ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 93

ARE THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS KNAVES?

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all that—and more than—Mr. Parnell had thought there was any use in proposing to the House of Commons to grant.

3. That the Tory Government had themselves recognised the reality of the crisis by appointing General Redvers Buller an extra-legal dictator for the county of Kerry, with a roving commission to beat unreasonable landlords to their knees, and that the Plan of Campaign was designed to exercise in the other distressed counties the same indispensable ' vigour beyond the law ' which General Buller exercised in the county of Kerry alone, and which the Tory majority had declined to exercise in a Parliamentary method.

4. That the Tory Government gave a still more striking recognition of the necessity for the Plan of Campaign and of the success of its teachings by passing, within six months after its promulgation, a stronger Land Act than they had rejected with scorn three months before the Plan was hit upon—a Land Act which is, to all intents and purposes, a permanent embodiment of the Plan of Campaign in the pages of the British statute-book.

5. That up to the time of the passing of that Act there had been substantially no evictions, no prosecutions, no bloodshed, and no harm done; that we again and again offered to abandon the Plan of Campaign if the Campaign tenants were guaranteed the honest benefits of that Act, which they themselves had won; and that a sensible arrears clause tacked on to the Act would have averted all the evictions, prosecutions, and barbarities which followed.

6. That then, and ever since, Mr. Balfour's attitude was summed up in his exhortation to the landlords to ' beg their bread rather than yield to the Plan of Campaign,' … continue reading »

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