e land, made on the larger basis, were kept to their same value;
and the fate of the landlord was sealed. Between the hammer and the
anvil as he was and is placed, his times have not been pleasant.
Families who have bought their estates on the faith of Government
sales and Government contracts, and families who have owned theirs for
centuries and lived on them, winter and summer--who have been neither
absentees nor rack-renters, but have been friendly, hospitable,
open-handed after their kind, always ready to give comforts and
medicine to the sick and a good-natured measure of relief to the hard
pressed--they have now been brought to the ground; and between our own
fluid and unstable legislation and the reckless cruelty of the Plan of
Campaign their destruction has been complete. Wherever one goes one
finds great houses shut up or let for a few summer months to strangers
who care nothing for the place and less than nothing for the people.
One cannot call this a gain, look at it as one will. Nor do the
tenantry themselves feel it to be a gain. Get their confidence and you
will find that they all regret the loss of their own--those jovial,
frank, and kindly proprietors who did the best they knew, though
perhaps, judged by present scientific knowledge that best was not very
good, but who at least knew more than themselves. Carrying the thing
home to England, we should scarcely say that our country places would
be the better for the exodus of all the educated and refined and
well-to-do families, with the peasantry and an unmarried clergyman
left sole masters of the situation.

In the desire of Parliament to do justice to the Irish peasant, whose
condition did once so loudly demand amelioration, justice to the
landlord has gone by the board. For we cannot call it justice to make
him alone suffer. His rents have been reduced from 25 to 30 per cent.
and over, but all the rent charges, mortgages, debts and dues have
been retained at their full value. The scheme of reduction does not
pass beyond the tiller of the soil, and the landlord is the sole
loser.[C]

Beyond this he suffers from the want of finality in legislation.
Nothing is left to prove itself, and the tinkering never ends. A
fifteen years' bargain under the first Land Act is broken up under the
next as if Governmental pledges were lovers' vows. When, on the faith
of those pledges, a landlord borrowed money from the Board of Works
for the improvement of his estate, f