LETTER IV.
AGRICULTURAL LABORERS OF WILTS, DORSET, DEVON, AND SOMERSET.
I have been very careful to collect the facts here set down from the most correct sources; and have inserted nothing but what was confirmed by my own experience and investigation. In this and future letters I shall treat each branch of industry separately. And first of agriculture.
The agricultural districts of England are widely separated from each other; the nature of the employment, the remuneration for labor, habits of the people, &c., are also different in the several districts, and it will therefore be necessary for a clear understanding of the subject, that I should take each district separately. I shall confine myself in this letter to the four counties of Wilts, Dorset, Devon and Somerset.
Strictly speaking, there is no great uniformity in the agricultural features of these contiguous counties, al-
not permitted herself to enjoy. Great Britian not only draws nothing from the Irish treasury, but gives Ireland the gratuitous benefit of her own enormous revenue. The whole of the Irish revenue, including every sixpence obtained for customs, excise, stamps and postage—from tea, sugar, coffee, tobacco, spirits, and from every other article imported, as manufactured in the island, is spent in Ireland itself. Not one sixpence is remitted to the British exchequer. In point of fact, the current had already set in from the British to the Irish treasury. Ireland, then, is, at the same time, rich and poor. It produces a vast superabundance of food, but that food is drained from its shores, it is not, however, drained by the state. It is drained in a great measure, by the landlords and their creditors, who, the more they can get, the more they will drain."
This at least shows, that the famine in Ireland is not the result of the Providence of God; but the mismanagement of the rulers of the land.