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Show POVERTY OF IRELAND'S POOR. (By Maude Gonne, Irish Joan of Am) Ireland is getting poorer and poorer year by year in'inhabitunts and in substance, sub-stance, and it can all be traced by sure and steady guideposts to English misrule. By reason of emigration the population is constantly decreasing. The strong and vigorous, the young men and young women are coming over to America and going to other countries where there is promise of liberty lib-erty and the chance to live. All that force is drained from Ireland, and, of course, she is getting poorer. There are many movements on foot supposed to be for the benefit of the pour. Some believe in Horace Plunk-itt's Plunk-itt's creamery movement; some believe that knitting industries will solve the problem; some in co-operation. They are all good in their way and are all well meant, and if they succeed in preventing pre-venting even a few individuals leaving the country so much the better. But they will never touch the root of the matter. Ireland can hope for no prosperity so long as English rule exists there. For the whole object of the English policy is the extermination of the Irish people from Ireland. It may be veiled, but it underlies every movement of England in regard to Ireland. England destroyed, one by one, every industry in Ireland. By a system imposing im-posing an export tax on every fabric sent out of Ireland, it destroyed our export ex-port trade in woolen, leather and silk manufacture. It destroyed Ireland's! salt meat industry iri the same way. When these industries were destroyed for lack of outside market, then the English removed the export tax. By that time the people had nothing left but the land, and the land was owned by English landlords or Irish landlords of English sympathies. The leases were put up at auction, and because be-cause all other means of a livelihood had been cut off, the people were forced into a strong competition for the lands and thev -u-er vm im rentals. And the rents all went to England to be spent there. Not a penny came back into Ireland. Now that our manufactures had been destroyed and Ireland made an agricultural country, the English introduced in-troduced free trade. A good thing for manufacturers, but destructive to the small agricultural landlord. The result is Ireland's pitiful poverty, pover-ty, with periodical famines, which are ever the signal for redoubled work by the English recruiting officer to force the starving people to Join the English army. In the last famine, two years ago when the people in the west were dying of starvation, in one village of eighteen houses, there were twenty deaths in one month, and in each house I visited , were five or six people lying on the ground in fever and starvation. The English refused to give help, and when the Irish members brought it up in the house of commons, instancing deaths from starvation, Mr. Balfour laughed at them and asked if England was expected ex-pected to send champagne to the Irish peasants. I traveled all through the famine-stricken famine-stricken -district, and by bringing the starving people together in, the towns and threatening to take the towns and take food if it were not given to them, I succeeded in getting a certain amount of help for them. It is self-evident, even though there were not too ample evidence and yearly year-ly demonstration, that English government govern-ment in Ireland has reduced the Irish people to the lowest stage of poverty, yet she goes still lower periodically when she actually starves has no 'food to eat, which is something for the comfortable com-fortable to think about. Ireland is naturally a fairly rich country, and so was quite capable of supporting 0,000,000 'of people when Queen Victoria came to the throne. Now that we have been reduced to 4,-500,000 4,-500,000 through Engliah miserovernment; our manufactories destroyed by export taxes and our farms made valueless by free trade, our people are worse off and there is more famine and starvation than ever. |