ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the exigencies of the Famine, the consolidation of holdings, the nature of agricultural production, the pervasive presence of monetary and contractual tenets and the emergence of a recognisable rural middle class of tenant farmers as the forces that left a wage-paid proletariat, subject to the laws of supply and demand, at risk in those years. It illustrates the severe inroads on the cottier class made by clearances, the failure of agricultural prosperity to transfer into increased employment or raised wages and the wretchedness of the labourers' housing conditions, The chapter discusses the contemporary debate on the merit of the workers' case for redress of their grievances. Radical perception of the problems through the voices of John Bright and John Stuart Mill was only marginally more sensitive in human terms, representing a British middle-class developed by the Industrial Revolution and steeped in laissez-faire principles and market economy tenets.
