About Ireland by E. Lynn Linton
page 16 of 66 (24%)
page 16 of 66 (24%)
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would make his own living and the landlord's rent out of a bit of land
which is lying idle and going to waste. All through the disturbed districts we come upon facts like this--upon the ruin and humiliation of kindly and delicately-nurtured ladies, of which the English public knows nothing; and while it hysterically pities the poor down-trodden peasant and goes in for Home Rule as the panacea, the wife of a tenant owing five years' rent and refusing to pay one, dresses in costly attire--and the lady proprietor knows penury and hunger; not to speak of the agonies of personal terror endured for months at a stretch. Let us, who live in a well-ordered country, realize for a moment the mental condition of those who dwell in the shadow of assassination--women to whom every unusual noise is as the sentence of death, and whose days are days of trembling, and their nights of anguish for the fear of death that encompasses them. Is this according to the law of elemental justice? Are our sympathies to be confined wholly to one class, and are the sorrows and the wrongs done to another not to count? Surely it is time for some of the sentimental fog in which so many of us have been living to be dispelled in favour of the light of truth! Here is an instructive little bit on which we would do well to ponder:-- A certain authority gives the following anecdote:--He says that he "has just had a long conversation with one of the leading Galway merchants. 'A farmer of this county,' said he, 'told me yesterday that he had let his meadowing at £8 an acre. I bought all his barley, and he confessed that on this crop too he had made £8 an acre. Now the judicial rent of this man's holding is 10s. the acre. He said, "I have |
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