Excerpt from The Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half Century Thus in each of the three divisions of the United Kingdom there is a material decline, and most of all in Ireland, the magni tude of the decline there being no doubt due to the fact that the figures are for a period just after the great famine. But how remote we seem to be from those days of famine. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.