past
and present and future on yearly tenancies. What is a yearly tenancy?
Why, it means that the owner of the land, at the end of any year, can
turn the people born on the land, off from the land, tear down their
houses and leave them starving at the mercy of the storm. It means terms
no Christian man would offer, and none but a madman would accept."

The rents are fixed in cash, being proportioned according to the
assessable value of the property. So if a tenant improves the estate,
his rent is increased, and thus actually a penalty is placed on
permanent improvements.

The tenant has no voice in the matter of rent: he must accept. And
usually the rents have been fixed at a figure that covers the entire
produce of the land. Then the landlord's agent collected all he could,
and indulgently allowed the rest to hang over the tenant's head as a
guarantee of good behavior.

Mr. Gladstone said in Parliament, July the Tenth, Eighteen Hundred
Seventy-nine: "Forty-nine farmers out of fifty in Ireland are in arrears
for rent, so it is legally possible to evict them at any time the
landlord may so choose. And in the condition that now exists, an
eviction is equal to a sentence of death."

At the time when Gladstone made his speech just quoted, a bill was up in
the House of Commons called "The Relief of Distress Bill." Simple people
might at once assume that this relief bill was for the relief of the
starving peasantry, but this is a very hasty conclusion, ill-considered
and quite absurd. The "Relief Bill" was for the relief of the English
landlords who owned land in Ireland. So the landlords would not be
actually compelled to levy on the last potato and waylay the remittances
sent from America, the English Government proposed to loan money to the
distressed landlords at three per cent, and this bill was passed without
argument. And it was said that Lord Lansdowne, one of the poor
landlords, turned a tidy penny by availing himself of the three-per-cent
loan and letting the money out, straightway, at six per cent to such
tenants as had a few pigs to offer as collateral.

The State of Iowa is nearly double the size of Ireland, and has, it is
estimated, eleven times the productive capacity. A tithe of ten per cent
on Iowa's corn crop would prevent, at any time, a famine in Ireland.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, Illinois sent, through the agency of
the Chicago Board of Trade, a shipload of wheat, corn and pork to
starvin