Poor Ireland

The special Land ('omniissioner oí the Dublin Freeman's Journal writes as follows from Ballyhaunis, eounty Mayo, under date of August 31 : I desire to record in the most solenm words I can command the sense of dismay with which I iind myself wading day after day into deeper depths of misery in this eounty. When I say that almost the entile community appears to me to be separated only by a íilm from an unknown abyss, I ask you to believe that I do not use language of this sort lightly. Even within the last few days the gloom has frightfully thickened. The prospect of au abundant harvest is at an end ; the chance even of a tolerable one hangs dangerously in the balance. The lightnings of Sunday night, the rains or winds which have i!igoi aiUwr iiaüv or niehtly ever since, have le"t the footprints of their vergeance deep beliind them. The two props of the Mayo farmer's liomestead have collapsed miserably upon his head. The potatoes are bad, the turf is worse. The f uel, which in winter is as the breath of life to the people, lias been drowned out of all chance of drying. The little troops of donkeys, laden with wickerwork panniers of turf, which may be seen crossing the wastes of Mavo, like small caravans of the desert.have this year a sinecure. Turf is in some places three, in some places four, in some places live times the price it fetched last year. In Ballyhaunis to-day it is dearer than coal, which costs 25s. (id. per ton delivered. The cry of bad or blighted potatoes has suddenly arisen here, there and everywhere. The ominous stench of the tainted iields reached my nostrils in the course of various country drives. The rougher kind of country cattle are simply unsalable. They are not paying tor their salt. ïlumdered at by'the heavens, driven f rom the fairs, rejected f rom the banks, crawling f rom mealshop to mealshop for credit, beaten even out of the English harvest niarket, turn where he will the Irisli peasant, tlie most uncomplahiing drudge that ever bowed his back to labor, iinds himself ïmprisóned within a cage of debt whose walls, like those of the mediseval torture chamber, seem to be closing in to stranggle him. The agony is not confined to one parish, one district - not even, I ani afraid, to one county. In district after district, wherejl have seen shopkeepers and farmers knotted together, hand and foot, in seeniingly inextricable debt, somebody has always been found to say : "This is happiness compared with tlie way people are on Clare Island," etc Four great absentee proprietors alone own 314,000 acres of the land oí Mayo. The richest part of these they farm for their own profit or graze with their own black cattle ; out of the remaining mountains and morasses to whlch the peasants still cling they have a revenue of L100,000 per year, which goes to adorn their Énglish slimmer gardeiis and Uiafng tuöujs, and makes nó' other rettfrn to tlie wretched soil from which it is wrung than the wages of a retinue of agents, herds and baliffs. It must be recollected that the storm is but gathering and has not yet burst. Up to the present the tenant is simply penniless, and no powers of reasoning, forcé or law can torture out of him what he has not. The landlord or shopkeeper can no more pound gold out of him than the alchemist of old with his pestle and ivortar. In a few weeks it will be otherwise. The real struggle will begin when the harvest has been reaped, when there is something to seize, something to sell. Tben will come the scramble of the landlord for his rent, of the shopkeeper for his debts, of the farmers themselves for lif e and food. One stands aghast at the frightful moment. The premonitory symptoms are already in the air. Decrees of ejectment were obtained at the last Westport Sessions against a number of the tenantry on a well-known property here. Decrees for the amount of rent due were obtained at the same time. Nobody knows the moment when they may be enforced, and a whole townland depopulated.