The Express.
London, England, 1848-08-30 00:00:00

(i. e., the landed gentry) will be at peace. All this
as a system we can understand. Whatever else ally
be thought of it, it is at least consistent and reliable,
and that is something. We know what it would be'
at ; and if the nation should ever adopt its disciples
for its government and guidance we should know be.
forehand what we had to expect.
But of the coo peting systems of policy, whether
they be Peelism or whiggism, or by whatever other
title designated, what shall we say ? We wail not men
or ministers; sooth to ray, we see but little eldferenee
in point of principle or purpose, as far as hapless Ire.
land is concerned, between the present cabinet and its
predecessors. While in opposition, all admit and
seem really to feel that the Aatutuble condition or
that kingdom imperiously demands :elorm ; that its
franchises ought forthwith to be equalised with those
of Britain; that its ecclesiastical state is wholly inde.
fenaitie; and that its physical resources ought with-
out delay to be liberated from the accursed thraldom
beneath which they. lie idle. But in office, forthnitß
never comes. The intolerable church monopoly grows
into something " not so very excessive in pecuniary
amount," but " involving considerations of the greeted
delicacy and difficulty." And the hindrances to
investment of capital and popular industry arc all
• resolved into the false pretence of "universal inie-
curity," and the flippant sneer of " want of self-reli-
ance. We neither deny the evils of insecurity or
want of self-depender ce; but every one, except cabi-
net ministers for the time being, know and admit that
neither the oue nor the other are univ, real, and his-
' Tory's inexorable verdict will undouleedly declare that
both have been much more the results of wicked and
I , mischievous laws, than the spontaneous produce of the

Celtic soil.
But, were it otherwise, there would still be no ex-
cuse for men whose own reiterated taunts of one an-
other for culpable neglect of just and practical
measures of relief stand upon record. To the indict-
nt recently preferred by Lord SHREWS/Mir
against miuisters there is no defence. Sir Roma
PEEL, when quitting office two years since, dithered
his belief that great measures of reform, social and
political, were needed by Ireland, and ought to be
attempted. Lord Join RUSSELL told the world that
he had had a dream about the matter, and that in his
midnight vision he had seen the soil of Ireland made
available for the sustenance of her people, the rightsof
Ireland placed finally and for ever beyond dispute,
and the al•ars of Ireland purified from the
desecration of intolerance and ascendancy. Bat
Sir ItemtEnt has never said or done any
one thing tending to accelerate the essential charges
he pronounced to be possible and indispensable in
1846 ; and Lord Joics has since awoke in office, and
lo I—it is all a dream. Not one earnest or manly
effort has been made during the present shameful
session to deal with the church question, or the fran-
chise question, or the mu icipal oue'tion, or the
grand jury question, or the labour question, or the
land question. It is perfectly farcical to talk of such
miserable scraps of legislation as the Evicted
Destitute Poor Bill, or such jobbing crotchets as
the Farmers' Estate Bill, as national measures.
Two measures, and two only, deserving the name of
Irish reform measures, were laid before parliament
since its assembling in November last; and of the be-
nefits derivable from both the justly dissatisfied
people of Ireland have been unfortunately deprived.
We allude to the Franchise Bill, and the Incumbered
Estates Bill. The forms was introduced in the
month of April, and early in May pass.d the wend
reading with general approval, especially from the
Irish members. But whether in consideration of the
latter circumstance, or from some other equally wise
and valid reason, from the moment it was
found practicable to carry the measure, it
was abandoned; and no entreaty or expostulation
could induce her Majesty's government to run the
risk of diverting any portion of popular attention
from the mischievous schemes on which in disgust
and despair it had daily become more and morn con-
centrated. To what evil influence this most unhappy
course is to be ascribed, we * cannot of course under-
take to tell : but whencesoever the fatal counsel came
that thus induced the whigs to do themselves, as a
party, and the people of Ireland, so manifest a wrong,
we trust that henceforth we may at least be spared
the odious task of having to record such proofs of in-
stability of purpose, or something less excusable.
The fate of the Incumbered Estates Bill has been,
if possible, still more to be regretted. The Franchise
Bill was not mangled and maimed in its progress
through committee as its more unhappy counterpart
was doomed to be. Next session we may still look
for its resuscitation and re-introduction in the form in
which it was unaccountably shelved last May. But
the lacumbered Estates Bill has passed into a law—
not as it was originally drawn—not as all who sin-
cerely advocated it as a remedial scheme
desired that it should have been—not, in a
word, in a shape calculated in reality to
" facilitate the sale of incumbered properties in Ire-
land," bat emasculated and paralysed and deformed
to suit the sinister and sordid views of the grasping
money-lenders and joint-stock companies.
Such are the wretched results of the session, as far
as one portion of the empire is concerned, and that a
portion which, for the sake of British interests, to say
nothing of its own, preeminently claimed an efficient
and restorative policy.

