Shall this man be permitted to batten in luxury in a foreign land, or at home; to whip our paupers from his carriage; or hunt them, like beasts of prey, from his grounds, whilst the lower classes—­the gradually decaying poor—­are compelled to groan under the burden of their support, in addition to their other burdens?  Surely it is not a question which admits of argument.  This subject has been darkened and made difficult by fine-spun and unintelligible theories, when the only knowledge necessary to understand it may be gained by spending a few weeks in some poor village in the interior of the country.  As for Parliamentary Committees upon this or any other subject, they are, with reverence be it spoken, thoroughly contemptible.  They will summon and examine witnesses who, for the most part, know little about the habits or distresses of the poor; public money will be wasted in defraying their expenses and in printing reports; resolutions will be passed; something will be said about it in the House of Commons; and, in a few weeks, after resolving and re-resolving, it is as little thought of, as if it had never been the subject of investigation.  In the meantime the evil proceeds—­becomes more inveterate—­eats into the already declining prosperity of the country—­whilst those who suffer under it have the consolation of knowing that a Parliamentary Committee sat longer upon it than so many geese upon their eggs, but hatched nothing.  Two circumstances, connected with pauperism in Ireland, are worthy of notice.  The first is this—­the Roman Catholics, who certainly constitute the bulk of the population, feel themselves called upon, from the peculiar tenets of their religion, to exercise indiscriminate charity largely to the begging poor.  They act under the impression that eleemosynary good works possess the power of cancelling sin to an extent almost incredible.  Many of their religious legends are founded upon this view of the case; and the reader will find an appropriate one in the Priest’s sermon, as given in our tale of the “Poor Scholar.”  That legend is one which the author has many a time heard from the lips of the people, by whom it was implicitly believed.  A man who may have committed a murder overnight, will the next day endeavor to wipe away his guilt by alms given for the purpose of getting the benefit of “the poor man’s prayer.”  The principle of assisting our distressed fellow-creatures, when rationally exercised, is one of the best in society; but here it becomes entangled with error, superstition, and even with crime—­acts as a bounty upon imposture, and in some degree predisposes to guilt, from an erroneous belief that sin may be cancelled by alms and the prayers of mendicant impostors.  The second point, in connection with pauperism, is the immoral influence that I proceeds from the relation in which the begging poor in Ireland stand towards the class by whom they are supported.  These, as we have already said, are the poorest, least educated,