THE AGRICULTURAL 



GAZETTE 



th the existing 



than the means of aubaatonce, . 



Ss of the people, and the listing social system, 



which Vm^* 1 "* the duration of a genera- 



which it req ^ been t})e ?f 



6 • • ™ In this 



al of which is denounced by some querulous 



tion to altei 



•verv people, so circumstanced, in all ages. In tins 

 Slw the example of the bees, to whom Mr. 



8X£ «* ■* «■" l«m »». polity ■— y. 



The 'eater the number of working bees, he sa> s 

 ^greater the produce of honey, and the irreater 



as the source of Ireland's woes, and the 



This would be to crown 



Then 



why 



tree, 



the power of residing aggre«ion. /«■» « 

 they swarm ! Simply because their hollow 

 S 5hey live in a state of nature, is absolutely and 

 permanently too small for their increasing OTfflfcers, 

 fnd the necessary store of 'honey ; and • noUith- 

 standing the many ingenious devices which have 

 Seen invented to'prevent their swarming when 

 living in an artificial state, it is found in practice to 

 U most expedient to let nature take its course and 

 to allow emigrant bees to go forth with equal ad- 

 vantage to themselves and to those whom they leave 

 behind them. The national prosperity of the hive 

 is just the aggregate prosperity of individuals. 

 Mr. QooDirr, therefore, should not cite the case ot 

 the' bees M an argument against emigration. He 

 says, I nrever, that the hive is not full ; but that 

 wasps, a mouse, a death's-head moth— one or all of 

 them— in the shape of Lad government, have got 

 into the hive, and are driving out the bees. 



Irishmen are quitting Ireland, not because it 

 cannot support them, but " because the ignorance, 



who govern has 



the repe. 



Irishmen, 



cause of Irish emigration ? 



the climax of absurdity. By the loss of her staple 



food, through the visitation of Heaven, Ireland is 



reduced from the condition of an exporter to that of 



an importer of food. Without foreign food her 



peoDle must starve ; and the remedy proposed is to 



render it less accessible; to protect the home 



produce which she has not, against the foreign 



produce which she wants. Behold a proof of Irish 



wit ; 



H Here Irish sense is seen ; 

 With nothing left that's worth defence, 

 We build a magazine." 



the men know 

 will be their 



more 



.ning. 



_. «*y perform 



Piece or task work 

 greatly to their advantage ; but it is al So ^ . ^ 

 advantage of the master, for he also Jtl^ * % 



the 

 is t 





1* 



anxiety, the 



of the 



We await, in breathless 

 which is to develop the policy 

 administration on these questions. For ourselves, 

 we consider the great evil of Ireland to be, the 

 difficulty of inducing her people to work up the raw 

 material— their land, without the Potato, which 

 Heaven appears to have decreed that they shall not 

 have. We often hear from Ireland of the supe- 



piofits of piece-work, for' the hands^n^Tntl ° f *• 

 he must employ by the day. in connectioTSi'S 

 taskers, must move on much more quickly ami r ** 

 more work is performed by them in the s ^ \- *** 

 would have been done if all were at work bvT ^? 

 either with or-without the master's eye on the ^ 



will endeavour to deseriu *l 

 work performed, and the expense of lifting o\T • 

 carting, and storing 30 acres of Mangold wSrzd* 

 I estimated the crop of Mangold Wurzel at J*~ 

 30 tons per acre, and to test the correctness «n2 

 estimate, I had several cart-loads weighed. The 



message being very dry? the roots were ca £ le ^ f . Pgil 



Goodiff without much earth sticking to th«m tu. 1° "** 



illustration of this, I 



r* 





weighs 



/|cwt ? and, without the wings, holds' ju«t«* 



mg to them. The 



«*pty et* 



cubic yard, but, with the wings, which are inches wLk 

 and are placed so as to bend over the wheels, makfoo t£ 

 cart about 8 inches wider at the top, and 6 inches hpW 

 in the sides, enables it to hold a much 



i- 



tity of roots. I found the weight of the cart-loaTrf 



neglect, or sunineness of th 

 fore 1 them to look to America, as the onlyrefage." 

