institutions, which the townsmen and mere cultivators of the soil do not stand in need of. All this would fall with the baron's castle and the commoner's mansion. The moral and political respectability of England would sink in proportion as society became deteriorated and confused. Offices which are now filled by respectable country gentlemen, and seats in Parliament, which are the objects of contention between wealthy families, would fall into the hands of men having no stake in the country, and whose chief object would be to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the nation, regardless alike of the happiness of the people, or the advancement of sound and rational reform. Talented as several of the French Deputies are, they have neither the same practical knowledge of legislation, nor the same prompting personal interest in the country, as many an English nobleman. The consequence has been that England is marching on in prosperity, while France is ground down under the most galling and systematic tyranny in Europe.

ART. VI.-First Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Irish Fisheries, with the Minutes of Evidence and Appendix. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty. Dublin, 1836.

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MONG the various sources of profitable employment by which the industry of Ireland could be rendered available towards the increase of the comforts of the people and the prcsperity of the empire, the fisheries are certainly entitled to a large share of attention. A very slight survey even of the geographical character of the island would alone be sufficient to confirm this position. Surrounded as it is by an ocean teeming with fish of every species calculated to gratify the most fastidious palate; indented with deep and spacious bays, in which the most numerous fleets ever launched by Great Britain in her most palmy days of nautical supremacy could ride in safety; with creeks and havens innumerable, into which smaller craft can have recourse for shelter on any unfavourable change of weather; with a dense population, no individual of which, let him locate himself as centrally as he will, can be more than fifty miles distant from the coast, so that the produce of the ocean could be served up to his table in a state almost as rife and healthy as he could enjoy it on the coast; with all these advan

tages, it might be thought that fresh fish would form one great element of national sustenance. If the survey be extended to the relative situation of the island with respect to other parts of the civilized world, the speedy and safe communication that can be maintained between it and all the great ports of Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the whole of the eastern, that is, of the commercial coasts of both Americas and the West Indies, affords an opening to mercantile speculations on the grandest scale; and these, again, are peculiarly aided by the extreme facility of access to her ports, and their acknowledged security, already alluded to. The natural advantages which Ireland thus possesses in a commercial point of view, may be still more strongly illustrated by the fact, that, while Great Britain commands a scope of commerce unprecedented in the annals of any nation since the records of history commence, not a vessel engaged in any department of it, with the trifling exception of the Baltic trade, but must, both when outward and inward bound, pass by the Irish coast. This reflection might lead to many enlarged speculations as to the general relations of the country, melancholy enough as to the past, but cheering in prospect. At present the considerations arising from it must be confined to the fisheries. The irresistible conclusion respecting them in this point of view is, that Ireland should furnish not only an ample stock of fish for domestic consumption, but also a superabundance adequate to meet the most extended demand of the most extended commerce. If, to these two facts, the great internal supply of the article, and the boundless expanse of foreign communication, be added another, equally indisputable, that the great majority of the population at home, and a large proportion of that of those foreign countries most intimately connected with it in their commercial relations, are bound by a moral necessity, of most powerful influence, to make fish, whether fresh or cured, a portion, and no small portion, of their usual sustenance, the inquirer is driven irresistibly into the inference that Ireland ought to be the greatest fish-producing and fish-exporting country on the face of the globe. Now, the fact is directly the reverse. Instead of contributing anything towards foreign consumption, the supply falls so far short of the wants of her own population, that in this, as in other cases of similar import, she is starving in the midst of plenty. The people of Ireland are indebted for their chief supply of an article almost essential to their existence, to the industry and sagacity of their Scottish neighbours.

Why is this so? Why-if the land, for causes we shall not at present enter into, be in a great measure locked up against

the industry of her inhabitants-why is the sea, that is open to all, the sea that seems to have made the coasts of Ireland the chosen pleasure-ground, for every variety of creature that animates its depths;-where, from the cliffs that tower over the Atlantic, may be seen by day the whale and sunfish indulging in their unwieldy gambols, or basking in undisturbed tranquillity, and by night its surface beaming with interminable streaks of sparkling herring shoals, that come and go, and leave no trace behind-why is it, that the sea, which almost throws up its countless myriads of living provender upon its shores, is unavailing to alleviate, if not to prevent, the cry of destitution that incessantly moans over the land? It is not want of knowledge. The facts just stated are as notorious as they are extraordinary. From the earliest periods, notice is taken of the abundance of fish. The ancient records of the country, few as they are that still remain, afford evidence that this branch of industry was well known and duly regarded. In the reign of Edward IV it was made the subject of special legislation. An act of the fifth of that reign provides that no foreign vessel should fish on the banks near the Irish coast, unless on payment of an annual duty of 13s. 4d., no small sum in those days; thus proving that the acknowledged abundance of the article was at that time well known in the neighbouring countries, and that the domestic legislature, for this was an act of the Irish parliament, felt it their duty to extend over this department of native industry a protecting duty of the most unexceptionable kind against unlimited foreign interference. Philip II. of Spain, whose connexion with the Netherlands had doubtless made him acquainted with the full value of this element of national wealth, paid an annual sum of 1000l. for license to fish on the northern coasts of Ireland for twenty-one years. The Dutch purchased a similar privilege in the reign of Charles I, for which this thrifty and shrewd people thought 30,000l. not too high a price; and, during the period of the republic, the Swedes procured a permission, on similar terms, to employ a stated number of vessels in the Irish fisheries. That these indulgences did not materially interfere with the domestic trade appears from a passage in the works of Sir James Ware, who wrote in the time of James I, in which it is stated, that "among the advantages of Ireland, may be reckoned her great and plentiful fisheries of salmon, herring, and pilchards, which, salted and barrelled, are every year exported to foreign parts, and yield a considerable return to the merchants." Instances of the public recognition of the extent and value of the Irish fisheries are not confined to the remoter periods. "The fisheries of Ireland," says Sir Wil

