Mr. Balfour further asserted that wherever any hardship has been
inflicted by recent evictions, the hardship is due entirely to the "Plan of Campaign" and the terrorism it exercises over tenants who have no interest, —indeed, the very reverse of an interest,—in acceding to it, and not to the law. For example, he quoted the case of a tenant holding a tenancy for which he pays £2 a year, who had demanded a reduction of a certain per-centage, while the landlord had offered him a less reduc- tion, the difference between what the tenant had been in- duced to demand and what the landlord had offered being exactly three-halfpence a week. On a question of three-half- pence a week, this poor man, being hounded on by the priests and politicians, had seen himself driven out of his house with his wife and children, and he was now a pensioner of the Land League, with no prospect for the future but the workhouse. Mr. Balfour expressed his profound pity for poor tenants in this position, and when one of his audience called out, "Serve him right !" he said that he could not feel indignation against him, though he did feel indignation against those politicians who for their own political purposes had driven him into sacrificing his home and livelihood for a consideration which even to him was trivial. Yet this is a typical instance of the evictions now taking place in Ireland.
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