John Mitchel

“ It is this conspiracy of " gentry " and "capitalists," "doing what they like with their own," fearing not God, neither regarding Man, that have established such free trade in human bodies and souls that they sit now at ease as the gods of this lower world, and by the alembic of Money, and the crucible of starvation, extract from your blood, and sweat, and brain and marrow whatever there is in you marketable, whereby they may turn a penny and leave the offal of you to the poor houses or the fever hospital. ”

“ For every ruined farmer there is one destitute labourer the more, for every ejected cottier there is another pauper on the rates, and the still increasing rates weigh down faster and faster continually more and more of those who still struggle to earn their bread into the class which has given up the effort in despair, and thrown itself on the earnings of other men. ”

“ While a landlord Parliament rules over Ireland, whether the same sit in College Green or in Westminster, no popular rights will ever be acknowledged by "law." This is a fundamental axiom in politics; if any of you doubted it before, I hope that the manner in which you have been defrauded in the matter of Tenant-right within the last four years has at length convinced that doubter. Four years ago Lord Devon and several other landlord-commissioners found that in the North there actually was such a "practice" as the sale of good-will so much these landlord-commissioners were forced to admit ”

“ Thus also capitalists, having by their gigantic operations abolished all household and homespun manufactures, and having laws made to their hand by the other conspirators "the gentry" enabling them to combine, and forbidding poor men to combine against them under penalties, can wring out of the working classes (by the same enlightened system of fair competition) their health and strength and life—can take the pick and choice of them—use them up and fling them on a dunghill to die when they are useless. ”

“ Our great capitalists never think of manufacturing articles for their own countrymen in the home market—they must compete with foreign nations in foreign markets; and as all nations are less heavily taxed than these two unfortunate islands, the only way in which capitalists can meet the foreign manufacturer is by reducing and pinching, and continually pinching and reducing the wages of their own workmen. ”

“ There never were so many ejectments in Ulster counties at once as have been brought this very spring. Extermination is creeping northward; and there is not in, all the nine counties a single small tenant-right farmer who can say with confidence that his house is his own.
Now in such a state of things what ought you, the small farmers of Ulster, to do? "Why meet legally and constitutionally, I suppose, appoint a chairman, hurl defiance at the Pope of Rome, express the utmost confidence in Lord Clarendon, and demand a revocation of the Maynooth grant. ”

“ In short, our vicious system of government, and especially the infamous land laws, are the machinery that has brought you to this pass, and, as the very Grand Masters say nothing at all about mending these, let them keep their "addresses of loyalty" to themselves. ”

“ They farther libelled the peaceable farmers of the North of Ireland by calling the sale of Tenant-right a mere "life insurance," asserting that an incoming tenant was always forced to pay the price of the outgoing tenant's good will, lest he should be murdered, and for that reason alone. ”

“ For your case was and is just this the farmers are gradually, in Ulster as in other provinces, losing hold of the soil, under the pressure of poor rates, rents and taxes, and becoming labourers; and the labourers and artisans, from the excessive competiton of other labourers and artisans, are sinking gradually into paupers, so that there is a continual sliding scale sloping downward to perdition. ”