutenant announced that nature had made Ireland a great grazing tract, and that her petty occupiers were little better than a social nuisance.[53] For some time it seemed as though the forecasts made by the great majority of our statesmen would prove correct. The immense emigration from Ireland to the United States had important results, unfortunate in many respects; but the uplifting of redundant millions from the soil greatly contributed to the country's welfare. Holdings were consolidated over very large areas, a beneficent process, if humanely carried out; a certain number of Englishmen and Scotsmen rented large farms; the progress of husbandry of all kinds was distinct; a vast field for agriculture, really worthy of the name, was opened. A new standard for the management of land was, in fact, set up; at the same time a few purchasers, under the Encumbered Estates Acts, laid out considerable sums in improving their estates; the Treasury made large advances to many Irish landlords; these did much in works of enclosure, draining, planting, and the like. Ireland began to wear a new aspect in several counties, especially in the more thriving parts of the southern provinces; the ruins made by the Famine, indeed, caused hideous eyesores, in wrecks of villages and the remains of peasant dwellings; but the mud hovels of the cottar population had largely disappeared, and the habitations of farmers of the better class very markedly improved. The economic conditions of landed relations became more conducive to prosperity than they had ever been before; rents fell considerably during a series of years, as the intense competition for land diminished; though they gradually rose in the course of time, they never reached the excessive rates of 1840-45; and the wages of labour greatly increased, and attained a level that, happily, has since been preserved. Many circumstances concurred to quicken and augment this unquestionable social and material progress. Agricultural prices were high from about 1852 onward; Free Trade was as yet adding to the wealth of Ireland; and there was a long succession of good harvests, the most important element in her general welfare. The railway system, too, introduced of late years, opened a number of new markets to her products, and greatly facilitated their access to British markets. At the same time the turnip replaced the potato over hundreds of thousands of acres; farm machinery greatly improved in Ireland; the importation of the best stock from England and Scotland had excellent results, and almost transformed the old breeds of Irish farming animals. An era of prosperity, in a word, had seemed to dawn on Ireland; and though agrarian disorder had not disappeared, the Whiteboy secret societies were greatly broken up, and political agitation well-nigh