of the most oppressive and demoralizing curses that ever degraded a people.  Perjury, fraud, falsehood, and dishonesty, were its fruits, and the only legacy it left to the country was an enormous mass of pauperism, and a national morality comparatively vitiated and depraved, in spite of all religious influence and of domestic affections that are both strong and tender.  Indeed it is exceedingly difficult to determine whether it has been more injurious to the country in a political than in a moral sense.  Be that as it may, it had a powerful effect in producing the evils that we now suffer, and our strong tendencies to social disorganization.  By it the landlords were induced, for the sake of multiplying, votes, to encourage the subdivision of small holdings into those that were actually only nominal or fictitious, and the consequences were, that in multiplying votes they were multiplying families that had no fixed means of subsistence—­multiplying in fact a pauper population—­multiplying not only perjury, fraud, falsehood, and dishonesty, but destitution, misery, disease and death.  By the forty-shilling franchise, the landlords encumbered the soil with a loose and unsettled population that possessed within itself, as poverty always does, a fearful facility of reproduction—­a population which pressed heavily upon the independent class of farmers and yeomen, but which had no legal claim upon the territory of the country.  The moment, however, when the system which produced and ended this wretched class, ceased to exist, they became not only valueless in a political sense, but a dead weight upon the energies of the country, and an almost insuperable impediment to its prosperity.  This great evil the landlords could conjure up, but they have not been able to lay it since.  Like Frankenstein in the novel, it pursues them to the present moment, and must be satisfied or appeased in some way, or it will unquestionably destroy them.  From the abolition of the franchise until now, an incessant struggle of opposing interests has been going on in the country.  The “forties” and their attendants must be fed; but the soul on which they live in its present state is not capable of at the same time supporting them and affording his claims to the landlord; for the food must go to England to pay the rents and the poor “forties” must starve.  They are now in the way of the landlord—­they are now in the way of the farmer—­they are in fact in way of each other, and unless some wholesome and human principle, either of domestic employment or colonial emigration, or perhaps both, shall be adopted, they will continue to embarrass the country, and to drive out of it, always in connection with other causes, the very class of persons that constitute its remaining strength.