er
relation between the farmers and labourers than unhappily exists at
present. Their joint heritage of suffering and hardship had drawn them
together in bonds of sympathy and friendship. The farmer often shared,
in the bitterness of the winter months, something out of his own stock
of necessities with his less fortunate labourer. And before the
arrival of the Creameries the daily allowance of the gallon of
"skimmed" milk was made to almost every labourer's family in the
country by kind-hearted neighbouring farmers. In addition, in a land
where few were rich, the ancient proverb held good: "The poor always
help one another." And it is true that, in the darkest days of their
suffering, the farmers and labourers shouldered their troubles and
their sorrows in a community of sympathy, which at least lessened
their intensity. It is only with the growth of a greater independence
among either class that the old friendly bonds and relationships have
shown a loosening, and newer and more personal interests have tended
to divide them into distinctive bodies, with separate class interests
and class programmes.

As a very little boy I remember trudging my way to school with
children who knew not what the comfort of boots and stockings was on
the coldest winter's day; who shivered in insufficient rags and whose
gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from
"Indian meal stir-about" (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from
maize). And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured
this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the
smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off--they were all the
progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism. This
further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the
farmers and labourers together--the labourers of to-day were, in
countless cases, the farmers of yesterday, whom the Great Clearances
had reduced to the lowest form of servitude and who dragged out an
existence of appalling wretchedness in sight of their former homes,
now, alas, razed to the ground. My mind carries me back to the time
when the agricultural labourer in Munster was working for four
shillings a week, and trying to rear a family on it! I vowed then that
if God ever gave me the chance to do anything for this woe-stricken
class I would strive for their betterment, according to the measure of
my opportunity. And it happened, in the mysterious