At a meeting in Dublin in the autumn of 1885, a parish priest, the Rev. Mr. Cantwell, described it as a "cardinal virtue" that "no one should take a farm from which another had been evicted," and called upon the people who heard him to "pass any such man by unnoticed, and treat him as an enemy in their midst." Public opinion and the law, if not the authorities of his church would make short work of any priest who talked in this fashion in New York. But in Ireland, and under the British Government, it seems they order things differently. So it occurred one day to the landlords thus assailed, as it did to the sea-lions of the Cape of Good Hope when the French sailors attacked them, that they might defend themselves.
To this end the Land Corporation was instituted, with a considerable capital at its back, and Mr. Kavanagh at its head. The "plan of campaign" of this Corporation is to take over from the landlords derelict lands and cultivate them, stocking them where that is necessary.
It is in this way that the derelict lands on the Ponsonby property at Youghal are now worked. But Mr. Kavanagh tells me that the men employed by the Corporation, of whom Father Keller spoke as a set of desperadoes or "_enfants perdus_," are really a body of resolute and capable working men farmers. Many, but by no means all of them, are Protestants and Ulstermen; and that they are up to their work would seem to be shown by the fact stated to me, that in no case so far have any of them been deterred and driven off from the holdings confided to them. A great part of the Luggacurren property of Lord Lansdowne is now worked by the Corporation; and Mr. Kavanagh was kind enough to let me see the accounts, which indicate a good business result for the current year on that property. This is all very interesting. But what a picture it presents of social demoralisation! And what is to be the end of it all? Can a country be called civilised in which a farmer with a family to maintain, having the capital and the experience necessary to manage successfully a small farm, is absolutely forbidden, on pain of social ostracism, and eventually on pain of death, by a conspiracy of his neighbours, to take that farm of its lawful owner at what he considers to be a fair rent? And how long can any civilisation of our complex modern type endure in a country in which such a state of things tolerated by the alleged Government of that country has to be met, and more or less partially mitigated, by deviating to the cultivation of farms rendered in this way derelict large amounts of capital which might be, and ought to be, far more profitably employed in other ways?