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This absence of great proprietors in Ireland necessarily brings with it, or if not necessarily, has actually brought with it, the employment of the middlemen, which forms one other standing and regular Irish grievance. We are well aware of all that can be said in defence of middlemen; that they stand between the little farmer and the great proprietor as the shopkeeper does between the manufacturer and consumer; and, in fact, by their intervention, save time, and therefore expense. This may be true enough in the abstract; but the particular nature of land must be attended to. The object of the man who makes cloth is to sell his cloth at the present market, for as high a price as he can obtain. If that price is too high, it soon falls; but no injury is done to his machinery by the superior price he has enjoyed for a season–he is just as able to produce cloth with it, as if the profits he enjoyed had always been equally moderate; he has no fear, therefore, of the middleman, or of any species of moral machinery which may help to obtain for him the greatest present prices. The same would be the feeling of any one who let out a steam-engine, or any other machine, for the purposes of manufacture; he would naturally take the highest price he could get; for he might either let his machine for a price proportionate to the work it did, or the repairs, estimable with the greatest precision, might be thrown upon the tenant; in short, he could hardly ask any rent too high for his machine which a responsible person would give; dilapidation would be so visible, and so calculable in such instances, that any secondary lease, or subletting, would be rather an increase of security than a source of alarm. Any evil from such a practice would be improbable measurable, and remediable. In land, on the contrary, the object is not to get the highest prices absolutely, but to get the highest prices which will not injure the machine. One tenant may offer and pay double the rent of another, and in a few years leave the land in a state which will effectually bar all future offers of tenancy. It is of no use to fill a lease full of clauses and covenants; a tenant who pays more than he ought to pay, or who pays even to the last farthing which he ought to pay, will rob the land, and injure the machine, in spite of all the attorneys in England. He will rob it even if he means to remain upon it–driven on by present distress, and anxious to put off the day of defalcation and arrear. The damage is often difficult of detection–not easily calculated, not easily to be proved; such for which juries (themselves perhaps farmers) will not willingly give sufficient compensation. And if this be true in England, it is much more strikingly true in Ireland, where it is extremely difficult to obtain verdicts for breaches of covenant in leases.

The only method, then, of guarding the machine from real injury, is by giving to the actual occupier such advantage in his contract, that he is unwilling to give it up–that he has a real interest in retaining it, and is not driven by the distresses of the present moment to destroy the future productiveness of the soil. Any rent which the landlord accepts more than this, or any system by which more rent than this is obtained, is to borrow money upon the most usurious and profligate interest–to increase the revenue of the present day by the absolute ruin of the property. Such is the effect produced by a middleman; he gives high prices that he may obtain higher from the occupier; more is paid by the actual occupier than is consistent with the safety and preservation of the machine; the land is run out, and, in the end, that maximum of rent we have described is not obtained; and not only is the property injured by such a system, but in Ireland the most shocking consequences ensue from it. There is little manufacture in Ireland; the price of labour is low, the demand for labour irregular. If a poor man be driven, by distress of rent, from his potato garden, he has no other resource–all is lost: he will do the impossible (as the French say) to retain it; subscribe any bond, and promise any rent. The middleman has no character to lose; and he knew, when he took up the occupation, that it was one with which pity had nothing to do. On he drives; and backward the poor peasant recedes, loses something at every step, till he comes to the very brink of despair; and then he recoils and murders his oppressor, and is a White Boy or a Right Boy;–the soldier shoots him, and the judge hangs him.