ures, is absolutely
identical with civilisation. It is such places as this, which, in the
interest of the people, justify the exemption from redistribution and
resettlement, made in one of a series of remarkable articles on Ireland
recently published in the _Birmingham Post_, of lands, the "breaking up
of which would interfere with the amenity of a residence."

* * * relations with all classes of the people here are so cordial and
straightforward that he has been easily able to give me to-day, what I
have sought in vain elsewhere in Ireland, an opportunity of conversing
frankly and freely with several labouring men. For obvious reasons these
men, as a rule, shrink from any expression of their real feelings. Their
position is apparently one of absolute dependence either upon the
farmers or the landlords, there being no other local market for their
labour, which is their only stock-in-trade. As one of them said to me
to-day, "The farmers will work a man just as long as they can't help it,
and then they throw him away."

I asked if there were no regular farm-labourers hired at fixed rates by
the year?

"Oh! very few--less now than ever; and there'll be fewer before there'll
be more. The farmers don't want to pay the labourers or to pay the
landlords; they want the land and the work for nothing, sir,--they do
indeed!"

"What does a farm-hand get," I asked, "if he is hired for a long time?"

"Well, permanent men, they'll get 6s. a week with breakfast and dinner,
or 7s. maybe, with one meal; and a servant-boy, sir, he'll get 2s. a
week or may be 3s. with his board; but it's seldom he gets it."

"And what has he for his board?"

"Oh, stirabout; and then twice a week coorse Russian or American meat,
what they call the 'kitchen,' and they like it better than good meat,
sir, because it feeds the pot more."

By this I found he meant that the "coorse meat" gave out more
"unctuosity" in the boiling--the meat being always served up boiled in a
pot with vegetables, like the "bacon and greens" of the "crackers" in
the South.

"And nothing else?"

"Yes; buttermilk and potatoes."

"And these wages are the highest?"

"Oh, I know a boy got 5s., but by living in his father's house, and
working out it was he got it. And then they go over to England to work."

"What wages do they get there?"

"Oh, it differs, but they do well; 9s. a week, I think, and their board,
and straw to sleep on in the stables."

"But doesn't it cos