Fifty Years' Progress of British Agriculture. 23 
greater landowners are non-resident, and previous to the famine 
of 1846 the land was in a large measure in the hands of 
middlemen on leases for life, with leave to subdivide and sublet 
for the same time. These men had no permanent interest in 
the property ; their business was to make an income out of it 
at the least cost, and their intermediate position severed the 
otherwise natural connection between landlord and tenant. The 
potato famine in 1845-46 prostrated the class of middlemen, 
and brought the landlords and the real tenants face to face. 
But the level which the latter had been permitted to obtain, 
and the practice being that the tenant made the permanent 
improvements at his own cost, led them to consider the land- 
owner very much as only the holder of the first charge on the 
land ; and they were in the habit of buying and selling their farms 
among themselves, subject to this charge — a course which, as a 
matter of convenience, was tacitly accepted by the landowner. 
He had security for his rent in the money paid by an incoming 
tenant, who, for his own safety, required the landowner's 
consent to the change of tenancy. This suited the convenience 
of landowners, the most of whom had no money to spend upon 
improvements, many of them non-resident and taking little 
interest in the country, and dealing with a numerous body of 
small tenants with whom they seldom came into personal 
contact. In the North of Ireland this custom of sale became 
legally recognised as tenant-right. The want of it in other 
parts of Ireland produced an agitation which ultimately led to 
the first Irish Land Act of 1870, and, ten years later, to the 
establishment of a Land Court with power to fix the rent. 
Circumstances have thus brought about a situation in which the 
landowner cannot deal with any freedom with his property, 
either in the selection of tenants or in the readjustment of rents. 
And this has arisen, in a great measure, from the neglect by 
the landlord of his proper duties, in not himself executing those 
indispensable permanent improvements which the tenant was 
thus obliged to undertake, and who in this way established for 
himself a co-partnership in the soil itself. 
The general progress of agriculture in the United Kingdom 
was suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the potato 
disease, which, after a warning in 1845, spread over Western 
Europe with destructive force in 1846, suddenly laying waste 
the produce of vast tracts of country, and rendering desolate 
those poor and populous districts which had become dependent 
for their food on this hitherto prolific root. Ireland, especially 
the western and southern counties, where the poor population 
had little else to subsist upon but potatoes, was completely 
