The case was heard by the Recorder at Kilmainham, and the facts which I have briefly recited were established by the evidence.  The daughter of this extraordinary “victim” Egan appeared as a witness, so “fashionably dressed” as to attract a remark on the subject from the defendant’s counsel.  To this she replied that “her brothers in America sent her money.”

“If your brothers in America sent you money for such purposes,” not unnaturally observed the Recorder, “why did they allow your father to sacrifice crops worth L60 for the non-payment of L8, 15s.?”

“They were tired of that,” said the young lady airily; “the land wasn’t worth the rent!”

That is to say, a farm which yielded a crop of L60, and pastured several head of cattle, was not worth L8, 15s. a year.  Certainly it was not worth L8, 15s. a year if the tenant under the operation of the existing or the impending laws of Great Britain in Ireland could get, or hope to get it for the half of that rent, or for no rent at all.

But this being thus, on what grounds are the rest of mankind invited to regard this excellent man as a “victim” worthy of sympathy and of material aid?  How had he come to be in arrears of a year in August 1886?  The proceedings at Kilmainham tell us this.

In November 1885 he had demanded, with other tenants of Mrs. Lewis, a reduction of 50 per cent.  This would have given him his holding at a rental of L4, 7s. 6d.  Mrs. Lewis refused the concession, and a month afterwards an attempt was made to blow up her son’s house with dynamite.  Between that time and August 1886, all the efforts of her son, who was also her agent, to collect her dues by seizing beasts, were defeated by the driving away of the cattle, so that no remedy but an eviction was left to her.  I take it for granted that Mrs. Lewis had a family to maintain, and debts of one sort and another to pay, as well as Mr. Egan—­but I observe this material difference between her position and his during the whole of this period of “strained relations” between herself and her tenant, that whereas she lay completely out of the enjoyment of the rent due her, being the interest on her capital, represented in her title to the land, Mr. Egan remained in the complete enjoyment and use of the land.  Clearly the tenant was in a better position than the landlord, and as we are dealing not with the history of Ireland in the past, but with the condition of Ireland at present, it appears to me to be quite beside the purpose to ask my sympathies for Mr. Egan on the ground that a century or half a century ago the ancestors of Mr. Egan may have been at the mercy of the ancestors of Mrs. Lewis.  However that may have been, Mr. Egan seems to me now to have had legally much the advantage of Mrs. Lewis.  Not only this.  Both legally and materially Mr. Egan, the tenant-farmer at Woodford, seems to me to have had much the advantage of thousands of his countrymen living and earning their livelihood by their daily labour in such a typical American commonwealth, for example, as Massachusetts.  I have here with me the Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Massachusetts.  From this I learn that in 1876 the average yearly wages earned by workmen in Massachusetts were $482.72, or in round numbers something over L96.  Out of this amount the Massachusetts workman had to feed, clothe, and house himself, and those dependent on him.