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. Under some 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.