Here was no powerful class of resident, improving landlords, or rich and ...

Here was no powerful class of resident, improving landlords, or rich and masterful farmers; and what history had not created, no law could provide. Instead, circumstance had produced, generally in Ulster and sporadically in the other provinces, a custom which made the tenant effectively part owner of the land.

So definite was the custom that the Ulster tenant could sell his leasehold, his successor stepping into his rights without any new contract with the owner. In effect, where the Custom of Ulster held full sway, the landlord had a rent-charge on the land, the tenant had the rest.

This was the formula now to be applied by Parliament to the whole soil of Ireland. Palmerston had characterized it in advance in the last, and not the least effective, of his popular phrases: Tenant's right is landlord's wrong.

The Act of 1870 was an act of confiscation to redress a process of confiscation which had lasted for centuries, and it failed because it did not confiscate enough.