ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 82

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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incidents which have landed the Tory party on the left of the Speaker's chair. The tenants won in many cases, the landlords won in none; and now that the struggle has cost the landlords and the British taxpayers probably five hundred times the amount of the original rent disputes, it is found that Mr. Balfour's squalid exploits were a gross and cruel blunder from beginning to end, and his successor is asked to do the thing which, if it had been done in 1887, would have saved the Tory Administration five years of disreputable misconduct and inevitable defeat—namely, to cease persecuting those seventeen hundred homeless peasant families, and cast about for some sensible means of readmitting them to the little cabins from which they were driven in the interests of Mr. Smith-Barry's claim to a peerage and of Mr. Balfour's fame in the Habitations of the Primrose League.

In the salad days of the late Government the dishonesty of the Campaign tenants and the shining virtues of their landlords were insisted upon in tones of thunder. 'Organised embezzlement' was Lord Salisbury's characterisation of the tenants' ethics. I wonder how many of the Campaigned landlords will attempt to take up that brave position before a Commission empowered to inquire into facts and figures? The tenants struggled against rack-rents that were crushing them into the earth. They sought reductions smaller than the Land Courts would have awarded them, if they had not been of set purpose excluded from legal relief. The so-called 'rich' tenants, whose dishonesty was the special horror of pure-souled rack-renters, because they made common cause with their poorer and more helpless brethren, were simply men not yet reduced to actual beggary, but whose rents were even more iniquitous than those of their pauper neighbours, and … continue reading »

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