s guilty of the unpardonable crime of insisting upon her
rent being paid. Her formula is simple, "Give me my rent, or give me
my land." In England and in some other countries such a demand would
be looked upon as perfectly reasonable; but "pay or go" is in this
part of Ireland looked upon as the option of an exterminator. Miss
Gardiner merely asks for her own, and judged by an English standard
would appear to be a strange kind of Lady Bountiful if she allowed
her tenants to go on quietly living on her property without making any
show of payment. But this is very much what landlords are expected to
do in county Mayo, except in very good seasons. The majority of the
people in the islands of Clew Bay have given up the idea of paying
rent as a bad job altogether, and these advanced spirits have many
imitators on the mainland. To the request, "Give me my rent, or give
me my land," is made one eternal answer, "And how can I pay the rent
when the corn is washed away and the pitaties rot in the ground? And
if I give ye the land, hwhere am I to go, and my wife and my eight
childher?" This answer, long used as an _argumentum ad misericordiam_,
is now defended by popular orators. No longer ago than yesterday I
heard it averred that the failure of the crop by the visitation of God
absolved the tenant from the payment of rent. The assumption of the
speaker was that landlord and tenant were in a manner partners, and
that if the joint business venture produced nothing the working
partner could pay over no share of profit to the sleeping partner.
Such doctrine is naturally acceptable to the tenant. It signifies that
in bad years the landlord gets nothing; in good years, what the tenant
pleases to give him, after buying manure and paying up arrears of debt
all round. It is, however, hardly surprising that the landlords see
the question through a differently tinted medium. They entertain an
idea that the land is their property, and, like any other commodity,
should be let or sold to a person who can pay for it. Strict and
downright "landlordism," as it is called, as if it were a disease like
"Daltonism," does not see things through a medium charged with the
national colour, and Miss Gardiner is a true type of downright
landlordism such as would not be complained of in England, but in
Ireland is viewed with absolute abhorrence.

As a proof how utterly an exacting landlord puts himself, if not
outside of the law, yet beyond any claim to pu