For centuries the Irish nation has groaned under the yoke of England. The chain has worn to the bone. The nation has felt its strength depart. Many of its noblest and fairest children have pined away in dungeons or starved by the roadside. The tillers of the soil, sweating from sunrise to sunset for a bare subsistence, have been turned from their miserable cabins—hovels, yet homes—and those who have been allowed to remain have had their substance devoured by a government seemingly never satisfied with the extent of its taxation. They have suffered unmitigated persecution for daring to have a religion of their own. Seldom has a conquered people suffered more from the cruelties and exactions of the conquerors. While Clarkson and Wilberforce were giving their untiring labours to the cause of emancipating negro slaves thousands of miles away, they overlooked a hideous system of slavery at their very doors—the slavery of a people capable of enjoying the highest degree of civil and religious freedom. Says William Howitt— [Illustration: IRISH TENANT ABOUT TO EMIGRATE.] "The great grievance of Ireland—the Monster Grievance—is just England itself. The curse of Ireland is bad government, and nothing more. And who is the cause of this? Nobody but England. Who made Ireland a conquered country? England. Who introduced all the elements of wrangling, discontent, and injustice? England. Who set two hostile churches, and two hostile races, Celts and Saxons, together by the ears in that country? England, of course. Her massacres, her military plantations, her violent seizure of ancient estates, her favouritism, her monstrous laws and modes of government, were the modern emptying of Pandora's box—the shaking out of a bag-full of Kilkenny cats on the soil of that devoted country. The consequences are exactly those that we have before us. Wretched Saxon landlords, who have left one-fourth of the country uncultivated, and squeezed the population to death by extortion on the rest. A great useless church maintained on the property of the ejected Catholics—who do as men are sure to do, kick at robbery, and feel it daily making their gall doubly bitter. And then we shake our heads and sagely talk about race. If the race be bad, why have we not taken pains to improve it? Why, for scores of years, did we forbid them even to be educated? Why do we complain of their being idle and improvident, and helpless, when we have done every thing we could to make them so? Are our ministers and Parliaments any better? Are they not just as idle, and improvident, and helpless, as it regards Ireland? Has not this evil been growing these three hundred years? Have any remedies been applied but those of Elizabeth, and the Stuarts and Straffords, the Cromwells, and Dutch William's? Arms and