IRISH POULTRY CULTURE: 



Industrial — Profitable— Pleasurable. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF POULTRY PRODUCTS. 



Variations many and great have marked all food products of late 

 years, especially those which are purely agricultural. On every hand 

 complaints are rife as to the inability of farmers to make a living, 

 and the tale in all parts of the United Kingdom is a very pamful 

 one. Low prices and unlimited supplies from abroad have caused 

 an agrarian revolution in Ireland, and in Great Britain is fast 

 bringing about a similar state of things. If it be true that in 

 the larger island — as a farmer has just written, asking whether 

 such things can be passed by as the gloomy accounts of goods 

 sold by the sheriliPs officer, or the still darker records of the 

 Coroner's inquest over the hapbss body who could not face the 

 last dismal act in his downward course to the cheerless realms of 

 want ; or that thousands of acres of land, once covered with corn 

 and peopled with labour, are now what is termed " laid down to 

 grass," but which are in reality abandoned to the reeds, weeds, 

 and thistles that are nature's own products without man's labour ; 

 or that the blinds of the mansion are down, the house empty, the 

 servants discharged, the coachman, the gardener, the little trades- 

 man sent to swell the unemployed in the larger towns — if this 

 be true in Britain how much more so in Ireland, where the multi- 

 tudes of tenants, who never knew the privileges nor had the 

 reserves of their Saxon brethren, have been absolutely forced into 

 a state of despair and of misery, none the less bitter because they 

 have in the past suffered a series of periods of such misery. Into 

 such a wide-reaching problem as is opened out by a subject like 

 this we do not intend to enter. Our object is a different one. But 

 it must be recorded as a fact that the attention now being directed 

 to what may be termed Minor Farm Produce has been largely the 

 result of outward pressure, not of inward enterprise and skill. It 

 is to be noted that the secret of industrial progress, wherever 

 found, has been the result of anticipating needs, of adapting pro- 

 ducts to the customer's tastes, and of even making a need by 

 offering a supply. How far this spirit has characterised farming 

 need '^t be discussed. **> is eenerallv admitted that whilst the 



