Advocating the making of blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone’s famous remedy of jam, this sapient “B.O.N.” says:—­

“The blackberry harvest would be over in the sunny Rhine country before it began in Ireland.  Why should not some practical native, go over from home and see how it is all done?  I quite know that any plan for bettering the physical condition of our people is open to the objection that as soon as they seem a little ‘comfortable’ the landlord would raise the rent in many a case; but perhaps in a still larger number of cases he would now be afraid to do so.  And I know, too, that even a blackberry wine industry will not be quite safe till we have Home Rule; but is not that coming fast?”

This mischievous little word is in the very teeth of the fact that rents cannot be raised on any plea whatsoever—­certainly not because the tenant makes himself better off by an industry other than his farming—­and that the whole machinery of Government had been put in motion to protect the land tiller from the land-owner.  Yet the Pall Mall Gazette is not ashamed to lend itself to this lie on the chance of catching a few fluttering minds and nailing them to the mast of Home Rule on the false supposition that this means justice to the oppressed tenant and wholesome restraint of the brutal proprietor.  Professor Mahaffy, in a long letter to the New York Independent, speaks of the same kind of thing still going on in America—­this bolstering up a delusion by statements as far removed from the truth as that of “B.O’N.’s,” to which the Pall Mall Gazette gives sanction and circulation.  That part of the American press which is under the influence or control of the Irish Home Rulers still goes on talking of the oppression to which the Irish tenant is subjected, just as the speeches of the Agitators (vide the astounding lies, as well as the appalling nonsense talked, when Lady Sandhurst and Mr. Stansfeld were made citizens of Dublin, and it was asserted that the Government turned tail and fled before these “delegates”) teem with analogous assertions wherein not so much as one grain of truth is to be found.  Let it be again repeated in answer to all these falsehoods:—­No tenant can be evicted except for non-payment of one year’s rent; that rent can be settled by the courts, and if he has signed an agreement for an excessive payment, his agreement can be broken; and he must be compensated for all the improvements he has made or will swear that he has made.  Also, he can borrow money from the Government at the lowest possible interest, and become the owner of his farm for less yearly payment than his former rent.  He, the Irish tenant, is the most protected, the most favoured of all leaseholders in Europe or America, but the old cries are raised, the old watch-words are repeated, just as if nothing had been done since the days when he was as badly off as the Egyptian fellah, and was, in truth, between the devil and the deep sea.  Let me repeat the legal and actual condition of things as summarized by Mr. Montagu Crackanthorpe, Q.C.  These six propositions ought to be learned by heart before anyone allows himself to talk of Home Rule or the Irish question:—­