The next is the evil of subletting, by which property becomes overloaded with human beings, who, for the most part, are bound by no ties whatsoever to the owner of the soil.

He is not their landlord, nor are they his tenants; and so far from their interests being in any way reciprocal, they are actually adversative.
It is his interest to have them removed, and, as circumstances unfortunately stand, it is theirs to remain, inasmuch as their alternative is ruin since they have no place of shelter to receive them.
Political corruption, in the shape of the forty-shilling franchise, was another cause, and one of the very worst, which led to the prostration of the country by poverty and moral degradation, and for this the proprietors of the soil are solely responsible.

Nor can the use of the potato, as the staple food of the laboring classes, in connection with the truck system, and the consequent absence of money payments, in addition to the necessary ignorance of domestic and social comforts that resulted from them, be left out of this wretched catalogue of our grievances.

Another cause of emigration is to be found in the high and exorbitant rents at which land is held by all classes of farmers--with some exceptions we admit, as in the case of old leases--but especially by those who hold under middlemen, or on the principle of subletting generally.

By this system a vast deal of distress and petty but most harrassing oppression is every day in active operation upon the property of the head landlord, which he can never know, and for which he is in no other way responsible unless by having ever permitted the existence of it for any purpose whatsoever.
In a country distracted like Ireland, it would be impossible to omit the existence of political and religious animosity as a strong and prominent cause of our wretched poverty, and consequently of emigration.