AND DECREASE OF FLAX-CULTURE IN IRELAND. 249 



public dinners of that very excellent association, whose 

 labours were of the highest importance to the spinners and 

 manufacturers, and of the greatest benefit to Flax-growers 

 in Ireland. Such will be a stepping stone to the solid rock 

 foundation on which Ireland's greatness, as a producing country 

 of manufacturing material, may be built, and never had any 

 viceroy such an opportunity of seeing a work in its infancy 

 so successfully finished as his excellency Lord Wodehouse 

 now has, for it is altogether in his power to so forward the 

 increase in Flax cultivation that Ireland may become the 

 nurse of the 100,000 now out of employment in Lancashire 

 until their children, not in arms, but now in 1864 returning 

 from school wanting a dinner, will talk of the year that Lord 

 Wodehouse, having placed Lancashire cotton-spinners inde- 

 pendant of cotton, as the only article they could spin on (as 

 they call it) the existing machinery of Lancashire. 



The cry has always been want of machinery, but if 

 machinery be once started to work, and that farmers know, 

 they can have their material sold off at once, or made market- 

 able on their own account. Flax will be brought in as a 

 standing crop in the course of rotation, and will be called (as 

 it is in Belgium and Holland) the rent paying crop in 

 Ireland. 



