ABSTRACT
The relations of employer and employed, which knit together the framework of society, and establish a mutual dependence and good-will, have no existence in the potato system. The Irish small holder lives in a state of isolation, the type of which is to be sought for in the islands of the South Sea, rather than in the great civilized communities of the ancient world. The excessive competition for land maintained rents at a level which left the Irish peasant the bare means of subsistence; and poverty,, discontent, and idleness, acting on his excitable nature, produced that state of popular feeling which furnishes the material for every description of illegal association and misdirected political agitation. The dependence for good and evil of workman on master manufacturer, of subject on Government, of child on father, is less absolute than that of the Irish peasant upon the lord of the soil from which he derives his subsistence.
