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 comfortable. Great landlords can do as they like with their estates, on this side of St. George's Channel; English landlords are absolute masters of the conditions on which they will let their land; and why should not Irish landlords be so? But in the first place, English landlords do not let their land to a labourer, but to a capitalist farmer, who is able to take care of his own interest. The capitalist has not to choose between the possession of a farm and destitution; the labourer has. This element subverts the whole basis on which the letting of farms, as a business transaction, and the foundation of a national economy, requires to rest. The capitalist farmer will beware of offering a rent that will leave him no profit; the peasant farmer will promise any amount of rent, whether he can pay it or not. England, moreover, not being a purely agricultural, but a commercial country, even great landlords learn to look at the management of estates in a somewhat commercial spirit, and can see their own advantage (where the love of political influence does not prevent) in making it the interest of the tenant to improve the land; or, if they can afford to do so, will often improve it for him. An average Irish landlord, instead of improving his estate, does not even put up the fences and farm-buildings which everywhere else it is the landlord's business to provide; they are left to be erected by the labourer-tenant for himself, and are such as a labourer-tenant is able to erect. If a tenant here and there is able and willing to make them a little better than ordinary, or to add in any other manner to the productiveness and value of the farm, there is nothing to prevent the landlord from waiting till it