The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1868-10-17 00:00:00

JUST LIKE THE num( PEOPLE!

Mr. C. Buxton, M at is political meeting the other
overalls, gave his experiences in the matter iif trilling
agricultural experiment he had made in the extreme west of
Ireland. It was as follows:
He was travelling in Ireland a year after the famine,
and he bought a small estate near Dingle under the
Encumbered Estates Court. It might make the
mouths of some gentlemen water when he mentioned
that although much of the land was very rich and
although the estate was only two miles from 15
good seaport, it was knocked down to him for
an acre ; but he was not surprised at line cheap-
ness of the land. when he found bow villainously it
had been treated. Anything more absurd and ruinous
than the whole systern which prevailed could
not be imagined. Por instance, the property was
divided into tiny portions, separated by huge banks, so
that fully one sixth of the arable land must have been
taken up by them, and instead of each tenant havin
his land in one plot, it seemed as if the fields had been
shaken out of a pepper-box. Thus, O'Callaghan
would have a quarter of an acre; then eight
or ten others had little bits next to It; then came
O'Callaghan again with another quarter of an acre;
and another perhaps '2OO or 300 yards away ; and as
there were hardly any foot-paths, but each one had
rights of entry to his own plots across those of his
neighbours," the quarrelling and even litigation which
prevailed among them were beyond belief. The soil
between the mountain and the bog was a deep vege-
table mould, but, as there was no sort of attempt to
turn aside the immense quantities of water from the
hills above, it was a sort of quagmire and the weedli and
rushes were a caution to see. Yet there was a honk
of people living upon it in hovels little better than
pigsties—indeol, the pig lived as one of the family
-although this was universal in all parts of Ireland.
The inhabitants were, so might be imagined. plunged
Into the depths of squalid poverty, subsisting almost
entirely on the potatoes which they raised fn an their
little plots of ground. There was no school, no
chapel, no sign, in fact, of civilization or of relk;ion,
except, indeed, a holy well, which he found adorned
with bits of rod rag, and so forth, placed there as
offerings to the patron saint. Of farm buildings, of
implements, of manuring, of rotation of crops, (Sr any-
thing of that kind no one had so much as an idea, and
their customs were so queer that he could perfectly
believe a statement once made by Lord George Hill—
viz., that he found that three of his tenants owned one
horse among them, that each of them undertook the
shoeing of one foot, but as there was no one to shoe the
fourth foot it never got shod, and of course was always
dead lame. Hesoon found that any attempt to improve
was utterly hopeless, for the inhabitants made a long
pull, a strong pull, and &pull altogether against every-
thing which smelt of innovation. He found that
even drainage was impossible, for, as every person of
experience warned him, if a landlord put down drain
tiles, the tenant 851 a matter of course would dig them
up and sell them. At last he made up his mind to buy
them all out and start afresh; and, 8.8 everybody at
that time was eager to emigrate, he easily induced the
regular tenants to leave, and the mere squatters were
offered 4:1 a-piece if on a certain day they would pull
down their ONVII hovels and take themselves off. 3ust
like the Irish people— they make a grand g,ala of the
affair, set to work with a will, pulled down their
houses, lighted bonfires with the tinders and turf, and
drank his health with loud cheers in awfully bad
whisky. After vainly trying to get a Norfolk
tenant, he luckily hit on a firs *rate Lunn,
from Aberdeenshire ; he gave him a thirty
years' lease at a merely nominal rent for five
years, but increasing by degrees after that and he tent
him the requisite capital on interest. The Aberdeen-
shire farmer threw down nearly all the fences, making
ten fields out of more than 200—made roads, built a
capital farmstead, drained the land in such a way as to
get water power to do almost everything, even
his churning, and laid down most of the land
in pasture, on which he kept a large herd of cows, and
drove a large trade in butter. There was scarcely
now a more deserving farmer anywhere. There was
this singular satisfaction in every agricultural im-
provement—viz., that he who had made an acre of
land bear twice as much as it did before had iuldel
merely to his own wealth, but to the supplies of food
for the poor and to the comfort and well-being of the
people.