THE ARREARS OF INJUSTICE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVI, Issue 26, 19 October 1888, Page 7

THE ARREARS OF INJUSTICE.

(The Nation, August 25.") Parliament has no sooner adjouraed, than the effects of its flagrant neglect of Ireland during the session that has just ended again become visible in results of disorder and brutal repression. At the opening of the session the Irish members pressed on the attention of the House of Commons the question of the arrears that accrued on the rental which the Commission issued in 1886, and the Judges, acting under powers given them by the Act of 1887, pronounced to be inequitab'e, crushing, and unpayable. The arrears are the subject of all the contentions and quarrels on all the estates where the evictor and the bailiffs are at work. Had they baeu abolished, or even materially reduced, the Plan of Campaign would have been suppressed, and boycotting would have disappeared by this time ; for the Plan of Campaign and boycotting are merely the rude weapons wherewith the defenceless tenants make good the defence denied them by the law. But the Parliament refused to listen to the appeal. They wasted what are now bewailed as priceless hours in the attempt to provide a requital for the unfortunate Colonel KingHarman's tergiversation ; and the arrears- burdened tenants are left face to face with another winter of raidings, repulses, and penal imprisonments by the Parliament that, through cheer, lazy ignorance, allowed these unjust burdens to accrue. I The consequences are already upon us. The maddened peasants of Clare have given expression in deeds that haw rung throughout the land to the bitter sense of wrong which this accumulation of inj astice and cruel neglect has producart among them. And on last Thursday, at Coolroe, in the county Wexford, a scene wa9 enacted which, but for the peaceful intervention of the veteran priest, Canon D *yle, of Ramsgrange, would probably bare culminated in a tragedy as bloody as that of Ballycohey. Everything points to the conclusion that if these impossible arrears are to be enforced at the point of the bayonet the winter of 1888-9 will be one of the most disturbed and one of the most deplorable, of our recent history. Th« tenants who are being pursued are exasperated by the conscienceless persistence in the levying of a rent the unfairness and injustice of which are registered in the statute-book. The judges of- the land iiave declared its unfairness ; tte whole of Ireland, not eveu excludiDg Mr. Balfour's adviser*, knows the impossibility of paying it ; and the tenants, with even the Removable Magistrates, who are now superseding the fimergencymen in the actual work of extermination, declaring that the rents are ex jrbitant, are not likley to surrender their homes with•ut a snuggle. Wexford— peaceful, crimeless, stainless Wexford— has proved that just in proportion to the orderliness and industry of the people attacked will be the bitterness of the resistance. When such men are moved we kaow from history what is likely to be the result. It is a cursed fatuity that is driving the Executive and the landlord to this felon's work. What is the use of it ? Recover the rents they cannot ; for the rents are not. there. He-let the evicted lands they cannot ; for no man will take an evicted farm. Mr. Balfour, wiih all his brag, has not yet been able to discover a man ready to take and work an evicted farm on any other terms tht»n tnoeeof payment by the landlord, instead of to the landlord. The tenants are using the farms from which they were driven with so much pomp and brutality on the Vandeleur estates a fortnight ago. The evicted tenants of Cooln c are even now back in their homesteads. The expensive display of military and police, and the organised ruffianiim of their treatment of the people have done nothing but impress the tenants with the consciousness of what a rabid thing laudlordism jet is in its tooth'essand withered decay, and in what a villanons woik Mr. Balfjur is engaged in trying to restore its vigoar and lost powers. The peace of the country is to be confounded, the homes of the peasants battered and broken, the peasants themselves harassed and imprisoned, simply because the Parliament of Westminster can do nothing for Ireland but coerce it ; and because the statesmanship of Mr. Ba.four can rise no higher than tte brutality that killed John Mandeville because he helped to save the Mitchelstown tenantry, and that continues to keep the same alternative of cowardly silenoe or fatal suffering before every man in Ireland who has a heart to feel for his fellows.