Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/147

Rh an alternative which rule the rate of both; if the unhappy condition of the Irish cottier tenant of former days may be referred to the one, the physical and mental degradation of the labouring classes in the Black Country, as revealed in the report of a late Commission, is even a more startling illustration of the other.

In fact the middlemen of Ireland were rather the exponents than the cause of the people's misery, and, though piled ten deep one above the other, on a single tenancy, they no more occasioned rack rents than the degrees on a barometer occasion the atmospheric pressure they record. Derivative tenancies, cottier allotments, potato cultivation, low wages, emigration have been the rude alleviations—not the origin—of the country's destitution; just as half-rations are the alternative for short provisions,—or any wages are preferable to starvation—a patch of ground, at a rack rent, to serfdom