80 A LIFE'S WORK IN IRELAND. 



Land Act never professed to lay down a new abstract 

 system of the rights of landlords and tenants. On 

 the contrary, it took the rights as it found them in 

 fact, from usage, and as they were acted on by good 

 landlords. But as to permanent improvements, it 

 shifted the presumption from being in favour of the 

 landlord to being in favour of the tenant. The com- 

 monest justice required that the present tenants 

 should only have the benefit of what they had done 

 themselves, or some one belonging to them had done. 

 What other tenants, strangers to them, had done, did 

 not concern them, whoever else it concerned. Again, 

 many improvements, as draining, pay thoroughly for 

 themselves in a certain number of years. A tenant 

 was not to be paid twice over for such improvements ; 

 hence the limitations of the Act in these respects. 

 The decision that tenant-right in Ulster, though sale- 

 able when the tenant is dispossessed by the act of the 

 landlord, cannot be sold at the mere will of the 

 tenant without the consent of the landlord, which so 

 much excites the anger of some, only means that 

 such was the usage before the Act, and therefore 

 the Court so held. It will be found that what I 

 have said explains any apparent anomalies. There 

 may have been individual cases of the exercise of 

 the coveted rights, but no such general usage. 



Consider how great was the gain to Irish tenants 

 from the Land Act all existing usages of the Ulster 

 tenant-right legalised elsewhere, four, five, seven 



