Ireland exhibits an accession of the anomalous symptoms which have
been noted of late. The arming of the people goes on so fast that the gun-trade is the briskest in the island. The people, who declare that they are starving, have food to buy guns withal. Not only so, but they have money to spend in powder and shot for wantonly firing about the country, even in 'Jollies. Some curious facts come out with respect to wages. It will be remembered that a great outcry was raised because the wages on public works were only 10d. a day; and they have been raised. Now the annual expenditure of an Irish labourer, including his potatoes (rent for conacre) used to be about five or six pounds a year—less than half-a-crown a week : with 10d. a day, there was 5d. a day thrown in to make up for the difference between potatoes grown on the conacre and maize meal bought at the shop. But the rate has been raised. We see one writer says that formerly the farmers paid "4d. a day and potatoes" : the same labourers now receive ls. 3d. a day—that is, 11d. in lieu of the potatoes. Are they worse off in this time of " famine," or better ?
While the poorer classes are thus trading on the "famine," i "there is an insane cry for more work" ; and the landlords are saddling themselves with unmeasured liabilities, to come upon the English treasury by and by with the plea of inability to pay. ." Vogue la galore I"
Mr. O'Connell is busy over the Repeal accounts, and a certain balance due to him. The accumulated rent of years, it seems, [LATEST EDITION.] falls short of the expenditure. Ireland has paid some hundred thousand pounds, and Repeal is where it was. The chief Repealer speaks as if he were cast down : just now the prospects of the agi- tation, he says, are bad, because of the "famine" ' This is odd ; for there seems no doubt that the Irish are receiving at present more cash than ever they had in their lives. But, somehow, there is confessedly a hitch in Repeal. There is no promise of greater vitality in the Young Ireland movement, which has dwin- dled into a business of letter-writing in the Nation newspaper; Mr. Smith O'Brien vouchsafing a series of didactic epistles about future measures.
The urgent business for all influential men in Ireland is, to guide the people quietly and discreetly through the difficulties of the dearth and the temptations to abuse presented by the immense eleemosynary subsidies from England : but the leading patriots are busy about their own objects of collecting pence or making displays of letter-writing. Even the vollies of musketry will not arouse them to go and mingle with the peasantry for the purpose of guiding them rationally.
