Poor-law, pauperism has distinctly increased during the last ten years, though the population has fallen off in numbers, and the charge of pauperism shows a corresponding increase.[12] The Income Tax returns, too, as regards the land, are of sinister omen; those under Schedule A have greatly diminished since 1890; and there is a considerable decline of property in the Funds.[13] As to the argument that the Tenant Right of the Irish farmer has risen in value, and that this proves Irish agriculture to be in a prosperous state, this is a complete, nay, a grotesque, fallacy. The rise in the value of Tenant Right is simply one of the many signs that a huge confiscation has taken place in the Irish land. If Ireland, therefore, has made material progress, this has been slow, partial, and with large drawbacks; such as it is, it must be mainly ascribed to the results of the Famine, which liberated the soil from a destructive burden. The whole country, it has truly been said, has still too much the look of a 'great neglected estate,' requiring development in most of its parts; large sections of the population are poor, feeble in health, and backward. Any advance, moreover, which Ireland has made in well being, since 1837-38, is as nothing compared with the extraordinary growth of the prosperity of England and Scotland, within the same period. True-hearted Irishmen grieve as they pass from the lesser to the greater island, and contrast the husbandry of Galway and Mayo with that of the Lothians and Kent; as they gaze on the Shannon, with scarcely a sail on its waters, and the Clyde teeming with its fleets of commerce; above all, as they turn from the decaying towns of their own country to such centres of wealth and of gigantic trade, as some even of the provincial cities of Britain, not to speak of the mighty world of London. The causes, indeed, of this contrast may be easily found; the mineral resources of Ireland are scanty; her commerce and manufactures are small; she is essentially an agricultural land, which has lost much from the effects of Free Trade; she has suffered greatly from misgovernment, agitation, and social disorder; all this has kept her back in the national race. The mineral products, on the other hand, of England and Scotland are immense, and of the first importance in an age of invention; they have decisively contributed to the huge development of the opulence and the trade of Great Britain; the policy of Free Trade, carried out for years, has had marvellous results in the same direction; if British agriculture is not progressing, British commerce and manufactures are still supreme; and Great Britain has been for ages a law-abiding land, in which order has been happily combined with liberty. These considerations fully explain the wide and ever-increasing distinction between Ireland and England and Scotland, only too manifest; they have been amply verified by unerring statistics. Two figures may