on high. Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into garrets, holes, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums. Thousands of Irish families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are with national prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and the purity of their home-life, found themselves suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged to seek work of the neighboring farmers and are only hired by the day, and therefore under the most precarious forms of wage. Hence “they sometimes have long distances to go to and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently ending in sickness, disease and want.”[1]
“The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the surplus-labour of the rural division;”[2] and then people still wonder “there is still a surplus of labour in the towns and villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened scarcity in some of the country divisions.”[3] The truth is that this want only becomes perceptible “in harvest-time, or during spring, or at such times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity; at other periods of the year many hands are idle;”[4] that “from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in October until the early spring following … there is no employment for them;”[5] and further, that during the active times they “are subject to broken days and to all kinds of interruptions.”[6]
These results of the agricultural revolution—i.e., the change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous economy of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be broken, these gentlemen draw their “labour-supply … chiefly from their small tenants, who are obliged to attend when required to do the landlord’s work, at rates of wages, in
