20 OCTOBER 1894, Page 13

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

"POOR PADDY-LAND !"

rTo TEE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I feel constrained to challenge some of your corre- spondent's (" Vactius Viator's ") statements regarding the agricultural habits of my countrymen. Misunderstood and misguided as Ireland has been in the past, it does seem hard that a gentleman who rushes through the country by a beaten track on a holiday excursion, seeing but a very limited portion of the land or its inhabitants, should employ the medium of your powerful journal to excite English prejudices by representing his casual and imperfect ex- periences as the real condition of things prevailing amongst the farming classes of the country. I inclose you ray card. You will observe my vocation, and I presume you will recog- nise that few persons could have better opportunities of studying the habits of the tenant farmers of Ireland than I have. I live in the centre of Ulster, amongst a tenantry admittedly distinguished for thrift and hardworking industry. The forefathers of most of them were planted here by the English, amidst the woods and wilds of a prairie country, to maintain the Protestant religion, and support the Union with England. These conditions they and their descendants faith- I ally fulfilled, and whilst performing their obligations they did not eat the bread of idleness, they converted moorland and forest into fruitful fields and waving meadows, and they are to-day as active and energetic in their agricultural pursuits, as the tenants of any county in England ; ergo, they are not likely to stand idly by with folded arms and witness the fruits of their labour decaying in their fields. Within the past few -days, I have travelled five hundred miles through different parts of Ulster, and I failed to see the oats and barley uncut or unhoused (except in cold, late, mountain districts), or the haycocks standing in the meadows, as your correspondent unfairly asks your readers to believe ; "one swallow does not make a summer," and a passing conversation with one lazy farmer, who, as likely as not, was amusing himself -chaffing " Vacuus Viator," should not be represented as typical of the habits and character of the farmers of the Province of Ulster. "Vaccine Viator," you say, "is not -exactly an average Englishman, but one of the most experienced -observers alive." Pray excuse me observing, that possessing, as I am sure he does, all the generous instincts of his country- men, his letters to the Spectator serve to convince one more forcibly that no Englishman, no matter how keen his sense of -observation may be, can ever thoroughly appreciate the Celtic character; and your correspondent's ignorance of the position mad action of the responsible and respected gentlemen, legal and lay, who are entrusted with the administration of the Irish Land Acts, may well be classed in the category of his other misrepresentations of the "Poor Land," upon whose honest toiling peasantry he has endeavoured to cast an

catworthy slur.—I am, Sir, Sze., AN ULSTERMAN.