s. a year. Certainly it was not
worth L8, 15s. a year if the tenant under the operation of the existing
or the impending laws of Great Britain in Ireland could get, or hope to
get it for the half of that rent, or for no rent at all.

But this being thus, on what grounds are the rest of mankind invited to
regard this excellent man as a "victim" worthy of sympathy and of
material aid? How had he come to be in arrears of a year in August 1886?
The proceedings at Kilmainham tell us this.

In November 1885 he had demanded, with other tenants of Mrs. Lewis, a
reduction of 50 per cent. This would have given him his holding at a
rental of L4, 7s. 6d. Mrs. Lewis refused the concession, and a month
afterwards an attempt was made to blow up her son's house with dynamite.
Between that time and August 1886, all the efforts of her son, who was
also her agent, to collect her dues by seizing beasts, were defeated by
the driving away of the cattle, so that no remedy but an eviction was
left to her. I take it for granted that Mrs. Lewis had a family to
maintain, and debts of one sort and another to pay, as well as Mr.
Egan--but I observe this material difference between her position and
his during the whole of this period of "strained relations" between
herself and her tenant, that whereas she lay completely out of the
enjoyment of the rent due her, being the interest on her capital,
represented in her title to the land, Mr. Egan remained in the complete
enjoyment and use of the land. Clearly the tenant was in a better
position than the landlord, and as we are dealing not with the history
of Ireland in the past, but with the condition of Ireland at present, it
appears to me to be quite beside the purpose to ask my sympathies for
Mr. Egan on the ground that a century or half a century ago the
ancestors of Mr. Egan may have been at the mercy of the ancestors of
Mrs. Lewis. However that may have been, Mr. Egan seems to me now to have
had legally much the advantage of Mrs. Lewis. Not only this. Both
legally and materially Mr. Egan, the tenant-farmer at Woodford, seems to
me to have had much the advantage of thousands of his countrymen living
and earning their livelihood by their daily labour in such a typical
American commonwealth, for example, as Massachusetts. I have here with
me the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of
Massachusetts. From this I learn that in 1876 the average yearly wages
earned by workmen in Massachusett