WHAT IRISH LANDLORDISM HAS DONE FOR IRELAND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVI, Issue 12, 13 July 1888, Page 19

WHAT IRISH LANDLORDISM HAS DONE FOR IRELAND.

This is what Irish landlordism has done for Ireland— it has praoti* oally expatriated the Irish race. But the people thus driven from their native shores have turned down their thumbs and the doom of the baneful system is sealed. For many years these expatriated people sent large sums of money annually to aid their friends to pay rent. They do not send money now for rent. Then we owe it to Irish landlordism that the number of inhabited houses, which was 1,328,839 in 1841, fell to 981,380 in 1881, and again to 914,108 in 1881. In other words, there were 50 per cant, more inhabited houses forty-seven years ago in Irtland than there are today. It has been estimated that the number of houses levelled by the landlords in the twenty years, 1841-61, was 270.000, and not one of them was the landlord's property— but the tenant's. The English people are well aware that this levelling has not ceased, and they an also at last aware that the houses which the landlords level with such nonchalance, not to say such fiendish gles, humble as they are, belong to the evicted not the evictor. In no other country in the world is a landlord permitted to destroy his debtor's property, yet in Ireland, as the landlords know, they hold and exercise that power. The levelling of the people's bouses has been consequent upon eviction, and in the squaring of aocounts this is an item which can hardly be overlooked. The landlords, in presenting their case to Lord Salisbury, did not mention how much of other people's property they had appropriated in rack-rents or by the eviction process ; but it it pretty well known now that evictions up to the establishment of the Land League were highly profitable to a landlord. They were the means by which he got rid of a tenant he had mined, and substitute 1 another who could go on paying the old rent, or even a higher rest, because he got his predecessor's house and buildings for nothing. All this will have to be carefully borne in Mind when we oome to the final settlement. It is calculated that, from 1849 to 1882, 482,000 families were actually evicted. Now, even if we suppose that only 200,000 of these were positively compelled to leave the country, then at the very moderate estimate of £100 each the landlords may be said to have robbed the evicted people of £20,000,000 worth of property,— Contemporary Review.