xvii LAND NATIONALIZATION WHY ? AND HOW ? 311 



schools, churches, everything being destroyed. The 

 results of this are still to be seen over a large part of 

 Ireland, where the traveller seems to be passing through 

 a land bereft of human inhabitants, but marked by 

 abundant ruins. The Daily News special commissioner, 

 writing from Mayo, in October, 1880, said : 



4 ' Tradesmen, farmers, and all the less wealthy part of the 

 community still speak sorely of the evictions of thirty or forty years 

 ago, and point out the grave-yards which alone mark the sites of 

 thickly populated hamlets abolished by the crowbar." 



The lands thus cleared were let in blocks of several 

 square miles each to English or Scotch farmers for grazing 

 farms, in order, as he tells us, that landlords " might get 

 their rents more easily and more securely," even though 

 they were sometimes less than those paid by the former 

 inhabitants. And what became of these inhabitants? 

 Let the Devon Commission, appointed by Parliament, and 

 consisting mostly of landlords, answer the question : 

 " It would be impossible for language to convey an idea of 

 the state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have 

 been reduced, and of the disease, misery, and even vice, 

 which they propagated in the towns wherein they have 

 settled ; so that riot only they who have been ejected have 

 been rendered miserable, but they have carried with them 

 and propagated that misery. They have increased the 

 stock of labour, they have rendered the habitations of 

 those who received them more crowded, they have given 

 occasion to the dissemination of disease, they have been 

 obliged to resort to theft and all manner of vice and 

 iniquity to procure subsistence ; but what is perhaps the 

 most painful of all, a vast number of them have perished 

 of want." l Now, consider these horrible results produced 

 in four years to a million of people ; consider further, 

 that the same kind of eviction, with its consequent misery 

 and vice, has been going on in Ireland in varying degrees 

 down to our own times, and that all this untold wretched- 

 ness, this cruel, heart-rending wrong, this vice, and crime, 

 and pauperism, this disease and death, have been caused 

 not in a great war between nations struggling for 

 1 Parl. Rep. 1845, vol. xix., p. 19. 



