186 AWAKENING OF ENGLAND. 



Castlereagh we get " the most practical and 

 the most visionary of races " working out its 

 destiny by the aid of agricultural science and 

 organisation. The work of thhming out a 

 congested district is work in which comedy 

 and tragedy are closely interwoven ; it is a 

 process intensely Irish. 



Where mud cabins are huddled together is 

 a farm which might not total more than six or 

 even four acres, consisting perhaps of a score 

 of isolated patches of land — recording, no 

 doubt, the passage of the greedy incisors of 

 the gombeen - man. From this wretched 

 holding, the nursery of a fiery patriotism, the 

 visionary in the old-time farmer, who wishes 

 to stay where his clan is, has to be overcome 

 by an appeal to his sense of the practical. 

 The surveyor will have to argue with him that 

 it is better for him to lose his old mud cabin 

 not worth £30, in order to inhabit a new 

 cottage worth £150 or £200 built on the thirty- 

 acre holding ready for him some miles away on 

 land which was recently grazed by the bullock 

 and the sheep. And when once the migrant 

 has been persuaded to leave his wretched 

 cabin and his uneconomic farm of isolated 

 patches of land, to take up abode in a new 



