a week (an average of 18 shillings) they sometimes bring home as much as £10 or £12, and their average profit amounts, it is said, to £7 10s. per head.

It must not be imagined that this provides them with a fixed and assured source of income. An increased use of agricultural machinery in England and Scotland would be sufficient to lessen the demand for manual labour. Even now a bad harvest in Great Britain means that the migratory labourers return home empty-handed. And further, one single failure of the potato-crop in Ireland means not merely extreme poverty but a condition of actual distress, of famine. During the last thirty years there have been in Western Ireland five or six years of famine, either total or partial. Not many months ago one might have seen in the counties of Mayo and Galway a whole population of men and women who were in no wise either vicious or degraded, literally dying of hunger owing to the almost complete failure of the potato-crop, and this in the twentieth century, in the midst of the United Kingdom, within fifteen hours of London!

Meetings were held in various places, in order to ask, not for charity, but merely that certain public works long promised and long postponed, should now be carried out in order to provide the unfortunate population with the means of living. One day, at Belmullet, a band of four or five hundred peasants, shouting that they were starving, and nearly all holding eviction processes in their hands, broke in on a Board of Guardians, crying: "Work or Food!" Otherwise there would be only one choice left for them, namely, emigration-that is the slums of New York-or else the workhouse, that is to say, the pauper's asylum, until they should be ready for the pauper's grave.

England and in Scotland. The details are heart-rending. One fact of comparatively recent growth is the increase in the number of young girls who enter on this annual service. Their number is estimated at 10,000. They come over in parties under the guidance of a " gaffer who is usually the father of one of them.

III. THE REMEDY.

For these periodical famines and this chronic distress England has for a long time known only one remedy : emigration, helped and subsidised by the Government. Even at the present day, how sad it is to see in every village, on the walls, in the market places, or in the postoffices, those great coloured posters, maps of Queensland or Manitoba, with appropriate pictures representing the life of a colonist in those fortunate lands and close by them another series of placards representing figures in uniform, batteries of artillery, infantry drilling under the shade of Indian palm trees, with all details as regards enlistment and the rates of pay. These are the regulation official advertisements of the War Office and the Colonial Office. These are the Anglo-Saxon methods of purification. Their aim is to purge Ireland of all that is left of the indigenous race, of "the natives."

Yet in England during the last quarter of a century there has been no lack of public men who have denounced this state of things in the West of Ireland. "The shame of our statesmen," as Mr. T. W. Russell once called it, "a sin against the divine law and against humanity." As early as 1880 General Gordon, who died soon afterwards in the defence of Khartoum, sounded a note of alarm in the Times. "I must say, from all accounts and from my own observation, that the state of our fellowcountrymen in these parts of Ireland is worse than that of any other people in the world-let alone Europe. believe that these people are made as we are; that they are patient beyond belief; but, at the same time, brokenspirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation in places in which we would not keep our cattle. The Bulgarians, Anatolians, Chinese and Indians are better off than many of them are. I am not well off; but I would offer Lord So-and-so, or his agent, £1,000 if either

I

of them would live one week in these poor devils' places and feed as these poor people do.”

It required something more than a letter of General Gordon's to awaken England. It required the agitation and the great agrarian crisis of 1879 to 1890; the cry of no-rent, and the close proximity of revolution; the feeling that in Western Ireland there lies an ever-recurring danger for the peace of Ireland. Indeed it is always the home of agitation, the danger zone par excellence. It is there that social warfare breaks out it is there that the Land League was founded, and that the Plan of Campaign was conceived and partly executed. When therefore, in 1891, the country was emerging from the great agrarian struggle, an English minister, Mr. Arthur Balfour, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, endeavoured to find a solution for the land problem of the West.

Popular opinion had long fixed upon its own solution of the question; a solution that was simple, radical and careless of many practical difficulties. Seeing that it is the transaction known as the Clearances which has done all the harm, those who aim at remedying matters must proceed to reverse the operation. One must restore to cultivation the soil required for cultivation, and give back to the people the land that is their heritage. The land for the people-that was the motto of the Land League. Between the area of the land and the number of inhabitants all proportionate balance has been destroyed. It must be re-established. Some of the owners of these waste latifundia must be expropriated, and the territories cut up into farms of moderate size for the peasants to buy back. This is all the more necessary because the land in the West, unlike the plains of Meath or Tipperary, is not particularly suitable for cattle-raising. Even the best districts are only of moderate value, very apt to deteriorate and return to their original state of nature. And the execution of this scheme would be all the more

I Quoted in Hansard, March, 13th, 1901, p. 1439.

easy because, owing to American competition,2 cattlebreeding in the West is no longer a very profitable investment. The Clearances were not merely a great crime against society: they were, all things considered, an unprofitable business transaction; and now the betteradvised among the landlords are already beginning of their own accord to turn their unproductive ranches back into ploughed land. What we want, say the Nationalists, is a re-colonisation of Connaught, a large redistribution of the soil, a vast agrarian re-settlement of the West of Ireland.

