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had agents—some of them resident, active, and kind; but some were only to be seen once in the year, or twice at the most, and that was when they came for the rent. There were clergy of different denominations, but their duties were spiritual, it was not their place to be temporal guides.
In many parts of the island, there were substantial farmers—men of capital and skill, and the absence of landlord or agent mattered little to them. They would gladly have welcomed them as friends, and looked up to them moreover with the respect tor which their position entitled them, but were to a great extent independent of any aid they could afford as guides or directors. They held their tenements from year to year, it is true; but they improved them as occasion and good husbandry demanded, without security, certainly, and with the chance of having their rent raised for their pains; but if this was done they had broad shoulders, and they merely grumbled and growled, as well they might, and submitted (having no choice), hoping for better times when enlightened laws would ensure to every man the fruits of his toil. They knew that their landlords would not be so blind as to part with good solvent tenants; although there were sundry little qualms, about election times, when passions ran high, and proprietors sometimes forgetting themselves, showed a disposition to punish people for having opinions of their own.
And in some parts of the island, these substantial farmers—aye, and the poorer men too—had this consolation, that if they did lose their farm, the in-comer would have to pay them for what they or their forefathers had done to improve it. In the parts where this custom did not exist, the moneyed farmer, as we have said, risked his money and his labour notwithstanding; but the poor farmer, knowing that he was a description of tenant whom few cared to keep, did about as little as he could, (and if he had done as much as he knew, that would have been little too,) and so the chances of anybody caring to keep him were lessened instead of increasing as the world advanced around him?
And in this, we thought, lay the root of the whole evil. Everybody who cared about the matter at all—everybody who spoke about it—considered the case of the sturdy farmers, who were best able to take care of themselves; but even those who proposed themselves to be the " tenant's best friends," appeared to overlook the case of the cottage farmer with his ten acres, half-skilled, struggling and poor?
And the hulk of the people held ten-acre farms; and the hulk of the ten-acre farmers needed guides, and they had none?
In this island, political agitation of one kind or another was constantly going on; and no wonder; for it had plenty of
