raised in
England, and this produce was generally of an inferior
quality.

Why is it that ten men in Ireland produce no more than four men
produce in England?

Henry George says (_Social Problems_, p. 150):

A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from
which these government-aided emigrants come. What surprises
an American at first, even in Connaught, is the apparent
sparseness of population, and he wonders if this can indeed
be that over-populated Ireland of which he has heard so
much. _There is plenty of good land_, but on it are only fat
beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you at first think
that they must be washed and combed every morning. Once,
this soil was tilled and was populous, but now you will find
only traces of ruined hamlets, and here and there the
miserable hut of a herd, who lives in a way that no Terra
del Fuegan could envy. For the 'owners' of this land, who
live in London and Paris, many of them having never seen
their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so
the men have been driven off. _It is only when you reach the
bog and the rocks_ in the mountains and by the sea shore,
that you find a dense population. Here they are crowded
together on land on which nature never intended men to live.
It is too poor for grazing, so the people who have been
driven from the better lands are allowed to live upon it--as
long as they pay their rent. If it were not too pathetic,
the patches they called fields would make you laugh.
Originally the surface of the ground must have been about as
susceptible of cultivation as the surface of Broadway. But
at the cost of enormous labor the small stones have been
picked off and piled up, though the great boulders remain,
so that it is impossible to use a plow; and the surface of
the bog has been cut away and manured by seaweed, brought in
from the shore on the backs of men and women, till it can be
made to grow something.

Sir Thomas Brassey writes from a capitalist's standpoint, while Mr.
George writes from the standpoint of a philosopher who not only sees
gross social wrongs but boldly applies the remedy. But let us see if
the same fester which irritates the body of Irish society has not also
a parasitical existence in our own land, where society is yet in its
infancy, where the