Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish land-agent—­problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870.  The Irish tenant has a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never had in the olden time, and this makes it more important than it ever was that the agent should have what may be called a diplomatic taste for treating with individuals, finding out the bent of mind of this man and of that, and negotiating over particulars, instead of insisting, in the English fashion, on general rules, without regard to special cases.  I have met no one who has seemed to me so cool and precise as Mr. Seigne in his study of the phenomena of the present situation.  I asked him whether he could now say, as Mr. Senior did a quarter of century ago, that the Irish tenants were less improvident, and more averse from running into debt than the English.

“I think not,” he replied; “on the contrary, in some parts of Ireland now the shopkeepers are kept on the verge of bankruptcy by the recklessness with which the tenants incurred debts immediately after the passing of the Land Act of 1870—­a time when shopkeepers, and bankers also, almost forced credit upon the farmers, and made thereby ’bad debts’ innumerable.  Farmers rarely keep anything like an account of their receipts and expenses.  I know only one tenant-farmer in this neighbourhood who keeps what can be called an account, showing what he takes from his labour and spends on his living."[20] “They save a great deal of money often,” he says, “but almost never in any systematic way.  They spend much less on clothes and furniture, and the outward show of things, than English people of the same condition do, and they do not stint themselves in meat and drink as the French peasants do.  In fact, under the operation of existing circumstances, they are getting into the way of improving their condition, not so much by sacrifices and savings, as by an insistence on rent being fixed low enough to leave full margin for improved living.”

“I had a very frank statement on this point,” said Mr. Seigne, “not long ago from a Tipperary man.  When I tried to show him that his father had paid a good many years ago the very same rent which he declares himself unable to pay now, he admitted this at once.  But it was a confession and avoidance.  ‘My father could pay the rent, and did pay the rent,’ he said, ’because he was content to live so that he could pay it.  He sat on a boss of straw, and ate out of a bowl.  He lived in a way in which I don’t intend to live, and so he could pay the rent.  Now, I must have, and I mean to have, out of the land, before I pay the rent, the means of living as I wish to live; and if I can’t have it, I’ll sell out and go away; but I’ll be—­if I don’t fight before I do that same!’”