"No one denies for a moment," said the agent, "that the tenant in all this business has been more than fairly, even generously, treated by the estate; yet no one seems to think it anything but natural and reasonable that he should demand, as he now demands, to be put back into the possession of his forfeited tenancy at a certain rent fixed by himself," which he will obligingly agree to pay, "provided that the hay cut and saved on the property two years ago is accounted for to him by the estate!"
In another case an agent, Mr. Ivough, had to deal with a body of five hundred tenants on a considerable estate. Of these tenants, two hundred settled their rents with the landlord before the passing of the Land Act of 1881, and valuations made by the landlord's valuer, with their full assent. There was no business for the lawyers, so far as they were concerned, and no compulsion of any sort was put on them. Among them was a man who had married the daughter of an old tenant on the estate, and so came into a holding of 12 Irish, or more than 20 statute, acres, at a rental of £18 a year. The valuer reduced this to £14, 10s., which satisfied the tenant, and as the agent agreed to make this reduced valuation retroactive, all went as smoothly as possible for two years, when the tenant began to fall into arrears. When the Sub-Commissioners, between 1885 and 1887, took to making sweeping reductions, the tenants who had settled freely under the recent valuation grumbled bitterly. As one of them tersely put it to the agent, "We were a parcel of bloody fools, and you ought to have told us these Sub-Commissioners were coming!" Mr. Sweeney, the tenant by marriage already mentioned, was not content to express his particular dissatisfaction in idle words, but kept on going into arrears. In May 1888 things came to a crisis. The agent refused to accept a settlement which included the payment by him of the costs of the proceedings forced upon him by his tenant. "You have had a good holding," said the agent, "with plenty of water and good land. In this current year two acres of your wheat will pay the whole rent. You have broken up and sold bit by bit a mill that was on the place; and above all, when Mr. Gladstone made us accept the judicial rents, he told us we might be sure, if we did this, of punctual payment. That was the one consideration held out to us. And we are entitled to that!"