_Middlemen and the Conacre System._--Middlemen were landlords between the head landlords and the cultivators. Head landlords with large properties, wishing to live away in some other country, divided their properties and let them to persons called "middlemen." The middleman divided his portion and sublet the same at about treble the rent he was paying his head landlord. A third middleman would parcel his up into small divisions and sublet at an enormous profit. With a string of middlemen between the head landlord and the cultivator, an acre let by the head landlord to his immediate lessor for five shillings per acre might cost the cultivator five pounds. But that was not the worst. Very often a man was required to pay two or three times for the same patch of ground--even the man paying for his little "hundred" of ground had sometimes to pay twice for his little patch of potatoes--because two men would be claiming title to the land. Then there was the usual staff of office men, rent warners, bog rangers, bailiffs and under-strappers who claimed tributes as well as the middlemen. Tenants were called upon to cut, save and draw home corn, hay, turf and sea manure for nothing, leaving the women and children attend to the tenant's own crops. Whether the middlemen were of Irish descent or foreign, Catholic or Protestant it did not matter much to the tenant, as they were nearly all oppressors of the worse kind imaginable.[6] The middleman of the Eighteenth Century were the very scum of society and the seeds of immorality. They destroyed and brought to sorrow most young girls that put any confidence in them or entered their service. Parnell's land agitation destroyed the last of them. _Molly McGuires._--This name was given to three secret societies The first was an Irish secret society, formed in or about the year 1833, in the Barony of Farney Co., Monogham, Ireland, to co-operate with the Ribbon-Men, and was called after C. McGuire, a leader in the Irish wars of 1641. The object of this society was to resist the distraining of cattle for rent, then common with landlords and middlemen. At that time very often a poor tenant had to pay five or six times for the same piece of ground, for which he had already paid his immediate lessor, because the immediate lessor, or landlord failed to pay one of the middlemen or landlords over him. (See Middlemen.) Distraining a tenant's cattle, impounding them, and selling them at auction before his eyes, in the name of British law and justice, for another man's debts, of which he had no knowledge or control and provided no legal remedy, to him appeared a wicked law. The McGuires applied the most desperate remedies available. Disguised as women, they rescued the cattle, flung boiling water and porridge on bailiffs, clubbed and stoned process servers, broke the locks on the pounds and released the cattle.