ch his very crudeness makes him
incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The
temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he
gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society
blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of
necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his
savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with a
competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for
this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is
therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English
working-men should be forced down further and further in every branch in
which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such
as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which
requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the
dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a
mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation,
the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all
simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than
skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are
therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers,
bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen
among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to
depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who
have forced their way into other occupations, should become more
civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong
degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in
view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when,
in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are
Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth,
no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status--in
short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part
of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand
how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our
modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more
degraded by the presence of Irish competition.

RESULTS.

Having now investigated,