In the desire of Parliament to do justice to the Irish peasant, whose condition did once so loudly demand amelioration, justice to the landlord has gone by the board.  For we cannot call it justice to make him alone suffer.  His rents have been reduced from 25 to 30 per cent. and over, but all the rent charges, mortgages, debts and dues have been retained at their full value.  The scheme of reduction does not pass beyond the tiller of the soil, and the landlord is the sole loser.[C]

Beyond this he suffers from the want of finality in legislation.  Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends.  A fifteen years’ bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the next as if Governmental pledges were lovers’ vows.  When, on the faith of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money from the Board of Works for the improvement of his estate, for stone cottages for his tenantry, for fences, drainage, and the like, suddenly his income is still further reduced; but the interest he has to pay for the loan contracted on the broader basis remains the same.  Which is a kind of thing on all fours with the plan of locking up a debtor so that he cannot work at his trade, while ordering him to pay so much weekly from earnings which the law itself prevents his making.

If the sum of misery remains constant in Ireland, its distribution has changed hands.  The small deposits in the savings-banks have increased to an enormous extent, and in many places where the tenants have for some years refused to pay their rents, but have still kept the land, the women have learned to dress.  But the owners of the land—­say that they are ladies with no man in the family—­have wanted bread, and have been kept from starvation only by surreptitious supplies delivered in the dead darkness of the night.  These supplies have of necessity been rare and scanty, for the most honest tenant dared not face the vengeance of the League by openly paying his just due.  Did not Mr. Dillon, on August 23rd, 1887, say, “If there is a man in Ireland base enough to back down, to turn his back on the fight now that Coercion has passed, I pledge myself in the face of this meeting, that I will denounce him from public platform by name, and I pledge myself to the Government that, let that man be whom he may, his life will not be a happy one, either in Ireland or across the seas.”  With such a formidable organisation as this, what individual would have the courage to stand out for abstract justice to a landlord?  It would have been, and it has been, standing out for his own destruction.  Hence, for no fault, no rack-renting, have proprietors—­and especially ladies—­been treated as mortal enemies by those whom they had always befriended—­for no reason whatever but that it was an easy victory for the Campaigners to obtain.  Women, with never a man to defend them, could be more easily manipulated than if they were so many stalwart young fellows, handy in their turn with guns and revolvers, and man