Ireland -- Fiction; Land League (Ireland) -- Fiction; Land tenure -- Fiction; Political fiction
Let us see how many details, how many improbabilities, will have to
be met before the benevolence of the commissioner can be made to
prevail. The reductions made on the rent average something between
twenty and twenty-five per cent. Let us take them at twenty. If a
tenant has to be evicted for a demand of L10, will he be able to live
in comfort if he pay only L8? Shall one tenant live in comfort on a
farm, the rent of which has been reduced him from L100 to L80, and
another, the reduction having been from L20 to L16? In either case,
if a tenant shall do well with two children, how shall he do with six
or eight? A true teetotaller can certainly pay double the rent which
may be extracted from a man who drinks. Shall the normal tenant earn
wages beyond what he gets from the land under his own tillage? Shall
the idle man be made equal to the industrious,--or can this be done,
or should it be done, by any philanthropy? Statesmen sitting together
in a cabinet may resolve that they will set the world right by
eloquence and benevolence combined; but the practices to which the
world have been brought by long experience will avail more than
eloquence and benevolence. Statesmen may decree that land shall be
let at a certain rate, and the decree will prevail for a time. It
may prevail long enough to put out of gear the present affairs of
the Irish world with which these statesmen will have tampered. But
the long experience will come back, and bargains will again be
made between man and man, though the intervening injuries will be
heartbreaking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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