Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 21, 2025
"'It is because the landlords, who have been their masters, have rack-rented them, have sunk them in poverty, have plundered their own improvements, have confiscated the fruits of their own industry, have done all that they could to degrade their manhood. That is why they are backward.
He was a thickset heavy-looking man, florid, with a military moustache, the last time I saw him. His mother is one of the 'rack-rented' tenants you hear of, having been able in ten years to increase her acreage from 74 acres to 376 acres, and her rental from £48, 11s. to £542!" As to the general effect of all this business upon the tenants, and upon himself, Mr. Ponsonby spoke most feelingly.
The cultivators were, in fact, rack-rented up to the minimum of subsistence. but this much was insured to them; in other words, they were predial serfs.
Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing and money-getting. White people are more in evidence here, and farmer and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and rack-rented tenant.
To exchange the rack-rented but limitless fields of Irish landlordism for the rickety and equally rack-rented tenements, with the checkerboard streets, where all must keep moving, is only adding sordidness to spare sadness. Surely, the birthday's injury is felt in a deep sense by the poor.
I am not aware of the landed possessions of The O'Gorman Mahon, but I have already stated that his nephew holds only a moderate estate, let by the way at about three times the Government valuation but not, I must add, necessarily, rack-rented, for Griffiths is, for reasons fully explained by a score of writers beside myself, a deceptive guide in grazing counties.
But in 1846 Sir Robert Peel successfully struck at the old laws imposing duties on foreign corn, and let in Baltic wheat and American provisions of every kind, to compete with and undersell the Irish rack-rented farmers. "High rents had produced hardness of heart in the 'middleman, extravagance in the land-owner, and extreme poverty in the peasant.
India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the cultivator.
A century since, whatever the table of precedency or Blackstone may say, an English baronet, particularly one of the date of 1611, was a much greater personage than he is to-day; and an estate of £4000 a year, more especially if not rack-rented, was of an extent, and necessarily of a local consequence, equal to one of near, or quite three times the same amount, in our own day.
"She was aye a richt-thinkin' woman, Rachel, there's nae mistake o' that; a' wonder hoo her son is gettin' on wi' that fairm he's takin'; a' doot it's rack-rented." It was an honest, satisfying conversation, and reminded one of the parish of Drumtochty, being both quoad sacra and quoad civilia.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking