A meeting was held in Cork on Sunday, on the
land laws, at. which 15,000 persons were present, including six Members of Parliament ; and Mr. Shaw, who may be taken as the represen- tative of the moderate Home-rulers, made his proposal. It is that a Commission should be appointed to sell the lands to the tenantry, and that the surplus fund of the Irish Church should be used to pay expenses and furnish a basis for the neces- sary compensations, a tolerably Radical proposal. All the speakers advocated compensations, but no speaker offered any calculation, however rough, as to the amount that would be re- quired, and the universal spirit of honesty did not extend to the mob. Not only did one man, who was rebuked by Mr. Shaw, want to shoot a, farmer for paying too much rent, but another wanted to shoot Sir Augustus Warren for buying a farm at. thirty-seven years' purchase. It was more than the tenant could afford to pay, he could only give twenty-two years', and he lost his chance. Nobody suggested that if Sir Augustus had been comfortably shot, and the tenant had got the land, the owner should be compensated for his lost fifteen years' purchase. Yet he would have been deprived of it, just as much as if it had been taken in cash out of his strong-box. Are the tenants under the expropriation scheme to pay market values, or not P That is the first question for Mr. Parnell and his friends to settle.
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