456 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



200,000 people were starving. Agrarian outrages, murder, 

 robbery, and intimidation were prevalent. Houses were 

 broken open to obtain arms ; midnight meetings were 

 held ; and neither the armed police nor the military could 

 cope with the situation. County Clare, where Ralahine is 

 situated, was in the very centre of the disturbed area. 

 Many of the landlords left their houses in charge of the 

 police, and went to Dublin or to England. Rents at this 

 time were enormously high, often 10 or 12 an acre for 

 small plots of land of average quality, so that all the pro- 

 duce, except potatoes enough to keep life in the cultivator's 

 family, went into the landlords' pockets. The crisis had 

 been aggravated by extensive evictions of the peasantry in 

 order to form large grazing farms, the rents of which were 

 more easy to collect and less likely to fail than those of 

 small holdings. The excitement was intense, and hatred 

 and suspicion of landlords and of all agents and stewards 

 was at its height ; and it was at this inopportune moment 

 that Mr. Craig first came to Ralahine, on the invitation of 

 its owner, Mr. Vandeleur, to see if he could establish a co- 

 operative farm and thus restore peace to this one estate 

 in a time of general anarchy. 



The steward who managed the farm had just been mur- 

 dered, and the owner's family had gone away for safety ; 

 and it was under these adverse circumstances, that a 

 stranger from England, a Saxon who knew not a word of 

 Irish, and a Protestant who, it was thought, would probably 

 interfere with their religion, was brought over by the 

 landlord, presumably in his o\vn interest and to get all 

 that was possible out of themselves, the labourers. The 

 former steward had been a tyrant, a cruel and unfeeling 

 one, and they naturally supposed that the new man from 

 England would be as bad or even worse, and that the talk 

 about their working for themselves was merely a pretence 

 to get more work out of them and to rob them more 

 completely than before. Within the first six weeks 

 after Mr. Craig's arrival at Ralahine there were four mur- 

 ders in the immediate neighbourhood, and he himself 

 received a letter with a sketch of a death's head and 

 cross-bones and a coffin on which was written, " Death to 



