THIS will be found to be a mixed chapter, but I respectfully desire every American to read it very carefully, and to give it some thought after reading it. In America, where one man is as good as another, we have so much that is good that we do not appreciate the blessings we enjoy; we do not realize how much a free government is worth. I am going to put upon paper some few governmental facts, to the end of showing my countrymen what a good government is worth to them, and what a bad government costs the people who groan under it.

In a late number of that especial organ of king-worshipers, the London Illustrated News, there is a beautiful engraving, entitled “The Princess of Wales and Her Daughter, in the Garden of Sandringham.” It is a lovely picture. The garden itself is a study, with its wonderful shrubbery, and flowers, and statuary; a garden that falls but little short of being a Paradise. And the Princess of Wales and her six or eight daughters are just as lovely—by the way, as the British Parliament gives every child born in the royal family a princely estate and an enormous allowance to start with, the royal family all have large families—the Princess herself is arrayed in gorgeous morning costume, with a hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, with a parasol with silken fringe upon it a foot deep, and everything comporting. The children are likewise gorgeously arrayed, and one of them is teaching a pug dog how to sit up, the said pug costing the British people at least an hundred guineas. The entire party are in as jolly a state as can be imagined.

Now I like such scenes as this immensely. I like to see comfort and even luxury. Had the husband of this fortunate woman and the father of these happy children been, early in life, a shoemaker, a tailor, a lawyer, a merchant, or anything under heaven, and had by his own labor and his own skill accumulated the means for all this luxury, I should insist upon his right to enjoy it because he had earned it, and had given the world something for it. But how did this woman get it? Why is she with a parasol with silken fringe a foot deep, her children in silks and satins, while just as good children, and just as good women, in Ireland, are shoeless, stockingless and almost naked! What title has she to the gardens at Sandringham, and by what right does she starve the peasantry of Ireland that she may thus disport herself and her children?

Simply this: She is the wife a dissolute middle-aged man, whose stupid mother was the niece of a stupid uncle, who was the son or brother or something or other of the worst kind of a man in the world, who happened to be the son of a king who was half a lunatic and half an idiot—the same who attempted by hireling soldiery to subjugate America—who became a king because he was the descendant of a race of pirates, who by arms wrested from the people of the countries they invaded, all their rights, and assumed to own the land.

Have these people from first to last ever added one penny to the wealth of the world? Is there any one thing they have ever done to push forward the progress of the nations? Not a thing. On the contrary, they have been the dead weights; they have been the blocks in the way. They simply live, and eat, and drink, and wear and disport themselves in the gardens at Sandringham and an hundred other gardens; they have castles, and servants, and special trains, and all that sort of thing, and hundreds of Guinea pug dogs; and to support all this, with the horde of nobility hanging upon them, and their retainers, the men of Ireland are starving, and the women of Ireland are going shoeless, stockingless, and well nigh naked.

I am not especially cruel in my nature, but were the royal family of England to invite the royal family of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia, and the King of Italy, and the Sultan of Turkey, and all the kings of the world, with all their nobles, to an excursion on the German ocean, and were the ships all to go down to the bottom of the sea, and make an end of the whole business at once, I should thank Heaven more fervently than I ever did before in my life. Royalty is larceny in the first degree. It is larceny all the way down, according to the amount of the spoil.

I did not confine my observations of land troubles to Ireland alone, though it is in Ireland that there is the worst condition of affairs, for the reason that there is a vital difference between the ruling classes of England and the entire Irish people, in race and religion, and that makes a great deal more difference in the British Empire than anywhere else on the footstool.

But the English or Scotch farmer has not so happy a time of it as he might have, and England will have just as violent a land agitation as Ireland within a very few years. The average Englishman has a vast veneration for royalty and nobility, and all that sort of thing, for he ascribes to the “system” what he himself has done to make Britain great, but his wife and children are nearer to him than Her Majesty or My Lord, and he is beginning to ask why he is yearly getting worse off, while Her Majesty and My Lord are living even more luxuriously and expensively than ever?

When a strong, vigorous race of men get to asking themselves this question, it is high time that Her Majesty and My Lord begin to look out for themselves. The French peasantry and the French artisans made it very warm for the “Divine Righters” several times, and finally they have a republic that will endure; not the best republic in the world, but a very good attempt at one; as good as we could expect from Frenchmen.

