CHAPTER XXIX.ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND—ROYALTY AND NOBILITY.

TENANT FARMER, COUNTY MEATH.

SOMETHING TO BE CONSIDERED.

What can Pat do? Nothing. He can’t get off the land, for the merciless exactions of My Lord, who is living in Paris and London, have left him nothing; he cannot get away; he has no title to possession a minute; he can be evicted from his holding at any time, for any one of a thousand causes; there are no courts he can appeal to, as in America, for the magistrates are all landlords. And so he bows his head, and meekly goes on and reclaims more land, only to have the rent raised for every acre made valuable by the labor of his own hands; until, finally, it comes to a point where he has reclaimed the entire holding, and My Lord’s agent comes to the conclusion that it is better for him and My Lord—their interests are identical—to convert the farm into a sheep-walk, and Pat is evicted—which is to say, he is thrown out upon the roadsideto starve, with his wife and children; and the cabin he has built is torn down.

Does he get anything for the making of the land? Not a halfpenny. All the labor bestowed upon that land, originally his, goes to My Lord, whose mistresses in London and Paris need it. They must have their silks and velvets, they must have their wines and carriages, and horses and servants—and Pat must pay for it.

It must be understood that there is no such thing as leases in the South and West of Ireland—the landlord dictates the terms, and the tenant must accept them. He has no alternative. He cannot get away; he has nothing to get away with. As to the difference between the farmer of the North and South of Ireland, it is not true that the farmer of the North is a wonderfully prosperous man, but it is true that he is better off than the farmer of the South. Why? Because there is not one law governing the whole country. The “custom” that governs one section does not govern the other.

Now, please, get this infamy in your mind, and try to comprehend it. The British government actually drove the Irish, which is to say the native owners of the soil, out of the North of Ireland into the South. The phrase “To hell or Connaught” had its origin in this. It was to Connaught that these people were condemned to go, the alternative being death.

Of course no American can understand why anybody should go to any place that he does not want to go, America being a free country. But the American must understand that England is not a free country; that the corrupt and vicious nobility of England wanted ground upon which they could commit piracy, and that they had the entire power of the British government behind it. The English bayonet is a rare persuader, especially when it has the stolid cruelty and the iron will of a Cromwell behind it. Let a man like Oliver Cromwell breathe upon a bayonet, and you may reasonably expect to see a baby impaled upon it in a minute. To have satisfied his ambition, and what he, in a mistaken way, considered his duty, he would have burned his mother.

It was considered necessary to have an English garrison in the land. To accomplish this the Irish were driven out of theNorth of Ireland, and when I say driven out, I mean driven out. They were forced to go, man, woman and child, into the wilds of Connaught.

Then the land vacated by this exodus, at the end of a bayonet—British rule always means bayonet, British statesmanship begins and ends with a bayonet, that being the only thing in the world that does not think—this land was divided up among the dissolute villains who infested the British Court, and for whom, they being the alleged sons of nobles, something must be done.

But a condition was attached to these grants of stolen lands. No native Irishman was to have a holding there. It was considered necessary that there should be in Ireland a garrison of what they chose to call “loyal” citizens, to hold the robbed and outraged Irish who had been driven into the South in check. Therefore the North of Ireland was given to the dissolute younger sons of dissolute English Lords, upon condition that their tenants should be English or Scotch, and in all cases Protestants.

IN A DISCONTENTED DISTRICT.

“CUSTOM.”

To get English or Scotch farmers to join in this wholesale brigandage, there had to be some inducement held out. They were not compelled to come upon the ground, and they madetheir bargain with the Lords. They insisted upon fixity of tenure, a low rent and free sale, which is to say they would not enter upon these stolen lands except upon a low rent, and if they made improvements they should have the benefit thereof, and if they chose to quit the lands they should have the right to sell the improvements they had made, and that the improvements should be a part of the value of the lands, and their interest therein should be an interest in law and equity.

This was agreed to, and on these conditions the North of Ireland was settled by English and Scotch Protestants; the “custom” known as “Ulster custom” was established, and is law to-day.

PROTECTING A GENTLEMAN FARMER.

