crochet factory on co-operative principles, which has over a hundred
employees; and at Lough Glynn, in Connacht, a carpet and cheese making
industry has been built up solely through the efforts of a religious
order of nuns. These are random examples, and I do not claim that they
are typical. They are, on the other hand, not exceptional.

It is impossible to exaggerate the effect of the English commercial
policy towards Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Wool, cotton, sailcloth, sugar refining, shipping, glass, the cattle and
provision trade, were all deliberately strangled. And besides the loss
of wealth to Ireland which was the consequence, one must take into
account the fact that traditions of commercial enterprise perished
through desuetude, so that in the industrial revolution at the beginning
of the nineteenth century Ireland was too severely crippled to derive
any benefit from the new order, as to which she was still further
handicapped by the poverty of her coal fields.

The land system, which is only now disappearing, served, moreover, not
to inculcate habits of thrift, but positively as a discouragement of
economic virtues. Until the legal recognition of tenant-right had been
secured, the tenant who made improvements was liable to have his rent
raised, and was aware that he had no legal right to compensation for
them on his removal from the holding. Further, the judicial fixing of
rents, which, as the time for rent revision has approached, has
presented to the tenant the temptation not to make the best of his land,
and so run the risk of an augmentation of rent, has been a source of
insidious demoralisation to the occupant of the soil.

The social upheaval resulting from land purchase will nowhere be more
marked than in this respect in the stability which it will produce in