his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room.  When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney.  Moreover, why should he need much room?  At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England.  So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration.  And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits.  Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman’s life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness.  The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.  The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat.  What else should he do?  How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other.  Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-men should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him.  And these branches are many.  All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish.  For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane.  To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman.  But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman.  Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen:  hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class.  And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish.  For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among