The condition of the people being such as I have described, one would naturally expect not to find pauperism very prevalent. As a matter of fact it is not. The average daily number of paupers in the workhouses throughout 1876 was 43,235, and of recipients of out-door relief 31,600: bringing up the total to 74,835. The average of persons in receipt of relief was 140.6 in 10,000 of population. This daily average represents the current subsisting mass of pauperism, and is in a considerable measure made up of the old, infirm, and sick. Of able-bodied paupers, the males were only 1697 in the daily average of workhouse inmates, and the females were 4130. There were 10,134 healthy children under fifteen in the workhouses, and the other inmates were either sick in hospital or permanently unable to work. These figures seem to be the very reverse of alarming. Permanent pauperism is not a very virulent social disorder when only two able-bodied persons to every five hundred of the population are in receipt of in-door relief, and when the whole permanent pauper population barely exceeds fourteen in a thousand. But though permanent pauperism may be well in hand, casual pauperism may be at a high pitch. Let us see how this matter has stood. I shall first take the statistics of 1876, and then try to modify my conclusions by such later figures as may be available. In 1876 the population of England and Wales stood at 24,244,000, and the total of paupers in receipt of relief, in-door and out-door, on the 1st of January of that year, was 752,887; Scotland, with a population of 3,527,000, had a total pauper population on the 1st of January, 1876, of 66,733. In Ireland, on the same date, the total population being 5,321,600, the paupers amounted to 77,913. In other words, at a rough estimate, on the 1st of January, 1876, about one person in every thirty-three in England and Wales was in receipt of relief as a pauper; in Scotland, about one in every fifty-three; while in Ireland the proportion was only one in sixty-eight. A similar proportion appears in the incidence of the poor-rate. In 1876 England and Wales paid at the rate of 6_s._ 0¾_d._ per head of population; Scotland 5_s_. 0½_d._; Ireland only 3_s._ 4_d._ Of course these figures must undergo modification in view of the altered circumstances of the present time. The statistics of 1876 are not an accurate guide to the facts of 1879. During the last three years there has been considerable depression of trade; and it may very well be that the returns of this year will indicate an ebb in the tide of prosperity. But, unless I am very much mistaken, after making all allowances, it will probably be found that Ireland is the part of the United Kingdom least affected by the present prolonged commercial crisis.[22]