The reasons for this state of things are to be found in the number and the small size of the Irish holdings, but more than this in the fact that from the first landlords came there in a business capacity. "Les uns comme les autres," says a French writer, M. Paul-Dubois, "ils n'ont vu dans la terre Irlandaise qu'une affaire, et non une patrie. Ils sont restés conquérants en pays de conquête. De là cette conséquence que, conscients d'être des étrangers, des intrus, ils se sont crus libres et quittes de toute dette envers le pays, de tous les devoirs de la propriété."[3] Planted on land which was confiscated, and, as a result, insecurely held, to risk the expenditure of money would have been unnatural, the more so since the expenditure which, in the circumstances, fell upon the tenant in the matter of improvements, provided the best possible security to the landlord by making the tenant all the more anxious to remain on the holding on which he had sunk what little capital he possessed, and in consequence virtually obliged, at risk of ejection, to submit unwillingly to periodical enhancements of rent. In addition to the few English-managed estates it was only in Ulster that matters were otherwise, owing to the existence of the custom--an embryo copyhold, Lord Devon called it--known as tenant-right. On the various confiscations of land, grants of which had been made to the "undertakers," many of the latter were either public bodies, such as the great City Companies, others were landlords who, even if not resident at a distance, had neither the means nor the inclination to spend the necessary money on their estates. This was provided by the tenant, who, without aid from the landlord, made improvements on his holding by his own labour; and in Ulster, where the tenants were settlers from England and Scotland, there arose an equitable proprietorship vested in the occupier, by which, on quitting the farm, he was entitled to claim from the new tenant a sum of money partly in compensation for the money and labour he had invested in the holding and partly as a price paid for the goodwill or possession, which the new tenant would have no other means of acquiring. The nature of this "Ulster Custom," which, until 1870, had no sanction or protection from the law, was clearly defined by the Master of the Rolls, in the case of M'Elroy _v._ Brooke, in the following words:--"The essentials of the custom are the right to sell, to have the incoming tenant, if there be no reasonable objection to him, recognised by the landlord, and to have a sum of money paid for the interest in the tenancy transferred." The English system we see then, with its competitive rent fixed by contract, and subject to the laws of supply and demand, did not exist; the social and prescriptive ties which in England bound the owner and the occupier to each other never arose under this state of things, and in their absence did not arise one of