The condition of the people in the districts to which the evidence obtained by the committee chiefly applied, appears “to be wretched and calamitous to the greatest degree.” A large portion of the peasantry in those districts, are described as living in a state of the utmost misery. Their cabins scarcely contain an article that can be called furniture. In some families there are no such things as bedclothes, the place of which is supplied by a little fern, and a quantity of straw thrown over it, upon which they sleep in their working clothes. The witnesses agreed in this description with regard to a large portion of the peasantry, and they agreed also in attributing the existence of this state of things to the want of employment. Yet the people are represented as being willing to labour, and we are told that they quit their homes at particular seasons in search of employment elsewhere, whilst the inhabitants of the coasts bordering on the Atlantic, carry on their backs the sand and seaweed many miles inland for the purpose of manure. The committee are of opinion that the rapid increase of the population[39] is one immediate cause of the want of employment. The demand for labour, they say, has not kept pace with the continually increasing number of persons seeking employment. Another cause of the want of employment, they consider, arises from the effect produced on the gentry of the country by the fall of prices. The fixed payments to which many of the landlords are subjected, whether in the shape of head-rents or interest on incumbrances, bear a greater proportion to the whole income than they did during the war, and consequently the balance remaining in the hands of the resident gentry is diminished, a reduced employment follows, labourers are discharged, and the distress of the higher class is thus visited upon the lower. ----- [39] See table, ante pp. 11 and 12. ----- The want of capital was however in most instances assigned as the principal cause of the want of employment. This want was manifested in the wretched description of implements commonly in use. The ploughs, carts, harrows, were of the very rudest kind, and there appeared to be a deficiency even of these. The same want of capital has, it is said, led to the payment of wages, not in money, but by allowances in account, or as a set-off against the landlord’s claims for rent, or presentments, or some other object, which is not only a hardship to the labourer, but tends to an increase of local burdens; and as it was “generally admitted that if the wages of labour were paid in money, the labour would be more cheaply purchased and more cheerfully and efficiently given,” the committee express a hope “that a system of ready money payment may be introduced, so far at least as the public works of the country are concerned.”