Above : Photo Of John Russell, Prime Minister At The Time

The famine had aggravated the land troubles, and evictions with all their attendant misery were terribly frequent. Much of this was due to the wanton greed of men who wished to re-let at higher rents the land whose value the toil of the poor peasants’ hands had increased. But there were also numbers of land¬lords, naturally humane and anxious to do justice, whose estates were so much in debt that, when the interest on the various mortgages and so forth were paid, there remained but the narrowest margin for their own use.