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expense that they were completely powerless.[1] The practice consequently spread, and an obnoxious class of middlemen, as they were termed, relet the greater proportion of the soil of Ireland at rack-rents to their teeming countrymen.[2] But though the ma-
- ↑ "Many of the witnesses, however, seemed to be impressed with the idea, that even with the assistance of the subletting Acts, there is frequently much expense and difficulty in preventing subletting in the case of leasehold farms; and this opinion has tended to prevent the grant of leases."—Dig. Dev. Com. Summary, p. 418.
- ↑ "The high prices of agricultural produce during the late continental war, and the consequently increased value of land, appear to have much increased subletting, by enabling the large farmers, without personal trouble, to derive from their leaseholds considerable incomes in the form of profit rents." Ibid. p. 418."Lord George Hill records, among other facts relating to rundale, that one person held his farm in forty-two different patches, and at last gave it up in despair of finding it; and that a field of half an acre was held by twenty-two different persons.""The evidence proves clearly that these malpractices have produced the results which might naturally be expected, and that sub-tenants, the tenants of lands much subdivided, and of farms held in rundale, are in general excessively poor, and their lands much exhausted."—Ibid. p. 419."It will be observed that several of the covenants above mentioned have for their object the prevention of the subdivision of farms, which is alleged to be so common and so injurious an effect of leases."
"But none of these covenants provide against the possibility of the farm, upon the death of the occupier, becoming subdivided, either by the provisions of his will, or by the operation of the statute of distributions, although it appears that these are the causes most frequently operating to produce subdivision."—Ibid. p. 237.
