the soil, for different reasons not contented with their lot, hostile, in a great degree, to the order of things around them, and more alive to their grievances than in the past generation; at this very time a cry against the payment of rent, and against 'landlordism,' as it was called, was being heard in a few counties. It was significant that agrarian crimes--some of the worst type--and agrarian disorder were distinctly increasing; and it should be added, that, in spite of Cardinal Cullen, the younger Catholic priests, in some districts, were beginning to play the part of agitators again. Passing from the general state of landed relations, the conditions of land tenure, briefly noticed before, had not improved of late years, and were, in some respects, worse. Rents had been rising for a considerable time: but except in comparatively few instances, they were not excessive, as affairs stood; whatever mendacious calumny has since maintained, Ireland, on the whole, was in no sense an over-rented land.[56] But the modes of occupation were essentially bad; they were open to the gravest objections; their vices had become more than ever apparent. The tenant right, under the Ulster custom, had, I have remarked, largely secured the tenant farmer, in parts of the province, what was generally known as the 'Three F's,' Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, the power of a Free Sale of the holding;[57] though it should be especially borne in mind that the fair rent was never adjusted by an external agency, but was settled by what Adam Smith would have called 'higgling' between the owner and occupier of the soil. The custom, however, had been very powerful; its violation, on anything like a great scale, would have certainly caused a fierce war of classes; and it gave the Ulster tenant, in tens of thousands of cases, a real proprietary right in the land, whatever might be the terms of his contract; a right equivalent to more or less joint-ownership, and that might be described as a precious _peculium_, subject to conditions that long had made it practically secure. But this most important right, involving property worth many millions, still remained wholly unprotected by law; and though its value had enormously increased, as the wealth of Ulster had been developed, of late years, it was being 'nibbled away' on not a few estates, and restricted by limitations of many kinds that had greatly impaired it. An analogous right, like seed scattered by the winds, had partially spread into the southern provinces, as the natural result of the equitable claims, the occupiers of farms had repeatedly acquired, though this had not been recognised on many estates, and its efficacy was not as yet great; but this right, such as it was, like its fellow, was not law-worthy, and depended wholly on the will of the lord of the soil. In addition to the tenant right in the north and the south, the concurrent claims of the tenant farmers, throughout the country, in