AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND
the infamous land laws, are the machinery that has brought you to this pass, and, as the very Grand Masters say nothing at all about mending these, let them keep their "addresses of loyalty" to themselves.
Then as for the mere "Repealers," they have long been asking you to join in an effort to restore the Irish Parliament as it stood before the Union. That is to say, to place Ireland and Irishmen and all that is theirs under the feet of the Irish "gentry," instead of the English and Irish gentry combined; and then our "Repealers" expect you to believe that straight-way, on the assembling of Irish peers and Irish nominees of peers in College Green, by some magic or other, tenant-right and the rights of industry will be at once guaranteed to the people.
This kind of babble you have hitherto very properly neglected and despised. While a landlord Parliament rules over Ireland, whether the same sit in College Green or in Westminster, no popular rights will ever be acknowledged by "law." This is a fundamental axiom in politics; if any of you doubted it before, I hope that the manner in which you have been defrauded in the matter of Tenant-right within the last four years has at length convinced that doubter. Four years ago Lord Devon and several other landlord-commissioners found that in the North there actually was such a "practice" as the sale of good-will so much these landlord-commissioners were forced to admit; but they took care to call it a mere practice, not a right, and a practice of selling not a right
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