the farmers and the agricultural labourers.  And through all the various agrarian agitations they made united cause against their common enemy, the landlord.  There was also in the days of my boyhood a far friendlier relation between the farmers and labourers than unhappily exists at present.  Their joint heritage of suffering and hardship had drawn them together in bonds of sympathy and friendship.  The farmer often shared, in the bitterness of the winter months, something out of his own stock of necessities with his less fortunate labourer.  And before the arrival of the Creameries the daily allowance of the gallon of “skimmed” milk was made to almost every labourer’s family in the country by kind-hearted neighbouring farmers.  In addition, in a land where few were rich, the ancient proverb held good:  “The poor always help one another.”  And it is true that, in the darkest days of their suffering, the farmers and labourers shouldered their troubles and their sorrows in a community of sympathy, which at least lessened their intensity.  It is only with the growth of a greater independence among either class that the old friendly bonds and relationships have shown a loosening, and newer and more personal interests have tended to divide them into distinctive bodies, with separate class interests and class programmes.

As a very little boy I remember trudging my way to school with children who knew not what the comfort of boots and stockings was on the coldest winter’s day; who shivered in insufficient rags and whose gaunt bodies never knew any nourishment save what could be got from “Indian meal stir-about” (a kind of weak and watery porridge made from maize).  And it was not the children of the labourers alone who endured this bleak and starved and sunless childhood; the offspring of the smaller struggling farmers were often as badly off—­they were all the progeny of the poor, kept poor and impoverished by landlordism.  This further bond of blood and even class relationship also bound the farmers and labourers together—­the labourers of to-day were, in countless cases, the farmers of yesterday, whom the Great Clearances had reduced to the lowest form of servitude and who dragged out an existence of appalling wretchedness in sight of their former homes, now, alas, razed to the ground.  My mind carries me back to the time when the agricultural labourer in Munster was working for four shillings a week, and trying to rear a family on it!  I vowed then that if God ever gave me the chance to do anything for this woe-stricken class I would strive for their betterment, according to the measure of my opportunity.  And it happened, in the mysterious workings of Providence, that I was able to battle and plan and accomplish solid work for the amelioration of the labourers’ lot.