te a nation of beggars, which cannot be maintained on the
land. The farmer mind fails to perceive how any Act of Parliament can
prevent an owner or peasant proprietor from selling his entire
interest in his holding. This, they argue, will lead to the creation
of a race of landlords who will bring more misery and ruin upon the
country than anything that the present generation is acquainted with;
as necessarily the class of landlords thus formed will be more
exacting and severe upon their tenants than the present large
territorial proprietors.

Thus far the farmer, who so far as the evils of subdivision or
subletting are concerned is at one with the great landed proprietor,
who, thanks to the recklessness of his predecessors, sees his efforts
to improve his property paralysed, and his own personal honour and
reputation endangered by the acts of the leaseholders or fee-farm,
renters over whom he has no power whatever. Many large holdings are
leased to middlemen who have sublet them at extravagant rents, but
cannot be dispossessed. This is the system which now exists, yet the
great landholders I have consulted describe it as the result which
will be brought about by giving the fee-simple of holdings to cottier
tenants. "And," I am asked on all sides, "is fixity of tenure to
signify the fixture of little tenants in their present holdings, on
which they cannot possibly lead a reasonably human existence? Is it
intended to stereotype disaster, to perpetuate the blundering of the
past? Or is it intended to give them at great expense to the country,
larger holdings on partially reclaimed waste lands on the system
commended by Mr. Mitchell Henry, and perhaps applicable to Connemara,
if not to other places? And is it intended that when Mike, and Thady,
and Tim are settled on their new clearings they are to do as they like
on them, to subdivide, to sublet, to conacre, to settle their numerous
children and their children's children on the original forty-acre
farm? And are they, after they have taken possession of it, partly
reclaimed and brought under plough, to be allowed to cultivate it or
not cultivate it as they like--to let it all go back first to pasture
then to sedge, and finally to bog?"

Mainly with a view to elicit further expression of opinion, I hinted
to the last and most accomplished person who put these queries to me,
that it would be absurd to give the cottier absolute control over his
land, and that he should have