AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND
instead of being dropped as you were at first led to believe, is this very week referred to a "select committee" a very select committee that they may consider how it may be made to act with most effect.
And all this time, while Parliament and ministers are conspiring to rob you by "law" in London, landlords, agents and bailiffs are conspiring to nibble away your property by a thousand stealthy devices at home. For instance, a rule is introduced "on the estate" that no tenant shall sell his farm except to an approved tenant or an adjoining tenant. Of course this, by restricting the market, lowers the price. Then, some landlords are hard to please about the tenant they will "approve," and keep you calling and calling again, bribing agents and bribing bailiffs, and negotiating and petitioning, with your hat, not on your head, where it ought to be, but in your hand, begging leave to sell your own property. Then there is a rule introduced now on most estates fixing a maximum price for tenant-right you are not to get more than a certain sum for it by the acre. You bought it perhaps ten or twenty years ago at £15 an acre, but the rule of the estate now is £10, and you arc robbed of the difference and very thankful you must express yourself (holding your hat in your hand) for being allowed to sell it at that.
In short, between the feeling of insecurity produced by the continual tampering of "law," and the constant gnawing and nibbling of landlords and agents at home, and the quarter-acre law and the poor law, the "tenant-right of
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