But “Ulster custom” does not extend over the entire island. While the farmer in Ulster has fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale, the farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing of the kind. He is a simple tenant at will. He holds a farm at the will of his landlord; his life is in the hands of a dissolute scoundrel who has no brains, backed by a dissolute scoundrel in the form of an agent who has brains, and both of these scoundrels are backed by the bayonets of the most infamous government on the face of the earth.

“Ulster custom” gives the tenant some rights. “Cork custom” is quite another thing. “Ulster custom” was a bribe. “Cork custom” is robbery. It is a system of wholesale confiscation of labor, of body and soul.

The farmer of Cork and Tipperary has nothing to say abouthimself, his wife or his children. If the son of the thief who stole his land loses money at bacaret in Paris, he telegraphs the other thief, his agent, that he wants money, and the secondary thief, who has a percentage in the robbery, goes about among the tenants, and raises the rent. And that is all there is about it. The tenant farmer has no lease. He lives upon the land at the pleasure of his landlord, and the measure of the rent he pays is the measure of the landlord’s vices and the agent’s expectations.

Each county has its own “custom,” and the poor, robbed slave lives under that custom. The North of Ireland farmer comes nearer to keeping body and soul together than the South of Ireland farmer, because the villain robbers who expelled the Irish from the North of Ireland had to make a custom more favorable to get the Scotch and English to go there to keep the Catholic Irish in check, and they would not have gone to the country except for some advantage. An English lord will do anything mean for the love of it—the Scotch are altogether too acute to do a mean thing without being paid for it.

An instance, not a very large one, but enough to illustrate the power of the landlord over his victim, the tenant, occurred upon the estate of My Lord Leitrim, who is this minute where I hope never to go if there is a hereafter.

This worthy descendant of a very unworthy race had an industrious tenant, whose farm he had been long coveting. But somehow he did not dare to take it by force, with the feeling there was in the country at the time, and so he sought a legal pretext. An Irish tenant is not permitted by the paternal government, under which he starves and goes naked, to make any improvements without the consent of the landlord. He cannot build an addition to his cabin (this condition is unnecessary, for he couldn’t if he would), he cannot dig a ditch or do anything. This is the law, but it has never been enforced, for in the very nature of things the tenant would not do more than was profitable to himself for the improvement of the land is the enrichment of the landlord, who religiously raises the rent with every improvement made.

A FOILED LANDLORD.

This tenant needed a ditch preparatory to the reclamation of a bog farther back, and he had been putting in all his sparetime for two years digging it. He did not suppose that My Lord would object to his reclaiming the bog.

THE FILLING OF THE DITCH.

One Saturday Mike was working in the ditch up to his knees in water when My Lord came riding by. He saw his opportunity. He knew the law.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Making the drain, sor,” replied Pat, proudly, for it was a big thing he had undertaken.

“Who gave you permission to make a ditch on my land?” demanded My Lord. “My fine fellow, you have that dirt all back by Monday morning, or out you go.”

Mike saw the trap he had fallen into. Before striking a spade he should have gone to My Lord’s agent, and got permission. But he was in for it, for he knew that My Lord had a legal excuse to rob him of his years of labor.

But the next morning he went to the chapel, and interviewed the priest. The priest asked:—

“If you get that earth back by Monday morning, will you hold the land?”

“Unless the ould—that is—My Lord doesn’t kape his worrud.”

“We’ll try whether he does!” said the father.

And so the sermon that morning was a very short one, and mostly devoted to Mike’s case. At its conclusion the father asked every man in the parish to come at once with his spade and put that earth back. They came—thousands of them—and they wrought with a will, and long before Monday morning the drain was filled up as nicely as possible; and when My Lord came riding by again to see the drain, and give orders for the eviction of Mike, he found that his cruel alternative had been fulfilled, as if by fairies.

An Irishman in Corduroy knee-breeches, with a spade in his hand and a short clay pipe in his mouth, would not make a very happy stage fairy, but he was a very serviceable fairy to Mike.

Had Mike not been so assisted he would have been evicted, and there would have been no appeal from it. He couldn’t employ counsel to fight his battle, for he had nothing with which to pay counsel, and the Justice would be a landlord anyhow, who had other Mikes to evict, and so Mike would have never gone into court at all, but would have accepted his fate in silence.

