300 THE WESTERN SEABOARD 



population ; for the rest there is but the fishing and 

 the tourist traffic, if they are to live at any higher level 

 than the bare subsistence that can be wrung from 

 their little patches of cultivated ground. It is one of 

 the tasks of the Congested Districts Board to resettle 

 these men on the grazing lands farther east, but the 

 difficulties are great. In the first place, the Connaught 

 men are very unwilling to move, and the inhabitants of 

 the district to which they are transferred resent their 

 intrusion ; in consequence it is easier to migrate a man 

 from Connemara to America than to the centre of 

 Ireland. Then, again, they know little of farming and 

 are almost helpless on twenty or thirty acres of proper 

 land, unless they happen to belong to the class who 

 have been in the habit of going over to Yorkshire or 

 Lincolnshire for the summer, and have there learnt 

 something of the management of arable land. It is a 

 sad region full of anguishing stories and bitter 

 memories ; one cannot say that the situation has arisen 

 through the misdoings of any one in particular, and 

 no one can see any immediate solution other than the 

 slow diminution of the population to an economic 

 level ; the only redeeming feature is that for all their 

 disadvantages the people seem neither unhappy nor 

 underfed. Indeed to the casual passer-by the men and 

 women seem more prosperous in Connemara than they 

 do farther east, and of course climate and type have 

 worked together to produce the most beautiful faces in 

 the world. Farther east in the flat plain of bog and 

 pasture that lies between Corrib and the Shannon we 

 visited a colony of small farmers on a " resettled " 

 estate. It was the famine that gave the great im- 

 petus to the Irish grazing system ; then the bulk of 

 the tenants lost their holdings and sank to petty 

 cultivators of two or three acres on the poorest part of 



