ABSTRACT
On Saturday last we witnessed the embarkation in boats of about fifty families, from the beach at Kilfanora village, to get on board the emigrant ship that lay at anchor off the Samphires. All were of the comfortable class of farmers, from the parishes of Castlemain and Milltown, and bound for New York, whense they were to proceed, some of the several and others to the western settlements. In the course f conversation with a very intelligent farmer who accompanied the emigrants “to see them off,” we learned a remarkable fact connected with some of them. It appeared that two of those held land jointly in the parish of Milltown, the term of which had lately expired and which had been in the possession of their fathers for over half a century. They offered the Landlord £100 for a renewal, but the offer was refused; a covetous and more wealthy neighbour bid £200 over, and was accordingly accepted and put into possession. The landlord was hardly to blame, but he who coveted the goods of another, and was the direct means of driving those honest and industrious people, young and adult, from the homes of their childhood, to seek asylum in a far distant clime, soon received an awful punishment at the hands of retributive Justice. In a month after he entered on possession while ploughing his field he fell suddenly to the ground a lifeless corpse! It is to the numerous similar acts of oppression perpetrated under the “outbidding system” so prevalent among the farming classes we may well attribute, in a great degree, the cause of the wholesale emigration from our shores by which this Land is stript [sic] of the bone and sinew of its strength and vitality.