A cheerful state of affairs, surely.

And speaking of the possibility of paying rent, I remember a young man on the Galtees, insufficiently clad (that was nothing new), working for dear life in a soaking rain.

“How many hours do you work?” I asked.

“From daylight to dark, sor,” was his answer, first peering around before speaking, to be sure that no one heard him. In free Britain it is dangerous for him to talk even of so small a matter as wages.

“And what are your wages?”

“Ten pence a day, sor.”

“Are you satisfied to work for so many hours for so little money?”

“Troth, sor, it wuld be betther for my ould mother if I cud get that the year around.”

A BIT OF HISTORY.

Ten pence is about nineteen cents; and understand he was not boarded. Out of that pittance he had to furnish his own food and his own bed. And yet he would have been thankful to the man who would have given him steady work at that price.

To know something of what landlordism really is, and how it all came about, read the following little history of the Barony of Farney:

In 1606 Lord Essex, who had “obtained” a grant of the Barony of Farney, leased it to Evar McMahon, at a yearly rent of two hundred and fifty pounds. And this was a mighty comfortable rent, for, understand, under theCrowngrants the one receiving it was only charged for arable land, the bog and mountain land adjacent, then esteemed worthless, being thrown in.

READY FOR EMIGRATION.

McMahon sub-let it to poorer men, and they so improved it that, fourteen years later, the same land was let for one thousand five hundred pounds, and in 1636 thirty-eight tenants were compelled to pay a rental of two thousand and twenty-three pounds.

Under the strong hands of the original owners, the robbed peasantry, who found themselves tenants on their own lands, this piece of property was mounting up in value very rapidly.

The Earl of Essex died in 1636 A.D. “His” estate went to his sisters. There is in English families always somebodyto inherit, and in case there should not be, the Crown steps in and takes it, that the proceeds of the robbery may not go out of the race. The two sisters married and had children, of course, and in 1690, when the two came together to divide their plunder, it was found that the rentals had risen to twenty-six hundred and twenty-six pounds. Then the rents began to be put up so as to produce something like.

The two daughters had children to be educated and provided for, marriages were getting to be common in the family, and the debts of the youngsters had to be paid. And so in 1769 this estate, which started so modestly at two hundred and fifty pounds, yielded eight thousand pounds.

How? Easily enough. The land in this stolen estate, as I said, was nine-tenths of it bog and stone, and only the arable land, some twenty-five hundred acres, was set down in the lease, all the bog and mountain adjacent for miles around being thrown in. By judiciously evicting the tenants from the arable land and converting it into cattle and sheep walks, and compelling the tenants to go upon the bog and stone land, which they were compelled to reclaim and drain, the original twenty-five hundred acres of arable land silently grew into twenty-four thousand six hundred acres, and fifty-seven families had multiplied to a population of twenty-three thousand eight hundred!

Can there be any way of making a great estate so delightful as this? It is a pleasant thing to have a government steal land and give it to you, and then protect you with bayonets while you are compelling the original owners to improve it for you.

Bear in mind this fact. The plunderers never put a penny upon this land. They never dug a ditch, dug out a stone, or cut a square foot of bog. The cabins the tenantry lived in they built themselves, and every improvement, great and small, they made themselves.

And this process of swindling, robbing, confiscation, spoliation and plunder went on until this estate, which commenced at two hundred and fifty-nine pounds in 1606, now yields the enormous revenue of sixty thousand pounds, or three hundred thousand dollars per annum!

THE YOUNG MAN BOYLE.

Which is to say, the laborers on this estate have been yearly robbed of their labor, and starved and frozen, that one family in England may live in wasteful luxury. This is all there is of it.

About the same time that Essex got his grant, Sir Walter Raleigh got a grant of forty-two thousand acres (exclusive of bog and waste) from the plunder of the Earl of Desmond’s estates. There lived in London at the time a young lawyer named Boyle, who was probably the worst man then living. He had been a horse thief, a forger, and murder had been charged to him. Raleigh was in prison and wanted money, and Boyle offered him one thousand five hundred pounds for his grant, which Raleigh accepted. Boyle paid him five hundred pounds on account, and promptly swindled him out of the balance.

