St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1886-11-11
The Irish Landlord System.
GeorQe Moore in Paris FfqarO.

In Ireland the landlord does absO-
lntely nothing save to grab all the
money that the peasant can scrape to-
gether. | am an Irish landlord.
have always done, now do, and will
continue to do, just as the other land
lords, for, it is as impossible for me as
the rest of my class to do otherwise /;
but that does not prevent me from
acknowledging the fact that it js a
worn out system, at war with the 10Th
century and something that should be
at once abolished. In Ireland every
chicken that goes into the pot, every
glass of champagne drunk, every silk
robe that rustles on the street, every
rose worn at the ball, is so much
squeezed out of the misery of the peas
ants howell. A few years ago this
tribute-fOr that is what it is-was &C
cepted without IA murmur, just as feu-
dalism or slavery was accepted long
ago in other lands. But now the
scales have fallen from the eyes of the
nation and the sore is laid open i'm all
its ugliness, just as if the inner gar
ment had been removed from the ma
tional body, revealing the flesh cover
ed with scars and pustules. This
wound, which hitherto was only visi
BILE to few, you now see everywhere
in the most squalid districts of the
city as we'll us in the elegant and fash
iOnable quarters.
See that man yOnder, ill-bred and
dressed in u wOrn-Out suit, smoking a
black pipe at the end of the weed-in-
vaded terrace of the villa that he has
rented for the season. He is engaged
in conversation with his daughter, Il
young girl whose face is the picture of
sadness, and who is now wearing her
best dress, that skirt of torn, red cash
mere, buttOned at the back. She is
telling him that he ought to give her a
new costume to go to some tennis or
garden party in the neighbOrhOod. He
growls and tells her that he thinks it
would be better for her not to accept
any invitations to tennis parties for
the present year.
"What," she answered, edo you
want me then, to die ali old maid 2
You do not give me the least chance
to catch a husband L am not allowed
to go to a single place of amusement,
and no young man is ever invited to
be here"
At last the father with n groan draws
forth from his pocket roll or Oank
notes, black, greasy and ragged-edged
notes that have been torn and cut i'll
halves and pasted together again {;
notes that smell of chimney smoke, of
novels, of the sweat of the fields and
bitches notes that have been spat up
on for good luck by their owners at
fairs; notes that are epitome of the
hungry and suffering of the peasant in
the west of Ireland.
The girl goes off skipping and hop
ping with three or four of the greasy
notes to buy new dress and to dream
of the husband she will never get,
while the father relapses into his dark
reverie, CRASHES his teeth at the land
league and dreams of the possibility
of extracting from his tenants in the
autumn what they refused to pay in
the spring; and |, as beheld the pic
ture-the greasy notes, the young girl
hunting for husband, the broken
landlord and the Matchmaking villa,
famed by its garden of weeds-I read
in all that, as in the epitaph on "a
tomb stone, the history of a type of
civilization soon to vanish forever.