has possessory interests in a piece of
land, held at the landlord's will, but that will controlled by custom. In
Ulster, and in an embryo degree elsewhere, this was what in a varying and
irregular way actually had come about. Agrarian customs developed that
undoubtedly belong to a backward social system, but they sprang from the
necessities of the case. The essence of such customs in Ulster was first,
a fair rent to be fixed not by competition, but by valuation, and
exclusive of tenant's improvements; second, the right of the tenant to
transfer to somebody else his goodwill, or whatever else we may call his
right of occupancy in the holding.

Instead of adapting law to custom, habit, practice, and equity, parliament
proceeded to break all this down. With well-meaning but blind violence it
imported into Ireland after the famine the English idea of landed property
and contract. Or rather, it imported these ideas into Ireland with a
definiteness and formality that would have been impracticable even in
England. Just as good people thought they could easily make Ireland
protestant if only she could be got within earshot of evangelical truth,
so statesmen expected that a few clauses on a parchment would suffice to
root out at a stroke the inveterate habits and ideas of long generations.
We talk of revolutionary doctrinaires in France and other countries.
History hardly shows such revolutionary doctrinaires anywhere as the whig
and tory statesmen who tried to regenerate Ireland in the middle of the
nineteenth century. They first of all passed an Act (1849) inviting the
purchase of the estates of an insolvent landlord upon precisely the same
principles as governed the purchase of his pictures or his furniture. We
passed the Encumbered Estates Act, Mr. Gladstone said, "with lazy,
heedless, uninformed good intentions." The important rights given by
custom and equity to the cultivator were suddenly extinguished by the
supreme legal right of the rent-receiver. About one-eighth of the whole
area of the country is estimated to have changed hands on these terms. The
extreme of wretchedness and confusion naturally followed. Parliament
thought this must be due to some misunderstanding. That there might be no
further mistake, it next proceeded formally to declare (1860) that the
legal relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland were to be those of
strict contract.(186) Thus blunder was clenched by blunder. The
cultivators were terro