OLD BUT TOLERABLY CHEERFUL.

Boyle being serviceable to the court (such men always are), was created Earl of Cork, and got from James I. patents for his plunder. Then he proceeded to marry his children into noble English families, the Duke of Devonshire being one of the descendants. One small portion of the estate now yields His Grace an annual income of thirty thousand pounds, being only a part of the land for which his ancestor, the horse-thief, forger and murderer, paid five hundred pounds.

His Grace, the Duke, is not content with the land. Undersome clause in the patent given by the pedantic James to the criminal Boyle, he claims the right to the fisheries in the Blackwater, and the Irish Appellate Court, an English landlord’s institution, as are all the courts, sustain the claim, and he levies tribute upon every fish drawn from the waters.

If it were very certain that there is no hereafter, and if a man had no more heart than an exploded bomb shell, it would be a very good thing to be a duke, with a forger and horse-thief for an ancestor. The duke was very judicious in the selection of a father.

The English landlord found after a while that sheep and cattle raising was more profitable than diversified farming, and with that calm, sublime disregard of the rights of the people which is characteristic of the ruling classes in England, eviction became fashionable. The policy pretty much all over Ireland was to clean out the population and consolidate a thousand small farms into one large one.

Between the years 1841 and 1861, twenty years, there were destroyed in Ireland two hundred and seventy thousand cabins, representing a population of one million three hundred thousand, all driven to the workhouse, to exile or death.

The process was a very simple one. A process of eviction was served, the tenant and his family would be pitched out into the road, and the cottage be leveled to the ground. This was originally done with crowbars, but crowbars were too slow. A mechanical genius, who was a landlord and had a great deal of eviction to do, invented a machine to facilitate the process. It was an elaborate arrangement of ropes, and pulleys, and iron dogs, and all that sort of thing, which could be run up beside a cabin and tear the miserable structure down in a few minutes and save a great deal in the way of labor.

This is the only labor-saving machine Irish landlordism has ever produced.

Any system that does not permit the marriage of two persons of sound bodies and minds and of the proper age, is an infamy that should be wiped out at no matter what cost, and no matter what means.

BANTRY VILLAGE.

I was walking down a street in Bantry, when I came to a little grocery store, with a ladder projecting over the wretched

AFTER A WHOLESALE EVICTION.

sidewalk. My Lord Bantry, who owns, or professes to, every foot of the ground in the village, is not willing to put the sidewalks in good order. His tenants, who pay him ground rent, built their own homes and are expected to build the sidewalks and keep them in order if they want them. Otherwise theymay walk in the mud. My Lord Bantry has his carriage, but he never drives through the village. He does not like to see distress.

This grocery was the property of an old lady of seventy, and perched on the ladder was a girl of about seven teen—her grandchild. She was using a paint brush as vigorously, if not as skillfully, as any male painter that ever lived.

We halted a minute and greeted her. Unclosing a pair of very rosy lips and showing a magnificent row of teeth (it might have been a pride in the teeth that made her open her mouth so wide, but, if so, it was pardonable!), she exclaimed:

THE “FIRSHT FAYMALE PAINTHER IN OIRLAND!”

“I am the firsht faymale painther in Oirland! Have ye a job ye can give me?”

And she laughed a very cheery laugh at the little pleasantry.

There was with us a boatman whom we had employed for a sail on the bay. As we passed, he looked back with a pleased expression.

“Nancy, there, on the ladther, is my gurl.”

THE BOATMAN AND NANCY.

We congratulated him on his good fortune, for Nancy wasa bright, handsome, buxom, cheery girl, who was just the kind that such a man should marry.

“You are to marry her?”

“Yes, some time.”

“Why not now?”

“Marry her now! What on? She has her grandmudther to care for, I have my fadther and mudther, and there is but little boating to do, and the rint is to pay jist the same. I have lived in Ameriky, and want to get back, but I won’t go widout Nancy, and God knows whin I shall git enough to go wid her.”

“Why don’t you marry her and take the chances.”