 We are not to suppose, however, that Mr. Goodiff 

 is one of those querulous 1 rishmen— for such it seems 

 there are, who carp at every tiling, and think a 

 Government is fully equal to the task of warding off 



ills which are the consequences of our own 



He is more 



those 



>* 



misdeed*, or negligence, or selfishness, 

 moderate in his views than to expect such impos- 

 sibilities; and only "thinks a Government can do 

 more than it generally does, and that it ought to do 



it. 



The duty of a Government, under this extremely 

 moderate view of its responsibilities, is defined to 

 consist, in u devising some way of supplying the 

 agriculturists with the means of working up their 

 jraw material — the land." In other words, if Irish 

 farmer* will perttBt, year after year, notwith- 

 standing Tepeated warnings, in staking their all 

 upon the Potato, and relying on it as " the only 

 anchor that can bring up the labouring vessel," 

 it becomes the duty of the Government, when that 

 anchor parts, to provide them with the same amount 

 of food, and the same means of cultivating their 

 land, and paying their rent, as if it had not failed. 

 Will Mr. Goodiff descend from generals to particu- 

 lars, and say how this is to be done ? Let us sup- 

 pose that her Majesty has honoured him with her 

 commands to form an administration, and that he is 

 so fortunate as to find— no easy task — a sufficient 

 number of Irishmen to constitute a Cabinet, agreed 

 on a system of Irish policy ] What will it be ? On 

 one point, and one point only, we can imagine them 

 unanimous— a long pull, and a strong pull, and a 

 pull altogether, at the Treasury, for funds to be ad- 

 vanced by way of loan, without interest and without 

 a repayment of principal, to enable the landlords to 

 support the poor in such reproductive works as crop- 

 ping the land and paying rent. From this point they 

 would diverge. 



One would advocate a well digested system of 

 colonisation, to rid the estates of a pauper tenantry ; 

 another would propose to bring in a bill to prohibit 

 emigration. The former was demanded a year or 

 two ago, before the Irish peasantry had solved the 

 problem of self-supporting emigration ; the latter 

 appears to be the cry now, among the employers of 



SS"\$J? n wages have risen from 13rf - a da y to 



H. VV ill the new Administration repeal the 

 incumbered Estate Act, which starving Chancery 



ZH^Ht i atl >n W ? wneTS who * e encumbrances 

 amount to 20 years' purchase of their rental, de- 

 nounce as an act of spoliation 1 Are we to have 



JSLl^ 11 ? ; ! nd if SOj how low in tK * «»fc K 



to descend J Are tenants only to benefit by it, or is 

 it to include those servants of servants, the sub- 

 tenants of a sub-tenant ? Are we to have a re-dis- 

 tabntum of property, under the name of tenant 



^ i IS ai a *! 'f 6Ct€d b > r more violent means ? 

 are landlords to be armed with more stringent 



riority of the Belgian to the British system of agn 

 culture. Why, then, is it not followed in Ireland ? 

 They have the Belgian foundation of small farms ; 

 why not add to these the varied rotation of Belgium, 

 its stall feeding, and its liberal ^ manuring ? A 

 reformed agriculture can only originate with the 

 people themselves, with the landowners and their 

 tenants. It can no more be enforced by Act of 

 1 Parliament, than the Potato blight can be prevented 

 by the same means. If we would know the condition 

 of the bulk of the population of Ireland in the palmy 

 days of its agriculture, when the Potato wantoned 

 as in its prime, Mr. Goodiyf has sketched it for us, 

 with the hand of a master. Every man was then a 

 capitalist to the amount of a year's food ; and yet 

 the village farmers were destitute of capital — all the 

 rich men were graziers ; and Sir Robert Kahe has 

 told us why — because they were too proud to con- 

 descend to such ungentlemanly occupation as arable 

 culture. The land was scarcely laboured or manured 

 so as to give the return it was capable of, and while 

 the produce of an acre in Great Britain averaged 

 41. 7s. 7d. y that of the same quantity of land in 

 Ireland averaged 21. 9s. 3d. As a natural conse- 

 quence, with a superior soil, lower rents, less taxes, 

 and markets only a shade lower, the farmers rarely paid 

 higher wages, in harvest time, than 13r/. a day. The 

 unemployed population amounted, on the average of 

 the year, to one-fourth of the whole ; and while 



food was exported to the value of 13,000,000^, the 

 people were fed Me — like Irishmen, on the potato. 

