they cannot safely ignore. The
decay and ruin of nearly all the "old families" in Ireland are among the
penalties of disregarding it.

To talk of an excess of labor, or an inability to employ it, in such a
country as Ireland, is to insult the general understanding. In the first
place, there is an immediate and urgent demand for at least Half a
Million comfortable rain-proof dwellings. The inconceivable wretched
hovels in which nine-tenths of the peasantry endure existence
inevitably engender indolence, filthiness and disease. Generation after
generation grows up ignorant and squalid from never having had a
fireside by which they could sit down to read or study, nor an example
of home comfort and cleanliness in their own class to profit by. In
those narrow, unlighted, earth-floored, straw-thatched cabins, there is
no room for the father and his sons to sit down and enjoy an evening, so
they straggle off to the nearest groggery or other den in search of the
comfort their home denies them. Of course, men who have grown up in this
way have no idea of anything better and are slow to mend; but the
personal influence of their superiors in wealth and station is very
great, and might be ten times greater if the more fortunate class would
make themselves familiar with the wants and woes, the feelings and
aspirations of the poor, and act toward them as friends and wiser
brethren, instead of seeming to regard them only as strange dogs to be
repelled or as sheep to be sheared. But the first practical point to be
struggled for is that of steady employment and just reward for labor. So
long as men's wages (without board) range from fourpence to one and
six-pence per day, and women's from a penny to six-pence (which, so far
as I can learn, are the current rates at present, and nothing to do for
half the year at any price), no radical improvement can be hoped for. A
family with nothing to do, very little to eat and only a hog-pen to live
in, will neither acquire mental expansion, moral integrity, nor habits
of neatness and industry. On the contrary, however deficient they may
originally be in these respects, they are morally certain to grow worse
so long as their circumstances remain unchanged. But draw them out of
their wretched hovel into a neat, dry, glass-lighted, comfortable
dwelling, offer them work at all seasons, and a fair recompense for
doing it, and you will have at least rendered improvement possible. The
feasibility of clea