THE PROGRESS OF RUIN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 183, 29 September 1876, Page 14

THE PROGRESS OF RUIN.

Time was in Ireland when the words of Goldsmith, that every rood of ground maintains its man, were not altogether untrue. That time, however, with its sights and scenes of happy human life, and fields smiling under the hands of the husbandman, is rapidly passing away. " Ireland," said Mr. Mitchell Henry some time ago in the House of Commons, "is speedily lapsing into the condition of a European. New Zealand." Places which once abounded with population are now desolate — where villages and homesteads formerly flourished, now are deserted ruins or hovels, whose wretchedness is made still more apparent by the misery of their inhabitants, and generous fields which once furnished food to men and women, are now given over to the short-hornsof the English cattle-dealer. Day after day the work of rural depopulation is going on, until the stranger who only knew the Ireland of twenty years ago, can no longer recognise in the wasted outlines of the land the country of his recollections. Were any other country able to exhibit an historical and social picture like that of Ireland, we should have little difficulty in discovering the cause. The dullest eye can at once trace to its origin the deplorable condition of the countries wasting away under the dry rot of Turkish despotism. Not one, not even the English statesman who is so lavish of his philanthropy on behalf of the sour sick man of the East, but would at once attribute the desolation of Turkish territory to the crimes and inefficiency of thife Turkish Government. In Ireland, however, the causes of the ruin spreading itself around like a cancer, if no leas clearly seen, are less openly acknowledged. Theory is piled upon theory to account for the skeleton-like array of facts which every new revelation of statistics lays before the world. With one it is the inevitable cause of a civilization in which the weaker party must go the wall; with another it is the application of political economy to the affairs of every-day life. How little the theories of political economy have to do with the condition of Ireland may be learned from a consideration of some of the doctrines taught by the masters of the science. On the question of population, the doctrine of Adam Smith differs nothing in spirit from that of Goldsmith. The increase in the numbers of a nation's population he regards as one of the best evidences of its prosperity. What, then, would he think of Ireland, whose population is diminishing from year to year, and diminishing without leaving any sensible improvement in the condition of those who remain behind ? It is not to political economy that we are to trace the decline of our national prosperity, but to a practical perversion of its doctrines. The vampire of centralisation is drawing the life-blood of ,the once comparatively healthy country. The spirit which would sweep away our political iadi

viduality has seized upon those in whose hands the social prosperity of the country is placed "by law. Ireland is no longer a land of pleasant farms in which the fruits of the earth grow up, as in " a garden of the Lord," for the sustenance of a brave and easily contented people. The curse upon him who removes his neighbor's landmarks has no terrors for the monopolising" soul of the Irish landlord. He does :not want the people, he wants the land, and the rent which will come to him whether it is occupied by beasts or men. "Were we addressing a Government wliich did not concur with him in the political expediency of lessening, as far as possible, the number of Irishmen on Irish soil, we might, with some hope, speak in tones of warning against a policy which, though it pleases the landlord, will prove, unless arrested in its course, the ruin of the thousands in whom a just ruler would find his surest and best support. — * Dublin Irishman.'