in the vile abominations called human dwellings in which
tens of thousands of God's comfortless creatures were huddled together
in indiscriminate wretchedness. Added to that, most of them had not a
"haggart" (a few perches of garden) on which to grow any household
vegetables. They were landless and starving, the last word in pitiful
rags and bare bones. They were in a far greater and more intense
degree than the farmers the victims of capricious harvests, whilst
their winters were recurrent periods of the most awful and
unbelievable distress and hunger and want. The first man to notice
their degraded position was Parnell, who, early in the eighties, got a
Labourers' Act passed for the provision of houses and half-acre
allotments of land. But as the administration of this Act was
entrusted to the Poor Law Boards, as it imposed a tax upon the
ratepayers, and as the labourers had then no votes and could secure no
consideration for their demands, needless to say, very few cottages
were built. With the advent of the Local Government Act and the
extension of the franchise, the labourer was now able to insist on a
speeding-up of building operations. But the Labourers' Act needed many
amendments, a simplification and cheapening of procedure, an extension
of taxing powers, an enlargement of the allotment up to an acre and,
where the existing abode of the labourers was insanitary, an
undeniable claim to a new home. Moderate and just and necessary to the
national welfare as these claims were, it took us years of unwearied
agitation before we were able to get them legislatively recognised.
What we did, however, more promptly achieve was the smashing of the
contract system by which the roads of the country were farmed out to
contractors, mostly drawn from the big farming and grazier classes
who, by devious dodges, known to all, were able to make very
comfortable incomes out of them. We insisted--and after some exemplary
displays of a resolute physical force we carried our point--that in
the case of the main roads, particularly, these should be worked under
the system known as "direct labour"--that is, by the county and deputy
surveyors directly employing the labourers on them and paying them a
decent living wage. In this way we removed at one stroke the black
shadow of want that troubled their winters and made these dark months
a horror for them and their families. But we had still to remove the
mud-wall cabins and the foetid dens in