igh rents paid.
The Irish people is thus held in crushing poverty, from which it cannot
free itself under our present social conditions. These people live in
the most wretched clay huts, scarcely good enough for cattle-pens, have
scant food all winter long, or, as the report above quoted expresses it,
they have potatoes half enough thirty weeks in the year, and the rest of
the year nothing. When the time comes in the spring at which this
provision reaches its end, or can no longer be used because of its
sprouting, wife and children go forth to beg and tramp the country with
their kettle in their hands. Meanwhile the husband, after planting
potatoes for the next year, goes in search of work either in Ireland or
England, and returns at the potato harvest to his family. This is the
condition in which nine-tenths of the Irish country folks live. They are
poor as church mice, wear the most wretched rags, and stand upon the
lowest plane of intelligence possible in a half-civilised country.
According to the report quoted, there are, in a population of 8.5
millions, 585,000 heads of families in a state of total destitution; and
according to other authorities, cited by Sheriff Alison, {272b} there are
in Ireland 2,300,000 persons who could not live without public or private
assistance--or 27 per cent. of the whole population paupers!

The cause of this poverty lies in the existing social conditions,
especially in competition here found in the form of the subdivision of
the soil. Much effort has been spent in finding other causes. It has
been asserted that the relation of the tenant to the landlord who lets
his estate in large lots to tenants, who again have their sub-tenants,
and sub-sub-tenants, in turn, so that often ten middlemen come between
the landlord and the actual cultivator--it has been asserted that the
shameful law which gives the landlord the right of expropriating the
cultivator who may have paid his rent duly, if the first tenant fails to
pay the landlord, that this law is to blame for all this poverty. But
all this determines only the form in which the poverty manifests itself.
Make the small tenant a landowner himself and what follows? The majority
could not live upon their holdings even if they had no rent to pay, and
any slight improvement which might take place would be lost again in a
few years in consequence of the rapid increase of population. The
children would then live to grow up under the impr