Farming in England doesn’t pay much better than in Ireland, and the reason for it, as in Ireland, is summed up in the one word, rent. In Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Cambridgeshire, there are hundreds upon hundreds of farms vacant, and doing nothing, the reason being the insecurity of tenant farmers and the rottenness of land ownership. It all comes from the fact that in England as in Ireland, the fee simple of the land is in the hands of the few, and that the few owners regard the tenants as so many cows to be milked for their infernal extravagancies, and that they are so stupid that they cannot be made to understand that there is a point beyond which the tenant cannot go, and that when that point is reached something must break.

One farm I saw was a good piece of land of two hundred and eighty acres. It lies as dead as Julius CÆsar, and is growing up to thistles. Why? Because the rent is four hundred pounds a year, or two thousand dollars. It has been screwed up to that point by successive owners, till the closest labor and the most starving economy will not pay the rent. It would not pay it anywhere on the globe.

In Nottinghamshire the “Noble” proprietors are having their farms left upon their hands for the same reasons, and they are attempting to farm them by their agents, practically evicting the skilled labor which was born upon the soil and is best fitted to cultivate it.

These owners are those whose debts compel them to get something out of their land. They either attempt to farm them themselves, or they make leases at a rent just low enough to induce their tenants to continue.

But there is another class that is not so merciful—or rather who are not compelled to be just, and the English nobleman is never just except upon compulsion. These are the drones who are actually rich, and have an income from some plunder outside of their lands. They will not make leases at all, for fear of losing the game! They want this beautiful land to grow up into shelter for hares and birds and all that sort of thing, for the sake of the pleasure of shooting in the season. The distress of the evicted tenant—eviction by reason of exorbitant rent is as certain as eviction for non-payment—is nothing to them. They must have their preserves of game; they must have their sport.

The process is the same in England as it is in Ireland. The landlord puts his estates in the hands of an agent, selecting for the purpose a man with a heart of flint and a face of brass, one who knows no mercy, and who would not do a kind act were he paid for it.

The tenant appeals to him for a reduction, but he might as well ask mercy of a tiger. Then in his despair goes to the landlord.

“My good sir,” says the landlord, beaming upon him benevolently, “I know nothing about these things. The matter is entirely in the hands of Mr. Smithson, my agent. Go to him.”

“But I have been to him and he will do nothing.”

“Really I regret it. But Mr. Smithson knows all about it—I don’t. If he, with a knowledge of the situation—that is what he is there for—can do nothing, I cannot. I am not to be expected to know anything about it, nor can I meddle with business that is his.”

And the poor devil of a tenant, with the prospect of starving on the land or emigrating from the only place on earth which to him is a home, goes away sadly, and My Lord or the Rev., as the case may be, drops his agent a note, saying:—“Jobson was here to get a reduction of his rent. He will stay, and can be made to pay. Be firm with him.”

Then the agent tells Jobson that lowering the rent is out of the question—and Jobson stays, for he does not want to leave. He buys his artificial manures and his fertilizers from the agent, for he can get credit nowhere else, the agent has a handsome commission from the manufacturer, and so between the agent and the landlord, the manufacturer and the usurer, and the rest of them, Jobson works fourteen hours a day only in the end to either lie down and die or by the help of friends get away to America.

I know one tenant who, dissatisfied with an agent’s apology for serious and unreasonable raising of his rent, determined to see the duke himself. At the interview His Grace said he really knew nothing about the matter; he had put the re-valuing into the hands of the most eminent man recommended to him; and, in short, if the tenant did not feel comfortable, it was open to him to leave and let another man come in at the new terms. Now this was the cruel truth, but only part of the truth. The tenant could not quit without tremendous sacrifice of his property—to say nothing of his home-love and other feelings. So he answered, “Your Grace, I cannot leave without ruinous loss; I have farmed well for many years; I can get nothing else at my time of life; and hence your power to oppress me.”

All England is dotted with unoccupied farms, and these blotches upon the fair face of nature are becoming more frequent every year.

There are in England about five hundred packs of hounds, numbering about eighty each, or forty thousand in all. The hunting horses number about one hundred and fifteen thousand, and the yearly cost of these hunting establishments is estimated at more than forty-five million dollars.

