he rather thought that the particular way in which land was held has often been the source of insecurity and want of cultivation.  From the state of the County Armagh he came to the conclusion, he said, that small holdings were not the great evil of Ireland.  In that county the greatest subdivisions had taken place, and yet it was one of the most flourishing, and best cultivated counties in Ireland.  Compare it, or in fact compare the whole province of Ulster with the province of Munster, and many more small holdings will be found in the former than in the latter.

The whole of the Premier’s plan for the reclamation of waste lands in Ireland, was received with marked approbation by the House.[199]

Having at some length explained the principle on which out-door relief was to be given, he adverted to the subject of emigration, about which, he said, the most extravagant expectations had been excited and entertained in Ireland, but which never could be realized.  Emigration did not, he said, consist in landing a certain number of people on the shores of America; they should be looked to when they would arrive there; and his opinion was, that the best mode of promoting emigration was by affording aid on the arrival of the emigrants at the place of their destination.  This had been extensively done, the previous year, at Montreal, and he should be sorry to give any other stimulus to emigration.  He then went on to prove that Ireland was not overpeopled; and as it was not, emigration, in his opinion, had not become a necessity for that country.  He again quoted Sir Robert Kane, who had stated that there were resources in Ireland, which, if properly developed, would enable that country to maintain seventeen millions of inhabitants.  He, Lord John, did not go so far as that, but he did not think the population of the country was excessive, and there was nothing in the country to prevent the highest improvement.  Other countries, he said, had been quite as badly off as Ireland was now asserted to be, which were, at present, in the highest state of prosperity.

To illustrate this he would read a description of a country, in which the following evils were said to exist.  The writer, an old English author, says:—­“The husbandman be thrust out of their own, or else either by covin or fraud, or violent oppression, they be put beside it; or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all.  By one means, therefore, or by the other, either by hook or by crook, they must needs depart away, poor wretched souls—­men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and the whole household, small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requires many hands.  Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in.  All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale—­yet, being suddenly thrust out,