I am afraid a great deal of not wholly innocuous nonsense has been written and spoken about this part of the United Kingdom by well-meaning philanthropists who have gauged the condition of the people here by their own standards of comfort and enjoyment.

Most things in this life of ours are relative.

I well remember hearing an American millionaire, who began life in New York as the patentee of a mouse-trap, express his profound compassion for a judge of the Supreme Court condemned to live "upon a pittance of eight thousand dollars a year." These dwellers in the cabins of Donegal are millionaires, so far as those essentials of life are concerned, which we call room and air and freedom to move and breathe, in comparison with hundreds and thousands of their own race in the slums of New York and Chicago and Liverpool and London.
Mrs.M'Donnell's cousin, however, took dark views of things.

The times "were no good at all." The potatoes, I had heard, were doing well this year.
"No! they wouldn't keep the people; indeed, they wouldn't.

There would have to be relief." "Why not manure the land ?" "Manure?
oh yes, the sea-stuff was good manure, but the people couldn't get it.