industrious man, for he was taxed upon his industry!  And yet who is not familiar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about “the lazy Irish”?  And if they were lazy—­which I entirely deny—­who made them so?  Had they no justification for their “laziness”?  Why should they wear their lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should live in riotousness and debauchery in the hells of London or the Continent?

“One could count on one’s fingers,” said the Cowper Commission in 1887, “the number of Irish estates on which the improvements have been made by the landlord.”  The Irish landlord class never did a thing for Ireland except to drain her of her life-blood—­to rob and depopulate and destroy, to make exaction after exaction upon the industry of her peasants, until their wrongs cried aloud for redress, if not for vengeance.  In England it was estimated in 1897 that the landlord class had spent in investments in landlord property a sum estimated at L700,000,000.  These can justly claim some right in the land.  In Ireland the landlord was simply the owner of “the raw earth”—­the bare proprietor of the soil, a dead weight upon the industry and honest toil of the tenant, receiving a rent upon the values that the labour and the energy of generations of members of a particular family had created.  The Irish landlord and his horde of hangers-on—­his agents, his bailiffs, his process-servers, his bog-rangers, his rent-warners—­created a system built upon corruption, maintained in tyranny, and enforced with all the ruthless severities of foreign laws enacted solely for the benefit of England’s garrison.  “I can imagine no fault,” said Mr Arthur Balfour, speaking as Prime Minister in the House of Commons, 4th May 1903, “attaching to any land system which does not attach to the Irish system.”  Evictions in Ireland came to be known as “sentences of death,” so cruel and numerous were they until the popular agitation was strong enough to check them.

Even the Gladstonian legislation of 1881, though it admittedly did something substantial towards redressing the balance between landlord and tenant by securing to the tenants what were known as “the three F.’s “—­viz.  Fixity of Tenure, Fair Rent, and Free Sale—­yet left the question in a wholly unsettled state.  The fixing of fair rents, no doubt, acted as a curb on landlord rapacity, but from the tenants’ point of view it was a wholly vicious, indeterminate and unsatisfactory system.  It was incentive to indifferent farming, since the commissioners who had the fixing of rents, and the inspectors who examined the farms, made their valuations upon the farms as they saw them.  True, the tenant could claim for his improvements, but in practice this was no real safeguard.  The more industrious the tenant the higher the rent—­the less industrious and the less capable the lower the figure to be paid.