"THE BAD EARL."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 268, 21 June 1878, Page 9

"THE BAD EARL."

(From the Nation?) During the past week numerous accounts of the eccentricities, the tyrannies, and the immoralities of the late Lord Leitrim have reached us from reliable correspondents. Were we to publish them they would fill several columns of our paper ; but some of the facts narrated could hardly be made fit for publication by any delicacy of handling. With reference to one atrocious case, we wrote to our correspondent asking him for the fullest particulars he could supply, and inquiring if they could be verified by the people of the locality. He replied : " The story of— is notorious, as much so, for instance, as if the chapel of the parish was burned down." Why do not those who angrily affect to disbelieve the current allegations regarding the moral character of the deceased man venture to deny their truth ? Why do they not bring forward some testimony to the purity and decency of his mode of life 1 Why do they not get the local clergy of any denomination — Catholic, Protestant, or Presbyterian — to give evidence of it ? Simply because they cannot. We think it very unlikely that accounts of the misdeeds of the deceased earl have not reached the offices of our Tory contemporaries, although they pretend to know nothing of such matters. Passing from that part of the subject, and turning to some of the less heinous doings of the departed Pasha, we may mention the following specimen cases which have been related to us : A tenant was served with notice to quit, and evicted, because his hedges and flax-pits were not cut according to pattern. The tenant sought compensation in the law courts ; there was hard swearing against him ; to settle some disputed points the chairman of quarter sessions went personally and inspected the place, found the tenant's contention was correct, and awarded compensation accordingly. On one occasion the earl saw a quantity of clothes that had been washed laid out on a hedge to dry ■; he sent for the owner and fined him. Seeing some drains cut in the land of a tenant who wished to effect, at his own expense, some improvements in his farm, he called for the tenant, railed furiously at him for daring to do. such work without authority, and ordered him, on pain of eviction, to have the soil turned back into the drains by the following morning. Entering the house of a tenant he found within only one person, a young member of the family, whom he ordered aud compelled to strip naked for his anniseinent. It is said that he afterwards paid some money compensation for this outrage, and to prevent a threatened exposure of it. Scores — nay, hundreds of such stories, evidencing his wayward, despotic, and violent temper, are current on his property. H they are not allowed to sink into oblivion the blame rests with those persons who have been striving to represent him as a model landlord, and, because of his horrible murder, to defame the whole Irish nation.