The rental of Kerry in 1870 was considerably less than it had been forty years previously, and higher prices were paid for the fee-simple of land than were offered in any other part of Ireland.  But Mr. Gladstone’s ‘remedial manoeuvres’ changed the country and the people.

Demoralising bribes to the Irish nation frittered away the proceeds of the plunder of the Irish Church.  A notable instance was a million under the Arrears Act, the principle of which was that no honest tenant who had paid his rent could derive any benefit from it, but that any drunkard or squanderer who had not paid his rent might have it paid for him by the Government on swearing that he was unable to pay.

Here is an instance that occurred on an estate under my management.

A tenant, whose yearly rent was L48, had one year’s rent paid by Government and another year’s rent given up by his landlord, on his swearing that the selling value of his farm was nil; ten weeks afterwards he served me with a notice, as required by the statute, that he had sold the interest of the farm for L670.

Again, there was a tenant who swore that he had expended L513, 14s. 6d. in permanent improvements, and that after this expenditure the fair letting value of the farm was only L17, though the original rent was L26, 4s.

How could I blame an ignorant peasantry for making false statements, when laws were framed by the leaders of public opinion in England which released the Irish tenants from every moral obligation, and made their assumed responsibilities and agreements a dead letter; while orators, living on the wages of patriotism, were allowed to preach sedition and plunder to an excitable people?  The result was that the work of demoralisation made rapid progress, perjury became a joke, assassination was merely ‘removal,’ and men who had been brutally murdered were said to have met with an accident.

I have already shown how apt a prophet Mr. Gladstone was in his forecast in the House of Commons in 1870, and one more quotation adds testimony to his inspiration—­though from what direction it came I will not linger to inquire:—­

’Compulsory valuation and fixity of tenure would bring about total demoralisation and a Saturnalia of crime.’

Exactly.

Mr. Laing, formerly M.P. for Orkney, in a magazine article defended the ‘Plan of Campaign’ as an innocent attempt to defend the weak against the strong, and as having been adopted only on estates where rents were too high, in fact, as the result of high rents.  As a matter of fact, in Orkney the rents advanced 194 per cent., and during the same period in Kerry they dwindled.  He also asserted that the Irish tenants’ improvements had been confiscated by the landlords as the tenant improved.

Certainly the law did not prevent them increasing the rent; but, unfortunately for the reasoning of Mr. Laing, and his taking for granted imaginary ‘confiscations,’ figures most decidedly prove that the landlords did not use any such power.  The rentals have steadily decreased while the landlords were borrowing and expending nearly half a million in my own county.