connection
with it recorded in the last quarter of a century are those of 1880, in
which year nearly 23,000 migrated, while within the last six years--in
1901--the figures were as high as 19,700. More than three-quarters of
these labourers come from Connacht, and of the total number more than
one-half from County Mayo, from which every year 47.8 per thousand of
the population migrate, and if one takes the adult male
population--_i.e._, that of men over twenty years of age--one finds that
the number of migratory labourers represents a proportion of 177.4 per
thousand. Nearly three-quarters of them go to England, and the harvest
fields of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire are in a large measure reaped by
their hands. From February till June the migration occurs, and the
labourers return in the late autumn to their homes. The fact that the
sum brought back by them is, at the highest estimate, said to be about
L18 after nine months of labour, and that the wages which they earn
amount to an average of 17s. a week, while, in addition to the cost of
living for three-quarters of the year, about L2 is spent on their
railway fare, all serve to show the nature of the economic conditions in
the West of Ireland which make such a migration for such a wage worth
while on the part of nearly twenty thousand people. One factor in this
connection which should be noted is that the number of girls who migrate
every year is said to be increasing, and is estimated to amount to
nearly half the total throughout the country. The precariousness of a
dependence on such a means of subsistence as this, is seen from the fact
that a bad harvest in England or a development in agricultural machinery
would put an end to the source of livelihood which it provides. If from
no other point of view the problem should be regarded seriously by
Englishmen in the light of the depopulation of the English countryside,
with its direct bearing upon the material for recruiting the army and
navy, and the problem of unemployment in general.

It is a surprising thing that the support of home industries, which was
one of the foibles of Dean Swift, who advised Irishmen to burn
everything that came from England except its coal, has only of very
recent years been resuscitated. So much is this the case that the action
of the South Dublin Board of Guardians, who in 1881 insisted that the
workhouse inmates should be clothed in Irish produce, was conspicuous by
its exceptional nature.