this makes it more important than it ever was
that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for
treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and
of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the
English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases. I
have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne
in his study of the phenomena of the present situation. I asked him
whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago,
that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from
running into debt than the English.

"I think not," he replied; "on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland
now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the
recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the
passing of the Land Act of 1870--a time when shopkeepers, and bankers
also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby 'bad
debts' innumerable. Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of
their receipts and expenses. I know only one tenant-farmer in this
neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he
takes from his labour and spends on his living."[20] "They save a great
deal of money often," he says, "but almost never in any systematic way.
They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of
things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not
stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do. In fact,
under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the
way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings,
as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin
for improved living."

"I had a very frank statement on this point," said Mr. Seigne, "not long
ago from a Tipperary man. When I tried to show him that his father had
paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself
unable to pay now, he admitted this at once. But it was a confession and
avoidance. 'My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,' he
said, 'because he was content to live so that he could pay it. He sat on
a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl. He lived in a way in which I
don't intend to live, and so he could pay the rent. Now, I must have,
and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of
living as I wish to live; and i