Brassey (Sir Thomas), in his book on Work and Wages, p. 71, says: 

The Irish Poor Law Commissioners stated that the average produce of the soil in Ireland was not much above one half the average produce in England, whilst the number of laborers employed in agriculture was, in proportion to the quantity of land under cultivation more than double, viz.:  as five to two.  Thus ten laborers in Ireland raised only the same quantity of produce that four laborers raised in England, and this produce was generally of an inferior quality.

Why is it that ten men in Ireland produce no more than four men produce in England?

Henry George says (Social Problems, p. 150): 

A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from which these government-aided emigrants come.  What surprises an American at first, even in Connaught, is the apparent sparseness of population, and he wonders if this can indeed be that over-populated Ireland of which he has heard so much. There is plenty of good land, but on it are only fat beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you at first think that they must be washed and combed every morning.  Once, this soil was tilled and was populous, but now you will find only traces of ruined hamlets, and here and there the miserable hut of a herd, who lives in a way that no Terra del Fuegan could envy.  For the ‘owners’ of this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them having never seen their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so the men have been driven off. It is only when you reach the bog and the rocks in the mountains and by the sea shore, that you find a dense population.  Here they are crowded together on land on which nature never intended men to live.  It is too poor for grazing, so the people who have been driven from the better lands are allowed to live upon it—­as long as they pay their rent.  If it were not too pathetic, the patches they called fields would make you laugh.  Originally the surface of the ground must have been about as susceptible of cultivation as the surface of Broadway.  But at the cost of enormous labor the small stones have been picked off and piled up, though the great boulders remain, so that it is impossible to use a plow; and the surface of the bog has been cut away and manured by seaweed, brought in from the shore on the backs of men and women, till it can be made to grow something.

Sir Thomas Brassey writes from a capitalist’s standpoint, while Mr. George writes from the standpoint of a philosopher who not only sees gross social wrongs but boldly applies the remedy.  But let us see if the same fester which irritates the body of Irish society has not also a parasitical existence in our own land, where society is yet in its infancy, where the people are supposed to enjoy all the advantages of the competitive system, and where all are, measurably, free to take and to use the opportunities offered the pioneers, or him who gets first his grip upon the three natural elements absolutely essential to man’s existence, viz.:  air, water, and land.