ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 91

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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in accusing us of fighting the tenants' battle for political purposes, the Times does not see that its whole aim now, and the whole aim of the landlord syndicate and of Mr. Balfour's repressive policy for the past five years, is, and has been, for the mere sake of having 'good enough ground for fighting' their own political and class battles, to 'make an example of tenants whom their own agent warns them were cruelly wronged 'at the commencement of the row, before the Plan of Campaign was adopted.' Assume for a moment that the worst that can be said against us is true—that our one thought was how to embarrass Mr. Balfour, and that Mr. Balfour's and the landlords' one thought was how to save the State—if the evicted tenants are the 'victims' and 'dupes' of political agitators, that surely is an additional reason for rescuing the victims, rather than for ' making an example of them.' Once concede that the tenants' claims were honest to begin with, and that any charge of crime against them is as gross a libel as the charge of dishonesty: was there ever a more savage policy propounded than that these poor peasants must be hunted to the workhouse or to agrarian crime in order to discredit half a dozen politicians whose dupes and victims the Times declares the evicted tenants to have been? That is precisely the theory on which Mr. Balfour and the landlords have been fighting since 1887, to their own ruin and the disturbance of the country. Have they not had enough of the experiment? or is the country to be delivered over permanently to turmoil which one sensible clause in the Act of 1887 could have put an end to—delivered over, not for the purpose of punishing dishonest or criminal tenants, but of ' finding good fighting ground' against a handful of politicians whose innocent victims the suffering tenants are proclaimed to be? … continue reading »

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