The Registrar-General's Report on the Agricultural Statistics of Ireland for
1875 comes to confirm the sanguine estimate of Irish prosperity in which the Lord-Lieutenant indulged last week at Derry. Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence is that of the Emigration returns, which we can only include among agricultural statistics by something like a " bull." That 31,000 persons left the shores of Ireland during the first six months of the present year, as compared with 45,000 who emigrated in the same period last year, shows that the demand for labour is really improving. The same inference is suggested by the return of total acreage under crops, as compared with the acreage under grass,—the former showing an increase of 62,000 acres, the latter .a decrease of 40,000 acres. Thus there is a slight turn in the tide which set in after the famine, and some land apparently that was given up to pasture has been reconquered by the plough. The -danger is that in the uncertain climate of Ireland this reaction may go too far, and that crops of too speculative a kind may again be grown. At present, this is not so ; the acreage under wheat, -of which the cultivation in Ireland is not safe in one year out of Eve, has diminished by one-third since 1871, while oats, barley, and green crops show an increase. Potatoes, –which are a fine crop this year, are less in favour than they were, partly owing to the popular change of habits, and partly to the dread of the American pest,—the Colorado beetle.
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