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
subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who,
in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until the land in many
cases was "subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator
of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation,
beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually
forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican
Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the
hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper
class--though we must allow for many honourable exceptions--was the
Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices
of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the
worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The
slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar
faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over
human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and
subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial
deterioration in the former. In Ireland the ethnological difference was
small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse
proportion.

For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies
of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will,
were alike in certain fundamental characteristics. The tenant