THE KENTED MAN OK. 53 



depredators, he would have been without the 

 means of redress, his homestead Avoukl have be- 

 come anything but comfortable, so he was much 

 hetter off by being a tenant at will. 



We have now before as a pretty plain sample 

 of what tenant-right means in Ireland. Not many 

 years ago, in America, an idea was started, that if 

 a tenant rented a house and land for a certain 

 number of years, and expended toil and dollars 

 upon them, that house and land was then to be 

 lost to the landlord, and to become the property 

 of the tenant. It is much the same in Ireland; 

 agrarian murderers, abetted by a domineering 

 priesthood, have long since driven . many land- 

 ' owners from their estates, and thus created an 

 absenteeism which has ruined the country ; and 

 now the idea has arisen in the naturally shrewd, 

 but, alas ! priest-muddled heads of the people, that 

 '^ Ireland is for the Irish," which, being translated 

 by those who have nothing to lose but ever}^- 

 thing to gain by savage irru^^tion, means tliat tlic 

 '^ Saxon " is to be dispossessed of his property, 

 which he has inherited or bought, as the Irish 

 Protestant Church has been plundered of hers, and 

 that the farms and the large landed estates should 



