and that the earnings of the labourers came, on an average of the whole class, to from two shillings to two and sixpence a week or thereabouts for the year round.  Thus circumstanced, the commissioners observed, ’It is impossible for the able-bodied in general to provide against sickness or the temporary absence of employment, or against old age, or the destitution of their widows and children in the contingent event of their own premature decease.  A great portion of them are, it is said, insufficiently provided with the commonest necessaries of life.  Their habitations are wretched hovels, several of a family sleep together on straw, or upon the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes even without so much to cover them; their food commonly consists of dry potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day.  There are even instances of persons being driven by hunger to seek sustenance in wild herbs.  They sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide.  Some go in search of employment to Great Britain, during the harvest; others wander through Ireland with the same view.  The wives and children of many are occasionally obliged to beg; but they do so reluctantly and with shame, and in general go to a distance from home, that they may not be known.  Mendicity, too, is the sole resource of the aged and impotent of the poorer classes in general, when children or relatives are unable to support them.  To it, therefore, crowds are driven for the means of existence, and the knowledge that such is the fact leads to an indiscriminate giving of alms, which encourages idleness, imposture, and general crime.’  Such was the wretched condition of the great body of the labouring classes in Ireland; ‘and with these facts before us,’ the commissioners say, ’we cannot hesitate to state that we consider remedial measures requisite to ameliorate the condition of the Irish poor.  What those measures should be is a question complicated, and involving considerations of the deepest importance to the whole body of the people, both in Ireland and Great Britain.’

Sir George Nicholls, who had been an English poor-law commissioner, was sent over to Ireland to make preliminary enquiries.  He found that the Irish peasantry had generally an appearance of apathy and depression, seen in their mode of living, their habitations, their dress and conduct; they seemed to have no pride, no emulation, to be heedless of the present and careless of the future.  They did not strive to improve their appearance or add to their comforts:  their cabins were slovenly, smoky, dirty, almost without furniture, or any article of convenience or common decency.  The woman and her children were seen seated on the floor, surrounded by pigs and poultry:  the man lounging at the door, which could be approached only through mud and filth:  the former too slatternly