s been
an attentive observer of his times, and he will tell you that
the vigorous and energetic, the intelligent and enterprising, are
departing to more favoured lands, and that this process has produced
a marked deterioration in the population within his memory. He can
distinctly recollect when there were more than double the present
number of strong farmers in the country about Belfast. He declares
that, with many exceptions of course, the land is getting into the
hands of a second or third class of farmers, who are little more than
servants to the small landlords. Even where there are leases, such
intelligent observers affirm that they are so over-ridden with
conditions that the farmer has no liberty or security to make any
great improvements. Were it otherwise he would not think a thirty-one
years' lease sufficient for the building of a stone house, that would
be as good at the end of a hundred years as at the end of thirty. All
the information that I can gather from thoughtful men, who are really
anxious for a change that would benefit the landlords as well as
themselves, points to the remedy which Lord Granard has suggested,
as the most simple, feasible, and satisfactory--the legalisation and
extension of the tenant-right custom. They rejoice that such landlords
now proclaim the injustice which the tenant class have so long
bitterly felt--namely, the presumption of law that all the
improvements and buildings on the farm belong to the lord of the
soil, although the notorious fact is that they are all the work of the
tenant.

And here I will take the opportunity of remarking that the legislature
were guilty of strange oversight, or deliberate injustice, in
the passing of the Incumbered Estates Act. Taking advantage of an
overwhelming national calamity, they forced numbers of gentlemen into
a ruinous sale of their patrimonial estates, in order that men of
capital might get possession of them. But they made no provision
whatever for the protection of the tenants, or of the property which
those tenants had created on these estates. Many of those were tenants
at will, who built and planted in perfect and well-grounded reliance
on the honour and integrity of their old landlords. But in the
advertisements for the sale of property under the Landed Estates
Court, it was regularly mentioned as an inducement to purchasers of
the Scully type that the tenants had no leases. The result of this
combination of circumstances bear