7, the tenants received the following still
greater and always one-sided privileges, (i) By this Act leases are
allowed to be broken by the tenant, but not by the landlord. All
leaseholders whose leases would expire within ninety-nine years after
the passing of the Act have the option of going into court and getting
their contracts broken and a judicial rent fixed. No equivalent power
is given to the landlords. (Land Act of 1887, secs, 1 and 2.) (2) The
Act varies rent already judicially fixed for fifteen years by the
Land Courts in the years 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, and 1885. (Sec. 29.)
(3) It stays evictions, and allows rent to be paid by instalments. In
the case of tenants whose valuation does not exceed L50, the court
before which proceedings are being taken for the recovery of _any_
debt due by the tenant is empowered to stay his eviction, and may give
him liberty to pay his creditors by instalments, and can extend the
time for such payment as it thinks proper. (Land Act of 1887, sec.
30.)

By these extracts, which do not exhaust the whole of the privileges
granted to the Irish tenant, it may be seen how exceptionally he has
been favoured. Nowhere else has such wholesale interference with the
obligations of contract, such lavish protection of the tenant, such
practical persecution of the landlord been as yet demanded by the
one-half of the nation; nor, if demanded, would such partiality have
been conceded by the other half. Yet, in the face of these various
Acts, and all they embody, provide for, and deny, our hysterical
journal _par excellence_ is not ashamed to publish a wild letter from
one of those ramping political women who screech like peacocks before
rain, setting forth how Ireland could be redeemed by the manufacture
of blackberry jam, were it not for the infamous landlords who would at
once raise the rent on those tenants who, by industry, had improved
their condition. And a Dublin paper asserts that anything will be
fiction which demonstrates that "Ireland is not the home of
rackrenters, brutal batonmen, and heartless evictors"; while political
agitation is still being carried on by any means that come handiest,
and the eviction of tenants who owe five or six years' rent, and will
not pay even one to clear off old scores, is treated as an act of
brutality for which no quarter should be given. If we were to transfer
the whole method of procedure to our own lands and houses in England,
perhaps the thing wo