These estimates do not include the original cost of the establishments, it is merely the annual expense. The first cost goes up into hundreds of thousands, for enormous prices are paid for good hunters and the better breeds of hounds.

And this hunting is no joke to the farmer. The horsemen and the hounds go across the country, and it matters little to them what damage is done to crops, grounds and animals. The tenant has no rights that the landlord is bound to respect, and he must submit to whatever burdens are imposed upon him.

It may be necessary to keep up the “good old English customs,” and to encourage “manly sports,” but are not the stomachs of the tenants and the stomachs of the tenant’s children worthy of some consideration? And then if killing game is a sport to be encouraged to keep up English manliness, why not give the tenantry, who, after all, do the fighting, a shy at it? Why keep all the good things for the nobility? John Hodge could improve his markmanship and his manhood by having an occasional shot at a deer, or a hare, and the deer or hare would not be an unacceptable addition to his remarkably short commons at table. But were John to presume to be seen with a gun in his hand he would be shot at by a burly game keeper, and if not killed would be arrested, tried, convicted and transported. What is My Lord’s amusement is John Hodge’s crime.

Inasmuch as the British government is for one class only, that class takes mighty good care of itself. Men in favor with the ruling classes are pensioned for life, and in many cases the pension goes beyond life, and is handed down to descendants on more pleas than is comprehensible. The army, the navy, the law departments, the State departments, the—well, if there is a department in the English government that is not like a comet, the pension tail ten times as long as the department nucleus, I have not found it.

The list of pensioners set in very small type, two columns to the page, occupy twenty-two large pages. And this enormous list is made up not of the common soldiers and sailors, but entirely of what are called gentlemen pensioners—men who were foisted into office as the younger sons of the nobility, or “sisters, cousins and aunts,” and after a few years of loafing about the government offices retired upon life pensions.

A fair sample of these pensions is that of the Duke of Schomberg. The duke was killed at the battle of the Boyne, in the year 1690, and a pension of six thousand pounds or thirty thousand dollars per annum was given his heirs. It is estimated that this family, the heirs of a foreign mercenary, has received from the British government the enormous sum of six hundred and eighty thousand pounds, or in American money three million four hundred thousand dollars! And this for his being a favorite of William of Orange, a Dutch King!

Rev. J. Smith, whoever he may be, served at the Lord knows what, twenty-three years, at a yearly salary of three hundred and sixty-four pounds, and was retired at fifty-six years of age with the comfortable pension for life of two hundred and thirty-one pounds annually! And so on you go, wading through twenty-two closely printed pages, two columns to the page, of just such cases, the yearly allowance for these excrescencies footing up for the year 1879 the enormous sum of one million three hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and fifty-eight pounds! It is a good thing to be the favorite of a duke.

The Royal family have a remarkably soft thing of it. Her Royal Highness, the Princess Royal, receives a yearly allowance of eight thousand pounds, the Prince of Wales receives the snug sum of forty thousand pounds, which he manages to squander in questionable ways (this does not include the grants Parliament has made at divers and sundry times to pay his debts), the Princess of Wales ten thousand pounds, Prince Alfred ten thousand pounds from his marriage and fifteen thousand pounds from his majority—twenty-five thousand pounds in all—Prince Arthur fifteen thousand pounds, Princess Alice six thousand pounds, Princess Louise, she of Canada, six thousand pounds, Princess Mary five thousand pounds, Prince Leopold fifteen thousand pounds, Princess Augusta three thousand pounds, Duke of Cambridge twelve thousand pounds, and in addition the last mentioned fraud has princely pay as field marshal, general, colonel, and no one knows what else.

Whoever chooses may figure up what all this costs the people of Great Britain. I have not the patience.

And bear in mind the fact that this does not represent any portion of what these absorbers take out of the people. This is merely pin money for the female leeches and pocket money for the male! In addition to this they have enormous estates all over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales; they have offices beyond number, with a salary attached to each, and they have allowances for everything under heaven. If the tax-payer breathes it costs him something, for the nobility have revenues based upon everything.

