e of apathy and
depression, seen in their mode of living, their habitations, their
dress and conduct; they seemed to have no pride, no emulation, to
be heedless of the present and careless of the future. They did not
strive to improve their appearance or add to their comforts: their
cabins were slovenly, smoky, dirty, almost without furniture, or any
article of convenience or common decency. The woman and her children
were seen seated on the floor, surrounded by pigs and poultry: the man
lounging at the door, which could be approached only through mud and
filth: the former too slatternly to sweep the dirt and offal from the
door, the latter too lazy to make a dry footway, though the materials
were close at hand. If the mother were asked why she did not keep
herself and her children clean with a stream of water running near the
cabin, her answer invariably was--Sure, how can we help it? We are so
poor.' The husband made the same reply, while smoking his pipe at the
fire or basking in the sunshine. Sir George Nicholls rightly concluded
that poverty was not the sole cause of this state of things. He found
them also remarkable for their desultory and reckless habits. Though
their crops were rotting in the fields from excessive wet, and every
moment of sunshine should be taken advantage of, yet if there was a
market, a fair, or a funeral, a horse-race, a fight, or a wedding,
forgetting everything else, they would hurry off to the scene of
excitement. Working for wages was rare and uncertain, and hence arose
a disregard of the value of time, a desultory, sauntering habit,
without industry or steadiness of application. 'Such,' he proceeds,
'is too generally the character and such the habits of the Irish
peasantry; and it may not be uninstructive to mark the resemblance
which these bear to the character and habits of the English peasantry
in the pauperised districts, under the abuses of the old poor law.
Mendicancy and indiscriminate almsgiving have produced in Ireland
results similar to what indiscriminate relief produced in England--the
like reckless disregard of the future, the like idle and disorderly
conduct, and the same proneness to outrage having then characterised
the English pauper labourer which are now too generally the
characteristics of the Irish peasant. An abuse of a good law caused
the evil in the one case, and a removal of that abuse is now rapidly
effecting a remedy. In the other case the evil appears to have