Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/234

Rh be confined to the least respectable portion of the community; and, in the next, we must entirely dissociate it from the more subtle feeling of uneasiness which is said to pervade the minds of the tenant farmers of the south and west. What I see reason to dispute, is that the hostility manifested towards the Government of England by the Irish in America, in the great manufacturing towns of England and of Scotland, and by the non-occupying population of Ireland itself, has been occasioned by laws affecting the tenure of land, or is likely to be modified by any change in them.

Fixity of tenure would not have materially impeded the exodus after the potato famine, nor have affected the action of the landlords, in so far as they may have contributed to it; for even that fantastic desideratum—as advocated by Mr. Butt—presupposes good husbandry and the payment of rent; two conditions of which the great majority of the small occupiers who either left of their own accord or were evicted during these last five-and-twenty years were from the circumstances of the case incapable; so, even admitting that much of the ill-feeling of which Fenianism is the exponent is to be traced to the resentment of those who emigrated, it is clear that so long as the landlord is to be left with any control or proprietorship at all over his land neither his conduct nor their opinion of it would have been materially modified. The