‘When nature is easily satisfied, and the necessaries of life procured with little labour and care, increase of population will follow: because parents, who are contented with their own condition, will feel no uneasiness for their offspring, who can, without any difficulty, procure a situation similar to their own. Emigration from such a country was not to be expected; for men whose modified wants were amply satisfied at home, had no need to seek elsewhere for wealth they did not desire, or distinctions they did not value. Besides, Ireland has always had peculiar attractions in retaining her children: a Scotchman loves a Scotchman, but an Hibernian loves the green fields of his youth and to enjoy these there are few privations to which he will not cheerfully submit. The eccentric humour, the boisterous mirth, the kind and social intercourse, that characterize the peasantry, likewise spread their charms, and generally succeeded in subduing the aspiring notions of adventurers, and helped to retain the people at home. When to these were added the allurements of a more tender kind, and when no restraint was placed upon the natural instinct of man, we must not wonder that Ireland is blessed with a population without a parallel in Europe. ‘The base and cowardly conduct of the Irish proprietors in deserting the country, though at the moment a grievance, was absolutely productive of good. Their large domains were parcelled out to humble cottages; farms were divided and subdivided; cabins every where raised their unostentatious roofs; and every floor was blessed with a numerous progeny. ‘Ireland has been forced into agriculture;[1] and, this still farther tends to increase the population, and to give her that political importance she never could have acquired if the people had been immured in mineral dungeons, or confined to the fetid vapours of a manufacturing bastile. Rural labour is not more conducive to the health of the body, than it is beneficial to the exercise of the mind; and we always find the agriculturist superior to the mechanic not only in physical strength, but in moral energy. The one is a natural soldier, who commands respect, and exacts consideration; while the other is a mere animated machine, whose ideas serve but as internal wheels to keep his hands in motion. His frame is distorted, his mind crippled, and his courage annihilated: but the agriculturist is a man such as nature intended—fearless, active and resolute; the air he breathes ensures him health; the ground he tills supplies him with sustenance; and his occupations make him moral, hardy, and brave. This is the copy of a million portraits, and they are all found in Ireland.