an English landlord for the equipment
of farms with cottages, outhouses, fencing, and a drainage system, which
results in a sort of partnership between landlord and tenant, was, to a
large extent, a thing unknown in Ireland, where, as was aptly said,
tenants' improvements were landlords' perquisites, and where point was
lent to the differences by the fact that the few properties on which the
equipment of the holdings was provided by the landlord were known as
"English-managed estates," and the number of these, Lord Cowper told the
House of Lords in 1887, could be counted on one's fingers.

Irish landlords have been compared, not to English squires, but to the
ground landlords of London, bound to the occupiers only in so far as
they received from their tenants a rent-charge liable to increase as the
tenant improved the holding, or as competition arose with the growth of
population.

The reasons for this state of things are to be found in the number and
the small size of the Irish holdings, but more than this in the fact
that from the first landlords came there in a business capacity.

"Les uns comme les autres," says a French writer, M. Paul-Dubois, "ils
n'ont vu dans la terre Irlandaise qu'une affaire, et non une patrie. Ils
sont restes conquerants en pays de conquete. De la cette consequence
que, conscients d'etre des etrangers, des intrus, ils se sont crus
libres et quittes de toute dette envers le pays, de tous les devoirs de
la propriete."[3]

Planted on land which was confiscated, and, as a result, insecurely
held, to risk the expenditure of money would have been unnatural, the
more so since the expenditure which, in the circumstances, fell upon the
tenant in the matter of improvements, provided the best possible
security to the landlord by making the tenant all the more anxious to
remain on the holding on which he had sunk what little capital he
possessed, and in consequence virtually obliged, at risk of ejection, to
submit unwillingly to periodical enhancements of rent.

In addition to the few English-managed estates it was only in Ulster
that matters were otherwise, owing to the existence of the custom--an
embryo copyhold, Lord Devon called it--known as tenant-right. On the
various confiscations of land, grants of which had been made to the
"undertakers," many of the latter were either public bodies, such as the
great City Companies, others were landlords who, even if not resident at
a distance, had neither