Lord Lansdowne’s system is beautiful, but it is unfinished.  Let him ‘crown the edifice with liberty.’  He possesses a giant’s power, and he uses it like an angel.  When he comes to trouble the waters, the multitude gathers around the fountain to be healed.  But his visits are, like angels’ visits, few and far between.  Many of the sick and impotent folk, after long waiting, are not able to get near till the miracle-worker has departed.  An absentee landlord, be he ever so good, must delegate his power to an agent.  Agents have good memories, and their servants, the bailiffs, are good lookers-on.  There is a hierarchy in the heaven of landlordism—­the under-bailiff, the head-bailiff, the chief-clerk in the office, the sub-agent, the head-agent.  All these must be submissively approached and anxiously propitiated before the petitioner’s prayers can reach the ears of Jove himself, seated aloft on his remote Olympian throne.  He may be, and for the most part really is—­if he belongs to the old stock of aristocratic divinities—­generous and gracious, incapable of meanness, baseness, or cruelty.  But the tenant has to do, not with the absentee divinity, but with his priest—­not with the good spirit, but his medium; and this go-between is not always noble, or disinterested, or unexacting.  To him power may be new—­a small portion of it may intoxicate him, like alcohol on an empty stomach.  He was not born to an inheritance of sycophancy; it comes like an afflatus upon him, and it turns his head.  It creates an appetite, like strong drink, which grows into a disease.  This appetite is as capricious as it is insatiable.  Hence, the chief characteristic of landlord power, as felt by the tenant, is arbitrariness.  The agent may make any rule he pleases, and as many exceptions to every rule as he pleases.  He may allow rents to run in arrear; he may suddenly come down upon the defaulter with ‘a fell swoop;’ he may require the rents to be paid up to the day; he may, without reason assigned, call in ’the hanging gale;’ he may abate or increase the rents at will; he may inflict fines for delay or give notices to quit for the sole purpose of bringing in fees to his friend or relative, the solicitor.  But whatever he may choose to do, the tenant has nothing for it but to submit; and he must submit with a good grace.  Woe to him if the agony of his spirit is revealed in the working of his features, or in an audible groan!  Most of the poor fellows do submit, till their hearts are broken—­till the hot iron has entered their souls and seared their consciences.  When the slave is thus finished, the agent and his journeymen are satisfied with their handiwork; their ‘honours’ can then count on any sort of services they may choose to exact—­may bid defiance to the priest and the agitator, and boast of an orderly and deserving tenantry devoted to the best of landlords, who is their natural protector.  It would be wicked to interfere with these amicable persons.  Why talk about leases?  The tenants will not have them; they don’t want security or independence by contract.  So most of the agents report—­but not all.  There are noble exceptions which relieve the gloomy picture.