Wherever you go the same deleterious influence signalizes its presence by analogous, if not by identical effects. In the South and West the poison has infiltrated the system itself, breeding monstrous excrescences in the shape of the middleman and the rack-rented cottier. In the North it has manifested its presence by a parasitical growth of inflated tenant-right prices,[1] as effectually fatal to the healthy expansion of our agricultural industry. The original cause of the disease is everywhere the same. The disproportion of the opportunities of employment to population has resulted in universal pressure and universal competition,—competition in the labour market, already modified by emigration; competition in the land market—only to be relieved by the application to more profitable occupations of so much of the productive energies of the nation, as may be in excess of the requirements of a perfect agriculture.
- ↑ I wish it to be distinctly understood, that I apply this phrase only to those cases where the price paid by the incoming tenant represents no real value.
The Rev. John O'Sullivan, P.P.
"The premiums paid for these holdings to one another is incredible. I have known a man to pay £35 for a plot of land for which he paid only £2.5s a year without any lease. Mr. Hickson has been telling me of a man who gave £15 to another, who held land at a very high rent; a man on the other side of the bridge paid £50 for the grass of three cows . . . . There are only ten years to run of the term, and
fair rent, he often creates a set of intermediate tenants, who make a profit rent, by subletting the ground to persons who live in the extreme of misery." Sir G. C. Lewis on Irish Disturbances, p. 313.
