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In their operations the proprietors were necessarily compelled to dispossess some, because the ground they had to dispose of could not possibly, if even given rent-free, support the numbers of inhabitants upon it; but this distressing task has been performed in almost all cases with the most extraordinary kindness; and we venture to assert, that in the whole of the evidence laid before Lord Devon's committee, five well substantiated instances cannot be adduced in the rural districts, in which rent-paying and well-conducted tenantry were evicted; and not one in which any tenant has been removed without receiving some compensation while what is pompously denounced as consolidation of farms, amounts to having increased the holdings of the occupants, in many cases, from a rood to two acres, "and in others to the enormous extent of eight."
Afterwards the committee had been the guest of a bank and of a trust company, and had for a period even paid rent to a common landlord. But its object was always to escape the formality of rent-paying, and it was now lodged in an untenanted mansion belonging to a viscount in a great Belgravian square.
He had, however, subsequently reversed the act and had restored the lands, whose tenure had been thus altered, to their original condition of rent-paying estate or "socage."
What happened in Tipperary only the other day when certain rent-paying tenants, who had been boycotted, did public penance in the following propositions?
He then, with his bluff benevolence, explained to Mother Hullins that Mrs Codleyn would stand no further increase of arrears from anybody, that she could not afford to stand any further increase of arrears, that her tenants were ruining her, and that he himself, with all his cheery good-will for the rent-paying classes, would be involved in her fall.
They stood therefore far above the "landless man," the man who had never possessed even under the old constitution political rights, whom the legislation of the English kings had forced to attach himself to a lord on pain of outlawry, and who served as household servant or as hired labourer or at the best as rent-paying tenant of land which was not his own.
Some demon drove me to tease my father to-day; he had one of his rent-paying peasants flogged the other day, and quite right too yes, yes, you needn't look at me in such horror he did quite right, because he's an awful thief and drunkard; only my father had no idea that I, as they say, was cognisant of the facts.
The serf occupied a position in rural society which it is difficult for us to understand. He was not a slave, such as was usual in the Southern States of the American Union before the Civil War; he was neither a hired man nor a rent-paying tenant-farmer, such as is common enough in all agricultural communities nowadays.
It is as certain as anything in life or politics can be that if the Bill of 1902 had been accepted, the Irish tenants would be still going gaily on under the old rent-paying conditions. The United Irish League was still in the first blush of its pristine vigour, and when the delegates of the National Directory came up from the country to Dublin they soon showed the mettle they were made of.
The attacotts, as they were called, were not slaves, but poor agriculturists obliged to pay heavy rents: their very name in the Celtic language means "rent-paying tribes or people." Their oppression never reached the degree of suffering under which the Irish small farmers of our days are groaning.
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