“Now, look over there, at that group of abominable tumble-down huts, which are quite as bad as the one we visited just now. One of the tenants had six sons. He gave up portions of the farm in order to settle them upon it. Each of them, when he married, built a house, and he now lives here, cultivating the tenth part of the original farm, which did not exceed about thirty acres. These divisions were all made without our permission. Each of the sons has five or six children; there are therefore thirty acres of land--and bad land too--from which they expect to get food for forty-five or fifty persons, and this in a country which, properly speaking, is only fit for stock raising! How can they escape dying of hunger? They answer by telling me that in certain parts of China the land supports still more people. “Apparently the climate and the land are better there than with us; here it is impossible. When one is dealing with the first tenant, one calculates that a family of five or six people can live off the farm; now they want to make it support forty or fifty. There is a limit to the earth’s productiveness, and this limit has been already passed. “We must always return to the fact that the great misfortune is the lack of manufactures. I have done all in my power to acclimatise them over here, but I have never succeeded. I asked a celebrated geologist to come and examine and ascertain what resources the country might offer. He left at the end of a week, telling me that he should be robbing me if he stayed any longer. There is a little iron, but since we have no coal to work it with we cannot hope to make it profitable. “I turned to another quarter for help. If we had not the raw material, at least labour was cheap. We thought that we might utilise that by establishing a manufactory which would have for its aim the production of objects that required but little raw material. Our railway companies import all their requisites from England. I wrote to some English capitalists: we had been studying to ascertain if these requisites could not be made in Ireland. Whatever combinations were adopted, even at the lowest calculation, we could never see our way to pay more than 3 per cent. on the capital invested. Another thing, who would be mad enough to establish a manufactory in a country where now every one is at the mercy of an occult and irresponsible power like the Land League, which has often prevented vessels from loading or unloading, solely because the owner of the ship had infringed or not obeyed some of its orders? Imagine a factory suddenly boycotted without warning! What would become of the shareholders?