LETTER TO THE CORK TENANT LEAGUE. BUNCRANA, May 4, 1847. SIR-It is with extreme difficulty, on account of the awful pressure of the times, that I can steal a moment from the duties they impose, to acknowledge the receipt of your esteemed favor, and to convey to your committee the expression of my warmest gratitude for the too kind and honorable notice they have taken of me. I regret to have to say that the rules, address, and pamphlet to which you allude in your communication, have not as yet reached me. The regret however is being alleviated by the lucid, forcible, and truly eloquent exposition of your principles made in the admirable letter I had from you. To these principles I can have no hesitation in giving my adhesion-no reason to refuse them my support or my approval. From the time I was able to think, they were my own. They grew with my growth, and strengthened with my strength. Every day's bitter experience of the barbarous system of landlord rule, fenced round by laws innumerable, to render it in mischief effective, and secure it against the reaction natural to misdeeds, gave them in my mind, if possible, a still more enduring fixity; and if I longed for anything, it was for such a reunion as yours-moral, peaceful, constitutional, yet resolute, and determined to subvert that system, or force its abettors to capitulate to what they never yet, as a body, recognized-pity or equity, or both. The principles of your league are the unmixed principles of commutative justice. The contracts hitherto between landlord and tenant may have been legal; they were not generally just. The tenant, from the peculiar circumstances in which he was

placed, could not ascend to that level with the proprietor which a contract, to be just or binding in conscience, essentially requires. He was not a free agent. It was, with him, "land or death!" The "equalitas rei ad rem" was placed in abeyance, or forced to yield by the alternative of starvation in the prospective, whilst the caprice or avarice of the lord of the soil became the sole criterion of its value. A landlord parliament of course sanctioned the injustice which rapacity exacted, and inscribed in the head of the book of their legislation, as an incontrovertible maxim, "that the proprietors had a right to do what they pleased with their own"-a dictum, if taken without limitation, destructive of morals, religion, and society. This right, in their hands, assumed a comprehensiveness, to which the modern and ancient worlds were almost strangers-I said almost, for Nero, as we read, burned Rome on a principle somewhat similar. This right of the lords of the soil was being not only extended to the fruit of the tenant's labor, to the ox, the ass, the man-servant, and maid-servant of the husbandman, but to his very soul and body; for even with these to do what they pleased, many of them claimed an unquestionable right. Nothing ever approached to this barathrum marcelli principle of theirs, but the right given, permitted, or assumed by Saul over a rebellious people-the just penalty of revolt against the indulgent sovereignty of their Lord" He will take your sons, and put them in his chariots, and make them his horsemen and his footmen, and he will appoint them to plough his fields and reap his corn. Your daughters he will take to be his cooks and bakers. He will take your fields and vineyards, and your best oliveyards, and give them to his servants. Your servants also

and your handmaids and your good bred young men and your asses he will take away, and put them to his own work. Your flocks also he will take, and you shall be his servants," etc.-1st Kings, chap. 8th. Saul's right they have ever claimed as theirs, in Ireland; Saul's rapacity they have literally imitated; Saul's destiny I do not, however, wish them. Saul's right ended in a bloody rebellion in which he lost his crown and life. Theirs, I fondly hope, will end with the famine and pestilence it has created, or eventuate in a fair and equitable adjustment of their and your rights. They cannot lose by having this right abridged, or crushed into proper dimensions. It only worked ruin to themselves and the nation-its only produce.

Dead sea fruits that tempt the eye

But turn to ashes on the lip.

With us, I am happy to be be able to say, tenant right is, at least, partially admitted, and many even practically admit the other duties which property imposes: but they are, alas! comparatively few-these just and good men, like streaks of glory scattered here and there on our otherwise dark and dismally clouded sky, such men as Sharman Crawford, the Marquis of Londonderry, the Marquis of Abercorn, Earl Gosford, and some others of all creeds whom it is needless to mention, prominently stand forth, as beacon lights, not surpassed in beneficent splendour by the proprietary of any other country. Verily they have their reward in their happy tenantry who look up to them with pride and affection, punctually pay their rents, and securely repose in the shade of their own "vine and fig-tree.” Together with the tenant right, the principle of compensation for improvements by some, is being admitted—they receive

of course the full value of their lands without trouble and are moreover repaid, by way of interest, with the benedictions of a peaceable, prosperous, and contented people. It is passing strange that principles working so much good— so evidently just, so indisputable, could have any adversaries pretending to common sense, or to any clear notions of equity, or even of their own interests.

The Cotton-grower of Lancaster, South Carolina, has as much right to claim, without compensation, the calicoes of Manchester, Glasgow, or Paisley, because he supplied to the manufacturer the raw material, as the landlord has to the tenant's improvements, because he let him the land. To thrust men out on the world who reclaimed the bleak and barren mountain side of deep morass, not value for 6d. per acre, until, fertilized by the sweat of their brows, and made valuable by their toil and capital, may have a sanction in law, but has none from justice-may be the act of a professing Christian, but is not, surely, the doing of an honest man. Again, to increase the rent as the tenant improves, and tax his industry, is not only flagitiously unjust, but, practically, a premium on indolence. Your scale for adjusting or regulating the burthens to be respectively borne by landlord and tenant, is so strictly impartial, that no reasonable man could object to it; no just man would. I am delighted to have to inform you, that the tenant class in Ulster are becoming alive to the necessities of the times, and the truly perilous position in which they are being placed. Your principles-your fears-your hopes-are theirs; and, in the partial enjoyment of some favors you do not possess, feeling them to be precarious, they seek like you to establish them on an immutable basis. They have

able advocates in the northern press-the Belfast Vindicator, the Northren Whig, and in the Derry Journal, and Standard, and they have zealous, vigorous supporters; whilst their adversaries are only being sustained by the merest drivellers that ever figured in a Dunciad. You have with you the liberal press of Dublin, the feelings of the great majority of the English people, who detest your oppressorsthe sympathies of the world; and, what is better than all, on your side is justice and Erin, on theirs is oppression and guilt. If it be not your own fault, you must succeed, and your success will lay the foundation of Ireland's prosperity; for even a Repeal of the Union, without the full recognition of your rights, would be of small service to our country. I see, moreover, in the constitution of your committee, the successful issue of the glorious struggle to which you are committed. It comprises men of every creed, united by the strong ties of brotherhood, and viewing man as he is, by the still stronger ties of mutual interest to work out a common good. Religion, that should bring you together for purposes of universal benevolence, can no longer be made, by the crafty, designing, or wickedly interested, to keep you asunder; nor can you henceforth, by any insidious legerdemain, be induced to see in the face of a fellow-countryman, because he differs from you in creed, that of an enemy. Ireland, you feel, is sufficient for us all, intended by a gracious Providence to make us all happy together. A few rapacious men, by sowing discord in the name of God and religion, made it the most miserable land on earth. They stirred up Protestant and Catholic to hate, and foolishly war with each other-like the mouse and the frog of the fable, with this difference, that, instead of the straw and

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