On Saturday last, Lord Penhryn, as chairman of the North
Wales Property Defence Association, gave evidence before the Welsh Land Commission. He denied most emphatically the suggestion, " made in a question in the syllabus of the Commission," that there existed in Wales any combination of landowners for the purpose of rejecting tenants of a parti- cular class. He then went on to show that the agitation had not its origin in any real sense of grievance, but had been deliberately fomented "by journalistic sensational writing in the vernacular Press by agitators totally unconnected with any interest in land, and with no other object than that of securing for the proprietors of those papers a pecuniary advantage by promoting their circulation." With this object in view, the vernacular Press confused the Land question with the Church question, threatened landowners, in the event of their venturing to support the Church, and revived obsolete prejudices against England. There is, we do not doubt, a great deal of truth in this view, and we agree that the allegations of oppression are purely fictitious. Still, the fact of the agita- tion remains. We have tried to show elsewhere that what it really rests on is the inherent hatred of a Celtic race to the English land system,—the most reasonable and most profit- able in the world for the tenant who is a man of reason, but one that seems oppressive to men who are at the bottom governed by sentiment, and also suffer from a fierce land- hunger.
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