Amidst such agitated passions it was inevitable that rent should speedily come to the front. Those who had contracted to pay rent, in the expectation that the produce of their labour would enable them to redeem their pledge, had been plunged into losses, more or less severe, by the badness of the seasons; their means were reduced; to pay was inconvenient; and it was a simpler method to take the matter into their own hands, and rather than appeal to the feelings of their landlords for a considerate diminution of their rents, to call rent itself into judgment, and to suppress it altogether. When, then, matters have reached the pass that an anti-rent agitation, based on the confiscation of property and the repudiation of contracts, has sprung up, and is swiftly spreading among an excitable people, it becomes important, in the highest degree, that the true nature of rent should be clearly understood by the whole country. Whatever may be ultimately decided about rent, let every man first know accurately what it is. To advocate a system of agriculture which shall abolish the possession of land by a class who are owners and not cultivators of the soil, and thus extinguish the charge for the loan of it to farmers, is perfectly legitimate. Let the merits and demerits of such a tenure be freely investigated; let peasant-proprietorship be counter-examined over against it; but let the conviction be brought home to every mind that no just or intelligent conclusion can be reached, unless every element of the problem has been fully and honestly weighed. A reduction of rents may very possibly be called for by necessity and by reason; but to place the position itself of landlord in an invidious light, as that of a man who exacts from the labour of others that for which he has neither toiled nor spun, is a most unwarrantable process of argumentation, and can lead to no trustworthy result in a matter of such transcendant importance to the nation.