“Niver! I’ll niver marry a gurl and bring childher into the world to go through what we have had to. I’ve seen enough of it. My fadther has been upon the place all his life and his fadther afore him. They made the land they wuz born upon, and the rint has bin raised rigularly, lavin us jist what we could git to eat, and now at sixty-five and bad wid the rheumatiz, so that he can’t work half the time, he has nothing. I went away to sea, and got to Ameriky, but I had to kim back to take care of him and my mudther, and it’s all I kin do to keep ’em from bein’ evicted. An Amerikin gev me the boat, which he had built for the season, and if it wuzn’t for wat I make out of it we would all be in the workhouse. I’ll never marry Nancy till I kin find some way to git to Ameriky, and some way there to make a dacint livin'. I will niver marry and settle here, to see Nancy and her childher kim up as I kim up, and me livin’ as my fadther and mudther is livin'.”

“And Nancy?”

“It’s hard on the poor gurl, for there are any quantity uv the byes who wants to marry her, but she, with her grandmudther on her hands, knows all about it, and she has sense enough to wait for something to toorn up. It will come, we hope, some day; but it’s weary waitin'.”

And so the two, who in any other country would be wedded and have a cottage of their own, with plenty to eat, and drink, and wear, two who owe the world by this time at least three chubby urchins, the girls like their mother and the boys like their father, are kept apart by this more than inhuman systemof landlordism, which is the bottom, top and sides of Irish misery. Others who never knew what it was to live better, would marry and would add to the eternal roll of paupers that make up the population of Ireland; but a residence in God’s country unfitted this man for that. He discovered that man’s natural inheritance was not rags, and filth and starvation, and he determined not to marry till he could get, somehow, to the country where that crowning achievement of the devil’s most astute prime minister, a landlord, is unknown.

OLD AND NOT CHEERFUL.

But the poor fellow will have to wait a long time. He is like a bear chained to a post—he can neither fight nor run. My Lord has a mortgage on him, and My Lord’s agent will never let up on him so long as there is a penny to be squeezed out of him. What to My Lord is Nancy and her woes or her hopes? He would be willing she should marry and multiply and replenish the earth, for it would give him more muscle to enslave in time, or rather, the young lord who is riding by on his gaily caparisoned pony, with two flunkies after him, would, when he came into the estate, have the children of the boatman and Nancy to fleece, as the present lord fleeces Nancy and the boatman. But as for his having any care for the welfare of Nancy and the boatman, that is preposterous. The cost of the trappings of the young lord’s pony would make them comfortable, but he would be a bold man who would suggest such a thing to him.

THISwill be found to be a mixed chapter, but I respectfully desire every American to read it very carefully, and to give it some thought after reading it. In America, where one man is as good as another, we have so much that is good that we do not appreciate the blessings we enjoy; we do not realize how much a free government is worth. I am going to put upon paper some few governmental facts, to the end of showing my countrymen what a good government is worth to them, and what a bad government costs the people who groan under it.

In a late number of that especial organ of king-worshipers, the LondonIllustrated News, there is a beautiful engraving, entitled “The Princess of Wales and Her Daughter, in the Garden of Sandringham.” It is a lovely picture. The garden itself is a study, with its wonderful shrubbery, and flowers, and statuary; a garden that falls but little short of being a Paradise. And the Princess of Wales and her six or eight daughters are just as lovely—by the way, as the British Parliament gives every child born in the royal family a princely estate and an enormous allowance to start with, the royal family all have large families—the Princess herself is arrayed in gorgeous morning costume, with a hat trimmed with ostrich feathers, with a parasol with silken fringe upon it a foot deep, and everything comporting. The children are likewise gorgeously arrayed, and one of them is teaching a pug dog how to sit up, the said pug costing the British people at least an hundred guineas. The entire party are in as jolly a state as can be imagined.

Now I like such scenes as this immensely. I like to see comfort and even luxury. Had the husband of this fortunatewoman and the father of these happy children been, early in life, a shoemaker, a tailor, a lawyer, a merchant, or anything under heaven, and had by his own labor and his own skill accumulated the means for all this luxury, I should insist upon his right to enjoy it because he had earned it, and had given the world something for it. But how did this woman get it? Why is she with a parasol with silken fringe a foot deep, her children in silks and satins, while just as good children, and just as good women, in Ireland, are shoeless, stockingless and almost naked! What title has she to the gardens at Sandringham, and by what right does she starve the peasantry of Ireland that she may thus disport herself and her children?

