It is a significant feature of the present agitation in Ireland that all parties are nearly agreed so far as the Connaught peasant cultivator is concerned. That anything approaching agreement on any part of the complex Irish problem should be arrived at is so remarkable that I am inclined to hearken to the popular voice. Whatever may be done for the benefit of other parts of the country, something must, it is thought, be attempted for the counties of Mayo and Galway. So far as I have been able to arrive at facts and opinions, it is not altogether a question of rent. A general remission of rent in these two counties would merely have the effect of enriching those farmers who are already "snug," but would leave the peasant cultivators exactly as they are at present. It is quite true that in some of the most wretched places I have seen the rent is extravagantly high; but while exclaiming against attempted extortion, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that for the last two years the attempt has been in the main abortive. Everybody is not so deep in his landlord's books as the irreconcileable Thomas Browne, of Cloontakilla; but a vast number of poor tenants owe one and a half and two years' rent. I speak of those whose holdings are "set" from 3l. to 8l. per annum. The rent has not impoverished them this year at any rate; they have had a fair harvest, their beast or few sheep have fetched good prices, and yet they are miserably poor. It is quite true that two very bad years preceded the good one, but allowing for all this there is no room for hope that under their present conditions of existence they will ever be better off than they are now--when they are practically living rent free.
Letting for the moment bygones be bygones between landlord and tenant, what is to occur in the future? Hunger is an evil counsellor, and there would apparently always be hunger and consequent discontent among the little cultivators of Connaught, even if the land were given to them outright. The fact is that, despite the assertions of demagogues, the holdings on which the people now live cannot support them, and, in fact, never have supported them. It is, as I remarked in one of my previous letters, the harvest money from England and the labourers' wages brought from Scotland which have kept body and soul together after a poor fashion. The annual migration of reapers and labourers has been a matter not of enterprise, but of necessity; for on the summer savings, varying from 10l. to 15l., the family entirely depend. It is, therefore, an absolute mistake to speak of the Mayo and Galway men as peasant cultivators living on the produce of the soil they cultivate. It cannot be done. I have talked to scores of these people, and have invariably found that a decent cabin with properly clad inhabitants depended upon something beyond the food produced on the spot. Either the father went to England for the harvest, or the boys were working in a shipyard on the Clyde, or the girls were in America and sent home money. On the seashore, among the wretched people who send their children out on the coast to pick shell-fish worth fourpence per stone, I found here and there a household such as I have described really depending on money earned far away. I have thought it well to put the case somewhat strongly because it is sheer absurdity to expect that a living for a family can be extracted from five Irish acres of land in Connaught. In very good years, and when credit is abundant, not so unusual an occurrence as might be supposed, it is just possible for the peasant to struggle on; but he can never be said to live. His land is exhausted by the old Mayo rotation of "potatoes, oats, burn," and he has no manure but guano and seaweed.