The Letters Of
The Letters Of "Norah" On Her Tour Through Ireland By Margaret Dixon Mcdougall - Page 130 of 208 - First - Home

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He Pointed Out To Me Many Who Seemed Doomed To Be The Last Of Their Race.

At last we passed the long, dead wall which encloses the magnificent demesne of the Marquis of Sligo and drew up at Westport once more.

The local papers which await me are full of Miss Gardner and her war with her tenants - more evictions, emergency men from Dublin to hold possession - and all the rest. I was introduced by a Protestant clergyman to a gentleman connected with the executive of the law for a quarter of a century. He knows the heartrending inner history of legal eviction. This gentleman has a wonderful tenderness in his heart for Miss Gardner. "Sure she grew up among us. The other one (Miss Pringle) found her as kindly a woman as was on God's earth and has made an ogre of her."

I will give an extract or two out of the softest part of the statement he has drawn up for me.

He tells of a landlord who evicted whole townlands in 1847. He hated the people because the famine swept over them. He became possessed with the same ideas as other landlords of the period, whose income had diminished through the visitation of God, that if the present possessors were rooted out and depopulated lands planted with Scotchmen, their skill and capital would prevent a recurrence of famine.

Now it is a fact freely attested to me by clergymen of different denominations that the planted people of Mayo required help, and help to a very large amount to keep them from starvation during the last scarcity. On many estates in Mayo and the adjoining parts of Sligo the Protestant population would have died of hunger but for the large help given both denominationally, and otherwise. They could not have seeded their grounds but for seed freely given them. Fields in Mayo this season are lying bare because the wretched people are not able to get seed to put in the ground. Some of the planted people complained to me that though when they settled on their present lands they got them cheap, two shillings and sixpence an acre for wild land, yet as they improved their land the rent was raised to five, to seven and six, to fourteen, and now to over a pound an acre. These men also complained that they could not possibly exist at all during these last seasons and pay the rent which was laid on them in consequence of the improvements done by their own labor. I find by the most conclusive proof that a difference of religious belief did not enable the settlers any more than the natives to pay a rent that could not be produced from the soil. The desire to change the nationality and religion of his tenants was so strong in one landlord that, in the words of my informant, "A scene of ruthless havoc began among his tenantry. To stimulate the slowness of the crowbar brigade he was known to tear down human habitations with his own hands." I remember these poor people standing in the market in those dark days of famine, having their bits of furniture for sale on the streets, and there were none to buy.

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