Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/60

 flesh and blood before our very eyes. It is a haunted hall where memories become realities again, instead of realities passing into memories. The struggle for Catholic Emancipation, it is true, was not of this order. It was part of a larger world movement into which the Nation was compelled by the leadership of one man. It may or may not have been the best beginning to have made; its fruits were unreal; and the victory was soon lost sight of by the Nation. But the land-war arose spontaneously from the people in a form that suggested an ancient memory. Before it found expression the compiler of the Devon Commission Digest remarked "that the tenant claims what he calls a tenant-right in the land, irrespective of any legal claim vested in him, or of any improvement effected by him." He mentions it as a curious thing; and to him, with his foreign State-idea, it was indeed a curious thing; yet it was only the first re-assertion of a very old memory. For the Nation was not asserting a tenant's right, but re-asserting a freeman's right. And inasmuch as the landlordry was now mainly absentee it was making that re-assertion in a solid national formation.

It was for this moment it had clung to the land with such fidelity. During the first forty years of the century rents were increased by thirty, forty, and in some cases fifty per cent. On an average it took a man 250 days of the year to clear his rent; and this meant that the people could only live on the dregs of the land and on sorrel and cattle-blood. Yet still they clung. When Pestilence and