Perry "Evictions" by Poulett Scrope

Thesis:
As a member of Parliament, Scrope recognized that the British government was harshly treating tenants in Ireland by evicting them from their lands

• Potato famine, ruined crops and inability of tenants to pay rent led to further evictions
• Life is essentially taken in Ireland by want and disease is engendered by want to where humans are deprived from a means of living
• What do the tenants do when a landlord releases all his tenants from his estate  they have no other refuge, so this action destroys their lives
o Mr. Gerrard razed an entire village in middle of fever and famine – 400 tenants now homeless and poor
o Marquis of Waterford did the same
o Mr. Clark and Mr. Carrick razed villages and were murdered as a result
• “Landlords consider themselves justified in consolidating their estates, and ejecting the numerous families of tenantry who have occupied under the old leases”
• These tenants are driven from land, on which they were “born and bred” and where they “take shelter”
• As a result, these tenants wander to towns and begin to beg to make a living
• Therefore, the ejectment of tenants essentially is a sentence of death because they had only learned how to maintain their families of that bit of land