Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/224

Rh more harm than an industrious tenant who is occasionally in arrear. Few things are more liable to deterioration than land, and the value of a field may be as completely annihilated* for a certain number of years as that of a house off which you take the roof. One of the landlord's most important duties is that of insuring the consummate cultivation of his estate, and to hold him up to obloquy because he makes a point of weeding his property of men whose want of energy or skill, or capital, renders them incapable of doing their duty by their farms, and replacing them by more suitable tenants, is hardly reasonable.

Again, the failure of the potatoes, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the application of steam and machinery to husbandry have converted a primitive art into a complicated science.† If the Irish


 * I quote the subjoined statement for the sake of the picturesque way in which the annihilation of the fertile properties of the soil is described : —

James Carnegie, Esq., Land Agent.

"In reference to the consolidation of farms, I may state that in 1823 I found a ploughland on an estate within three miles of Macroom, in the possession of a number of miserable cottiers ; seeing that the property could not be improved by them, and that they had dragged the life and soul out of the ground, I recommended the landlord to take it away from them, and to give each of them his house, and from five to six acres of ground, during his life at a nominal rent. This was done, and the land taken up and improved, and let in larger farms to solvent tenants." — Dig, Dev. Com. p. 463.

† "The number of persons fitted to direct and superintend any industrial enterprise, or even to execute any process which cannot be reduced almost to an affair of memory and routine,