Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/106

Rh and even for the last year no information is supplied from a considerable number of the electoral divisions. Luckily, however, the returns of the relieving officers from the four counties, for which the Sheriffs made no returns, happen to be perfect, and more than supply the links necessary to complete the list of evictions for the whole of Ireland during the past year, as will be seen on reference to the opposite table. With the exception of those for Dublin, and a few other places, no distinction has been made between the urban and the agricultural evictions, though for the purposes of the present argument such an analysis would have been desirable. On the other hand the return of evictions during a single year is not altogether a safe guide to an average over a longer period. I therefore propose to convert the figures with which we are furnished for 1865, into a round number, and to take the general rate of rural evictions in Ireland at about 1,500 per annum, which is probably considerably in excess of the tenth. (See Table).