My Visitors 147 



Some of them were normally civil. The whole 

 of my evidence has been in official print now for 

 years, and nobody has ever ventured to question 

 a word of it. The Commission naturally 

 succeeded in suppressing or discrediting the most 

 valuable information which they were chartered 

 to establish, and the Congested Districts Board 

 fell deeper into the mud from which Parliament 

 had attempted to clean it. The Anglo-alien 

 conspiracy has ever since been persecuting those 

 who moved for the commission and occasioned 

 the exposure. 



Part of my purpose was to show that a living 

 could be made by land, and how. A fairly 

 obvious quest, one might think, among a people 

 who had no other means to live ; but another 

 Land Act was then in preparation, and, to accom- 

 modate its intentions, the Commission was 

 expected to prove that the people could not 

 possibly live by the land, in which case, rent was 

 impossible, and the landlord a monster fat on 

 misery, to be deprived of his estate for as nearly 

 nothing as could be. In short, we had Royal 

 Charter for a scheme to confiscate one class for the 

 accommodation of industrial incapacity in another. 

 My own idea implied that if a living could be 

 made rent could be paid, and that the selling 

 landlord was entitled to his capitalised value. As 

 an Irishman, I have always been at the serious 

 disadvantage of disliking robbery in any form, 

 even by Royal Charter ; but the question of 

 landlord and tenant was no direct affair of mine, 