Simply this: She is the wife a dissolute middle-aged man, whose stupid mother was the niece of a stupid uncle, who was the son or brother or something or other of the worst kind of a man in the world, who happened to be the son of a king who was half a lunatic and half an idiot—the same who attempted by hireling soldiery to subjugate America—who became a king because he was the descendant of a race of pirates, who by arms wrested from the people of the countries they invaded, all their rights, and assumed to own the land.

Have these people from first to last ever added one penny to the wealth of the world? Is there any one thing they have ever done to push forward the progress of the nations? Not a thing. On the contrary, they have been the dead weights; they have been the blocks in the way. They simply live, and eat, and drink, and wear and disport themselves in the gardens at Sandringham and an hundred other gardens; they have castles, and servants, and special trains, and all that sort of thing, and hundreds of Guinea pug dogs; and to support all this, with the horde of nobility hanging upon them, and their retainers, the men of Ireland are starving, and the women of Ireland are going shoeless, stockingless, and well nigh naked.

A DIRE WISH.

I am not especially cruel in my nature, but were the royal family of England to invite the royal family of Prussia, and the Czar of Russia, and the King of Italy, and the Sultan of Turkey, and all the kings of the world, with all their nobles, to an excursion on the German ocean, and were the ships all to go down to the bottom of the sea, and make an end of thewhole business at once, I should thank Heaven more fervently than I ever did before in my life. Royalty is larceny in the first degree. It is larceny all the way down, according to the amount of the spoil.

THE PROPER END OF ROYALTY.

I did not confine my observations of land troubles to Ireland alone, though it is in Ireland that there is the worst conditionof affairs, for the reason that there is a vital difference between the ruling classes of England and the entire Irish people, in race and religion, and that makes a great deal more difference in the British Empire than anywhere else on the footstool.

But the English or Scotch farmer has not so happy a time of it as he might have, and England will have just as violent a land agitation as Ireland within a very few years. The average Englishman has a vast veneration for royalty and nobility, and all that sort of thing, for he ascribes to the “system” what he himself has done to make Britain great, but his wife and children are nearer to him than Her Majesty or My Lord, and he is beginning to ask why he is yearly getting worse off, while Her Majesty and My Lord are living even more luxuriously and expensively than ever?

When a strong, vigorous race of men get to asking themselves this question, it is high time that Her Majesty and My Lord begin to look out for themselves. The French peasantry and the French artisans made it very warm for the “Divine Righters” several times, and finally they have a republic that will endure; not the best republic in the world, but a very good attempt at one; as good as we could expect from Frenchmen.

Farming in England doesn’t pay much better than in Ireland, and the reason for it, as in Ireland, is summed up in the one word, rent. In Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Cambridgeshire, there are hundreds upon hundreds of farms vacant, and doing nothing, the reason being the insecurity of tenant farmers and the rottenness of land ownership. It all comes from the fact that in England as in Ireland, the fee simple of the land is in the hands of the few, and that the few owners regard the tenants as so many cows to be milked for their infernal extravagancies, and that they are so stupid that they cannot be made to understand that there is a point beyond which the tenant cannot go, and that when that point is reached something must break.

LAND TROUBLES IN ENGLAND.

One farm I saw was a good piece of land of two hundred and eighty acres. It lies as dead as Julius Cæsar, and is growing up to thistles. Why? Because the rent is four hundred pounds a year, or two thousand dollars. It has been screwed up to that point by successive owners, till the closestlabor and the most starving economy will not pay the rent. It would not pay it anywhere on the globe.

In Nottinghamshire the “Noble” proprietors are having their farms left upon their hands for the same reasons, and they are attempting to farm them by their agents, practically evicting the skilled labor which was born upon the soil and is best fitted to cultivate it.

These owners are those whose debts compel them to get something out of their land. They either attempt to farm them themselves, or they make leases at a rent just low enough to induce their tenants to continue.

MEATH LADS AT CROSSAKEEL.

