ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 90

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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emergency men in receipt of regular wages for personating agriculturists of stern Loyalist principles. The amount of viaticum necessary to buy off a couple of dozen public disturbers of that sort is the most twopenny-halfpenny of considerations in the problem of pacifying a country, in which the equitable reinstatement of the evicted tenants is the first and last of axioms.

Driven from all their other old victorious war-cries against the tenants' combinations—the fault 'at the commencement of the row, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted' fixed on their own shoulders out of the mouths of their own prophets; the guilt of continuing the row and of the blood shed in its progress pertaining wholly to themselves and to the tenants not at all—it seems as if the landlord syndicate and their advocates in the Press are now about to concentrate themselves, as upon a last redoubt, on the position that, be the tenants right or wrong, criminal or stainless, at all events the Plan of Campaign was instituted for political purposes, and was therefore a work of the devil with which there must be no compromise. The Times takes this view with much self-complacency. It thinks it has disposed of the whole case for the reinstatement of the evicted tenants when it cites Mr. John Redmond's statement that the Plan of Campaign was a political weapon. Shocking! exclaims the promulgator of 'Parnellism and Crime'—how can you plead for mercy to evicted tenants after an admission like that? But the Times' reasoning now is precisely the line suggested by Mr. Horace Townsend to the landlord syndicate as their cue for gulling the British public. You have no case on the merits: 'make public as soon as possible that you are only fighting the way in which the tenants want to get the rents down.' The grotesque thing is that, … continue reading »

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