But in Ireland the management was very different.

Men there held tracts of ground, very often at their full value, paying for them such proportion of rent as a farmer could afford to pay in England and live.

But the Irish tenant would by no means consent to be a farmer.

It was needful to him that he should be a gentleman, and that his sons should be taught to live and amuse themselves as the sons of gentlemen--barring any such small trifle as education.

They did live in this way; and to enable them to do so, they underlet their land in small patches, and at an amount of rent to collect which took the whole labour of their tenants, and the whole produce of the small patch, over and above the quantity of potatoes absolutely necessary to keep that tenant's body and soul together.
And thus a state of things was engendered in Ireland which discouraged labour, which discouraged improvements in farming, which discouraged any produce from the land except the potato crop; which maintained one class of men in what they considered to be the gentility of idleness, and another class, the people of the country, in the abjectness of poverty.
It is with thorough rejoicing, almost with triumph, that I declare that the idle, genteel class has been cut up root and branch, has been driven forth out of its holding into the wide world, and has been punished with the penalty of extermination.