They were breezy, out-of-door men, both of them.  One amused us with a tale of espying, the other day, two hounds, a collie dog, a terrier, and eighteen cats all amicably running together across a farmyard, with their tails erect, after a dairymaid who was to feed them.  The other capped this with a story of a pig on his own place, which follows one of his farm lads about like a dog,—­“the only pig,” he said, “I ever saw show any human feeling!” The gentleman who goes to Norwich thought the English landlords were in many cases worse off than the Irish.  “Ah, no!” interfered the other, “not quite; for if the English can’t get their rents, at least they keep their land, but we can neither get our rents nor keep our land!” They both admitted that there had been much bad management of the land in Ireland, and that the agents had done the owners as well as the tenants a great deal of harm in the past, but they both maintained stoutly that the legislation of late years had been one-sided and short-sighted.  “The tenants haven’t got real good from it,” said one, “because the claims of the landlord no longer check their extravagance, and they run more in debt than ever to the shopkeepers and traders, who show them little mercy.”  Both also strenuously insisted on the gross injustice of leaving the landlords unrelieved of any of the charges fixed upon their estates, while their means of meeting those charges were cut down by legislation.

“You have no landlords in America,” said one, “but if you had, how would you like to be saddled with heavy tithe charges for a Disestablished Church at the same time that your tenants were relieved of their dues to you?”

I explained to him that so far from our having no landlords in America, the tenant-farmer class is increasing rapidly in the United States, while it is decreasing in the Old World, while the land laws, especially in some of our older Western States, give the landlords such absolute control of their tenants that there is a serious battle brewing at this moment in Illinois[12] between a small army of tenants and their absentee landlord, an alien and an Irishman, who holds nearly a hundred thousand acres in the heart of the State, lives in England, and grants no leases, except on the condition that he shall receive from his tenants, in addition to the rent, the full amount of all taxes and levies whatsoever made upon the lands they occupy.

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the gentleman who goes to Norwich, “if that is the kind of laws your American Irish will give us with Home Rule, I’ll go in for it to-morrow with all my heart!”