"The state of society which has been described may be considered as a proof of the grossest ignorance; for what can be a greater proof of ignorance than a systematic opposition to law, carried on at the constant risk of liberty and of life, and producing where it is most successful, in the rural districts, one level of hopeless poverty, and in the towns, weeks of high wages and months without employment—a system in which tremendous risks and frightful sufferings are the means, and general misery is the result? The ignorance, however, which marks the greater part of the population in Ireland, is not merely ignorance of the moral and political tendency of their conduct—an ignorance in which the lower orders of many more advanced communities participate—but ignorance of the businesses which are their daily occupations. It is ignorance, not as citizens and subjects, but as cultivators and labourers. They are ignorant of the proper rotation of crops, of the preservation and use of manure—in a word, of the means by which the land, for which they are ready to sacrifice their neighbours' lives, and to risk their own, is to be made productive. Their manufactures, such as they are, are rude and imperfect, and the Irish labourer, whether peasant or artisan, who emigrates to Great Britain, never possesses skill sufficient to raise him above the lowest ranks in his trade. "Indolence—the last of the causes to which we have attributed the existing misery of Ireland—is not so much an independent source of evil as the result of the combination of all others. The Irishman does not belong to the races that are by nature averse from toil. In England, Scotland, or America he can work hard. He is said, indeed, to require more overlooking than the natives of any of these countries, and to be less capable, or, to speak more correctly, to be less willing to surmount difficulties by patient intellectual exertion; but no danger deters, no disagreeableness disgusts, no bodily fatigue discourages him.