310 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



Landlordism in Ireland. 



In Ireland we have the spectacle of landlords doing 

 what they like with their own for three centuries, backed 

 up by a landlord parliament which made any laws they 

 thought necessary ; and the result has been a country 

 in continual rebellion and a people ever on the verge 

 of starvation. 



This chronic starvation has been imputed to any and 

 every cause but the real one — to over-population, to idle- 

 ness, to potatoes ; the real and all-sufficient cause being 

 that the mass of the population are crowded on small and 

 utterly insufficient holdings of the worst lands at extrava- 

 gantly high rents, which means that everything they 

 raise besides enough potatoes to support life goes as tribute 

 to the landlords.. 



Under such conditions, no population however limited, 

 no industry however great, no agriculture however perfect, 

 no soil however fertile, could save a people from poverty 

 and recurring famines. 



As Mr. De Courcy Atkins well puts it : 



"Less than 2,000 persons own two-thirds of the land in Ireland, 

 and out of its five or six million inhabitants there is no man of those 

 who have tilled it and given it all its present value who owns one 

 sod of its soil. For the land owned by these two thousand 

 persons, many of whom are absentees, five hundred thousand 

 families are competing, as the sole stay between them and starva- 

 tion." {The Case of Ireland Stated. 1880.) 



The Devon Commission, published in 1847, declared 

 authoritatively that in Ireland everything on the land 

 which gives it value — houses, buildings, fences, gates, 

 drains, &c., had been made by the tenants, and were 

 undoubtedly their own property ; yet from that day on- 

 ward for many years our Parliament allowed and even 

 encouraged the Irish landlords to rob the tenants of this 

 property by forms of law, and thousands and tens of 

 thousands of Irish tenants were robbed accordingly ! 

 Yet more. In the four years succeeding the great famine, 

 there were over two hundred thousand evictions ; whole 

 town-lands were depopulated, and their human inhabitants 

 driven off to make room for cattle and sheep — houses^ 



