SECT. XXXVII.] RESULTS OF THE INQUIRY. 311 



want of the commonest articles of furniture, the uncleanly 

 habits of the inmates themselves, and the numbers which, 

 without distinction of age or sex, are closely crowded to- 

 gether, they are frequently the means of generating and 

 communicating infectious disease." 



te It sometimes happens, likewise, that they retain in the 

 English and Scotch towns the practice which they had learnt 

 in their own country, of keeping pigs in the house. For 

 the most part their rooms are nearly destitute of furniture, 

 and they lie on the ground, the whole family frequently 

 sleeping in the same bed. Many details will be found in 

 the evidence, as to the practice of the Irish of crowding 

 themselves into narrow spaces, particularly in the testi- 

 mony of the medical gentlemen, who in most cases had 

 made a complete and close inspection of the worst parts of 

 the large towns at the time when the cholera prevailed in 

 this country ." 



" With respect to food, the Irish for the most part use 

 in Great Britain the same diet to which they had been ac- 

 customed in their own country. This food, it is scarcely 

 necessary to say, is potatoes and milk, both for breakfast 

 and dinner ; the latter meal being occasionally seasoned 

 with a herring, and more rarely with bacon or salt pork." 



" On the whole, it appears that, to a considerable extent, 

 the Irish labourers who settle in Great Britain do not in- 

 crease their comforts, or improve their style of living, in 

 proportion to the increase of their incomes ; that they have 

 a fixed standard of existence, little superior to that which 

 they observed in their own country ; and that everything 

 beyond the sum which enables them to live in this manner 

 is spent in drinking. Persons not reconciled by habit to 

 the plain and meagre food and the confined lodgings in 



