Considerable pains are taken to show that the system of middlemen which then prevailed, or persons holding tracts of land intermediately between the head landlord and the smaller occupiers, was injurious to both, and a bar to improvement. It was defended on the ground of its affording greater security for the rent. But Arthur Young says that the smaller tenantry were found to be the most punctual rent-payers; and he further observes, “that at the last extremity it is the occupier’s stock which is the real security of the landlord,—it is that he distrains, and finds abundantly more valuable than the laced hat hounds and pistols of the gentleman jobber, from whom he is more likely in such a case to receive a ‘_message_’ than a remittance.” These “profit-renters” are said to waste their time and their means in horseracing and hunting, and to be the hardest drinkers and most dissolute class of men in Ireland, as well as the greatest oppressors of the poor tenantry, whose condition is described as little better than the cottars they employ. Arthur Young declares, that—to be ignorant of the condition of the labouring classes and the poor generally, is to be wanting in the first rudiments of political knowledge, and he states that he made every endeavour to obtain the best information on the subject, from persons in every class of life. According to some, the poor were all starving. According to others, they were in a very tolerable state of comfort.—Whilst a third party, who looked with a jaundiced eye on British administration, pointed at their poverty and rags as proofs of the cruel treatment of their country. When truth is thus liable to be warped, an inquirer should, he remarks, be slow to believe and assiduous to examine, and he intimates that such had universally been his practice.