individuality. It differs decidedly from the Irish type of peasant
degradation. Something of this may be due to the effect of race. The
Kelt and the Saxon may be expected to differ. Yet we think but little
stress is to be laid upon this. There is, probably, much more Keltic
blood in the southern and western counties of England, and, also, more
Saxon blood in some of the southern and even western parts of
Ireland, than has been generally supposed. We apprehend that a Saxon
population, under the same conditions as the southern and western
Irish peasantry, would have grown up into very much the same sort of
people as the Irish have been; while a Keltic population, exposed to
the same influences, through successive generations, as the midland
and southern peasantry of England, would not have been essentially
different at the present day from the actual cultivators of the soil.

'The Irish peasant is poorer and yet more reckless than the
Englishman; but he is not so sullen or so spiritless. His body is not
so muscular or so strongly-set as that of the Anglo-Saxon husbandman,
on whose frame the hard and unintermitted toil of thirty generations
has stamped its unmistakable impress, and, correspondently, he is a
less persevering and less vigorous labourer; but, as a general rule,
his stature is taller and his step far more free and elastic than that
of the sturdy but slow and stunted labourer of our southern counties.
There are wild mountainous districts of the west, indeed, in which
the lowest type of the Irish peasantry is found, that must be taken
as exceptions to our general statement; and as many from those regions
cross the Channel to tramp through England in the complex character
of mendicant labourers, no doubt some have received from them an
impression as to the Irish peasantry very different from what our
observations are intended to convey. But no one can have travelled
through the south of Ireland without having noticed what we state. The