But it is quite certain that until these last few years the farmers were doing well. The proof is, that when for some reason or other they wished to retire, they always managed to sell their leases, and sometimes to sell them very dearly. And even now they find buyers. I was given numerous instances of this fact. Mr. Henry George, the Socialist of whom I have already spoken, himself acknowledged, that “Irish land is generally let below the price that the landlords could obtain if it were put up to auction and they consented to let it to the highest bidder without regard to persons.” He even quoted an article in the _Nineteenth Century_, in which a well-known Irish economist, Miss O’Brien, states that the sub-tenants generally pay the leaseholders twice the amount for the land that the latter give to the landlords. This fact established, we must still acknowledge that certain landlords, particularly those who seek to sell, have sometimes profited, at a moment when the majority of the leases were drawing to a close, by suddenly raising the rents in a formidable manner. This transaction has been carried out by speculators or by creditors on mortgage, who have taken possession. It has rarely been done by hereditary landowners. However, there is one well-known man who is accused of having, with the aid of one of his brothers, doubled in one year all the rents on an estate which he had just inherited, and of having immediately sold it to an English manufacturer for a price based on the new rental. This man is Mr. Parnell, the chief of the Land League. Knowing the usual inaccuracy of accusations inspired by political passions, I was much inclined to doubt the truth of this one. However, the incident has been vouched for by so many of Mr. Parnell’s neighbours, so many details respecting it have been quoted to me, that it appears difficult to believe that there is not some foundation for it. When we examine facts closely we find then that in nine cases out of ten, when an unfortunate man is spoken of as rack-rented to death, it is of a sub-tenant they are speaking, not of a farmer. The Irish farmer, on whose fate so much pity is wasted, is in reality more often than not a frightful jobber; and it would be well to remember that, in spite of all the laws that are made to prevent it, in spite of the formal clauses contained in most of the leases, there are very few farmers who do not contrive by different combinations, to find five or six poor fellows who give themselves up to him, bound hand and foot, so great is their desire to have a few acres of bad land. This is the case of a man whose cabin I visited at Derrygariff; and there are in Ireland two or three hundred thousand men who are in the same position.