THE LAND WAR IN IRELAND.

Kumara Times, Issue 1027, 16 January 1880, Page 4

THE LAND WAR IN IRELAND.

The Morning Post remarks:—<" Mr Parnell and his fellow agitators seem to be _ making only to much way in their unjusifiable attempt to set the masses of the people against their landlords. It is melancholy to see the Irish peasantry becoming the dupes of such a senseless and criminal agitation. We do not know what steps the Government purpose to take in this emergency. There is one thing, however, which it certainly will not do. It will not and cannot allow these doctrines of confiscation and murder to be put into practice with impunity. Irish agitators must be taught that, however clement the law may shows itself when revolutioary theories are broached, any attempt to but Buch theories in force will be resisted by the whole power of the law. If the tenants consider their rents too high they must settle with their landlords the best way they can. It can never be tolerated that a whole class of Her Majesty subjects should be compelled by murderous outrage and violence to hand over half their property to the tillers of the soil. Certainly something must be done if the South and West of Ireland are not to be handed over to absolute chaos.

The Daily Telegraph (Oct. 14) observes that when Mr Parnell advises that a tenant should offer his landlord what he chooses to consider " a fair rent," and if he does not obtain a receipt in full, should decline to pay anything, and then cling to his homestead, he as much counsels resistance as a man in the street who says to an arrested rioter, "Refuse to go." A tenant who does not pay, and passively resists eviotion, is placed in open defiance of the law. Mr Parnell knows that in this matter he goes beyond the pale of all sympathy from thin sing men. He simply gives counsel that cannot be obeyed excepting at the expense oi a riot on every farm. He means to force the landlords to call in on every occasion the Sheriff and the police, and perhaps Her Majesty's troops. He probably thinks that the difficulty of detaching sufficient armed force to every locality will preclude the acceptance of this challenge by the Government j but here he ia mistaken. It would not be necessary to accompany every evicting party with a body of soldiers or constabulary ; for the first unsuccessful attempt at tenant resistance would teach all the farmers that they could not safely defy the law, and rents would be collected or defaulters expelled as now by the mere exhibtion of a writ. Irish tenants are not quite so mad as to risk their lives or limbs to execute the policy of Mr Parnell. If, however, we have no great fears that this new agrarian panacea will lead to organised and widespread resistance, it is quite possible that it may develop isolated violence in new forms. In other ways its results have been already injurious. The very persons who have most at heart the creation of peasant proprietary in Ireland will be most dismayed by the declarations of Mr Parnell.

The World aaya:—Mr Parnell is as morally responsible for the attempt made on the life of Lord Sligo's steward as if he had pulled the trigger ; and it is increditable that, if Mr Parnell had not already received a substanial illustration of his influence with the Imperial Government at Westminister, he would have commenced the nefarious campaign which will end by plunging whole districts of Ireland in disorder, and in demoralising large masses of the Irish people. This is the worst and wickedest form of demagogy; and that it Bhould now be possible in Ireland is due, in the first instance, to the mistaken surrenders of Her Majesty's Ministers last session. The assassination season is beginning, and October is likely to bring with lit quite as much sport, in the way of landlord shooting, as it has of pheasant shooting in some English neighborhoods. The Government have received fair warning from Mr Parnell of what he intends, and from the peasantry whom Mr Parnell addresses, of the fruits which his agitation is certain to yield. If, after this, they postpone for a Bingle day precautionary action of the.most peremptory kind, Her Majesty's Ministers as well as Mr Parnell himself, must be held responsible for every drop of blood that may be shed.

The New York Times : -Nothing could be more characteristic of the tworaceß than the difference in the agitation produced by agricultaral depression and distress in England and Ireland. In both countries there have been three successive bad seasons, with the inevitable coDseqaence of unprofitable crops. The burden on the tenant farmers, occasioned by land laws, and heavy charges of one kind and another, which is severe enough at all times, has become unendurable, and there is altogether justifiable demand for relief. In England, the farnrera call for a reduction of rent, and arsue the reasonableness and necessity for the demand. They agitate for a reform in the antiquated lawß that fetter them to a hard condition, and, when they have no other hope, they emigrate. In any case, they look for relief to lawful means. In Ireland like causes produces very different effects. .... The landlords and the tenants are sharing the hard times together, but the former would doubtless, in most cases, be ready to make any reasonable concession in the matter of rent. But it can hardly make them feel generous to have the demand made at monster meetings, attended largely by bawling roughs of the towns, who never cultivated a foot of soil in their lives. Some of them may not feel altogether to blame for owning land, or unmitigated miscreants for seeking to get Borne revenue from it. They

might be disposed to reduce rents where it was shown to be a necessity for the tenants, and to allow the tenants a fair chanoe for a living, but they can hardly like to be told that they have no right to owu their, farms, and to be threatened with violent dispossession. If they are not ready to give up all voice as to the terms aud conditions on which their own property shall be rented, it is not clear that they are, therefore, heartless villians.

The Philadelphia Press says Ireland true to her traditional policy, appears to be on the verge of an agrarian outbreak. It is not the mere discontent of the daylaborers and semi-pauper peasantry, with mud cabins and little patches of potato-ground,-but of a higher class of the Irish tenant-farmers, who, for the moment, from the failure of the crops, and other causes, are unable to pay their rent, and are by no means willing to be ejected from their homesteads. There may be a wholesale eviction of these people, but that would but provoke a series of agrarian murders, to prevent and [punish which will require that a large part of the country be placed under military occupation. The landlord's cruel power of turning tenants and their families out of doors, and even of pulling down their houses, so as to render re-occupation impossible, must be annulled, or the anti-rent agitation will almost certainly ripen into something very like civil war. The Scottish American says several additional meetings have been held in Ireland, attended by large bodies of tenant-farmers and others, to demand a reduction of the rents, and a revision of the land laws. It is evident that the agitation is assuming very formidable proportions, and in the opinion of the Pall Mall Gezette, trouble is brewing in the country, in consequence of the anti-rent and Nationtlist agitations, firm hand, more than a conciliatory policy, may be needed by the Government for the repression of the evil. The Irish World says :—"All acts of eviction from the soil are act of war. Indead, the very word eviction (from evincere) means to vanquish, to overcome conquest. All this is warfare. It is well that the true definition of this doleful world should be made known. Made known to be conquered, in order that, realising the wretched position in which the ' fortune of war has placed them, some of them—the law-and-order oneß among them—may go quietly out of their homesteads and die peaceably by the roadside ; leaving the victor to "do as he likes with his own." made known to the conquerors, too, in order that they may calculate the consequences which may follow from the acts of Borne other men, who will not surrender unconditionally to the exterminating foe, but will repay robber law with the " wild justice of revenge." We say Ireland to day is in state of war. how long shall this war go on ? It will go on until landlordism is evicted from the island, and the Irish people—every man ofjthem, no matter what his creed or race, Saxon, Dane, or Milesian—shall have received his share in the inheritance.