And with respect to the progress already made, M. de Beaumont had remarked many years before that in Ireland a certain relative progress was quite compatible with the continued existence of pauperism among the lower classes. "One single cause," he remarks, "suffices to explain why the agricultural population becomes poorer, while the prosperity of the rich is on the increase: it is that all improvement in the land is profitable solely to the proprietor, who exacts more rent from the farmer in proportion as he works the land into a better state."
Since M. de Beaumont wrote, the pauperism in the cities has assumed a more wretched and repulsive form, in consequence of the crowding there of poor peasants who had been evicted from their small farms and fled to the nearest city or town with the hope of finding there at least charity.
"For the last ten years," wrote Abbe Perraud, in 1864, "there has been taking place in the large cities an accumulation of poor as fatal to their health as to their morality. They are mostly country people whom eviction has driven from the country, who have been unable to emigrate, and who were unwilling to shut themselves up immediately in the workhouses. The resources they procure for themselves, by doing odd work, are so completely insufficient, that it is impossible to be surprised at their destitution."
Dr. Rodenberg, describing the state of the poor country people crowded in the "Liberties of Dublin," says of the rooms in which they live: "In those holes the most wretched and pitiable laborers imaginable live; they often lie by hundreds together on the bare ground."
Such citations might be sadly multiplied, but those given are sufficient as descriptive of the state of the poor Irish in the cities. Let us now see how the peasants live in the country in many parts of Ireland:
II. "The destitution of the agricultural classes," writes Abbe Perraud, from personal observation, "in order to be rightly appreciated, must be seen in the boggy and mountainous regions of Munster, of Connaught, and of the western portion of Ulster.
"The ordinary dwelling of the small tenant, of the day-laborer, in that part of Ireland, answers with the utmost precision the description of it twenty years ago given by M. de Beaumont: 'Let the reader picture to himself four walls of dried mud, which the rain easily reduces to its primitive condition; a little thatch or a few cuts of turf form the roof; a rude hole in the roof forms the chimney, and more frequently there is no other issue for the smoke than the door of the dwelling itself. One solitary room holds father, mother, grandfather, and children. No furniture is to be seen; a single litter, usually composed of grass or straw, serves for the whole family. Five or six half- naked children may be seen crouching over a poor fire. In the midst of them lies a filthy pig, the only inhabitant at its ease, because its element is filth itself.'
"Into how many dwellings of this kind have we not ourselves penetrated—especially in the counties of Kerry, Mayo, and Donegal—more than once obliged to stoop down to the ground, in order to penetrate into these cabins, the entrance to which is so low that they look more like the burrows of beasts than dwellings made for man!
"Upon the road from Kilkenny to Grenaugh, in the vicinity of those beautiful lakes, at the entrance of those parks, to which, for extent and richness, neither England nor Scotland can probably offer any thing equal, we have seen other dwellings. A few branches of trees, interlaced and leaning upon the slope in the road, a few cuts of turf, and a few stones picked up in the fields, compose these wretched huts—less spacious, and perhaps less substantial, than that of the American savage."
At the time of Abbe Perraud's visit, a correspondent of the Dublin Saunders News-Letters, who was commissioned to inquire into the condition of the peasants, gave the following reply, which, as the abbe justly remarks, is but the faithful echo of all the descriptions made within the last half-century: