18 



sin."), iioo, and Ibr the market garden $300,000, and it is 

 our own. Our 4500 horses, 1500 oxen, 12,000 cows and 

 6,000 Bwine show the best breeding. Our farming is the 

 work of intelligent men. It is a wise saying, "That state 

 is perfectly seeure whose soil is owned by its well-mean iug 

 citizens." 



Notice the contrast, — Ireland ! that green isle of the sea, 

 with a soil deep, rich, easily worked, but owned by the 

 aristocrats, — her poor peasantry compelled to give rent so 

 great that they cannot taste the luxury they create. The}' 

 raise fat cattle and touch them not, raise grain and eat it 

 not. They live in hovels, squalid and wretched, the floor 

 of earth and the roof of thatch, their table spread with 

 potatoes and herbs, their lives bound, aspirations blotted 

 out, their duty to work, their lot to suffer and die. What 

 wonder that their industry is rude, their progress back- 

 ward, and their very religion hatred of the upper classes, 

 and their prayer and longing and purpose to be free from 

 social oppression. 



The conservative says, "Change is impossible ;" "The 

 land owner is lord, his right unimpeachable, his preroga- 

 tive greater than all the rights of humanity ;" "To change 

 will be revolution;" "The law must stand though man 

 may die." But the progressive statesman takes sides with 

 humanity. He sees in the thatched cottage of the Irish 

 tenant a man, with sacred rights more enduring than the 

 tenure of laws ; sees in the mind and heart, made dormant 

 by the long fruitless toil, the sign of mighty forces which 

 shall come forth to energize the nation and exalt the com- 

 monwealth and add lustre to the history of the world, when 



