"Instead of the population increasing in a healthy manner, implying an increase in marriages, in families, and in all the affections connected with them, and implying an increase in general prosperity, as for nearly a century before, and now amounting, as we might expect, to 8,600,000, it is 2,000,000 less. This is a disastrous change in the life of the Irish. At this downward rate, decreasing 20 per cent. in ten years, five such periods would suffice to exterminate the whole population more effectually than the Indians have been exterminated from North America. Fifty years of this new career would annihilate the whole population of Ireland, and turn the land into an uninhabited waste. This is a terrible reverse in the condition of a people, and is the more remarkable because in the same period the population of Great Britain has increased 12 per cent., and because there is no other example of a similar decay in any part of Europe in the same time, throughout which the population has continued to increase, though not everywhere equally, nor so fast as in Great Britain. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the annals of mankind can supply, in a season of peace—when no earthquakes have toppled down cities, no volcanoes have buried them beneath their ashes, and no inroads of the ocean have occurred—such wholesale diminution of the population and desolation of the country. "The inhabited houses in Ireland have decreased from 1,328,839 in 1841 to 1,047,735 in 1851, or 281,104, (21·2 per cent.,) and consequently more than the population, who are now worse lodged and more crowded in relation to houses than they were in 1841. As the uninhabited houses have increased only 12,951, no less than 268,153 houses must have been destroyed in the ten years. That informs us of the extent of the 'clearances' of which we have heard so much of late; and the 1,659,300 people less in the country is an index to the number of human beings who inhabited the houses destroyed. We must remember, too, that within the period a number of union workhouses have been built in Ireland, capable of accommodating 308,885 persons, and that, besides the actual diminution of the number of the people, there has been a change in their habits, about 300,000 having become denizens of workhouses, who, prior to 1841, lived in their own separate huts. With distress and destruction pauperism has also increased. "The decrease has not been equal for the males and females; the numbers were as follows.— 1841. 1851. Males 4,019,576 3,176,124 Decrease 20·9 per cent. Females 4,155,548 3,336,067 " 29·6 "