ve no notion of making money by modern methods.
We have always lived on the land, selling our superfluity to pay the
rent, and now that our arrangements are disturbed, we don't know which
way to turn. The blame rests with America, whose competition has so
lowered the price of produce that the farmer's superfluity, that is,
what he does not consume himself, will no longer suffice to pay the
rent. That is a general statement only. Landlords are generally
reasonable, and meet their tenants fairly enough when the tenants are
well-disposed and honest. The tenant-farmers of Ireland have no more
to complain of than the tenant-farmers of England--much less in
fact--but they have an army of agitators, an ignorant English press,
and the G.O.M. on their side. That makes all the difference. We have
occasional cases of unfair landlordism, but they are so rare as to be
the talk of a county or two.

"A Mrs. Hazlitt holds, with her farm, about twenty or thirty acres of
slobland reclaimed from the Atlantic. Slobland is land reclaimed from
the sea. This piece is on Donegal Bay. It was protected by a great
dyke after the Dutch style. But the Atlantic is sometimes angry, and
then he becomes unmanageable. He was ill-tempered one night (being
troubled with wind), and he just washed down the dyke and inundated
the reclaimed meadows, upon, which I have seen the most beautiful
crops. The landlord, the Reverend James Hamilton, a Protestant rector,
insists on rent being paid for this washed-away land. He does not
rebuild the dyke, and the land lies waste--the widow paying rent for
acres of useless salt marsh. That is pointed to by all the malcontents
in Donegal as a specimen of landlordism, and Protestant landlordism,
and more especially reverend Protestant landlordism. Nobody but a
parson would exact the rent. These isolated examples are cited to
bring discredit on Protestant landlords in general.

"This town is asleep, and it will not awake till the last Judgment. In
1885 we had a manufacturer from Belfast looking about for the best
place for a big cloth mill on the river. The town was in a ferment of
excitement, and everybody began to wonder what he would do with his
additional income. The shop-keepers expected that their customers
would have twice the money to spend in future, and the working folks
began to be cocky with their employers, saying that they would get
much better wages at the great factory. Then Mr. Gladstone brought out
his '8