Again: 

“L1 4s. an acre is the highest estimate for the draining of this land in covered drains; the remainder of the expense consists in the trenching up the surface, turning up the subsoil, and mixing it with the bog; no manure is wanted, a portion of the bog being burned for that purpose.”

With regard to deep bogs, his testimony was as follows: 

“The expense of reclaiming deep bogs per acre may be estimated thus:—­Drainage of an English acre, in the most perfect way, about L1 4s., which is about 40s. the Irish acre; that includes the under drain:  the levelling and digging comes to about L1 10s.; and afterwards the claying comes to about L6 12s. per statute acre.”

Finally, he said: 

“The reclamation of mountain land is very profitable, and easily effected; but the reclamation of deep bog land is attended with a much greater expense, and requires both care and judgment.  But both are certainly reclaimable, and would give a successful return when judiciously treated.”

Mr. Featherstone, a practical and successful farmer, told the Committee that he had reclaimed the worst sort of bog land for L13 an acre, and some cushbog land for, L6 an acre:  the former, when reclaimed, was worth L1 an acre, and the latter L2 an acre.  “It took me,” he said, “L13 an acre to reclaim the first red bog I tried my hand on:  and it would take to reclaim, on the average, the red bog of Ireland, L10 an acre.”

The soundness of the views put forward by Sir Richard Griffith and Mr. Featherstone is proved by the reclamation of similar wastes in England.  With regard to Chat-moss, on the Liverpool and Manchester railway, Mr. Baines writes from Barton Grange, in Lancashire, which he calls “a house standing in the midst of a tract of 2,000 acres of peat moss, within a few years past as wet and barren as any morass in Ireland, but now covered with luxuriant crops.”  He averages the sum expended in reclaiming the Lancashire mosses at L10 an acre, all spent in manual labour.[259] One thousand acres of Rawcliffe-moss in Lancashire was reclaimed for L9,000, although high wages were paid to the labourers.  It pays, says Mr. Scrope, ten per cent. on the outlay, and now gives constant employment to seventy labourers.  In Ireland, he adds, private enterprise cannot do such work.  There is no capital.  With regard to reclamations made on the estate of Sir Charles Styles, in the county Donegal, Captain Kennedy, the manager, testified before the Devon Commission that the original cost of reclamation was refunded in three years.  And he further expressed his conviction that an outlay of L5 an acre would pay ten per cent. on those lands.

What grave mysterious reasons of State, then, have prevented the Irish wastes from being reclaimed?  In the Famine, our roads were torn up and made impassable to apply a labour test to destitution; food was next served out without any such test; M Soyer was sent over to make cheap soup for the million; the bone and sinew of the country were shipped off to spend themselves in trying to subdue the wildernesses of another hemisphere, or die in transitu, or on Grosse Isle and such charnel-houses, whilst nearly five millions of reclaimable acres in their own fertile load were still left as nature had left them.