IRELAND. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

 GENERAL SYSTEM OF LABOUR. 



THE interest of the reader will not diminish as he 

 comes to the part of this volume dealing with the 

 Irish peasant : but in Ireland the classification of the 

 labourers cannot be quite so easily made as in the more 

 prosperous agricultural regions in the other parts of 

 the United Kingdom. Again, we cannot, we think, do 

 better than quote from the comprehensive report of the 

 Board of Trade ; for we thus get " boiled down," so 

 to speak, the gist of a great accumulation of tables 

 and returns that, whilst interesting and in place in a 

 " Blue Book," do not provide the succinctness and com- 

 prehensiveness that the general reader will look for. 

 Our task, a rather considerable one, has been to extract 

 and put before the public as clear and distinct a picture 

 as is possible of the whole subject, without tiring the 

 eye or confusing the mind. We seek, laboriously, to 

 extract the essential from the non-essential, and to 

 present nothing that will not prove of permanent we 

 may say historical interest. There is nothing in the 

 ensuing quotation that will not come into this category. 

 The report, dealing with classes of labourers and terms 

 of remuneration, says : 



" In many parts of Ireland agricultural labourers cannot be 

 classified according to their duties, as so many of the farms 

 which employ labour other than that of the family are 



