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.
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