3. Absenteeism is no disadvantage or loss to the country.  This principle is in great favour with the agents.  There is no theme on which they are so eloquent or so argumentative.  In the absence of the landlord the agent is all-powerful.  What the Irish lord deputy was to the Tudors and Stuarts, the Irish agent now is to the great absentee proprietor residing in London or Paris.  He will undertake to demonstrate that the West-end of London would be just as prosperous if the Queen and her court resided constantly at Balmoral or Killarney; if the parliament met alternately in Edinburgh and Dublin, and if the government offices were all at Liverpool.  With the blessing of absenteeism, houses in London would be built as fast, and would bring as high rents; trade would be as brisk, artizans of all sorts as well paid, life as happy, and the Londoners as well content.  The Irish, however, have, in their ignorance of political economy, conceived the idea, that if the millions sterling sent annually out of the country to London were spent among those by whose labour the money is made, there would be more employment for all sorts of tradesmen, more business for the shopkeepers, more opportunities of advancement for the farmers’ sons, more houses built, more trees planted, more land reclaimed, more factories established, more money stirring, more wealth, more life, more enjoyment, an immense increase of national prosperity.  The agents say that this is all a delusion.

4.  The next principle of the new agents is this—­and to carry it out is the aim of all their improvements—­that their mission is to produce the greatest amount of rent from the smallest number of tenants.

5.  To reduce the population by emigration or other means until there is barely a sufficient number of labourers to attend the agricultural machines, and herd the cattle.

6.  To discourage marriage in every possible way, and to diminish pauperism till there shall be no further use of the workhouses but to serve as lying-in hospitals for the thrifty spinsters, as they do in Cumberland and Westmoreland—­where the arrangement seems the most natural thing in the world.  It is certainly not an unnatural consequence of the practice of men and women sleeping in the same apartment.

Now let us see the working of this new system in Ireland; for it is at work more or less extensively in all the four provinces.  The rules of the estate, when rigidly enforced, as they generally are by the improving agents, tend steadily, powerfully, to break down the small farmers.  They are disappearing by thousands every year.  Some take their chance across the Atlantic.  Others fall into the condition of labourers, and may earn 2 s. a day on the estate.  This will last for awhile until the land is drained, manured, and turned into permanent pasture.  Then their occupation is gone.  There is nothing more for them to do.  There is no place for them, no room, no support in their native land.  The grass will grow without their labour, and the bullocks will fatten without their care.