of food, raiment, and lodging is at an end, and they have only to eat when they are fed, lie down when bidden, rise and put on their clothes when the morning gives them light, and once a-week say their prayers in the church or chapel, as their conscience dictated, without leaving the proud roof where they are fed and housed!
These palaces certainly in this respect stand preeminent over every other portion of the earth, and tell the true story of Ireland's strange management more than volumes of essays would do. To pauperize men, women, and children, in sight of, and walking over a rich uncultivated soil, as is Ireland, and shut them up, with no other crimes than that of compulsory poverty, where they are fed, clothed, and lodged at the governor's option, inclosed with bolts and bars, like felons, with no more freedom than state prisoners have, is certainly a strange comment on liberty, a strange comment on the family relationship, which prohibits all intercourse between parents and children, except a few hasty moments one day in seven. The workhouses in Ireland are many of them well managed on the principles as they are established; but, as an overseer in one of the best conducted ones said, "I have been here many years, and have seen the workings and effects of a poorhouse, and can only say—the best that can be said of them—they are prisons under a different name, calculated to produce a principle of idleness, and to degrade, never to elevate, to deaden in the human heart that rational self-respect which individual sup-
