ar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers
who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about "the lazy Irish"? And
if they were lazy--which I entirely deny--who made them so? Had they
no justification for their "laziness"? Why should they wear their
lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should live
in riotousness and debauchery in the hells of London or the Continent?

"One could count on one's fingers," said the Cowper Commission in
1887, "the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been
made by the landlord." The Irish landlord class never did a thing for
Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood--to rob and depopulate
and destroy, to make exaction after exaction upon the industry of her
peasants, until their wrongs cried aloud for redress, if not for
vengeance. In England it was estimated in 1897 that the landlord class
had spent in investments in landlord property a sum estimated at
L700,000,000. These can justly claim some right in the land. In
Ireland the landlord was simply the owner of "the raw earth"--the bare
proprietor of the soil, a dead weight upon the industry and honest
toil of the tenant, receiving a rent upon the values that the labour
and the energy of generations of members of a particular family had
created. The Irish landlord and his horde of hangers-on--his agents,
his bailiffs, his process-servers, his bog-rangers, his
rent-warners--created a system built upon corruption, maintained in
tyranny, and enforced with all the ruthless severities of foreign laws
enacted solely for the benefit of England's garrison. "I can imagine
no fault," said Mr Arthur Balfour, speaking as Prime Minister in the
House of Commons, 4th May 1903, "attaching to any land system which
does not attach to the Irish system." Evictions in Ireland came to be
known as "sentences of death," so cruel and numerous were they until
the popular agitation was strong enough to check them.

Even the Gladstonian legislation of 1881, though it admittedly did
something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord
and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as "the three
F.'s "--viz. Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale--yet left the
question in a wholly unsettled state. The fixing of fair rents, no
doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants'
point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and
unsatisfactory system. It was incentive