ny
flow of capital into these districts, and a flow of capital into them
would surely have given them better communications and more varied
industries. Dr. Sigerson states that some of the worst of these regions
in the west of Ireland are as well adapted to flax-culture as Ulster,
and Napoleon III. showed what could be done for such wastes as La
Sologne and the desert of the Landes by the intelligent study of a
country and the judicious development of such values as are inherent in
it. The loss of population in Ireland is not unprecedented. The State of
New Hampshire, in America, one of the original thirteen colonies which
established the American Union, has twice shown an actual loss in
population during the past century. The population of the State declined
during the decade between 1810 and 1820, and again during the decade
between 1860 and 1870. This phenomenon, unique in American history, is
to be explained only by three causes, all active in the case of
congested Ireland,--a decaying agriculture, lack of communications, and
the absence of varied industries. During the decade from 1860 to 1870
the great Civil War was fought out. Yet, despite the terrible waste of
life and capital in that war, especially at the South, the Northern
State of New Hampshire, peopled by the energetic English adventurers who
founded New England, was actually the only State which came out of the
contest with a positive decline in population. Virginia (including West
Virginia, which seceded from that Commonwealth in 1861) rose from
1,596,318 inhabitants in 1860 to 1,667,177 in 1870. South Carolina,
which was ravaged by the war more severely than any State except
Virginia, and upon which the Republican majority at Washington pressed
with such revengeful hostility after the downfall of the Confederacy,
showed in 1870 a positive increase in population, as compared with 1860,
from 703,708 to 705,606. But New Hampshire, lying hundreds of miles
beyond the area of the conflict, showed a positive decrease from 326,073
to 318,300. During my college days at Cambridge the mountain regions of
New Hampshire were favourite "stamping grounds" in the vacations, and I
exaggerate nothing when I say that in the secluded nooks and corners of
the State, the people cut off from communication with the rest of New
England, and scratching out of a rocky land an inadequate subsistence,
were not much, if at all, in advance of the least prosperous dwellers in
the most