When potatoes are cheaper than Indian meal potatoes are eaten, but one or the other constitutes the sole food of the people. As the cost is always about the same, the figures are not changed in either case.
To this you want to add about three pounds a year for “luxuries.” Luxury in an Irish cabin means an ounce of tobacco a week for the man of the house, and the remainder of the three pounds goes for tea. I admit this is an extravagance, this tobacco and tea, and I doubt not that a commission will be appointed by Parliament to devise ways and means to extinguish the dudheen of the man and abolish the teapot of the woman. This three pounds a year, thus squandered, would enable the landlords to have a great many more comforts than they now enjoy. I presume the Earl of Cork could build another yacht on what his tenantry squander in tea and tobacco.
Add to this one pound for clothing (an extravagant estimate) for each member of the family, and you have the entire cost of the existence of the Donegal family, twelve pounds three shillings six and three-quarters pence, or, in American money, fifty-seven dollars and sixty-one cents!
The clothing provided by this pound a year means for the man of the house a pair of brogans, which he must have to work at all, a couple of shirts, a pair of corduroy trowsers, and a second-hand coat of some kind. The women and children wear no shoes or stockings, and their clothing I have described before. Of bed-clothing they have nothing to speak of. A few potato sacks, or gunny bags, or anything else that contributes anything of warmth, makes up that item.
The Queen and the Princess of Wales sleep on down and under silk, and the Queen has one thousand people about her person. My Lord has his yacht in the harbor, and the humblest seaman on board sleeps under woolen and has meat three times a day.
Some day there will be a Board of Equalization from whose decision there will be no appeal. Then I would rather be the Donegal peasant’s wife than the Queen. Despite the fact that she sent one hundred pounds to the starving Irish, she won’t need silken covering to keep her warm.
To pay the rent and provide this fifty-eight dollars for food and clothing consumes the entire time of every member of the household. The land will not pay it—it is impossible to get it off the soil. So the man of the house plants his crops and leaves them for the women and children to care for, and he goes off to England or Wales, and works in mines, or in harvest fields in the season, or at anything to make some little money to fill the insatiable maw of the landlord, and to keep absolute starvation from the house.
Then the boy in America sends his stipend, which helps—provided his remittances can be kept from the lynx-eyed agent, who would raise the rent in a minute if he knew that remittances were coming.
WOMEN’S WORK.