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Updated: May 16, 2025
But in 1859 the first attempt was made by the famous Act X. to check the rack-renting power of the zameendars.
If we examine the rents paid one hundred and fifty, or even one hundred years ago, they will appear trifling when compared with the rents of the present day; so that, at first, one is inclined to question the accuracy of those writers who denounce the avarice and rack-renting propensities of the landlords of their time.
The past extravagance of the landlords, absenteeism, rack-renting, injustice of all kinds; the past jealousy of England and her over-shadowing all native industries and productions; difference of religion, racial temperament, and the irreconcilable enmity of the conquered towards the conquerors; ignorance and idleness; the morality which marries too early, when the land, which was just enough to support one family, is expected to keep three or four; want of self-respect in the dirt and disorder of domestic life; want of all communal life or amusement, save in heated politics and drink; bogs here, unthrift there, small holdings everywhere all these things help to complicate a question which passion has already made too difficult for even the most radical kind of statesmanship to adjust.
The landlords and their agents have over and over again been shot for rack-renting when the rents had been forced up by secret competitions among neighbours and even relations. "Ask any living Irish farmer if I am right, and he will say, Yes, ten times yes. "The Irishman has a land-hunger such as is unknown over the water. And why? Because the land is his sole means of living.
This would prevent an incredible amount of rack-renting and oppression on the one hand; and of poverty, revenge, and bloodshed on the other. Where is the landlord now who looks to the moral character or industrial habits of a tenant? Scarcely one.
The fact that they elected Unionist members of Parliament and held Unionist demonstrations was accounted for by the existence of a handful of rack-renting landlords, a few sweating capitalists and some clergymen whose churches were empty because the people were tired of hearing them curse the Pope.
The younger people feel differently, and when I was passing this landlord's house, not long afterwards, I found these lines written in pencil on the door-post: In the days of rack-renting And land-grabbing so vile A proud, heartless landlord Lived here a great while. When the League it was started, And the land-grabbing cry, To the cold North of Ireland He had for to fly.
I thought it well to rub the facts in a little. "Rack-renting landlords," I said. "Sweating capitalists, and clergymen whose churches are empty because their congregations are tired of hearing them curse the Pope!" "Eh?" said Clithering, "what's that? what's that?" "Only a quotation," I said. "I forget if it was a Cabinet Minister " "Not at all," said Clithering. "I recollect the words now.
The new landowners who came into possession of forfeited estates or of confiscated monastic lands continued to substitute pasture for tillage, and to dispossess the agricultural population as well by the reduced demand for labour as by rack-renting and evictions.
What nonsense it is to talk about the "traditional rack-renting" of a property held by the Ponsonbys for two hundred years, the tenants on which could welcome me when I came into it with the language of the address you have here seen!
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