200 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. [BOOK II. 



labourers could not, at the highest calculation, give con- 

 stant employment to more than one hundred men. When 

 this number was first mentioned, some of the witnesses 

 present scouted the idea of there being so little employ- 

 ment ; but, upon their examining the calculation, they 

 agreed to its justness, and said that, if one hundred was 

 not over the mark, it was under it. 



There is no such thing in this parish as wages given 

 by the small farmers ; they exchange their labour, and 

 give day for day, one to another. They cannot afford to 

 give money, and there is so little employment to be had 

 that they set no value on their labour. 



For fifty miles round this place, said one witness, every 

 grain of wheat and oats, and every pig, is sent to foreign 

 markets. The people do not know the taste of meal or 

 flour ; some of them kill their pigs, hoping to get a 

 better price by doing so, and they cannot eat even the 

 entrails. 



During the winter months they live on the produce of 

 the con-acre ; in summer they live on cabbage and green 

 herbs. Those who have a plot of early potatoes dig them 

 before they are half grown, eating them unripe. This 

 causes sickness, sends many to their graves, and wastes 

 in one month what would support the people for two if 

 allowed to mature. 



For three months in the year a labouring man gets only 

 one meal a day. 



In the mountainous districts, say the witnesses, famine 

 is so great, when the potatoes are finished, that the people 

 bleed the cattle and other animals and feed on the blood, 

 after boiling it. An instance is mentioned of a man 

 who bled the same animal three times in one season; 



