to sweep the dirt and offal from the door, the latter too lazy to make a dry footway, though the materials were close at hand.  If the mother were asked why she did not keep herself and her children clean with a stream of water running near the cabin, her answer invariably was—­Sure, how can we help it?  We are so poor.’  The husband made the same reply, while smoking his pipe at the fire or basking in the sunshine.  Sir George Nicholls rightly concluded that poverty was not the sole cause of this state of things.  He found them also remarkable for their desultory and reckless habits.  Though their crops were rotting in the fields from excessive wet, and every moment of sunshine should be taken advantage of, yet if there was a market, a fair, or a funeral, a horse-race, a fight, or a wedding, forgetting everything else, they would hurry off to the scene of excitement.  Working for wages was rare and uncertain, and hence arose a disregard of the value of time, a desultory, sauntering habit, without industry or steadiness of application.  ‘Such,’ he proceeds, ’is too generally the character and such the habits of the Irish peasantry; and it may not be uninstructive to mark the resemblance which these bear to the character and habits of the English peasantry in the pauperised districts, under the abuses of the old poor law.  Mendicancy and indiscriminate almsgiving have produced in Ireland results similar to what indiscriminate relief produced in England—­the like reckless disregard of the future, the like idle and disorderly conduct, and the same proneness to outrage having then characterised the English pauper labourer which are now too generally the characteristics of the Irish peasant.  An abuse of a good law caused the evil in the one case, and a removal of that abuse is now rapidly effecting a remedy.  In the other case the evil appears to have arisen rather from the want than the abuse of a law; but the corrective for both will, I believe, be found to be essentially the same.’

The expectation that such a neglected people, made wretched by bad land laws, should be loyal, was surely unreasonable.  For them, it might be said, there was no Government, no protection, no encouragement.  There could not be more tempting materials for agitators to work upon.  Lord Cloncurry vividly sketches the state of things resulting from the want of principle and earnestness among politicians in dealing with Irish questions at that time.

’From the Union up to the year 1829, the type of British colonial government was the order of the day.  The Protestants were upheld as a superior caste, and paid in power and official emoluments for their services in the army of occupation.  During the second viceroyalty of Lord Anglesea, an effort was made by him to evoke the energies of the whole nation for its own regeneration.  That effort was defeated by the conjoint influence of the cowardice of the English cabinet, the petulance of Mr. Stanley, and the unseasonable violence and selfishness of the