The Royal household is a curiosity. There’s the Lord Steward, who draws two thousand pounds a year; the Lord Treasurer and Comptroller, nine hundred pounds each; Master of the Household, twenty one hundred and fifty-eight pounds; Secretary of the Board of Green Cloth, whatever that may be, three hundred pounds; Paymaster, five hundred pounds; Lord Chamberlain, two thousand pounds; Keeper of the Privy Purse, two thousand pounds; Assistant Keeper of the Privy Purse, one thousand pounds. It takes two men to keep the privy purse, and it is large enough to require it. Then there are eight Lords in waiting, who get for waiting seven hundred and two pounds each, and there are grooms in waiting, grooms of the privy chamber, extra grooms in waiting, four gentlemen ushers, one “Black Rod,” whatever he may do I don’t know, but for being a “Black Rod” he gets two thousand pounds a year. Then there’s a clerk of the closet, mistress of the robes, ladies of the bed-chamber, and bed-chamber women, maids of honor, and poet laureate, and examiner of plays.

The poet laureate gets five hundred pounds a year for writing a very bad ode in praise of Her Majesty on each birthday, which must be a very bitter pill for him, he being actually a poet. But he does not give the worth of the money, for there is absolutely nothing in the Queen of England to praise. Mr. Tennyson has a very hard place.

The Master of the Horse receives two thousand five hundred pounds, the Master of the Buck-hounds one thousand seven hundred pounds, Hereditary Grand Falconer one thousand two hundred pounds, (by the way kings don’t falcon any more), then there are eight Equerries in Ordinary at seven hundred pounds each, which is certainly cheap; five Pages of Honor at one hundred and twenty pounds each, and a Master of the Tennis Court, which is a sort of a ten pins, I suppose, at one hundred and thirty-two pounds.

These, understand, are only a few of the people belonging to the Royal household. There are over a thousand persons, male and female, attached thereto, all receiving magnificent salaries, for real or imaginary services to Her Majesty.

The Queen receives, exclusive of the vast income of her estates, for the running of her household and pensions for the dead-beats who get too old to show themselves, the enormous sum of four hundred and seven thousand pounds, or, in American money, two million thirty-five thousand dollars per annum! And this represents but a portion of the swindle, as constantly allowances are being made and annuities granted which do not show upon paper, and can only be reached by the most ferret-like acuteness and perseverance.

Ninety per cent. of all this mummery, for which the people of England have to pay in good hard cash, is the most absurd and utter nonsense. Like falconry and all that business, it has gone out of date. In the old times kings kept buck-hounds and flew falcons, and such offices were necessary, that is, if kings were ever necessary, which I deny, but it has all gone, never to return. But the offices remain—and the salaries. They are kept up to make places for illegitimate children of lords, for poor relations of royalty and nobility, and for favorites whose fathers or themselves have done dirty work for the government.

In the name of all that’s good, what does the Queen of England want of eight ladies of the bed-chamber, and thirteen women of the bed-chamber? Can’t she unhook her dress and corset, untie the fastenings of her skirts, peel off her clothes, draw on her woolen night-cap over her foolish old head, and turn in the same as other women? What does she want of all these people about her? I can understand that it would take that number and more to make the ancient nuisance presentable in the morning, but why tax the people of Great Britain forty-four thousand pounds a year for this service?

And then when it is taken into account that the entire royal family have each all this humbuggery, to a less extent, it can be figured up what a very expensive thing royalty is, and how wise the American people were to bundle the whole business off the continent at the time they did.

One thousand people at salaries ranging from one hundred to ten thousand dollars a year, to take care of one rickety old woman, who is mortal the same as is the humblest of those ground into the dust by her and hers, and who has no more title to the place she occupies than a thief has to your watch.

Ireland swarms with soldiers, and, for that matter, every nook and corner of the British Empire is scarlet with military. Royalty and nobility, having no reason for existence, have to be maintained by brute force. Royalty and nobility do not pay for this expenditure; a subjugated people pay for their own debasement. To every pound of the expenditure in the British Empire, sixteen shillings four and one-eighth pence go to the war debt and the support of the army, leaving three shillings seven and seven-eighth pence for all other purposes whatsoever. Military power is the basis of despotism everywhere. Germany groans under it; Russia sweats under it; and wherever a king is tolerated you will find bayonets and artillery in most uncomfortable plenty. Some day, let it be hoped, the kings and nobles will experience the delight of looking down the muzzles of these arms themselves.

