a point is conclusive. He was the first and most important witness summoned before Mr. Maguire's committee. His professional position, his experience, the peculiar nature of his duties, his well-known calmness and impartiality, and above all his manifest sympathy with the cause of the tenant, invest his evidence on matters of fact with an authority that cannot be gainsaid. And it stands to reason that matters should have fallen out as Judge Longfield has described. What inducements had the poor people to stay? Their staff of life had withered in their hands and could not be replaced. A plough could hardly have turned in
counter statements, denying the general truth of the accusation, or alleging great exaggeration in it. It seems to be hardly the province of a digest, such as this, to enter into the question of the veracity of the witnesses in each particular instance of alleged oppressive consolidation, as these instances only affected the characters of particular individuals, and not the general question as relating to the country at large. It may suffice, that it appears that, in some cases, tenants have been ejected for the purpose of consolidating farms; but that there are few estates upon which evictions for this purpose have occurred, though on some of those few estates many tenants have been ejected.
"It appears, too, that in general, where such evictions have occurred, the ejected tenants owed considerable arrears of rent, which, in most cases, were remitted, and that some allowance in money or value was made to them. The farms, too, from which they were removed, seem to have usually been below the minimum size capable of affording a maintenance or profitable and constant employment to an average family."
