Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Social conditions
The fullest publicity should be given to evictions, and every
effort made to enlist public sympathy. That the farms thus
unjustly evicted will be left severally alone, and everyone
who aids the eviction shunned, is scarcely necessary to say.
But the man who tries boycotting for a personal purpose is a
worse enemy than the evicting landlord, and should be expelled
from any branch of the League or combination of tenants. No
landlord should get one penny rent on any part of his estates,
wherever situated, so long as he has one tenant unjustly
evicted. This policy strikes not only at the landlord but the
whole ungodly crew of agents, attorneys, and bum-bailiffs.
Tenants should be the first to show their sympathy with
one another, and prompt publicity should be given to every
eviction, that the tenants of the evictor wherever he holds
property may show their sympathy.
Such a policy indicates a fight which has no half-heartedness
about it, and it is the only fight which will win.
Well may the author of the “Plan of Campaign” wind up his catechism by
the appropriate remark that “such a policy indicates a fight which has no
half-heartedness about it.” Never before was such a tremendous weapon of
social war put in motion. Never before, in the whole course of history,
was such a forcible ultimatum drafted for the consideration of the
adverse party.
Leaving details aside, and the minute instructions on the true mode of
skirmishing with the myrmidons of the law, the idea of using the very
rent claimed by the landlord as a provision for feeding the struggle
against him is in itself perfection—a real masterpiece of strategy. An
artist can only feel the warmest admiration for such a combination of
everything that is most pleasant to the heart of the agrarian warrior
and most deadly to the landlord’s cause. As an orator of the League (Mr.
W. O’Brien) has put it: “We have discovered a weapon against landlordism,
the mere threat and terror of which have already brought down
rack-renters to their knees. We have discovered a weapon which feudal
landlordism can no more resist than a suit of armour of the middle ages
can resist modern artillery.” And the country where such an admirable
paper has been penned by its political leaders is supposed by its foes to
be unable to rule its own affairs! This is unfairness with a vengeance.
Let those meet its provisions, since they are so very clever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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