But there is another class that is not so merciful—or rather who are not compelled to be just, and the English nobleman is never just except upon compulsion. These are the drones who are actually rich, and have an income from some plunder outside of their lands. They will not make leases at all, for fear of losing the game! They want this beautiful land to grow up into shelter for hares and birds and all that sort of thing, for the sake of the pleasure of shooting in the season. The distress of the evicted tenant—eviction by reason of exorbitantrent is as certain as eviction for non-payment—is nothing to them. They must have their preserves of game; they must have their sport.

The process is the same in England as it is in Ireland. The landlord puts his estates in the hands of an agent, selecting for the purpose a man with a heart of flint and a face of brass, one who knows no mercy, and who would not do a kind act were he paid for it.

The tenant appeals to him for a reduction, but he might as well ask mercy of a tiger. Then in his despair goes to the landlord.

“My good sir,” says the landlord, beaming upon him benevolently, “I know nothing about these things. The matter is entirely in the hands of Mr. Smithson, my agent. Go to him.”

“But I have been to him and he will do nothing.”

“Really I regret it. But Mr. Smithson knows all about it—I don’t. If he, with a knowledge of the situation—that is what he is there for—can do nothing, I cannot. I am not to be expected to know anything about it, nor can I meddle with business that is his.”

And the poor devil of a tenant, with the prospect of starving on the land or emigrating from the only place on earth which to him is a home, goes away sadly, and My Lord or the Rev., as the case may be, drops his agent a note, saying:—“Jobson was here to get a reduction of his rent. He will stay, and can be made to pay. Be firm with him.”

Then the agent tells Jobson that lowering the rent is out of the question—and Jobson stays, for he does not want to leave. He buys his artificial manures and his fertilizers from the agent, for he can get credit nowhere else, the agent has a handsome commission from the manufacturer, and so between the agent and the landlord, the manufacturer and the usurer, and the rest of them, Jobson works fourteen hours a day only in the end to either lie down and die or by the help of friends get away to America.

THE COST OF “SPORT.”

I know one tenant who, dissatisfied with an agent’s apology for serious and unreasonable raising of his rent, determined to see the duke himself. At the interview His Grace said he really knew nothing about the matter; he had put the re-valuinginto the hands of the most eminent man recommended to him; and, in short, if the tenant did not feel comfortable, it was open to him to leave and let another man come in at the new terms. Now this was the cruel truth, but only part of the truth. The tenant could not quit without tremendous sacrifice of his property—to say nothing of his home-love and other feelings. So he answered, “Your Grace, I cannot leave without ruinous loss; I have farmed well for many years; I can get nothing else at my time of life; and hence your power to oppress me.”

All England is dotted with unoccupied farms, and these blotches upon the fair face of nature are becoming more frequent every year.

There are in England about five hundred packs of hounds, numbering about eighty each, or forty thousand in all. The hunting horses number about one hundred and fifteen thousand, and the yearly cost of these hunting establishments is estimated at more than forty-five million dollars.

A MAYO FARMER.

These estimates do not include the original cost of the establishments, it is merely the annual expense. The first cost goes up into hundreds of thousands, for enormous prices are paid for good hunters and the better breeds of hounds.

And this hunting is no joke to the farmer. The horsemen and the hounds go across the country, and it matters little to them what damage is done to crops, grounds and animals. The tenant has no rights that the landlord is bound to respect, and he must submit to whatever burdens are imposed upon him.

It may be necessary to keep up the “good old English customs,” and to encourage “manly sports,” but are not the stomachs of the tenants and the stomachs of the tenant’s children worthy of some consideration? And then if killing game is a sport to be encouraged to keep up English manliness, why not give the tenantry, who, after all, do the fighting, a shy at it? Why keep all the good things for the nobility? John Hodge could improve his markmanship and his manhood by having an occasional shot at a deer, or a hare, and the deer or hare would not be an unacceptable addition to his remarkably short commons at table. But were John to presume to be seen with a gun in his hand he would be shot at by a burly game keeper, and if not killed would be arrested, tried, convicted and transported. What is My Lord’s amusement is John Hodge’s crime.