liam Temple, who wrote subsequently to the revolution, "might prove a mine under water as rich as any under ground." Young, in his valuable Tour through Ireland, in 1779, truly remarks, that "there is scarcely a part of Ireland but what is well situated for some fishing of consequence. Her coasts and innumerable creeks are the resort of vast shoals of herring, cod, ling, hake, mackerel, &c., which might, by proper attention, be converted into funds of wealth." Daniel, in his Rural Sports, says, that "the waters of Ireland abound in all that can invite an angler to their banks; perhaps they are better stored, and the fish contained in them of a size superior to those found elsewhere in the united empire." To quote the words of Wakefield, who travelled through the country in 1812, would be little more than to echo those of preceding writers. Want of knowledge, therefore, is not the cause of the depressed state of this branch of the natural resources. Neither is it want of industry. From the earliest periods, the native inhabitants of the western shores, where the harbours are most numerous, and the fish of every kind most abundant, are known to have been in the habit of launching out their little corachs, ribbed with osiers and coated with hides, buffetting the billows of the Atlantic, and returning home laden gunnel deep; less rejoiced, perhaps, at the plentiful addition they were thus contributing to the relief of their anxious families at home, than grieved at being compelled to relinquish the still greater abundance their scanty means of conveyance compelled them to leave behind. Even at the present day, the reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry, with which the reader will be made better acquainted by and by, state, that when the herrings drift in large shoals into the immediate vicinity of the shores, the inhabitants of the coast villages are in the habit of clubbing their blankets to form them into a kind of clumsy net for their capture; they themselves, their wives and children, submitting to the want of covering in the best manner they can, until the fishing is over. In the southern counties, the adventurous young men, finding that domestic employment, either on land or water, holds out no adequate remuneration, proceed across the Atlantic to Newfoundland, whence some return with the earnings of one or more seasons, while others are induced to expatriate themselves altogether, and to make that bleak and desolate region of fog and loneliness the seat of their permanent residence. It is not, therefore, want of industry. What then can be the cause?

In attempting to solve this problem, we shall commence by a statement of the causes to which this state of things has been generally attributed; and then, without presuming to intrude

upon the reader any speculative hypothesis of our own, that might, on a still more enlarged investigation--for we are not ashamed to confess, that it is a question to excite our feelings as well as to engage our understandings-prove equally unfounded in principle, and fallacious in result, as any of those that have been hazarded and proved futile, we shall detail, concisely but accurately, the attempts made, from time to time, to fix this department of national industry upon a solid footing, describe its position and bearings at the present moment, and then leave to common sense to follow out the subject to a sound and legitimate conclusion, as to the ulterior measures best suited to restore it to its ancient state of efficiency.

The present depressed state of the fisheries of Ireland has been attributed to the following causes-the poverty of the fishermen, their ignorance and prejudices, the want of shelter for their craft, injudicious laws and restrictions, and the frequency of wars.

Poverty is a charge which has been brought against fishermen in all ages of the world, from the Ichthyophagi with whom Menelaus was condemned to mess during his disastrous voyage homewards from Troy, to the native Australians of our own days; yet, poor as the vocation is, it did not prevent the Dutch from embarking in it, and persevering in it so as to render it a source of comfortable subsistence for no small portion of their population, and of revenue and greatness to their country; neither has it prevented the population in many of the maritime villages of England from procuring from it, for themselves and their families, if not the comforts enjoyed by the agricultural peasantry, at least a certain elevation in social existence, adequate to maintain them several degrees above that state of squalid destitution which the Irish peasant deems alone deserving of being branded with the name of poverty. The poverty of the Irish fisherman, therefore, does not proceed merely from his being of that vocation. It may tend to prevent his rising into some more profitable line of living; but it exerts no necessary influence to depress him into beggary. His ignorance, the second cause, is the natural-the necessary-result of his poverty; and as to his prejudices they are but an additional link in this chain of causes and effects. In confirmation of the position, that the destitution, ignorance, and prejudices of this class in Ireland arise from circumstances extraneous to their mode of life, we shall, instead of entering into abstract theoretical disquisitions, adduce the actual state of the fishermen of Claddagh, as given in Hardiman's History of the town of Galway, and shall make no apology for deviating somewhat from the direct course