and gifted with a natural aptitude for the loom and the spindle, he introduced the weaving of woollen yarn into stout frieze stuffs and foot-gear for both sexes.  This was in 1840, and in 1854 Gweedore hand-knit socks and stockings were sold to the amount of L500, being just about the annual estimated rents of all the properties bought by Lord George at the time when he bought them in 1838!  But with this difference:  The owners from whom Lord George bought the properties got their L500 very irregularly, when they got it at all; whereas the wives and daughters of the tenants, who made the socks and stockings, were paid their L500 in cash.

Clearly in Gweedore I have a case not of the children of the soil despoiled and trampled upon by the stranger, but of the honest investment of alien capital in Irish land, and of the administration by the proprietor himself of the Irish property so acquired for the benefit alike of the owner and of the occupiers of the land.

That the deplorable state in which he found the people was mainly due to their own improvidence and gregarious incapacity is also tolerably clear.  On the west coast of Norway, dear to the heart of the salmon-fisher, you find people living under conditions certainly no more favourable than here exist.  North of the Hardanger Fjord, the spring opens only in June.  The farmers grow only oats and barley; but they have no market except for the barley, and live chiefly by the pasturage.  It is as rocky a region as Donegal.  But the Norsemen never try to make the land do more than it is capable of doing.  With them the oldest son takes the farm and works it.  The juniors are welcome to work on the farm if they like for their brother, but they are not allowed to cut it up.  There is no rundale in Norway; and when the cadets see that there is no room for them they quietly “pull up stakes,” and go forth to seek a new home, no matter where.

For fourteen years Lord George Hill spent on Gweedore all the rents he received from it, and a great deal more.  During that time the relations between the people and their new landlord seem to have been, in the main, most friendly, notwithstanding his constant efforts to break up their old habits, or, to use their own language, to “bother them.”  But there were no “evictions”; rents were not raised even where the tenants were visibly able to pay better rents; prizes were given annually for the best and neatest cottages, for the best crops of turnips (neither turnips, parsnips, nor carrots were there at Gweedore when Lord George bought the estate), for the best pigs (there was not a pig in Gweedore in 1838!), for calves and colts, for the best fences, the best ordered tillage farms, the best labourers’ cottages, the best beds and bedding, the best butter, the best woollen goods made on the estate.  The old rundale plan of dividing up the land among the children was put a stop to, and every tenant was encouraged not to make his holding smaller, but to add to and enlarge it.  A corn-mill, saw-mill, and flax-mill were established.  In 1838 there was not a baker within ten miles.  In 1852 the local baker was driving a good business in good bread.  The tenant’s wife, for whom in 1838 a single shift was a social superiority, in 1852 went shopping at Bunbeg for the latest fashions from Derry or Dublin.