system of tyranny which cries from earth to heaven for relief.  Were I to narrate my own story it would startle many of the Protestants of Ireland.  There are good landlords—­never a better than the late Lord Downshire, or the living and beloved Lord Roden.  But there are too many of another state of feeling and action.  There are estates in the north where the screw is never withdrawn from its circuitous and oppressive work.  Tenant-right is an unfortunate and delusive affair, simply because it is almost invariably used to the landlord’s advantage.  Here we have an election in prospect, and in many counties no farmer will be permitted to think or act for himself.  What right any one man has to demand the surrender of another’s vote, I never could see.  It is an act of sheer felony—­a perfect “stand-and-deliver” affair.  To hear a man slavishly and timorously say, “I must give my votes as the landlord wishes,” is an admission that the legislature, which bestowed the right of voting on the tenant, should not see him robbed of his right, or subsequently scourged or banished from house and land, because he disregarded a landlord’s nod, or the menace of a land agent.  At no little hazard of losing the friendship of some who are high and good and kind, I write as I now do.—­Yours, my dear Butt, very sincerely,

  ’THOMAS DREW.

  ’Dundrum, Clough, County Down,
  September 7, 1868.’

Some resident landlords employ a considerable number of labourers, to each of whom they give an excellent cottage, an acre of land, and the grass of a cow, with work all the year round at seven shillings a week.  The tenants are most comfortable and most grateful, while the praise of those landlords is in the mouths of the peasantry all round the country.  But these considerate landlords are in a minority.  As a rule, on the estates where the improvement system is going on, where farms are being consolidated, and grazing supersedes tillage, an iron pressure weighs upon the labouring classes, crushing them out of the country.  It is a cold, hard, calculating, far-reaching system of inhumanity, which makes the peasant afraid to harbour his own flesh and blood.  It compels the grandmother to shut the door in the face of the poor homeless orphan, lest the improving agent should hear of the act of sheltering him from the pitiless storm, not more pitiless than the agent himself.  The system of terrorism established by the threats of eviction de-humanizes a people remarkable for their hospitality to the poor.  Mr. Thomas Crosbie, of Cork, a gentleman whom I believe to be as truthful and honourable as any agent in Ireland, gives appalling illustrations of this in his account of ‘The Lansdowne Estates,’ published in 1858.  Mr. Trench has given the English public several pretty little romances about these estates; but he omitted some realities that ought to have impressed themselves upon his memory as deeply as any of his adventures.  Mr. Crosbie found that the ’rules of the estate,’