ONE of the main causes which led the authorities
of various workhouses to treat the casual poor with
unwarrantable harshness and neglect will be done
away with by the law which is to come into operation
on the Ist of October next, and which provides that
the costs for the relief of the wandering poor are to
be chargeable to the common fund of each union, and
not, as hitherto, to the parish in which the workhouse
happened to be situated.
Vagrancy, in the dire and menacing form which it
has of late assumed, is a plague of such recent growth,
that the inhabitants of localities less exposed to the
infliction are very imperfectly aware of the extent to
which it presses upon the resources of places which,
owing to their central position, the affluence and hu-
manity of their inhabitants, or their neighbourhood
to extensively pauperised districts, are exposed to a
perpetual influx of migratory poor. The cases of
Marylebone wotkhouse, and more recently of that
of St. 'Martin-in-the-Fields, have, in consequence of
the rather unwarrantable conduct of their authorities,
made a great deal of noise. And doleful has been
the outcry from places like Liverpool, Bristol, and
the Welsh ports, overwhelmed and preyed upon by
swarms of famishing Irish. But the extent of the
calamity, the terrific rapidity of its increase, the
disease and demoralisation which everywhere follow
in its train ; the inadequacy of the union workhouses,
as at present organised and officered, to corrector con-
trol the evil; the interruption of their proper tune-
tions, consequent on their attempts to do so; above

all, the intolerable burden imposed ou some
of those parishes which have been so Un-
fortunate as to offer eligible sites for union work-
houses, are as yet very imperfectly known to
the community at large. Nor is it a slight labour to
supply this defect. The documents recently issued by
the poor-law board are sufficiently voluminous. Bat
they are so imperfectly digested, so badly arranged
in every respect, that lacking, as they do, the conveni-
ence of an index, or even of a decent table of con-
tents, it is no easy matter to epitomise their most
striking results, or select at a glance the most alarm-
ingly hideous of the monster evils whose existence
they disclose. As yet, indeed, anything like a statis-
tical estimate of the numbers and cost of the vagrant
poor is impossible, from the mere fact that
hitherto, in many of, the workhousee, no
separate account has been kept of the expense of their
casual inmates. The best we can do at this moment
is to select some individual case, as an example both
of the general evils which we have signalised above,
and specially of that inequality in point of pecuniary
parish responsibility which Mr. IiULLER s bill II
intended to remedy.
One thing is obvious enough from the papers before
us, that it is not the parishes that are so large or po7
pious as to have a workhouse to themselves that
have had most reason to complain. There, whatever
the amount of the rates expended in casual relief, it
er, is
equally contributed by all the ratepayers. Taints
the parishes of Marylebone and St. Martin-in. the-identsields
include so large a proportion of the wealthy res
of the metropolis, persons spending there the incomes
which they derive from all quarters of the United
Kingdom, that they have the less right to complain
it an inordinate share of the poverty as well as the
wealth of the empire should either endenizen itself
among them, or ask at their gates the temporary
may Or
tauce of a meal and a night's repose. The same
be said of the other parishes that have separate work-
At
houses, at least at the west end of the metropolis.
all events, the proceedings of some of their underlings