Convinced that he has a hereditary right to the domain in general, the Irish peasant besides attributes to himself a special and prescriptive right to the plot of ground that he, like the landlord, occupies from father to son, though on a precarious tenure. This right is not purely imaginary; it was consecrated in the year 1860 by a special Act of Parliament, due to the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. Recognised from immemorial times in Ulster, it has always been claimed in all the other parts of Ireland; it is the _tenant right_, what in our own Picardy is called the _droit de marché_. It is well known in what consist this ancient prerogative of the Picardy farmer (Troplong in the Preface to his _Traité du Louage_, and Lefort in his _Histoire des contrats de location perpétuelle_, have treated it exhaustively): it is simply the privilege of preserving in perpetuity for him and for his heirs, the use of the ground for which he pays rent regularly. Not only is this privilege not denied to him, but he can transfer it to a third person, for a premium that goes by the name of _intrade_. The amount of that premium is often a third or even a half of the intrinsic value of the soil. Formerly this “_droit de marché_” applied to everything that can be let or hired; the labourers, the threshers, the shepherds of a domain, each claimed it in his own province as a hereditary monopoly. In modern days it is strictly limited to the hiring of servants, in the few districts where it survived the French revolution (in Péronne for instance). The thing that is only a curious exception in France has remained the rule in Ireland, where _tenant right_ has been in force for the last twenty-seven years. And what, after all, can be better founded than such a right? Has not the tenant, in the majority of cases, made his plot of ground what it is? Has he not tilled it, improved it, manured it, drained it according to his better knowledge; in a word, has he not _created_ it in its actual form? “Let us,” says the peasant, “admit the rights of the landlord. How could he deny me mine? Are they not legibly written in the furrow I have traced upon this earth, in the fruits I have made her bear?... The land is not a simple material, unreducible like a piece of gold. It is a chemical product, a conglomerate that is valuable especially by reason of all the substances I have mixed up with it during an occupation of ten, twenty, thirty years, or even more.... Who shall dare to deny the share I have brought into this company of which I am the acting manager, and deny that this share belongs to me?”