Inasmuch as the British government is for one class only, that class takes mighty good care of itself. Men in favor with the ruling classes are pensioned for life, and in many cases the pension goes beyond life, and is handed down to descendants on more pleas than is comprehensible. The army, the navy, the law departments, the State departments, the—well, if there is a department in the English government that is not like a comet, the pension tail ten times as long as the department nucleus, I have not found it.

The list of pensioners set in very small type, two columns to the page, occupy twenty-two large pages. And this enormous list is made up not of the common soldiers and sailors, but entirely of what are called gentlemen pensioners—men who were foisted into office as the younger sons of the nobility, or “sisters, cousins and aunts,” and after a few years of loafing about the government offices retired upon life pensions.

A fair sample of these pensions is that of the Duke of Schomberg. The duke was killed at the battle of the Boyne, in the year 1690, and a pension of six thousand pounds or thirty thousand dollars per annum was given his heirs. It is estimated that this family, the heirs of a foreign mercenary, has received from the British government the enormous sum of six hundred and eighty thousand pounds, or in American money three million four hundred thousand dollars! And this for his being a favorite of William of Orange, a Dutch King!

THE ROYAL FAMILY.

Rev. J. Smith, whoever he may be, served at the Lord knows what, twenty-three years, at a yearly salary of three hundred and sixty-four pounds, and was retired at fifty-six years of age with the comfortable pension for life of two hundred and thirty-one pounds annually! And so on you go, wading through twenty-two closely printed pages, two columns to the page, of just such cases, the yearly allowance for these excrescencies footing up for the year 1879 the enormous sum of one million three hundred and thirteen thousand two hundred and fifty-eight pounds! It is a good thing to be the favorite of a duke.

MAYO PEASANTRY.

The Royal family have a remarkably soft thing of it. Her Royal Highness, the Princess Royal, receives a yearly allowance of eight thousand pounds, the Prince of Wales receives the snug sum of forty thousand pounds, which he manages to squander in questionable ways (this does not include the grants Parliament has made at divers and sundry times to pay his debts), the Princess of Wales ten thousand pounds, Prince Alfred ten thousand pounds from his marriage and fifteen thousand pounds from his majority—twenty-five thousand pounds in all—Prince Arthur fifteen thousand pounds, Princess Alice six thousand pounds, Princess Louise, she of Canada, six thousand pounds, Princess Mary five thousand pounds, Prince Leopold fifteen thousand pounds, Princess Augusta three thousand pounds, Duke of Cambridge twelve thousand pounds, and inaddition the last mentioned fraud has princely pay as field marshal, general, colonel, and no one knows what else.

Whoever chooses may figure up what all this costs the people of Great Britain. I have not the patience.

And bear in mind the fact that this does not represent any portion of what these absorbers take out of the people. This is merely pin money for the female leeches and pocket money for the male! In addition to this they have enormous estates all over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales; they have offices beyond number, with a salary attached to each, and they have allowances for everything under heaven. If the tax-payer breathes it costs him something, for the nobility have revenues based upon everything.

The Royal household is a curiosity. There’s the Lord Steward, who draws two thousand pounds a year; the Lord Treasurer and Comptroller, nine hundred pounds each; Master of the Household, twenty one hundred and fifty-eight pounds; Secretary of the Board of Green Cloth, whatever that may be, three hundred pounds; Paymaster, five hundred pounds; Lord Chamberlain, two thousand pounds; Keeper of the Privy Purse, two thousand pounds; Assistant Keeper of the Privy Purse, one thousand pounds. It takes two men to keep the privy purse, and it is large enough to require it. Then there are eight Lords in waiting, who get for waiting seven hundred and two pounds each, and there are grooms in waiting, grooms of the privy chamber, extra grooms in waiting, four gentlemen ushers, one “Black Rod,” whatever he may do I don’t know, but for being a “Black Rod” he gets two thousand pounds a year. Then there’s a clerk of the closet, mistress of the robes, ladies of the bed-chamber, and bed-chamber women, maids of honor, and poet laureate, and examiner of plays.

The poet laureate gets five hundred pounds a year for writing a very bad ode in praise of Her Majesty on each birthday, which must be a very bitter pill for him, he being actually a poet. But he does not give the worth of the money, for there is absolutely nothing in the Queen of England to praise. Mr. Tennyson has a very hard place.

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