elight.'

Lord Lansdowne's system is beautiful, but it is unfinished. Let him
'crown the edifice with _liberty_.' He possesses a giant's power, and
he uses it like an angel. When he comes to trouble the waters, the
multitude gathers around the fountain to be healed. But his visits
are, like angels' visits, few and far between. Many of the sick and
impotent folk, after long waiting, are not able to get near till the
miracle-worker has departed. An absentee landlord, be he ever so good,
must delegate his power to an agent. Agents have good memories,
and their servants, the bailiffs, are good lookers-on. There is
a hierarchy in the heaven of landlordism--the under-bailiff, the
head-bailiff, the chief-clerk in the office, the sub-agent, the
head-agent. All these must be submissively approached and anxiously
propitiated before the petitioner's prayers can reach the ears of Jove
himself, seated aloft on his remote Olympian throne. He may be,
and for the most part really is--if he belongs to the old stock of
aristocratic divinities--generous and gracious, incapable of meanness,
baseness, or cruelty. But the tenant has to do, not with the absentee
divinity, but with his priest--not with the good spirit, but his
medium; and this go-between is not always noble, or disinterested,
or unexacting. To him power may be new--a small portion of it may
intoxicate him, like alcohol on an empty stomach. He was not born to
an inheritance of sycophancy; it comes like an _afflatus_ upon him,
and it turns his head. It creates an appetite, like strong drink,
which grows into a disease. This appetite is as capricious as it is
insatiable. Hence, the chief characteristic of landlord power, as
felt by the tenant, is _arbitrariness_. The agent may make any rule
he pleases, and as many exceptions to every rule as he pleases. He
may allow rents to run in arrear; he may suddenly come down upon the
defaulter with 'a fell swoop;' he may require the rents to be paid
up to the day; he may, without reason assigned, call in 'the hanging
gale;' he may abate or increase the rents at will; he may inflict
fines for delay or give notices to quit for the sole purpose of
bringing in fees to his friend or relative, the solicitor. But
whatever he may choose to do, the tenant has nothing for it but to
submit; and he must submit with a good grace. Woe to him if the agony
of his spirit is revealed in the working of his features, or in an
audible groan! Most of the poor