Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 32.djvu/604

584 But as there has been no cessation in the growth of the mechanical industries of the United Kingdom, or in her transportation service by land or sea, or in her production of coal and iron, or in the consumption of her staple food commodities—such growth, although not increasing as it were by "leaps and bounds," as in some former periods (as during the decade from 1865 to 1875), being always in a greater ratio than her increase in population —it would seem that any increase in the number of her necessarily unemployed must have been mainly derived from the one branch of her industry that has not been prosperous, namely, agriculture, in which the losses in recent years on the part alike of landlords, tenants, and farm-laborers, from decline in land and rental values, in the prices of farm products, and through reduction of wages, has been very great. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace inclines to the opinion that twenty thousand English farm-laborers, involving, with their families, a population of from sixty to eighty thousand, were, between 1873 and 1887, obliged to quit their homes, and mostly drifted to the larger cities, in consequence merely of substituting, through the increasing unprofitableness of grain-culture, pasture for arable land; and this substitution is reported as at present continuing at the rate of two hundred and sixty thousand acres per annum.

We have in these facts, furthermore, a clew to the cause of the increased discontent in recent years in Ireland. If the Irish tenantry could pay the rent demanded by the landlords, and at the same time achieve for themselves a comfortable subsistence, there would be no necessity for extraordinary governmental interference on their behalf; and this was what, prior to the years 1873-'75, the prices of farm products—especially of all dairy products—enabled the better class