ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 80

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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gation—namely, because the facts prove that the evicted tenants have been turned out of their homes, not through any dishonesty or criminality of their own, but through the astounding folly of Mr. Balfour, who deliberately shut them out from the Land Act of 1887, and marked them down as victims of landlord vengeance and coercionist braggadocio. Furthermore, investigation will prove that the attempt (in Mr. Smith-Barry's notorious phrase) to 'make an example ' of the evicted tenants ignominiously failed; that, after bombarding those couple of dozen bodies of Irish peasants with every conceivable weapon of Coercion for five years, Mr. Balfour left every one of the little peasant combinations unbroken just where he found them; and that, consequently, the reputation of a successful coercionist, wherewith he managed to exalt himself and ruin his party, is a matter that will bear close public inquiry no better than the late Mr. Pigott's forged letters. The initial fact to be borne in mind is that, at the passing of the Land Act of 1887, not more than fifty of the Campaign tenants had been evicted—my belief is not above a dozen. Seventeen hundred families who have been since dispossessed were still safe by their firesides. The thousands of Coercion prosecutions, the police fusillades, prison scenes, and burnings of evicted cabins with paraffin oil, which disgraced Ireland for five years and lost the General Election for the Tories, had not yet taken place. A statesman of good sense might have then and there closed the Plan of Campaign chapter in peace, if he had recognised that the Campaign combinations were simply a rough-spun remedy for an admitted evil. He had only to insert in the Act of 1887 a clause entitling the Campaigners to the benefits of the Act their own exertions had secured for their brother tenants. For example, Lord … continue reading »

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