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increased activity of farmers, if they will rise to the need 

 of the moment. They can increase production to the 

 utmost they are capable of, and can market all they can 

 produce. The distributive trade at least should not 

 suffer if farmers do their duty, and the distributive 

 houses can, if custom is good in the country, keep many 

 manufacturing firms employed. Ireland, if only the far- 

 mers worked energetically, could bear the shock of the 

 war better than its mighty industrial neighbour. 



I have spoken of increased production by the farmers 

 as a duty. The word duty implies obligation. In a 

 merely technical and legal sense Irish farmers have no 

 obligations connected with the land they occupy other 

 than the payment of their rent or annuities. But there 

 is another sense in which their obligations to the nation 

 are very real, and if these obligations are not fulfilled, 

 Irish farmers as a class will suffer just as surely as if 

 they had the reputation of not paying their legal debts 

 and were refused credit on all sides. Irish farmers ap- 

 pealed to the nation to support them in their efforts first 

 to have security of tenure and to have tribunals created 

 which would fix the fair rental farmers should pay, and 

 after that they asked the nation to back up their great 

 policy of land purchase. The nation supported farmers 

 in their struggle and secured legislative sanction for the 

 changes they desired. Public credit was pledged to 

 enable the gigantic financial operations connected with 

 land purchase to be carried through. Why was all this 

 done? It was not because farmers were really the 

 poorest class in Ireland. At all times, even to-day, even 

 in Dublin, the capital city of this country, many thou- 

 sands of urban workers lived and live in a state of 

 wretchedness and poverty which could hardly have been 

 paralleled and certainly not exceeded even in the worst 

 of the congested districts. The Great Father has His 

 many mansions in the heavens and the Devil has his on 

 earth. In Dublin alone twenty thousand families live 

 in one room each, in a state of foetid squalor which you 



