CHAPTER III. 



SOCIAL CONDITIONS OF THE PEOPLE. 



Ireland is a poor country. Anyone who has 

 wandered through the endless mountain wastes 

 of Connaught, who has seen the dirty slums of 

 an Irish town, inhabited by a modern proletariat 

 without modern industrial development, will 

 scarcely need to look out figures for his impres- 

 sions. At the same time statistics confirm his 

 conceptions. According to a calculation of Sir 

 Robert Giffen, which was laid before the Com- 

 mission on Financial Relations, for the work of 

 which it was, in a certain sense, taken as a basis, 

 the income of Ireland maybe calculated at from 

 63 to 76 million pounds.^ This estimate, with a 

 population of 4^ millions, would give an average 

 income of from ^15 to ;fi6. Small as this 

 average income appears (and it must be con- 

 siderably lower in the west), it is the result of a 

 growth, though certainly a slow one. The 



^ Final Report of the Royal Commission on the Financial 

 Relations between Great Britain and Ireland, p. 174, f/ se^. 



