“We don’t want wurruk. We’re rich, and are enjoyin’ ourselves.”
Mickey Doolan was the evicted tenant, and had the agent offered them a thousand pounds an hour he could not have got a stroke from one of them.
This is boycotting. The process was first tried upon a Captain Boycott, hence the term. It was an invention of Mr. James Redpath, as I said, and a very clever one it is.
To prevent the evicted tenant from taking another farm, and reclaiming it for the benefit of My Lord and his agent, the Land League makes him the princely allowance of three shillings a week, on which he supports his family, and it finds him some sort of a shelter. My Lord and his agent have the privilege of getting in the crops themselves, else they rot in the field.
There is no violence, no shooting or mobbing—only passive resistance. The British government cannot compel a man to labor, and there is left the Irish the blessed boon of dying from starvation. Possibly the government will make labor compulsory—it would not be worse than most of the laws for the government of the unhappy island now in force. But so far the Irishman need not labor for an unjust landlord unless he chooses to, and that means he need not labor for any of them.
There is no such thing as a just landlord in Ireland. Ireland is a cow to be milked, and just enough potatoes are given her to make the milk.
ONE LANDLORD WHO WAS KILLED.
You hear a great deal in America about shooting landlords. How many landlords have been shot? It is much to the discredit of the Irish race that more have not been; but the melancholy fact is, only a very few have been put out of the way by buck-shot. When I look over the meagre list I blush for the Irish. It is something in the way of an offset to know that they are not permitted to have arms, and it may be plead in extenuation that the police and soldiery are all pervading; but, nevertheless, it does seem as though a few more might be picked off. If they cannot have fire-arms, there are at least pitch-forks and stones. Clearly, the Irish are not so public-spirited as they should be.