consciousness that one was reaching out a helping hand to the most neglected, despised, and unregarded class in the community.  The passage of the Local Government Act of 1898 was that which gave power and importance to our movement.  The labourers were granted votes for the new County and District Councils and Poor Law Guardians as well as for Members of parliament.  They were no longer a people to be kicked and cuffed and ordered about by the shoneens and squireens of the district:  they became a very worthy class, indeed, to be courted and flattered at election times and wheedled with all sorts of fair promises of what would be done for them.  The grant of Local Government enabled the labourers to take a mighty stride in the assertion of their independent claims to a better social position and more constant and remunerative employment.  The programme that we put forward on their behalf was a modest one.  It was our aim to keep within the immediately practical and attainable and the plainly justifiable and reasonable.  In the towns and in the country they had to live in hovels and mud-wall cabins which bred death and disease and all the woeful miseries of mankind.  One would not kennel a dog or house any of the lower animals 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