1881.] on the Land Systems of England and of Ireland. 607 



Bold their estates long ago to the occupying tenants. This has actu- 

 ally been done under the Irish Church Act, and to a less extent under 

 the Irish Land Act of 1870, which have added about 5000 to the 

 number of small Irish proprietors. Probably more occupiers would 

 have availed themselves of tlie fixcilities granted by these Acts, if they 

 had not been taught by agitators that, by waiting a little while, they 

 would get the land for nothing. 



4. But the greatest distinction between the Irish and English land 

 system is in the relation between landlord and tenant, — partly in the 

 laws which regulate it, but mainly in the customs and ideas wliicli 

 influence it. Let us briefly notice some of the circumstances which 

 have brought about this great diflerenco in customs and ideas. 



The greater part of Ireland never adopted feudal institutions as a 

 whole, and, where they were adopted, the feudal lord w^as not the 

 friend and protector of his tenant, as in England, but was constantly 

 regarded as an alien intruder. Again, though the feudal law of 

 landlord and tenant was ultimately established in Ireland, it was 

 more favourable to the landlord and less favourable to the tenant, 

 than in England. Nevertheless, for two centuries and a half after 

 the English poor-law w^as established, there was no poor-law in 

 Ireland, so that small tenants naturally held on to the land for bare 

 life, having no other means of subsistence. 



Meanwhile the respect for property, that is, for the landlord's 

 rights, as distinct from the tenant's, was very much weakened by the 

 differences of religion, and by the demoralising effect of the penal 

 laws. It was further weakened by the fact that so many Irish land- 

 lords entirely neglected their duties, and left all imin-ovements, 

 including the erection of farm-buildings, to be executed by their 

 tenants, while they contented themselves wdth receiving their rents. 

 Of course, the case was aggravated where the landlord, as often 

 happened, was an absentee. No liberality on the part of an agent 

 can supply the want of that kindly intercourse between the hall and 

 the cottage, which binds classes together in an English village, but 

 of which Irish farmers and labourers have little experience. No 

 wonder that Irish tenants should thus grow up in the belief that the 

 soil was theirs, and the rent only the landlord's. 



We cannot do justice to the agrarian movement in Ireland, or 

 appreciate the deeper causes to which it owes its origin, without 

 placing ourselves in the position of a representative Irish tenant 

 before the Act of 1870, and striving to interjH-et the feelings which 

 underlay his fierce hatred of landlordism, a hatred which even the 

 remedial legislation of that year has failed to appease. We shall 

 afterwards be far better able to appreciate the still more sweej)ing 

 reforms which are now in contemplation. 



The representative Irish tenant is not a capitalist farmer at all, 

 in the English sense, but rather a cottager holding some fifteen or 

 twenty acres of land, including several acres of rough pasturage for 

 the cows, of which the poorest Irish family generally manages to keep 



