’To provide against this difficulty, landlords adopted a system of taking duty-work, in fact, in a new form.  They had cottiers (cottagers), day-labourers established in cottages, on their estate, usually near their own residence.  Many of these cabins were the poorest habitations that can be imagined; and these were given rent free, that is, the rent was to be worked out on whatever days, or on whatever occasions, it was called for.  The grazing for the cow, the patch of land for flax, and the ridge or ridges of potato land were also to be paid for in days’ labour in the same manner.  The uncertainty of this tenure at will, that is, at the pleasure of the landlord, with the rent in labour and time, variable also at his pleasure or convenience, became rather more injurious to the tenant than the former fixed mode of sacrificing so many days’ duty-work, even at the most hazardous seasons of the year.

’My father wished to have entirely avoided this cottager system; but he was obliged to adopt a middle course.  To his labourers he gave comfortable cottages at a low rent, to be held at will from year to year; but he paid them wages exactly the same as what they could obtain elsewhere.  Thus they were partly free and partly bound.  They worked as free labourers; but they were obliged to work, that they might pay their rent.  And their houses being better, and other advantages greater, than they could obtain elsewhere, they had a motive for industry and punctuality; thus their services and their attachment were properly secured. . . .  My father’s indulgence as to the time he allowed his tenantry for the payment of their rent was unusually great.  He left always a year’s rent in their hands:  this was half a year more time than almost any other gentleman in our part of the country allowed. . . .  He was always very exact in requiring that the rents should not, in their payments, pass beyond the half-yearly days—­the 25th of March and 29th of September.  In this point they knew his strictness so well that they seldom ventured to go into arrear, and never did so with impunity. . . .  They would have cheated, loved, and despised a more easy landlord, and his property would have gone to ruin, without either permanently bettering their interests or their morals.  He, therefore, took especial care that they should be convinced of his strictness in punishing as well as of his desire to reward.

’Where the offender was tenant, and the punisher landlord, it rarely happened, even if the law reached the delinquent, that public opinion sided with public justice.  In Ireland it has been, time immemorial, common with tenants, who have had advantageous bargains, and who have no hopes of getting their leases renewed, to waste the ground as much as possible; to break it up towards the end of the term; or to overhold, that is, to keep possession of the land, refusing to deliver it up.