Up to the time of the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Irish were compelled to support the archbishops and bishops of a church whose religion is as foreign to them as Buddhism, paying therefor the sum of one hundred and two thousand eight hundred and twenty-five pounds per annum, and to other attaches, for curacies and all that business, a vast amount more. This immense amount of money was a tax yearly upon a starved and overworked people, to keep in luxurious idleness a parcel of drones whose only functions in life were to eat, sleep and hunt; who were of no earthly use to the people who supported them, either in a temporal or a spiritual way. There is one English church at Glengariff, in a parish in which there are only six Protestants, the rector, his wife, two children, and two servants. The rector has as fine a house as there is in the country-side, the cost of which and its support is a burden on a people struggling for their daily bread.

Pauperism is a certain consequence of royalty and nobility. The Queen of England cannot have one thousand men and women about her person under pay without taking bread from the mouths of many people, and the luxury of a noble must find an echo in the other extreme, the workhouse.

The number of adult paupers in England and Wales in 1880, exclusive of vagrants, was seven hundred and eleven thousand seven hundred and twelve and the cost to the labor of the country to relieve them footed up eight millions eight hundred and nineteen thousand six hundred and seventy-eight pounds.

This does not include Ireland and Scotland, but England, the most prosperous part of the British Empire. The English writers on political economy ascribe this appalling pauperism to every cause but the right one. Wipe out royalty, nobility, and landlordism, and give the people a chance to earn their bread, and this army would be reduced to almost nothing.

Crime goes on hand in hand with pauperism. In 1879 the United Kingdom had the enormous number of one million four hundred and ninety thousand four hundred and thirty-nine committals for crime. This does not include the cases of drunkenness or kindred offences which come before magistrates and are summarily disposed of.

The principal business of the aristocracy of England is to make places for themselves and their sons and nephews. No matter how large the plunder of the tenantry, the landed aristocracy must have government employment for their surplus children, for they cannot all stay on the acres originally stolen from the people. And so British arms conquer other lands, or British diplomacy, which is a lie backed by a man-of-war, “acquires” it, and immediately a full staff of officials is sent out, all under magnificent salaries, to stay just long enough to be retired upon a fat pension. If possible, the expense of governing the “acquired” possession is squeezed out of the unfortunate natives; if not, the home government makes up the deficiency.

Cyprus, an island made almost barren by years of Turkish misrule and oppression, is now in the hands of the English, with a commander-in-chief at fifteen thousand pounds a year, and a complete staff, the cost of which is not less than seventy thousand pounds per annum, to say nothing about the armament necessary to be kept there.

The island of Maritius, a speck in the Indian Ocean, thirty-six miles long and twenty miles broad, furnishes sinecures for the scions of English nobility to the tune of eleven thousand six hundred pounds per year, and three little islands off the Malayan Peninsula are governed by a parcel of “Sirs” and “Hons.” at an annual cost of twenty-one thousand two hundred and ten pounds.

These are only samples. England has such harbors of refuge for her surplus nobility everywhere, and the cost of supporting these locusts is a crushing tax upon the labor of the country. The items of pauperism and crime are easily accounted for.

Some of her stolen dependencies, however, are made to pay very well. The total receipts from British India for the year 1879, (customs, taxes, etc.), were sixty-five million one hundred and ninety-nine thousand six hundred and sixty-two pounds, while the expenditures for the same year were sixty-three million one hundred and sixty-five thousand three hundred and fifty-six pounds. India is so worked as to support a vast army of officials and leave a balance of two million pounds for profit besides. But the real profit is much larger. The manufacturers and merchants of England compel the down-trodden natives to buy their goods at their own prices, and a never failing stream of wealth flows from India to England. India was a successful piece of brigandage, and has always paid very well.

Other steals have been successful—in fact they all have been. These younger sons, legitimate and illegitimate, have to be supported some how, by the labor of the country, and to transfer even a portion of their cost to the people of other countries is a saving of just that much from the people at home. But where is the necessity of supporting them at all? What necessity is there for their existence?

The peers of the realm number four hundred and eighty-seven, and of this number four hundred and two own, or at least get rent for, fourteen million one hundred and twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and thirty-one acres of land, which bring them a rental annually of eleven million six hundred and seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and thirty-nine pounds. In addition to this enormous income the most of them have appointments of various kinds, all of which make the position of peer a very comfortable one.

