to the full, and who are, in consequence, evicted from their farms and deprived of their means of subsistence?—­or is it for the good of a handful of men who live by and on the agitation they created and still keep up?  Do the leaders of any movement whatsoever give a thought to the individual lives sacrificed to the success of the cause?  As little as the general regrets the individuals of the rank and file in the battalions he hurls against the enemy.  The ruined homes and blighted lives of the thousands who have listened, believed, been coerced to their own despair, have been no more than the numbers of the rank and file to the general who hoped to gain the day by his battalions.[B] The good in this no-rent movement is reaped by the agitators alone; and for them alone have the chestnuts been pulled out of the fire.  Furthermore, whose hands among the prominent leaders are free from the reflected stain of blood-money?  These leaders have counselled a course of action which has been marked all along the line by outrage and murder; and they have lived well and amassed wealth by the course they have counselled.

From proletariats in their own persons they have become men of substance and property.  These assertions are facts to which names and amounts can be given; and that question, Cui bono? answers itself.  The inference to be drawn is too grave to be set aside; and to plead “charitable judgment” is to plead imbecility.

The plain and simple truth is—­the protective legislation that was so sorely needed for the peasantry is fast degenerating into injustice and oppression against the landlords.  Thousands of the smaller landowners have been absolutely beggared; the larger holders have been as ruthlessly ruined.  For, while the rents were lowered, the charges on the land, made on the larger basis, were kept to their same value; and the fate of the landlord was sealed.  Between the hammer and the anvil as he was and is placed, his times have not been pleasant.  Families who have bought their estates on the faith of Government sales and Government contracts, and families who have owned theirs for centuries and lived on them, winter and summer—­who have been neither absentees nor rack-renters, but have been friendly, hospitable, open-handed after their kind, always ready to give comforts and medicine to the sick and a good-natured measure of relief to the hard pressed—­they have now been brought to the ground; and between our own fluid and unstable legislation and the reckless cruelty of the Plan of Campaign their destruction has been complete.  Wherever one goes one finds great houses shut up or let for a few summer months to strangers who care nothing for the place and less than nothing for the people.  One cannot call this a gain, look at it as one will.  Nor do the tenantry themselves feel it to be a gain.  Get their confidence and you will find that they all regret the loss of their own—­those jovial, frank, and kindly proprietors who did the best they knew, though perhaps, judged by present scientific knowledge that best was not very good, but who at least knew more than themselves.  Carrying the thing home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman left sole masters of the situation.