the means nor the inclination to spend the
necessary money on their estates. This was provided by the tenant, who,
without aid from the landlord, made improvements on his holding by his
own labour; and in Ulster, where the tenants were settlers from England
and Scotland, there arose an equitable proprietorship vested in the
occupier, by which, on quitting the farm, he was entitled to claim from
the new tenant a sum of money partly in compensation for the money and
labour he had invested in the holding and partly as a price paid for the
goodwill or possession, which the new tenant would have no other means
of acquiring. The nature of this "Ulster Custom," which, until 1870, had
no sanction or protection from the law, was clearly defined by the
Master of the Rolls, in the case of M'Elroy _v._ Brooke, in the
following words:--"The essentials of the custom are the right to sell, to
have the incoming tenant, if there be no reasonable objection to him,
recognised by the landlord, and to have a sum of money paid for the
interest in the tenancy transferred." The English system we see then,
with its competitive rent fixed by contract, and subject to the laws of
supply and demand, did not exist; the social and prescriptive ties which
in England bound the owner and the occupier to each other never arose
under this state of things, and in their absence did not arise one of
the strongest inducements to a landed gentry to live on their estates
and to concern themselves in the welfare of their tenants, a social
system which, by the interchange of kindly offices wherever in England
the proprietors live on their property, does much to make the
countryside attractive to the poorer classes and to check migration.

There is no more erroneous idea than to suppose, as do some people, that
there was a large body of resident landed proprietors in Ireland until
the land war drove them to seek safety across the Channel. As a matter
of fact, long before this had begun there existed an absentee
aristocracy dependent on middlemen or agents--"the vermin of the
country," Arthur Young called them--who constituted a mere mechanical
medium for the collection of rent, and as such were the worst exponents
of the amenities which, in happier circumstances, are supposed to
subsist between owners and occupiers of agrarian land. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century the increase of population in the island and
the high prices resulting from the war led to