 Such is Mr. Goodiff's account of the state of Irish 

 agriculture in its best days, given as nearly in his 

 words as possible. Those in italics, in the last sen- 

 tence, are his. The word in capitals is our comment 

 on them, and on his advocacy of the Potato as the 

 only anchor that can bring up the labouring vessel. 

 Those were glorious days ior Conacre and Castle 

 Rackrent, agrarian outrage and wholesale assassina- 

 tion of landlords and land agents ; but they are 

 departed. The unemployed, Potato-fed population, 

 seeing the blight of the lazy root perennial, are 

 fleeing. With the diminished competition for land 

 agrarian outrage is on the decline. Even in Tip- 

 perary assassinations are few and far between, 

 though she still keeps her hand in. Those who 

 emigrate improve their own condition, for, ."the 

 most good-for-nothing here is sure to do well there," 

 says Mr. Goodiff. u It is not more than two years," 

 he adds, " since the broken-down, indolent, lame, 

 and weakly occupant of part of the land I 

 hold, left his wife and nine little bovs for this 



wife and nine little boys for 

 El Dorado of the west. 



He has twice in 

 time remitted small sums to 



his 



Or 



doing what they will with their own , All these 

 have lately been demanded by some section o the 



excelled iJSS °l l l'* l T*i Are """rtBages to be 

 cancelled, or will Ireland be satisfied with 



toting the loans made under the Temnorirv fcjf f 

 Act I j the Poor-law to be ^M^3^J^ 

 ftt h* property should support Iri 8 hdestS n 1 



repu- 



tilt^n 5°° r t0 ] u kft t0 Starve ; an ' 1 if **, from 



that 



no-.v sent 111. to defray the charge of sending out his 

 two eldest sons. It is expected that by their joint 

 labours they will be able to send for the mother and 

 the other children, at an early period next summer." 

 The condition of those who remain is also improved ; 

 for Mr. Goodiff has been obliged to pay 20d. a day 

 ior reaping his grain, against the 13<J. which he 

 paid with grain selling for half as much more than 

 at present. National prosperity is just the aggre- 

 gate of the prosperity of the greatest number of 

 individuals. We do not believe that a society with 

 a more patriotic object could be formed than to 

 promote emigration from a country circumstanced 

 like Ireland at the present time. 



I .11 1 I— — I !■ ■ 'Mil. I 



M- ■ i^^^ , . ■ ■ ■ ■■ ■ — 



ON HARVESTING ROOT CROPS. 



Self-ixterest is the mainspring of all productive 

 and economical labour, and it comes forth most promi- 

 nently in piece-work. "In the estimation of everv 



Mangold Wurzel to be 20, 22, and 23 cwt. • this of 

 course, include^the earth sticking to the roots. ' ' 



The mode of harvesting our root crop, which we 

 have adopted for several years, is this; we let the lifting 

 —cutting off the leaves and the roots, and putting the 

 roots into the cart— at so much per acre, accoidii^ to the 

 weight of the crop, to one man, who gets other men to 

 join with him in the work and share in the profits • 

 and the arrangement I require to be adopted is, that the 

 one-horse carts which I employ to haul the roots shall 

 be constantly employed, and I require from 16 to 20 loads 

 or tons of roots to be filled hourly. The number of 

 carts required is according to the distance of the field 

 from the store ; thus, the distance from the middle of 

 the field to the store being 15 chains, four carts are 

 required ; 22 -chains require five carts ; and 30 chau* 

 require seven carts. 



