e Czar of Russia squirms upon his throne, not because he is
necessarily a bad man, but because he is the head and center of a
condition of things which squeezes the life out of the people. His
subjects hurl infernal machines at the tyrant because he represents
the system which oppresses them. But the evil is far deeper than the
throne, and cannot be remedied by striking the occupant of it-_the
throne itself must be rooted out and demolished_. So the Irish
question has a more powerful motive to foment agitation and murder
than the landlord and landlordism. The landlord simply stands out as
the representative of the real grievance. To remove _him_ would not
remove the evil; agitation would not cease; murder would still stalk
abroad at noonday. _The real grievance is the false system which makes
the landlord possible._ The appropriation of the fertile acres of the
soil of Ireland, which created and maintains a privileged class, a
class that while performing no labor, wrings from the toiler, in the
shape of rents, so much of the produce of his labor that he cannot on
the residue support himself and those dependent upon him aggravates
the situation. It is this system which constitutes the real grievance
and makes the landlord an odious loafer with abundant cash and the
laborer a constant toiler always upon the verge of starvation.
Evidently, therefore, to remove the landlord and leave the system of
land monopoly would not remove the evil. Destroy the latter and the
former would be compelled to go.

Herein lies the great social wrong which has turned the beautiful
roses of freedom into thorns to prick the hands of the black men of
the South; which made slavery a blessing, paradoxical as it may
appear, and freedom a curse. It is this great wrong which has crowded
the cities of the South with an ignorant pauper population, making
desolate fields that once bloomed "as fair as a garden of the Lord,"
where now the towering oak and pine-tree flourish, instead of the corn
and cotton which gladdened the heart and filled the purse. It was this
gigantic iniquity which created that arrogant class who have exhausted
the catalogue of violence to obtain power and the lexicon of sophistry
for arguments to extenuate the exceeding heinousness of crime. How
could it be otherwise? To tell a man he is free when he has neither
money nor the opportunity to make it, is simply to mock him. To tell
him he has no master when he cannot live except by p