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Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 699, 8 May 1916, Page 6

There is perhaps a little exaggeration in the picture drawn by the London "Chronicle's" correspondent of the newly-prosperous peasant farmers of Galway being "thrown back to (he old days of crime," because of their participation in the Sinn Fein revolt. The trouble cannot but affect the progress of the reforms so recently instituted, and no doubt many families will be ruined, but we may expect the clemency of the Government to extend to these people after il has brought swift retribution upon the ringleaders. The circumstances of the short-lived revolt in South Africa are hardly parallel to those surrounding the Irish outbreak, but the clemency pursued by the South African Government had results which would justify it in Ireland. In dealing with people who were the dupes of propagandists who did their underhand work from the safe ground of America and Germany, (leniency would not only be wise, but just. The pawns in the game were as much the dupes of I heir emotions, fed with the memories of genuine grievances, il is only within the last quarter of a century that the British Government has begun to remove those grievances and to understand that the problems of Ireland were not in the least like those of England. Ireland is 'almost entirely an agricultural country, and for centuries il has suffered under the curse of absentee landlordism, with the result that tenant farmers could do little more than pay their rents, and were given no incentive either to conserve the soil or to make improvements. The Congested Districts Board was given powers of compulsory purchase to do away with that stale of affairs and to give the small farmers their own holdings. A reminder of the bad old days was given the other day in a cable announcing the death of Lord Clanriearde. This eccentric miser owned large properties in the West of Ireland, which he refused to sell, hot last year the board took his rural properties and paid him something over £'200,000 in compensation. They have since been cut up into small farms, allotted on easy terms of purchase, and the holders enabled to work them by means of the agricultural banks and the Slate stud farms. II is obviously belter for the Stale that these small farmers should be permitted lo develop into prosperous producers than thai a policy of repression should make them confirmed malcontents.