FROUDE ON IRISH LANDLORDISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 203, 23 February 1877, Page 7

FROUDE ON IRISH LANDLORDISM.

— — ♦+— Mr. James Anthony Froude would seem to have been guided by the ' Irish World ' into a new and perhaps profitable field of research. He has been studying up the land question in Great Britain and Ireland, and compressed the fruits of his labor into a lecture on " The Uses of the Landed Gentry," which he delivered in Edinburgh a few weeks ago. Now, nobody will accuse Mr. Froude of harboring any pro-Irish bias, or of cherishing ''socialistic notions," or of desiring to "overturn social order," or even of being disloyal; yet here is his calm and deliberate judgement of Irish Landlordism — mark it well :

The Landlords in Ireland represent conquest and confiscation, and they have gone on from generation to generation with an indifference to the welfare of the people which would never have been tolerated in England or Scotland.

Coming as it does from a noted anti-Irish partisan, a sturdy champion of British supremacy, this condemnation is really as severe and sweeping as any that has ever appeared in the columns of the ' Irish World.' Nor does the distinguished historian atop here. So grievously, he continued, did these land-sharks prey upon the people, that the law had at last to interpose (he omits to say that it was spurred on by fear) in the form of Mr. Gladstone's Land Act — "perhaps the only really good measure passed for Ireland in the last two hundred years." Now, we have the testimony of competent judges to show that Gladstone's Land Act does more harm than good ; we have the testimony of J. A. Froude to show that every other English law operating in Ireland during the past two centuries had a baleful, not a beneficial effect ; — let the reader draw his own conclusion ! — ' Irish World.'