Mr. Abraham P. Keeley said: "There is much fault found with the landlords, but they are by no means so much to blame as is supposed. Put the saddle on the right horse. And the right horse is the steam horse. The rapid transit of grain and general farm produce has lowered the value of land more rapidly than the landlords could lower the rent. Every year the prairie lands of America are further opened up by railways; India and Egypt and Australia are now in the swim, and Ireland, as a purely agricultural country, must suffer. A curious illustration of the purely rural condition of the country was mentioned the other day. Nearly all the great towns drink the water of the rivers upon which they stand. Cork drinks the Lee; Limerick drinks the Shannon; you can catch trout from the busiest quay in Limerick. Now, the towns of England don't drink their own rivers. You don't drink the Rea at Birmingham, I think?" I was obliged to admit that the pellucid waters of the crystal Rea were not the favourite table beverage of the citizens of Brum, but submitted that Mr. Joseph Malins, the Grand Worthy Chief Templar, and his great and influential following might possibly use this innocent means of dissipation. Mr. Thomas Manley continued: "The tenant farmer has cried himself up, and the Nationalists have cried him up as the finest, most industrious, most honest, most frugal, most self-sacrificing fellow in the world. But he isn't. Not a bit of it. The landlords and their agents have over and over again been shot for rack-renting when the rents had been forced up by secret competitions among neighbours and even relations. "Ask any living Irish farmer if I am right, and he will say, Yes, ten times yes. "The Irishman has a land-hunger such as is unknown over the water. And why? Because the land is his sole means of living. We have no enterprise, no manufactures to speak of. The Celtic nature is to hoard. The Englishman invests what the Irishman would bury in his back garden, or hang up the chimney in an old stocking. So we have no big works all over the country to employ the people. And as we are very prolific, the only remedy is emigration. Down at Queenstown the other day I saw 250 Irish emigrants leaving the country. A Nationalist friend said, 'If they'd only wait a bit till we get Home Rule, they needn't go, the crathurs.' What's to hinder it? How will they be better off? Will the land sustain more with Home Rule than without it? And when capital is driven away, as it must and will be the moment we pass the bill, instead of more factories we'll have less, and England and Scotland will be over-run with thousands of starving Irish folks whose means of living is taken away.