two brothers to a piece of land which was about to become vacant and
perhaps considering their respective offers, when one sent him a
ten-pound note. He cut it in two and returned one-half, with an
intimation that on receiving a receipt he would forward the other." I
never met anyone in Ireland who would not readily admit that high
rents were mainly due to the action of the tenants themselves, who,
being actuated by what is called land-hunger, which is nothing more in
the majority of cases than the necessity to live, had in their
desperation bid more than the land was worth. Mr. Thomas Manley, of
Trim, County Meath, said:--"The tenant farmer has cried himself up,
and the Nationalists have cried him up as the finest, most
industrious, 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 competition among neighbours and even relations. Ask any
living Irish farmer if I am right, and he will say, Yes, ten times
yes." As an Irish farmer and the son of an Irish farmer, living for
sixty years on Irish farms, and from his occupation as a horse-dealer,
claiming to have an intimate acquaintance with the whole of Ireland,
and with almost every farmer who can breed and rear a horse, Mr.
Manley is worth a hearing. Continuing, in the presence of several
intelligent Irishmen, some of them Home Rulers, but all agreeing with
the speaker, Mr. Manley said:--"Rents have been forced up by people
going behind each other's backs and offering more and more, in their
eagerness to acquire the holding outbidding each other. Landlords are
human; agents, if possible, still more human. They handed over the
land to the highest bidder. What more natural? The farmers offered
more than the land could pay. But why curse the landlords for what was
their own deliberate act?" Mr. Manley's knowledge of England enabled
him to say that "the Irish farmer is much better off than the English,
Scotch, or Welsh farmer, not only in the matter of law, but also in
the matter of soil." The legal point is demonstrable. Let us see how
the Irish tenant stands. The disinclination of the Irish for factory
work, as exemplified in the closing of the Galway jute factory,
because of irregularity of attendance, and the refusal of the starving
peasantry of congested Donegal and Connemara to accept regular
employment in the thread fac