They have a very pleasant life of it. They all have a castle on their estates in the country, and in the season guests made up of the same class, with a few poets, novelists and painters to supply the intellect and make variety, indulge in all sorts of festivities, and in town, in the season, their houses are constantly filled, at no matter what expense. Then they each have a membership in all the clubs, and between their country houses, and their town houses, and their clubs, they take pleasure and cultivate gout till death, which has no more respect for them than it has for their oppressed tenants, takes them to a place where there is no difference between a duke and a laborer.

Gout, by the way, is the fashionable English disease, and a nobleman or a squire of an old family would rather have it than not. It is a sort of mark of gentility, about as essential to his position as his family tree, and no matter how they suffer under it, they bear it with fortitude as one of the evils incident to their rank—an evil that emphasizes their dignity. When Dickens sent Sir Leicester Deadlock into the next world via the family gout, he did not satirize at all. The starved Irish never have the gout, nor do the working people who clamor for some measure of right. The Jack Cades never were so afflicted; only your noble, who toils not, neither does he spin, who goes to bed every night full of every flesh that exists, every wine that is pressed, to say nothing of more potent beverages. It is an accompaniment of “gentle birth,” and very liberal living—living so liberal as to be only possible by those who have other people’s unrequited labor to live upon.

An Englishman dearly loves a lord. There is a cringing servility, a hat-off reverence for noble birth, in England, that to an American is about the most disgusting thing he sees. My Lord may be a thin-haired, weak-legged, half-witted being, capable of nothing under heaven but billiards and horses, loaded to the guards with vices, and only not possessing all of them because of his lack of ability to master them. He may be the most infernal cumberer of the earth in existence, but if he is of noble birth, if he has the proper handle to his name, he is bowed to, deferred to in every possible way. A London tradesman had rather be swindled by a nobleman than paid honestly by a common man, and for one to have permission to put over his door, “Plumber (for instance) to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales,” is to put him in the seventh heaven of ecstacy. The farm population of England show outward deference, but they don’t feel it, and the Irish have so intimate an acquaintance with them that they refuse even lip service and ignore the “hat-off” requirement altogether. This lack of respect for the nobility in Ireland is considered one of the most alarming signs of the times.

I saw a sample of this bowing to royalty, in Scotland. I happened to be doing Holyrood Castle at the same time His Majesty Kalakeau, King of the Sandwich Islands, was in Edinburgh. Now King K. may be a very good man, but in appearance he is an ordinary looking man of half negro blood, and not a very remarkable mulatto at that. Our Fred Douglas would cut up into a thousand of him.

He is a sort of a two-for-a-penny king; but he is a king for all that, and so all the dignitaries of Edinburgh, the mayor, the principal citizens, a duke or two, and a half dozen right honorables showed him the city, and escorted him, and lunched him, and banquetted him. They brought him to Holyrood, and the entire lot of them formed in two ranks, and, with hats in hand, bowed reverently as this king of a few thousand breechless, semi-civilized savages, passed to his carriage. And they glared ferociously upon the few Americans who, not just au fait in such matters, and not knowing precisely who the distinguished colored man was, stood with their hats on their heads, inasmuch as it was raining. Had it been the King of the Fijis, and had it been raining hot pitchforks, these snobs would have stood with uncovered and bowed heads, simply because he was a king. To these people, “there is a divinity which doth hedge a king,” no matter what kind of a king it is. They do the same thing for that venerable old stupidity, Victoria Guelph, precisely as they did it for that amiable imbecility, Albert, her husband, and are doing it every day for those embryo locusts, their children. Burns wrote:—

But this class of Scotch have forgotten Burns. Possibly they never understood him. But Burns was wrong. Kalakeau may be a man, but the snobs who toadied to him so meekly, are not, and never can be.

“Look upon that picture, and then upon this!” I have shown how the English oppressor lives. Let us go, by actual figures, taken from official sources, for a few actual facts as to the Irish tenant. The Parish of Glencolumbkille, in County Donegal, is a fair sample of the west coast. In this parish there are eight hundred families. In the famine of 1880, seven hundred of these families were on the relief list, and on to the end of the famine (if famine may be said to ever end in Ireland), four hundred families had absolutely nothing but what the relief committees gave them.

The committees were able to give each of these families per head per week seven pounds of Indian meal, costing five pence farthing, up to about five dollars and fifty cents per year.

