for you they contemplate a law that will forbid
the letting of land, for the future, for a period longer than five
years. Hugh's leases will soon be falling in, and then he can't make a
slave of any man for a longer period than five years."

"Surely no one is so silly as to think of passing such a law, with a
view to put down aristocracy, and to benefit the tenant!" I cried,
laughing.

"Ay, you may laugh, young sir," resumed Jack Dunning; "but such _is_ the
intention. I know very well what will be your course of reasoning; you
will say, the longer the lease, the better for the tenant, if the
bargain be reasonably good; and landlords cannot ask more for the use of
their lands than they are really worth in this country, there happening
to be more lands than there are men to work it. No, no; landlords rather
get less for their lands than they are worth, instead of more, for that
plain reason. To compel the tenant to take a lease, therefore, for a
term as short as five years, is to injure him, you think; to place him
more at the control of his landlord, through the little interests
connected with the cost and trouble of moving, and through the natural
desire he may possess to cut the meadows he has seeded, and to get the
full benefit of manure he has made and carted. I see how you reason,
young sir; but you are behind the age--you are sadly behind the age."

"The age is a queer one, if I am! All over the world it is believed that
long leases are favours, or advantages, to tenants; and nothing can make
it otherwise, _caeteris paribus_. Then what good will the tax do, after
violating right and moral justice, if not positive law, to lay it? On a
hundred dollars of rent, I should have to pay some fifty-five cents of
taxes, as I am assessed on other things at Ravensnest; and does anybody
suppose I will give up an estate that has passed through five
generations of my family, on account of a tribute like that!"

"Mighty well, sir--mighty well, sir! This is fine talk; but I would
advise you not to speak of _your_ ancestors at all. Landlords can't name
_their_ ancestors with impunity just now."

"I name mine only as showing a reason for a natural regard for my
paternal acres."

"That you might do, if you were a tenant; but not as a landlord. In a
landlord, it is aristocratic and intolerable pride, and to the last
degree offensive--as Dogberry says, 'tolerable and not to be endured.'"

"But it is a _fact_, and it is natural o