Page:The Irish problem (Hibernicus).djvu/11

7 We say it is not. We affirm that a lease is too mach [sic] for a bad farmer and too little for a good one in this country, And why? To answer this question aright we must define a bad Irish farmer and a good Irish farmer.

The bad farmer in Ireland is a man whose misfortune it is to be a bad farmer rather than his fault. He lacks skill and the habit of order more than he lacks security. It is really passing strange, as one goes from house to house on some Irish estates, to see how the people are marked off, as it were, into two distinct classes. If the distinction went by districts it would be more intelligible; but it does not. On the same hillside—on one farm we see the fences cared for, the ground free of weeds and wet, the crop flourishing, the house tidy and clean; and on the next one to it we see every one of these conditions reversed. And even if some of the slovenly ones do manage occasionally to get as good crops out of the ground as some of the orderly ones, surely life is not all a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. Deprive it of comfort, and you deprive it of half its sweetness; and though it may be argued that families which pass a half civilized and dirty existence, are, from never having known better, as happy after their fashion as the cleanest and most refined, still it is surely our duty, if we can, to introduce them to the higher walks of enjoyment, which when they have entered, they will never recede from.

From these remarks it will have been already seen that when we speak of a good farmer, we speak not only of a man who can raise fair crops of oats and potatoes, and turn a ready penny by the judicious buying and selling of cattle, but of one who can raise these crops in a clean and farmer-like manner, and who when he has made a little money by judicious "jobbing," as it is called, considers it a duty to expend some of it as well as a good deal of his spare time in imparting the polish of respectability to his family and his premises. We class, then, the man who (though he may raise very good crops) lives in a slovenly way, in a slovenly house, and cultivates his farm in a slovenly manner, not amongst the good farmers, but amongst the bad—amongst those, who in addition to all these defects, suffer the weeds to choke their crops, and the wet to sour their land, and, by bad rotation, poor ploughing, and indifferent manuring, wear out the sod till it is well nigh barren.

What advantage would it be to the community to give leases to such men as these? The only thing that it is posible [sic] to do is to bear with them as well as you can, and endeavour to train up their sons by dint of good schooling and agricultural teaching, to be more civilized and enlightened than their sires. But if their