SOME OF THE DUKE OF LEINSTER’S KILDARE TENANTS.
THE QUESTION OF LEASE.
This is the way England obtained possession of Ireland. This is the title by which My Lord This, and My Lord That, holds the lands he exacts rent for to-day. This is his deed to the property upon which five millions of people are eating two meals of potatoes a day, that he may gamble and keep mistresses in London and Paris.
“Why does he sign a lease, the conditions of which he cannot fulfil?”
There are no leases. It is not as it is in America, where the tenant and the landlord come together, and bargain and wrangle over the terms, and when an agreement is arrived at both are bound by the terms thereof. There is no lease, no writing, no courts, except for the landlord. The tenant is born upon the ground which British brute force, the only principle there is in British government, robbed him of. The new landlord enforced upon him by the pikes of Elizabeth’s banditti, said to him, “The rent of this land will be one shilling an acre.” He could go nowhere else. He knew no other country, and so he bowed his head and built with his own hands a cabin—in the subjugation the old homes were entirely destroyed—and went to work upon land, forty acres of which, in its natural state, would not pasture a goat.
Before it had any value whatever the bog had to be cut off, the stones dug out—in short, the land had to be made. They call it “reclaiming.”
The tenant has no lease. He is purely and simply in the power of the landlord. Whatever rent the landlord chooses to exact, that is the rent he must pay. He is a tenant at will—and the will is the will of his landlord, the English robber who lives in luxury in London and Paris, and permits himself to be fleeced by sharpers, who, differing from the English, use finesse instead of force. In brute force the English cannot be excelled; when it comes to decent robbery, the kind of robbery where the victim has some sort of compensation in the knowing that it was accomplished by superior acumen, the English are babies.