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Lyttelton Times, Volume LVII, Issue 6506, 3 January 1882, Page 4

Some time since a telegram appeared in oar columns of a somewhat incomprehensible nature. It announced that the Lord Mayor of Loudon invited subscriptions in aid of the defence of < property in Ireland. Who were to subscribe, and for what manner of defence, was left to the imagination. Whether the landlords were to be provided with body-guards, or their enemies dogged by a secret service, we were not told. All this, however, is now explained. The subscriptions, it seems, were to be in aid of a society known as “The Property Defence Association,” which is neither more nor less than a sort of counter land league. The latter was organised to combine tenants against landlords; the former has been set on foot for the purpose of helping landlords to fight their recalcitrant tenants. The modus operandi is this:— When a tenant, in obedience to the League, refuses to pay his rent, his cattle and other possessions are, after the usual formalities of shooting bailiffs, beating process-servers, et hoc genus omne, have been gone through, put up for sale. To the auction come crowds of excited sympathisers, vowing vengeance on the head of any creature who shall be so mean-spirited as to make a bid. Representatives of the Land League seize the opportunity to deliver furious harangues, damnatory of the Saxon in general and Mr Gladstone in particular Amid groans and hooting the sheriff proceeds to open the sale. Now is the time for the agent of the

Property Defence Association. Strongly guarded by police, but yet with some risk of a chance paving-stone, this gentleman makes his bid. One of two things then follows. Either the goods are knocked down to him at an absurdly low figure, in which case they are taken away and resold by tb© Society elsewhore; or they are rnn up by tho friends of the tenant to their full value, in whioh oaso tho tenant’s landlord is of oourso reimbursed to the full extent of his unpaid rent and costs. Difiioulties have, of course, to bo overcome. The goods have often to bo sent great distances, sometimes oat of the country altogether, before a market can bo obtained. But tho Society’s operations are by no means confined to tho attending of distress sales, It has in some hundreds of cases bought the tenant right of farms whose holders have gone to the furthest lengths m refusing to pay their rents. It sends labourers to work for boycotted landlords, and reaping* machines to gather in the crops on deserted farms. In any and every way in whioh the League can be powerful, the Society professes its readiness to check it.

Now, that all this should be legal and even laudable is one thing; that Englishmen and the Queen’s subjects in general should he asked to contribute towards its support is another. Private organization to assist the law is quite as legitimate, when the question is one of defending property, as when it is one of personal safety, or freedom of conscience. Seeing that it has been the constant boast of Mr Parnell and his lieutenants that the ordinary laws of Ireland were powerless before the system they had invented, we may be excused some little satisfaction at seeing Mr Parnell thus hoist with his own petard. Organizations like that now under discussion are no new thing. The Vigilance Committees of the American West were based On the same principle, with the difference that in their case, life, even more than property, was at stake. If the Irish Defence Association has any share in convincing Ireland’s peasantry of the nselessness as well as illegality of the extremes to which they are now being hounded on, then it will have done good work. But its work is none of our business; colonials, at any rate, are not called upon to subscribe to it. The reason is exactly the same as that given by us some time ago, when the propriety of starting a branch Land League in the Colony was mooted. The calamities and quarrels of Ireland are two different things. The former we may and ought to succour, on the broadest ground of humanity. With the latter we have no call to interfere, and we should not do so. It is perfectly right and proper for the landlords of Ireland to help themselves: but for them, or the Lord Mayor for them, to ask help from outsiders, is by [no means equally reasonable.