RELATION OF LANDLORD AND TENANT. 171 



limited in every condition of life. The abuses of power are riot, 

 however, peculiar to persons occupying a high condition in 

 society, but are as often found among the lowest, who seem to 

 have nothing else but the ability to injure and exert it most 

 cruelly when they are most loudly claiming compassion for 

 themselves, as the victims of injustice. I believe there is a great 

 deal more abuse of power on the part of farmers towards their 

 laborers, than on the part of landlords towards their tenants. 

 The farmers can protect themselves ; the laborers, in general, are 

 without power. Indeed, the more cultivated and improved is 

 the education of a man, and the higher the condition which he 

 occupies in society, the stronger are the inducements to a just and 

 honorable conduct, not only in his enlarged mind, but in the 

 increased value of character to such a man. In Ireland, the 

 middle-man, who comes between the landlord and the poor ten 

 ants, who there are themselves laborers, and especially those 

 middle-men who are themselves subletters of the soil, are always 

 feared for their severity and oppression. How far a man s politi 

 cal independence is affected by his relation to his landlord, is 

 another consideration. A man living under such a constitution 

 of government as that of England, unless he is himself an office- 

 seeker, or dependent upon the emoluments of public office, will 

 not deem this of so much importance as many might consider it ; 

 and if he makes up his judgment from the representation which 

 the minority in a republican or elective government always give 

 of the character and measures of the majority, he may be led to 

 conclude that his chance of being protected in his rights, and 

 secured in his person and property, is as good under an hereditary 

 government, or one chosen for him by others, as under one in the 

 choice of which he himself, with others, is permitted to give his 

 suffrage. I would not be thought to undervalue political liberty ; 

 and, in my opinion, human wisdom has never devised a constitu 

 tion of government so just and so favorable to the happiness of 

 its subjects as that of my own country. But I have been too 

 often in the minority not to have learned that a majority com 

 posed of thousands may be as despotic as a single tyrant ; and 1 

 am not unaware that the position occupied by the governments 

 of all civilized countries, is, at the present day, very different 

 from what it was a century ago. As the reformation, under 

 Luther, gave a blow to the doctrine of the infallibility of the 