These people all said that if they got half as much more, ten and one-half pounds, it would be as much as they would use in times of plenty.

Your pencil and figures will show you that this would be equivalent in good years, to an expenditure per head for food for every individual, of one pound thirteen shillings and sixpence a year, or for the average family of say four and one-half, seven pounds thirteen shillings and sixpence per year.

This is the cost of food for the average family per year when the times are good.

When potatoes are cheaper than Indian meal potatoes are eaten, but one or the other constitutes the sole food of the people. As the cost is always about the same, the figures are not changed in either case.

To this you want to add about three pounds a year for “luxuries.” Luxury in an Irish cabin means an ounce of tobacco a week for the man of the house, and the remainder of the three pounds goes for tea. I admit this is an extravagance, this tobacco and tea, and I doubt not that a commission will be appointed by Parliament to devise ways and means to extinguish the dudheen of the man and abolish the teapot of the woman. This three pounds a year, thus squandered, would enable the landlords to have a great many more comforts than they now enjoy. I presume the Earl of Cork could build another yacht on what his tenantry squander in tea and tobacco.

Add to this one pound for clothing (an extravagant estimate) for each member of the family, and you have the entire cost of the existence of the Donegal family, twelve pounds three shillings six and three-quarters pence, or, in American money, fifty-seven dollars and sixty-one cents!

The clothing provided by this pound a year means for the man of the house a pair of brogans, which he must have to work at all, a couple of shirts, a pair of corduroy trowsers, and a second-hand coat of some kind. The women and children wear no shoes or stockings, and their clothing I have described before. Of bed-clothing they have nothing to speak of. A few potato sacks, or gunny bags, or anything else that contributes anything of warmth, makes up that item.

The Queen and the Princess of Wales sleep on down and under silk, and the Queen has one thousand people about her person. My Lord has his yacht in the harbor, and the humblest seaman on board sleeps under woolen and has meat three times a day.

Some day there will be a Board of Equalization from whose decision there will be no appeal. Then I would rather be the Donegal peasant’s wife than the Queen. Despite the fact that she sent one hundred pounds to the starving Irish, she won’t need silken covering to keep her warm.

To pay the rent and provide this fifty-eight dollars for food and clothing consumes the entire time of every member of the household. The land will not pay it—it is impossible to get it off the soil. So the man of the house plants his crops and leaves them for the women and children to care for, and he goes off to England or Wales, and works in mines, or in harvest fields in the season, or at anything to make some little money to fill the insatiable maw of the landlord, and to keep absolute starvation from the house.

Then the boy in America sends his stipend, which helps—provided his remittances can be kept from the lynx-eyed agent, who would raise the rent in a minute if he knew that remittances were coming.

But the work of caring for the crops is not all the women

and children do. They knit and sew, every minute of the spare time they have from field work, making thereby from two to three cents a day. This knitting is done for dealers who furnish the material and pay for the work, and to get the material journeys of twenty to forty miles, and the same distance back again to deliver the finished work, have to be performed.

In brief, there is not a moment to be lost, nor an opportunity wasted to make a penny. The penny not earned makes the difference between enough food to sustain life, bare as life is of everything that makes it desirable, and absolute pinching, merciless hunger. No matter at what sacrifice, the penny must be earned and religiously applied either for rent or food. Clothing is always a secondary consideration—a place to stay in and food to keep life in the body, these are the first.

What is the amount paid the drones of England in the form of pensions? How much does the Queen receive? How much do the little Princes and Princesses cost the Nation? How much the Dukes and Dukelings, the Right Honorables and the Generals and Colonels, and the Secretaries and all that? “Look upon this picture and then upon that!” A nobility rioting in extravagance—a whole people starving!

And yet there are those who believe the people of Great Britain have no grievances, but should settle down contentedly and in quiet!

If there is an American who does not hate royalty, nobility, and aristocracy, in no matter what form they come to view, he either wants to be an aristocrat himself, or is grossly ignorant of what this triplet of infamy means. If there is an American who does not sympathize with the common people of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, he is either a heartless man or does not know the condition of the laboring classes of that unhappy Empire. And if there is an American who reads these pages, and does not from this time out, make politics just as much a part of his business as planting his crops, that American does not know what is good for him. Government is the most important matter on this earth. Good or bad government makes the difference between nobility-ridden England and free America.