This is certainly an awful picture of the slavery resulting from compelling a whole nation to devote itself to agriculture, and thus annihilating the power of association--from compelling a whole people to forego all the advantages resulting from proximity to market for the sale of their products or the purchase of manure--and from compelling men, women, and children to be idle, when they would desire to be employed. In reading it, we are forcibly reminded of the _razzias_ of the little African kings, who, anxious for a fresh supply of slaves, collect their troops together and invade the neighbouring territories, where they enact scenes corresponding exactly with the one here described. In Africa, however, the slave is fed by those who have burned and destroyed his house and his farm; but in Ireland, as labour is valueless, he is turned into the roads or the grave-yards to die of famine, or of pestilence. And yet, even now, the _Times_ asks the question-- "How are the people to be fed and employed? That is the question which still baffles an age that can transmit a message round the world in a moment of time, and point out the locality of a planet never yet seen. There is the question which founders both the bold and the wise." Up to this time there had been repeated cases of partial famine, but now the nation was startled by the news of the almost total failure of the crop of potatoes, the single description of food upon which the people of Ireland had been reduced to depend. Constant cropping of the soil, returning to it none of the manure, because of the necessity for exporting almost the whole of its products, had produced disease in the vegetable world--precisely as the want of proper nourishment produces it in the animal world--and now a cry of famine rang throughout the land. The poor-houses were everywhere filled, while the roads, and the streets, and the grave-yards were occupied by the starving and the naked, the dying and the dead; and the presses of England were filled with denunciations of English and Irish landholders, who desired to make food dear, while men, women, and children were perishing by hundreds of thousands for want of food. Thus far, Ireland had been protected in the market of England, as some small compensation for the sacrifice she had made of her manufacturing interests; but now, small as has been the boon, it was to be withdrawn, precisely as we see to have been the case with the poor people of Jamaica. Like them, the Irish had become poor, and their trade had ceased to be of value, although but seventy years before they had been England's _best_ customers. The system had exhausted all the foreign countries with which England had been permitted to maintain what is denominated free trade--India, Portugal, Turkey, the West Indies, and Ireland herself--and it had become necessary to make an effort to obtain markets in the only prosperous countries of the