This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed on the face
of the globe. It has been matched in portions of India, but nowhere
else in this Empire save in little Prince Edward Island, where we shall
meet with it again. In Ireland, where it assumed its worst form, violent
conquest by a neighbouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the
old owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional English
tenures, even into the relations between the British superior landlord
and the British occupying colonist. The bulk of the confiscated Irish
land, as I have mentioned, had been granted in fee to English noblemen,
gentlemen, or speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class
tenants. A number of Cromwell's private soldiers settled in Leinster and
Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an exception to this
rule. But the greater part of Ireland, in ownership, as distinguished
from occupation, consisted of big estates, and a large number of the
English owners, being only a day's sail from England, became, by natural
instinct, habitual absentees. Others lived in Dublin and neglected their
estates. Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland the
proportions of an enormous economic evil. In England the landlord was,
and remains, a capitalist, providing a house and a fully equipped farm
to the tenant. In Ireland he was a rent receiver pure and simple,
unconnected with the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic.
The rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who
contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and had to extract
that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the occupiers, whether
Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, and usually did so by
subdivision of holdings and disproportionate elevation of rents. Over
three of the four Provinces of Ireland--for a small part of Ulster was
differently situated--the middleman himself frequently became an
absentee and farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further