MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 103

MR. MORLEY'S TASK IN IRELAND

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draws 20,000l. a year out of a specially distressful region, and never lays his eyes upon his estate—last month served rent-processes broadcast. I am told he has just intimated to the tenants that he will not press for the rent until Christmas if they will pay at once the costs of the legal proceedings taken against them. What an epitome of Irish landlord wisdom! A demand is made which it is now admitted it was unwise to make, and the tenants who cannot pay rent are asked to pay law costs for the landlord's blunder. But it is an eloquent hint that landlords of the less needy type have come to see that any attempt to carry things with too high a hand in Ireland this winter might prove even more embarrassing for the landlords' cause than for Mr. Morley. It is possible, therefore, that the very difficulties and the appalling dangers, both to landlords and tenants, of the situation in Ireland this winter may be the best allies of a Government whose business is peace.

Then, one of the advantages of the Evicted Tenants' Commission is that it to a great extent removes the agrarian conflict from the scenes of battering-ram operations and moonlight outrages to the judicial atmosphere of a High Court of Appeal. The tenantry's feelings upon the subject may be summed up thus: If the landlords are wise enough to show a conciliatory spirit, well and good; if they shirk investigation, they are broken; if they challenge it, they will be broken all the worse. The landlords, for their part, are in a state of miserable irresolution between the desire to run away from the Commission and the terror of public opinion if they do. They now demand that its sittings shall be secret, and that they shall have liberty to obstruct it at will. They have been more or less shamed out of the attitude of defiant high-and-mightiness taken up for them by the Times in relation to Sir James Mathew's … continue reading »

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