United States or South Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Who can suppose that in our times the free cottiers of a whole province in Ireland, after supporting their families and paying their rent, could spare even in three years the money and means requisite to meet the demands of such an occasion?
Nearly a score of men were immediately about him; for the party he met on his return were the Bodagh's son, his servants, and such of the cottiers as lived near enough to be called up to the rescue. On finding himself secured, he lost all presence of mind, and almost all consciousness of his situation. "I'm gone," said he; "I'm a lost man; all Europe can't save my life.
And on many and many such a time when he opened them again the eyelids were wet. He wanted to get away quickly, silently, unobserved. With the instinct of habitual thought his mind turned London-ward. He met but few persons, and those only cottiers. He saluted them in his usual cheery way, but did not stop to speak with any.
Many families were living on a single meal of cabbage, and some even, as we were assured, upon a little seaweed." A highly respectable merchant of the town called upon this gentleman and assured him that the small farmers and cottiers had parted with all their pigs and their fowl; and even their bed clothes and fishing nets had gone for the same object, the supply of food.
The instant I asked a question concerning the peasant-proprietor problem and the future of the "poor devil" cottiers, whose sufferings have made an excellent stalking-horse for the farmers, properly so-called, I was met with a well-formulated objection to any scheme of peasant proprietorship.
Up to this time such was not the habit of Irish cottiers. They held their own land, and laboured there for a spell; and then they would work for a spell, as men do in England, taking wages; and then they would be idle for a spell.
This is the poorest parish in Donegal, and no statement can be too strong with respect to the wretched condition, the positive misery and starvation in which the cottiers and small farmers on this immense domain are found. We baited at Dungloe. A more miserable and dilapidated village or town I never saw. What a contrast did its dirty little inn present to the hotel at Gweedore."
It was far otherwise with the Irish farmers and cottiers, who not only "held the harvest," or rather its monetary result, but held the land and were "not going to give it up." The people, the speaker opined, had really won the battle already, and it was for them to exercise the power they had suddenly become aware of wisely and mercifully.
Immediately the landlords began to utter bitter complaints of surplus population; they began to ventilate their grievances through the English and Irish press, saying that their land was overrun by cottiers and squatters the main cause of all this being kept in the background, namely, the immense and continuous increase of forty-shilling freeholders, by themselves, and for their own purposes.
Instead of a great operation on the waste lands, and the conversion of cottiers into proprietors, Parliament passed a Poor Law for maintaining them as paupers: and if the nation has not since found itself in inextricable difficulties from the joint operation of the old evils and the quack remedy it is indebted for its deliverance to that most unexpected and surprising fact, the depopulation of ireland, commenced by famine, and continued by emigration.
Word Of The Day