Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 66, No. 410, December 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
"THE LAND QUESTION.--A letter from Kilrush, dated the 27th
inst., and published in the _Clare Journal_, says:--'So eager
are the country farmers to make sale of their grain, that
every day is a market. Two causes seem to influence them;
first, their present and urgent necessities press upon them,
and, secondly, an opinion prevails, which appears not to be
confined to the west, that it is more secure to have the money
in their pockets than to leave the crop to become a prey to
agent or poor-rate collector; and also that, in the event of
no reduction being made in the annual rent, they may have no
difficulty in walking off. Such are the feelings operating on
the minds of the majority of the farmers in this locality. It
is now too plain and obvious, that should a reduction in the
rents take place here, it will come two years too late, as the
greater number of the farmers (formerly comfortable) have not
as much as would support their families for half the coming
year. This is a sad but true state of things, in a district
where, some few years since, the rents were paid, perhaps,
more regularly than in any other part of the south of Ireland.
A few have left their holdings, after selling every article,
leaving the naked walls of a house to the landlord, and gone
to a neighbouring townland, where the quality and cheapness
of the land presented a greater encouragement; but such cases
of flying tenants have become so common of late, that every
paper teems with similar statements. _If we are to have the
land cultivated here, the rents must not only be reduced to
half the former price_, but the tenant must be assisted to
set the crop, and encouraged to introduce a proper method of
cultivation, otherwise the land will be left idle, and _the
majority of the present occupiers will become inmates of the
workhouse_.'"--_Times_, Oct. 31, 1849.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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