"Ay, you may laugh, young sir," resumed Jack Dunning; "but such _is_ the intention. I know very well what will be your course of reasoning; you will say, the longer the lease, the better for the tenant, if the bargain be reasonably good; and landlords cannot ask more for the use of their lands than they are really worth in this country, there happening to be more lands than there are men to work it. No, no; landlords rather get less for their lands than they are worth, instead of more, for that plain reason. To compel the tenant to take a lease, therefore, for a term as short as five years, is to injure him, you think; to place him more at the control of his landlord, through the little interests connected with the cost and trouble of moving, and through the natural desire he may possess to cut the meadows he has seeded, and to get the full benefit of manure he has made and carted. I see how you reason, young sir; but you are behind the age--you are sadly behind the age." "The age is a queer one, if I am! All over the world it is believed that long leases are favours, or advantages, to tenants; and nothing can make it otherwise, _caeteris paribus_. Then what good will the tax do, after violating right and moral justice, if not positive law, to lay it? On a hundred dollars of rent, I should have to pay some fifty-five cents of taxes, as I am assessed on other things at Ravensnest; and does anybody suppose I will give up an estate that has passed through five generations of my family, on account of a tribute like that!" "Mighty well, sir--mighty well, sir! This is fine talk; but I would advise you not to speak of _your_ ancestors at all. Landlords can't name _their_ ancestors with impunity just now." "I name mine only as showing a reason for a natural regard for my paternal acres." "That you might do, if you were a tenant; but not as a landlord. In a landlord, it is aristocratic and intolerable pride, and to the last degree offensive--as Dogberry says, 'tolerable and not to be endured.'" "But it is a _fact_, and it is natural one should have some feelings connected with it." "The more it is a fact, the less it will be liked. People associate social position with wealth and _estates_, but not with farms; and the longer one has such things in a family, the worse for them!" "I do believe, Jack," put in my uncle Ro, "that the rule which prevails all over the rest of the world is reversed here, and that with us it is thought a family's claim is lessened, and not increased, by time."