Note (return) — Chapter XII

“I think not,” he replied; “on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the passing of the Land Act of 1870—a time when shopkeepers, and bankers also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby ‘bad debts’ innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he takes from his labour and spends on his living.”20 “They save a great deal of money often,” he says, “but almost never in any systematic way. They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact, under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings, as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin for improved living.”