George Hill, and the remedies suggested by Dr. Sigerson for the suffering in these districts are all in the direction of the remedies applied by Lord George Hill to the condition in which he found Gweedore.  After giving full value to the stock explanations of Irish distress in the congested districts, such as excessive rents, penal laws, born of religious or “racial” animosity, and a defective system of land tenure, it seems to be clear that the main difficulties have arisen from the isolation of these districts, and from the lack of varied industries.  Political agitation has checked any 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