Connecticut western news., 1882-05-24
NASBY IN IRELAND.
HE TELLS A PITIFUh STORY OF WHAT HE
 SAW THERE.


 spent all of last summer in & tour of the continent, remaining longest in Ireland, where I had the company of MT. Redpath, says D. R. Locke, of the Toledo Blade.
 The south and west of Ireland have nothing whatever to make the people remain there, except patriotic love of home. The condition of the peasantry is simply horrible, and the farming horrible, and the farming classes are on the border of starvation. The city of Cork has deceased from 100, ,OOO to 6O,- 900, and trade is everywhere dull and stagnant.
 The farmers are tenants at will, sub ject to eviction on any and every pre- text, and every cent they earn goes to meet the demands or desires of the landowners. Go into Galway and you will find no comfort whatever. It is simply question of how little @ family can live upon. They have two meals of potatoes day, with meat once year, at Christmas, and just exist in hope less dazed sort of way.
 Take Glengariff, for instance; it is a celebrated watering place, with hotels and accoutrements as fine as any at Saratoga. That is what the tourist sees. Just across the bay, distance of two miles, the traveller will find the most abject poverty. The cabins are generally twelve or fifteen feet in size, built flat upon the ground, with no floor. In each cabin of one room is housed large family-husband, wife and half dozen children-with pigs and chickens. The bed in one corner is made of potato sacks stretched upon poles and boards, and softened by covering of dried heather. In another corner is a fiat stone, whereon the peat is burned, the smoke ascending from hole through the thatched roof. In such house exist. ence seems intolerable, but there those people remain fighting for life and pray ing for the dawn of brighter life.
 The women all wear a cotton slip, and never have pair of shoes or stock lngs from years end to years end. The men are more warmly clad, perhaps, because their work is out among the rocks and bog, where shoes are abso- lutely necessary. And they all work men, women and children. I know a little girl far distant, who will start from home with panniers of dried peat strapped across a donkey, and travel barefooted through rain and cold a distance of twelve miles, where she sells her peat for eleven pence, and then trudges home again. The peat she sold was dried at home by her little brothers and sisters. Amid such scenes as this l spent four weeks around Glengariff. The peasant class of the south and west are in a most abject and destitute con- dition.
 At Kenmare saw thirteen families turned into the roadway. They had made themselves beds of dried heather and had potato sack on poles for covering, while the rain poured down upon them in torrents. Women with sucking infants tried to find shelter underneath these sacks, and there they lay in utter helplessness and misery, in water and mud, with nothing to eat.
 There can be no gathering of any kind without 8 detachment of soldiers and government reporter. The re- porter sits up on the wagon alongside the speaker, makes complete report of every word uttered, and telegraphs it in full the same night to the Irish secretary at Dublin. Why, went with Redpath one Sunday to little meeting twelve miles south of Cork. There were about ten or twelve vehicles. but the procession was followed closely by thirty of the constabulary. The south and west of Ireland is simply under military law. That's all there is of it.