IRISH LANDLORDISM.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2443, 17 January 1881, Page 4

IRISH LANDLORDISM.

Mr James Eedpath, a distinguished American journalist, and special commissioner to Ireland for the “ New York Tribune,” delivered an eloquent address at Clonbur, County Galway, on the 26th September last. After condemning violence, and pointing out to the thousands who were assembled on that occasion that they must rely on moral suasion and public opinion for redress, Mr Eedpatb referred to the late Lord Leitrim as follows : —I am talking now, am I not. to hundreds of men and women who knew Lord Leitrim, and were his tenants? (Shouts of “Yes’’from the audience.) Lid Lord Leitrim not bear the reputation of being one of the vilest lepers in social life? (Shouts of “Aes.”) Don’t his tenants say that he flung a score, at least, of young girls into the brothels of Liverpool and New York! (“Yes.’’) Is it not believed by everyone that he was killed on account of his personal offences ? (“Yes.”) Yes ; these facts are as well known in Galway and Donegal as the similar offences of Nero and of Henry the Eighth. Yet Eroude dares to charge the Irish political leaders with being “ patorns of assassination,” because this leprous Lord Leitrim was slain. The speaker then went on to point out that the cry raised about religious differences was a sham, as'the present agitation was in the interests, of Protes tants ns well at Catholics. It was a struggle, not against the English people, but against the feudal leeches who were fattening on the industrious yeomanry of the three kingdoms. Referring to the landlords, he continued You all know men of Galway, with how remorseless a thoroughness the great landlords of the West of Ireland have enforced their heathen creed. Thousands of schools, and churches, and villages in the West of Ireland ; tens of thousands of the cabins of the toilers of the soil and of the sea; and hundreds of thousands of labourers, and mechanics, and artizans, and teachers, and scholars, and priests—by individuals, and by districts have been swept away, as if a pestilence had passed over them, throughout all this Land'of Sighs, by these hereditary “ Huns and Vandals,” who use not the flaming sword of a “ Scourge of God,’ but the civil decree of the process server — Huns who hide their cowardly heads in foreign gambling hells. Vandals who hire a native constabulary to destroy the homes of the people of Ireland. (Loud Cheers.) The third article of the landlord’s creed is that the Irish family has no rights that the Irish gamekeeper is bound to respect; that whenever the little holding of the farmers, by his own toil, or by the toil of his forefathers, reclaimed from barrenness, is necessary for the welfare of his hares and rabbits and grouse, the fathers, and mothers, and little ones must be driven out that the ground game and wild fowl may fatten. (Applause.) You little know, men of Galway, that the tourist travelling from the sea in any direction in this country*, must pass through a wild and deserted country —desolated not by conquerors in the interest of their race, but by landlords in the interest of their rabbits. Americans regard their Government as an organisation for the protection of the rights of men. The Irish landlords regard the British Government as an institution, not for the protection of human rights,but for the more perfect conv«rsation of feudal jrerogatives— The Irish landlords have made a tool of the British Government and a tool of the British people for generations. When I go back to America I shali say, and I shall prove by examples—giving names and dates, and figures and estates —that there is no parallel to the oppression that the Irish peasantry endure in all Europe to-day, excepting in the Christian provinces of Turkey, where the taxes are farmed out to Mahommedans. (Loud cheers.). The landlords have escaped exposure before Christendom, because by their law of libel they can ruin any editor who tells of their cruelties. (Applause.) What would England have said if three millions of Christians had been expelled from Turkey for no offence excepting that for a single famine year they could not pay extortionate taxation ? England would have flung the Sultan and his hosts out of Europe headlong into Asia. But the Irish landlords have driven three millions of Irish Christiaus out of their native country, and England has looked on and helped them, and sternly punished every effort of the people to resist this expulsion. (Cheers.) For three centuries the rule of the landlord has been one long record of ruin and disaster ; and yet to day as in the days of Cromwell, the only remedy of the lords of the soil is—Exile or exterminate the Irish, Once their cry was “To hell or Connaught!” Now it is “To the poor-house or America!” What was statesmanship with Hardenburg and Stein in Germany cannot be Communism with Parnell and Davitt in Connaught. (Cheers.) Who opposes the landlords The Land League. (Cheers for the Land League.) What is its creed? The Land League teaches that God on do wed all men with equal rights to the soil ; that the land of a country is the property of the whole people of the country, which they alone can alienate, and then only in perpetual trust, always subject to such laws as shall promote, not the sellish interests of a class, but the general prosperity ; that the system that breeds and for centuries has bred hunger in hovels, wretchedness in rags, indigence and ignorance—empty stomachs and empty heads—to the end that rich brewers may hunt over the sites of ancestral homesteads and rich brokers may mock Heaven by attempting to revive feudalism in the nineteenth century —that pheasants may fatten and peasants grow gaunt—that the existing system of feudal land tenure iu the West of Ireland is iu its origin immoral, despotic in its government, and by its influence destructive alike of material prosperity and intellectual dcvelopement —and that, therefore, having been weighed in the balances of time and found wanting it shall be thrown down and destroyed utterly aud for ever. (Cheers). The triumph of the Land League will he a triumph of civilisation over barbarism — a triumph of democracy over feudalism —a triumph of human rights over blood rusted prerogatives. (Loud and long continued cheering).