This scheme, that is to say, the radical and popular solution of the question, has not proved too alarming for the Conservative Government, in principle, subject, however, to the reservation that they will only apply the principle with the utmost caution, and will not sanction State intervention as a substitute for the natural action. of economic forces, but merely as a stimulant. These principles they first admitted in 1891. It was then that, on Mr. Balfour's suggestion, they proceeded to deal with the social and economic improvement of the West. Their first step was to form an autonomous and administrative body, enjoying large powers within certain strictly defined limits, namely, the Congested Districts Board.3

This institution is a great Board à l'Anglaise, an almost independent commission of a non-political character. It

2 The graziers (entrepreneurs of cattle-breeding, who rent their grazing land for eleven months every year from the landlords and pasture their cattle on them) are no longer successful in making money. About the middle of the 19th century the landlords had introduced Scotchmen into the West as graziers. But these settlers have now disappeared, and the trade is usually carried on by local business men, who are not unwilling to add to it the trade of usurer.

3 Land Act of 1891, Section 41 (54 and 55 Victoria, ch. 48). Many Acts have since been passed modifying the original Act.-V. 56 and 57 Victoria, ch. 35.-57 and 58 Victoria, ch. 50.—59 and 60 Victoria, ch. 47-62 and 63 Victoria, ch. 18.-1 Edward VII., ch. 3 and ch. 34.3 Edward VII., ch. 37.-4 Edward VII., ch. 34. The Board has authority over only a certain number of districts which are strictly defined and scheduled as officially Congested Districts. A Congested District is, according to the Act, a district which includes at least 20 per cent. of the population of a county, and in whose electoral divisions the average rateable valuation is less than 30 shillings per inhabitant.

includes some ten honorary members nominated by the Government, and is provided for executive purposes with a whole army of clerks and officials, together with a budget of about £80,000. 4 We may here, perhaps, venture to express the opinion that from a general point of view we have no very deep admiration for these great British Boards. They have the advantage, doubtless, of being above popular influences, but they do not possess the advantage of freedom from Governmental pressure. Their tendency is to become irresponsible meeting places of somewhat mediocre amateurs, where the incompetence of some members is only equalled by the careless indifference and prejudices of others; where every man is pulling the wires in his own direction; and, consequently, where business is done without order and method and without any prearranged plan of action. As a matter of fact, though one finds in the C. D. B. (as it is named), two eminent men to represent the interests of the peasants, two priests, Father O'Hara, Parish Priest of Kiltimagh, and Dr. O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe, the majority

The Congested Districts, according to the Act of 1891, comprise 428 "electoral divisions," or say, 3,411,000 acres of land, out of the 20,198,000 acres in Ireland; say one-sixth of the whole area of the country. They comprise one-ninth of the total population of Ireland viz., about half a million inhabitants. They include 96,792 holdings of the rateable valuation of £504,234 (say about £5 per holding). If one draws an imaginary line from Londonderry to Skibbereen, almost all the land to the west of this line (except County Clare) is a Congested District. This legal definition of the Congested Districts is very narrow and complicated. By confusing the boundaries it creates a whole world of difficulties and of administrative red-tape which retards progress. The whole province of Connaught, the whole County of Kerry, and the whole County of Donegal ought to be legally considered as Congested Districts. V. on all the matter in the text, the Annual Reports of the Congested Districts Board (Thom and Co., Dublin). Cf. Ireland, Industrial and Agricultural, Dublin, 1902, p. 258, etc., published by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction. V. the Parliamentary discussions on the subject, especially Hansard, March 13th, 1901; March 14th, 1902; March 14th, 1905; June 28th, 1906. Cf. Etienne Béchaux. La Question Agraire en Irlande, Paris, 1906, p. 163, etc.

Its ordinary

4 The Board is presided over by the Chief Secretary. budget shows receipts of £41,250, consisting of the annual yield of a portion of the Church Fund assigned to it under the Act of 1891; also two grants from the imperial budget of £25,000 and £20,000 (the second of these two dates from 1903). In all, £86,250.