Mr. Bence Jones, a man of great energy and force
of char- acter, who has long devoted himself to the task of developing the agricultural resources of Ireland in a thoroughly generous spirit, and who has laid out, in the course of forty years, more than £25,000 on " permanent improvements," sends to Wednes- day's and Friday's Ti711C8 very striking pictures of the gross tyranny which, under the influence of the Land League, is now dominant in Ireland, and attempting to estrange the best land- lords from the most contented tenants. Mr. Bence Jones's articles in Macmillan appear to have offended the leaders of the revolution, and some of them have threatened Mr. Bence Jones's tenants, if they should venture to pay him more rent than Griffith's valuation ; and as he refused this, the tenants have been terrorised into refusing their rent altogether, while the labourers have been called off his estate. Worse still, the Cork Steamship Company have been terrorised into refusing transport to his cattle, because other owners threatened to withdraw theirs if Mr. Jones's cattle were taken,—a cowardly and illegal act, which may, one would hope, injure them much more than a proper courage would have done. But when Mr. Bence Jones bursts into a passion with the Government, accuses it of indifference to these things, and worse still, of an indif- ference calculated in order to "force submission to an unjust measure of confiscation," he only transforms himself from a man of great pith into a man who thinks evil intolerable the moment it touches himself. We should like to know what the Government could do to cure this deep-rooted evil in a moment, or even to eradicate its symptoms. Would an illegal suspen- sion of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the seizure of the Land Leaguers, relieve Mr. Bence Jones's tenants of their fear of a. League which embraces hundreds of thousands whose hearts are in their pockets, or else their pockets in their hearts P
