"Everywhere," said the _Quarterly Review_, "throughout all parts, even in the best towns, and in Dublin itself, you will meet men and boys--not dressed, not covered--but hung round with a collection of rags of unrivalled variety, squalidity, and filth--walking dunghills. * * * No one ever saw an English scarecrow with such rags." The difference in the condition of these poor people and that of the slave--even the slave of Jamaica at that day--consisted in this, that the negro slave was worth buying, whereas the others were not; and we know well that the man who pays a good price for a commodity, attaches to it a value that induces him to give some care to its preservation; whereas he cares nothing for another that he finds himself forced to accept. "Starving by millions," as they are here described, death was perpetually separating husbands and wives, parents and children, while to the survivors remained no hope but that of being enabled at some time or other to fly to another land in which they might be permitted to sell their labour for food sufficient to support life. The existence of such a state of things was, said the advocates of the system which looks to converting all the world outside of England into one great farm, to be accounted for by the fact that the population was too numerous for the land, and yet a third of the surface, including the richest lands in the kingdom, was lying unoccupied and waste. "Of single counties," said an English writer, "Mayo, with a population of 389,000, and a rental of only £300,000, has an area of 1,364,000 acres, of which 800,000 are waste! No less than 470,000 acres, being very nearly equal to the whole extent of surface now under cultivation, are declared to be reclaimable. Galway, with a population of 423,000, and a valued rental of £433,000, has upward of 700,000 acres of waste, 410,000 of which are reclaimable! Kerry, with a population of 293,000, has an area of 1,186,000 acres--727,000 being waste, and 400,000 of them reclaimable! Even the Union of Glenties, Lord Monteagle's _ne plus ultra_ of redundant population, has an area of 245,000 acres, of which 200,000 are waste, and for the most part reclaimable, to its population of 43,000. While the Barony of Ennis, that abomination of desolation, has 230,000 acres of land to its 5000 paupers--a proportion which, as Mr. Carter, one of the principal proprietors, remarks in his circular advertisement for tenants, 'is at the rate of only one family to 230 acres; so that if but one head of a family were employed to every 230 acres, there need not be a single pauper in the entire district; a proof,' he adds, 'THAT NOTHING BUT EMPLOYMENT IS WANTING TO SET THIS COUNTRY TO RIGHTS!' In which opinion we fully coincide."