THE SENTENCES OF DEATH.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 38, 9 January 1885, Page 25

THE SENTENCES OF DEATH.

(Dublin Freeman, November 15.)

There were 1,215 families, embracing 6,139 persons of both sexes and all ages, evicted in Ireland during the months of July, August, and September. Of these only 47 families, or about one twentysixth of the whole, were re-admitted as tenants ; and while a much larger number were put in as caretakers— that is, as persons who can be turned out at a moment's notice, and whose numbers, when they are turned out, will not come into the eviction statistics — not fewer than 3,114 poor people were left at the ditch to die or crawl to the workhouse, which they regard, not without cause, as both a moral and a physical death, and, besides a degradation to their name and their kith and kin, wherever they be. No word can be too strong to characterise and to condemn those evictions. The cruelty of the landlord class is rivalled only by their blindness. A memorial signed by thirty tenants on the estate of the Earl of Egmont, in Cork, complains in the strongest terms of the conduct of the SubCommission presided over by Mr. M'Devitt, and pointing out that though that Bub- Commission has ceased its operations amongst them, its " most obnoxious member," Mr.jWalpole, is retained on the present Sub-Commission. They allege that Mr. Walpole fixed renti on lands on which he never set foot, and they allude to the fact that their landlord's valuer is this Mr. Walpole's cousin, and that the landlord's agent is this Mr. Walpole's fellow-countryman and neighbour and intimate, and that they are aggrieved by his decisions, and can feel no confidence in him. We cannot say that the Land Commissioners' reply to this document is a satisfactory one. It simply expresses the Commission's good opinion of Mr. Walpole and their reliance on the Sub- Commission of which he is one, although at the close of their letter they admit the necessity for reminding Mr. Walpole and fellows of the importance attaching to the provisions of the Land Act regarding labourers' cottage?, which the tenants point out as having been wholly ignored by the present Sub-Commissioners in their district. Mr. O'Brien called attention to the matter last week in the House of Commons. We would deeply regret that the peace of the country should be disturbed during the winter either by landlord rapacity or by Sub- Commissioners' stupidity. But our eyes cannot close to the fact tbat at the present moment in Skye there is a regular revolt and uprising of the tenantry. Six hundred stalwart crofters at Uig and Portree have defied the evicters and cowed the police. The police themselves say that a great blunder has been made by the authorities. Sir William Harcourt spoke loudly in the House of Commons of the necessity of maintaining the law, but the sense of the representatives of the people is that the law as it stands cannot and ought not be enforced. The crofters in Boss-shire have passed a resolution declaring that they insist on their ancestral rights, and will pay only the original value of the land, and that if no immediate concessions are granted they will unite with other associations "in bringing their views to an execution." It will be seen from this that the neighbours- house is on fire, and that the flames may spread to Ireland if fanned by evictions at the hands of the landlords and the imposition of rents, which are as much rackrents when imposed by landlords' friends as Sub- Commissioners, and called "judicial," as they were when imposed by landlords ont of court, and, called by the Minister " impossible." Mr. Justin M'Carthy called attention in the House of Commons to the evictions already reported by us in the county for which he sits as member. If the Irish tenants' hands be upon the ploughshare which shall yet uproot landlordism in this country, they will not turn back till the work is done thoroughly, completely, and radically. Outrages in the country, as will be seen by the Parliamentary return accompanying that of evictions, are reduced to a minimum both as far as regards number and seriousness. It is the duty of the Government to fee that landlord outrages on the the people be also put an end to, and that neither legal nor illegal provocation shall be given to a large and struggling class at present in desperate straits from the deceptive harvest and the overwhelming odds of foreign competition,