other cattle as are necessary, then they will be their own merchants and
send their wool and butter and hides and linen beyond sea for ready
money and wine and spices and silks. They will keep only a few miserable
cottiers.[23] The farmers must rob or beg, or leave their country. The
shopkeepers in this and every other town, must break and starve: For it
is the landed man that maintains the merchant, and shopkeeper, and
handicraftsman.

[Footnote 23: "Unlike the peasant proprietor," says Lecky, "and also
unlike the mediaeval serf, the cottier had no permanent interest in the
soil, and no security for his future position. Unlike the English
farmer, he was no capitalist, who selects land as one of the many forms
of profitable investment that are open to him. He was a man destitute of
all knowledge and of all capital, who found the land the only thing that
remained between himself and starvation. Rents in the lower grades of
tenancies were regulated by competition, but it was competition between
a half-starving population, who had no other resources except the soil,
and were therefore prepared to promise anything rather than be deprived
of it. The landlord did nothing for them. They built their own mud
hovels, planted their hedges, dug their ditches. They were half naked,
half starved, utterly destitute of all providence and of all education,
liable at any time to be turned adrift from their holdings, ground to
the dust by three great burdens--rack-rents, paid not to the landlord
but to the middleman; tithes, paid to the clergy--often the absentee
clergy--of the church to which they did not belong; and dues, paid to
their own priests" ("Hist, of Ireland," vol. i., pp. 214-215, ed. 1892).
[T.S.]]

But when the 'squire turns farmer and merchant himself, all the good
money he gets from abroad, he will hoard up or send for England, and