The Paducah evening sun. [volume] (Paducah, Ky.) 1906-1929, 1909-03-05
IreIand's Most Hated Landlord
OBSERVATION-DISCLOSURES,

Lord cianricarde. the most exc
Grated man in Ireland, is about to
lose his property there. His enorm-
Gus estate of O.n00 acres is to be
taken from him BY the Irish Land
commissioners and distributed among
the Galway peasantry-of course, at
fair valuation.
For. fifty years the name OF this
peer has been the foremost in all the
long agony of Irish land agitation,
with its annals of crime and misery
and its slowly evolved Imprisonment
and solution. He Is not only an abb
sentee landlord, drawing rents from
vast estates without returning it in
any expenditure thereon, but abso-
lutely deaf to all appeals from the
impoverished districts which yield
him golden tribute.
Some Of the Incidents of the Mar
quis' career as a landlord would not
be believable were they not simple
matters of cold history. Even his
own agents have pleaded with him IN
vain to make some abatement of his
rents in Ireland during times of acute
famine and distress. There was a.
ways one reply-when there was a
reply at all. Simple refusal. One
of these agents, his request ignored.
was murdered in cold blood by the
outraged peasantry. who did not
know of ais pleas in their behalf.
Bailiffs, policemen. and those who
took the places OF evictei tenants
have been murdered on these Galway
farms.
Men who took the agency for the
lestates and survived the ordeal re-
] signed; one of them sued the MAJ
lquis, the widow of another gave
\ damning evidence against his lord
ship before the Parnell commission.
Where all the agitators and his own
ltenary and agents failed, so keen
an upholder of the sacred rights of
property as the Lord st. Alwyn tried
Ito succeed. When, as Sir Michael
Hicks-Beach. he was secretary for
ireland, he wrote letter calling up
on Lord Clanricarde to behave as
other landlords and to make some
labatements to his starving tenantry.
Failing this. he threatened to leave
him without police assistance in the
collection of his rents. All in vain;
deaf to appeals and entreaties, deaf
to the voice of starvation and mis-
cry, he was deaf also to threats
whether they came from his enemies
or from the heads of the government.
! unbendins, unheed.ng, he went on
the fearful tenor of his way, and gave
as little heed to the threats of the
government as he did to the spectacle
of starving families camped in winter
weather outside the holdings from
which the troops had evicted them.
So the long record of crime and vio-
lence, of suffering and death. went
on, and still goes on, till this last
victim of the Lord Commissioners
bids fair to end it forever.
In Ireland the Marquis of Clanri-
cardc is absolutely unknown. for in
nearly fifty years he has only once
visited the country, and that was
when he went to the funeral of his
father. thirty-four years ago In
England he is almost as mysterious
and elusive figure. The public do
not know him. and when he made
sudden and dramatic visit to the
House of Lords eighteen months ago.
and actually took part in a debate,
members of both houses scrambled
into the peers chamber with as much
curioslty as If II had been the Sultan
of Turkey or the Kaiser who was
up" YET the man who addressed
'My Lords" is the most execrated
man in all Ireland. and throughout
the United Kingdom those OF his own
order regard him as its greatest
enemy.-Harper's Weekly.