The mode of lifting the roots. — Five men are employed 

 to pull up the roots ; each man pulls up two rows; 

 standing between the rows, he takes with his left hand a 

 root from the row on his left side, and with his right 

 hand a root from the row on his right side, and pulfifflg 

 both up at the same time, places them side by side, 

 across the row where he pulled up the roots with his 

 right hand, so as to have the tops lying in the space 

 between the two rows he has pulled up ; the next man 

 takes the two rows at the right hand of the last two 

 rows we have just described, and he, with each of his 

 hands, pulls up a row, and places them on the line oi 

 the row which he has pulled up with his left hand, with 

 the root end lying towards the root end of the first row, 

 so that we have now four rows of roots iving close 

 together in two rows, side by side, with their leaves on 

 the outside of each of these rows, and the roots of each 

 row nearly touching each other ; and eyery foiar rows, 

 when growing, are thus, when pulled, laid in two rows, 

 root to root, occupying not more than 27 inches. Isow, 

 as the next four rows are lifted in the same way, and 

 placed in like manner, we have a space unoccupied of 

 three times 27 inches, or 6 feet 9 inches between eacH 

 double row of roots, for the cart to go between them 

 (viz., this double row of bulbs after they have had 

 the leaves and roots cut off), to carry off the bulbs to 

 the store. After the five men who are pulling the roots, 

 there follow 10 women or boys with knives, made a 

 pieces of old scythes, who, with repeated blows, cut oi 

 the leaves and roots, without ever moving one oi wot 

 with their hands ; this is constant, but not hard uorj, 

 and it requires 10 active women or boys to keepupwiiu 



the five men pulling. «_««» ti^ 



Immediately on the heels of the cotters follow me 

 carts between the two double rows of bulbs as tney <* 

 having their leaves and roots cut off, and a man, ow 

 the principals of the gang, and nine young active so j 

 and girls throw up the bulbs as fast as they can mro 

 cart, the man speaking to the horse to move 1 orw ^ 

 or stop, as they clear the ground ; when one can ^ 

 an empty one has been brought by one oi tie u ^ 

 drive the carts, and placed immediately beiuiw 



one ; so that as he moves 



off with the full cart, .the 



forwards; 



calls the horse with the empty cart to m ° re as {aa t 

 and they proceed to throw the roots into the c ^ 

 as they did into the one that has just gone on i ^ 

 The pulling of the roots and the filling <« are ^ 

 being the principal work, one of the leaoei ^ ^ 

 each of these departments of the w ? rk ', im j,^ 

 by his example, he shows those wi tu ^ 



he wishes them to work, and thus the wot ^ rt . ]o afe 



with the utmost regularity and dispatch , -- ^ gtore . 



^Teach in a M 

 4 every tbree^ 



of hands, which are vB^JlSatZc" 



are hourly filled in the fields au- , . ft ua . v . 



ISO to 182 loads of 22 cwt. and 23 cwt. eat ;ni .^ 



nine hours : thus a cart-load is filled every 



by 10 pair 

 hands, and 



hands- 



the leaves and roots c 



in all 25 pair of hands, men, ivonien, an 

 this has been repeatedly done in a day. enc \ f&ng * 

 The stores are made of posts ; and faf^ ^^ \{ 



space 9 foet apart and 4| 



every j the space will admit, and as J) ear 



as near to where W {) 



labourer on pvece-work not only gets value for the ad- 

 ditional work he perforins, but he also reaps the adv 



*i 1 1 fret above, « •- 

 let into the ground 18 inches, and 4, k- iU „ ;ilii j e ot 



five rails above, 4 or 5 inches wi 

 the posts ; and each of these st 



Irish Government- re^cl"^ oXhS tdA^JS £*J^^ 



' » Hard WOlk 1S ea sily performed with good will, when j In placing the roots in the store, we put st 



f*cra ^f t«* a tv. u " • i • ' S V T *"" l,,v <*"*an- five rails above, 4 or 5 inches wide, B« • )ar t. 



tageof his mechanical ingenuity and skill, as welli " * .*... ....--- -'- -*~— * «re 3 leet *n 



hf a r T c " amC r «>genuity and skill, M weH asfor the posts ; and each of these stores arc -> - ; 

 ^^^•S^^A 6 ^^* ^^^^ "aveHof them about 7 feet long ea h, ^ 



I 



ide 







