Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 April 1878 — The Irish Murder. [ARTICLE]

The Irish Murder.

The assassination of the Earl of Leitrim can not, of course, be excused by any reference to his harshness as a landlord ; but it is a comfort to know that the cause of it was peculiar to him and to his estates. While human nature remains what it is, it can not symj athize fully with a landlord who carries his legal rights to the extent of oppression and cruelty. Particularly is this true of an Irish landlord exercising almost absolute power over thousands of people who have neither the means to pay their rent where they are nor to move elsewhere. The Earl of Leitrim had the character of a hard man. The press dispatches, which are always conservative in tone, report that he was shot opposite a ccttage from which he had recently evicted a widow ; that eighty-nine of his tenants were under notice to quit; that his Lordship was very particular and exacting in his dealings with his tenantry, visiting with unsparing severity the slightest infraction of “the rules of the estate;” and that the Ribbon Society have a strong hold upon the county, owing chiefly to his severity. All the evidence thus far in points to the conclusion that he made “the rules of the estate” supreme, and ofdinary humanity subordinate ; it is not surprising that inhumanity, having so illustrious an example to follow, at last rose against him and destroyed him. This shocking affair is an indication that land-reform in Ireland has not been carried to the point which it was supposed to have reached. It is true that no Parliamentary measures can make landlords merciful, and Mr. Gladstone’s bill was not intended to accomplish so sweeping a change; and it was believed that the public sentiment which demanded and supported that bill had by this time taken firm hold of the Irish*landlords. It was supposed that the policy of wholesale eviction had been generally abandoned, and, the evils of absenteeism having been cured, that relations of mutual confidence and esteem had been, for the most part, established between landlords and tenants. This may still be true of the mass of tbe people, but the development of so shocking a case of barbarism on both sides seems to show that a good deal remains to be done.— Chicago Tribune.