The Express.
London, England, 1847-01-14 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, JAN. 14.

TWENTY-ONE gentlemen in Dublin have formed
what they please to call a landlords committee, and
they propose, through the medium of the Press,
twenty-three resolutions, a little more than one for
each member, which in this crisis they recommend
as the future salvation of Ireland. We really do not
see why these gentlemen have mot, or what is their
aim in thus communicating their " collective wisdom"
to the empire. There are some truisms, much nonsense,
but nothing whatever that is new in their resolutions;
and really if the summary and the summing of the wis-
dom of Irish landlords be but this, then we should really
recommend the gentlemen to stay at home, mind
their tenants, and leave state cares to the imperial
parliament. For, if this be a sample of what an Irish
parliament would be, we must say that it promises
very crude, careless, and common- place legislation.
Almost all that is good in the twenty-three resolu-
tions is borrowed from the intended measures of govern-
ment. Waste lands, colonisation, emigration, conso-
lidation of drainage acts, compensation fur improve-
ments, facility of selling estates and transferring pro-
perty—all these are borrowed from the intended acts
of the administration. But not content with the
humble rank of being altogether political plagiarists,
the landlords committee preface all these fine and
somewhat stale recommendations by a few abstract
propositions in political economy :
First [they say] the direct employment of the great man
of the able-bodied peoplc by the state has an unavoidable
tendency to paralyse industry, and to substitute artificial for
natural labour. _ _

Now, it is very illogical and unfair to attribute
these terrible effects to state employment. The state
would never have thought of employing labourers,
had not industry first been paralysed, and had not
labour, both natural and artificial, been suspended.
The labour rate commenced its operation after har-
vest, when farmers and landlords had no employment
to give. Had not the state interfered, the labourer
must have starved. Now that the peasant has been
made to live, by the intervention of the state, for three
or four months, the landlords complain that they can-
not get him back to his old temporary, ill-paid task, and
thatthe public works stand in the way ofthe farmer and
the landlord. We beg to say, that in this 1,-81x-et we
have very little pity for either. Had they fairly
treated and supported, during the idle season, the
workmen whom they want in the busy season, they
would have no cause for their present complaint. The
labourer who tills the land, ought to be supported by
that land throughout the year ; and the landlord or
the farmer who habitually turns off his labourer to
beg during the dull months of summer and of winter,
deserves to want him at seed-time and at harvest.
The second resolution is as follows:

That any system of relief to the able-bodied that does
not lead to the increase of food, or articles that may be
exchanged for food, will diminish the capital of the country,
and that just in proportion as capital decreases, poverty will
increase. . . .

According to this sapient declaration, half a mil-
lion, or a million, spent on a railroad connecting the
east and west of -Ireland, would be highly detri-
mental, for it would certainly diminish capital and
not produce food. What wiseacres! How com-
pletely in the teeth of the recommendation of many
members of the twenty-three, who, like moat Irish-
men, are sensible and able men taken separately, but
who turn to something quite the reverse as soon as
they get together. Another resolution declares that
labour is worth nothing, except distributed by private
individuals, and that all the money that the state
can and must afford for the employment of the poor,
should be given through private individuals.
We shall not pause to refute or comment upon this
dogmatical assertion, it being quite sufficiently dis-
proved by that which follows, viz., that piers, har-
bours' curing houses for fish, and salt depots, should
be established for maritime districts. Is the money
for them necessarily to pass through private hands,
through those of the sea-shore landlords, for
example ? Is it to erect temples to jobbery, that the
landlords of Ireland have formed a committee in such
a crisis as the present ?
The same selfishness is evident in the proposals for
dealing with waste lands. The proprietors are not
to part with an acre of moor ; the state is to enable
them to render such profitable, and the poor are but
to derive the temporary advantage of labouring there-
on during the years of reclamation. After this we
are recommended a system of baronial boards, to take
care of the roads and the cess, and to build new
cabins, throwing gaols, criminal expenditure, and
lunatic asylums on the state. With all this, not one
word of poor law or poor rates.
If the landlords of Ireland come before the impe-
rial public with such principles,such recommendations,
such disinterestedness, such novel wisdom, we can
only say that they will but gladden their enemies,
and communicate a depressing feeling of shame and
sorrow to their friends.

Whilst on the subject of Ireland, let us take the
opportunity of correcting a mistake of the Freeman's
Journal, which represents us as the determined foe of
all public charity to Ireland. The Freetnan's Journal
mistakes us altogether. In discussing the denunciation
of all private charity towards the Irish preached
by the Times, we pointed out the many advan
tages, which private had over public charity.
But we never said that where private charity was I
not forthcoming, public charity should be denied.
The government in its bills of last session provided
for the gratuitous supply of very necessitous districts ;
but it repudiated the idea of interfering with all the
markets of Ireland, and making itself at once the
general importer and caterer of food. The last was
impossible, and would lead direct to famine, not
plenty. In the same spirit we deprecate public
charity, or distribution of corn to the populace, like
that which prevailed in ancient Rome. But such
objections should always give way to necessity. The
first of rules le, that no part of the population of our
empire should starve.

ADIMEINO firmly to our opinion that, of the candi-
dates who have presented themselves to the consti-
nof Manchester, Mr. BRIGHT is the choice most
tfinteeg most calculated to promote the advance of the
great Liberal cause, nevertheless, we cannot but
admit that Lord LINCOLN'S statement of his political
sentiments is frank, liberal, and noble. Such an ex-
planation, at such a time, augurs well for the conduct
of the section of practical Tories in parliament, and
relieves not a few doubts entertained on this subject.
In another article, we have stated and summed up
the urgent reasons which exist for doing away at the
earliest moment with the rag of protection still stand-
ing for corn. On this subject, we cannot bat record