124 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



Maguires. Many of these pamphlets were devoted to 

 the woes of the tenantry, and were diatribes directed 

 against the landlord-and-middleman system, which 

 was in truth a very bad one. Others, again, were 

 written by indignant Protestants, who ascribed the 

 miseries of Ireland to the early age at which the 

 peasantry married, and denounced the priesthood for 

 their alleged encouragement of early marriages for the 

 sake of the fees. But the most intelligent and well 

 informed of the pamphleteers, while not denying the 

 evils of the landlord-and-middleman system, pointed 

 to the fact that the standard of living of the peasantry 

 had risen greatly and was still visibly rising. As 

 evidences of improvement, they directed attention to 

 the superior clothing of the peasantry, male and 

 female, that was everywhere witnessed at chapel ami 

 market, and to many other signs that indicated a 

 greater ease of living. 



There is no doubt, however, that the population of 

 Ireland was superabundant, in the sense that the laud 

 could not support it except in a regrettable poverty. 

 But poverty is the lot of almost all agricultural 

 countries. . On the Continent of Europe, from the 

 Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, the tillers of 

 the soil are bound to a hard struggle to wrest sub- 

 sistence from the land, and only live by the exercise 

 of an extreme penuriousness. Yet everywhere, at the 

 present day, they are better off than their fathers and 

 grandfathers were. An agricultural community is 

 naturally averse from improvements, and reluctantly 



