THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (_continued_)--PROPOSED REFORM OF THE IRISH
LAND SYSTEM
Retrospect of the present Irish land system--Position of the Irish
landlords--Position of the Irish tenant class--This not as
advantageous as might be supposed--The effects of the land code on
Irish agriculture injurious--The effects on the general Irish
community--Confiscation, violation of contracts, shock given to
credit, increased alienation of classes, and demoralisation--The land
system considered on the side of ownership--'Voluntary
purchase'--Mischief of this policy--It sets up a false standard
against rent, and creates unjust distinctions between different
classes of tenants--The results it has produced already--An instance
of the system--The demand for the compulsory purchase of the Irish
land caused by 'voluntary purchase'--Compulsory purchase has some hold
on opinion, but is an impossible, and would be a disgraceful and
ruinous policy--It would ruin Irish landlords as a
class--Instances--It would ultimately bring Ireland into the state in
which she was before the Great Famine--Proposed plan for the reform of
Irish land tenure--Questions as to the means of compensating Irish
landlords, a deeply wronged order of men.
Having traced the attempts that have been made to reform Irish land
tenure, in the last thirty years, and noticed the administration of the
new Irish land code, I must, for the sake of clearness, take a short
retrospect, and consider the Irish land system as it exists at this day; I
shall review it on the side of occupation first, that is, in the relations
of landlord and tenant. The agricultural rental of Ireland, we have seen,
has been, or is being, reduced about 40 per cent. since 1881, through the
operation of laws carried out by tribunals of the State; this proceeding,
unexampled in civilised lands, has been the means, I have proved, of doing
gross wrong to the Irish landed gentry. But this, if a signal, is only one
of the many acts of injustice perpetrated on a cruelly injured body of
men. The fee simple has been wrested from the Irish landlord, where he has
been subjected to the legislation of late years; he has been deprived of
the ownership which had been his birthright. An estate, nominally for
fifteen years, but really capable of being renewed for ever, has been
created against him by an unjust law; and this has been vested in his
former tenants, subject to the mode of land tenure known as the 'Three
F's,' the chief of these being 'fair,' that is, State-settled rents, in
the adjustment of which he has no voice. He may, no doubt, retain
fragments of his old proprietary rights; parts of his estate may be
excluded from the provisions of the law; he may be the lord of 'future
tenants;' he is left 'royalties,' such as minerals, mines, and timber; he
possesses most of his former legal remedies; and should the holders of the
lands, which had been his own, who have obtained the benefits of the
'Three F's,' infringe the statutory conditions imposed on them, they may
be dispossessed, and he may enter upon their farms again. But,
notwithstanding exceptions and possibilities like these, the Irish
landlord has, for practical purposes, been well-nigh assimilated to a
rent-charger, and his tenants have been nearly converted into owners of
the soil, an utter revolution in the whole land system, in truth, turning
it upside down. The status, indeed, of the Irish landed gentry now bears a
strong resemblance to that of the chief landlords of the eighteenth
century, who, separating themselves altogether from their lands, let them
in perpetuity at low rents, and, as a necessary consequence, produced the
middleman, the pest, as he has rightly been called, of Irish land tenure.
The enormous and, as I believe, the unjust benefits secured by recent
legislation to the Irish tenant, are not, however, so complete as they
appear to be, and are not without disadvantages attendant on them. Tenants
of holdings, to which the law does not apply, such as tenants of demesnes
and large pastoral lands, if rightly excluded, nevertheless complain; and
'future tenants,' and petty occupants, who cannot afford to seek 'fair
rents' from the Courts, have, from their point of view, solid grounds of
complaint. The scope of the new land code is, therefore, to some extent,
restricted; and if the law has actually caused a general reduction of
rents, it has not secured the 'Three F's' for a considerable body of
farmers, not improbably a fourth or fifth part of the class as a whole.
And even the occupiers of the Irish soil, who have obtained the advantages
of the new mode of tenure, have not obtained these without a certain kind
of drawback. Completely separated as they now are from their former
landlords, they cannot expect indulgences from a class which considers
itself to have been shamefully wronged; the allowances, which, whatever
may be said, had been made to them, in thousands of cases, have, as a
rule, been altogether withdrawn; they get no help in making improvements;
they are usually obliged regularly to pay their 'fair rents;' above all,
landlords, of a strict or harsh nature, are sometimes on the look-out to
see if they do not violate the statutory conditions to which they are
subject, in order to convert them into 'future tenants,' outside of the
protection of the law, and even to reacquire their lands. These
circumstances are not without adverse effects; though unquestionably they
are far more than countervailed by the change which has been wrought in
Irish land tenure, and has given the Irish tenant the benefits already
described. Yet, even from this point of view, the law does not operate as
unreservedly in his favour as might be supposed. He has his 'fair rent,'
probably much too low; his 'fixity of tenure,' a perpetuity in all but
name; his right to 'free sale,' sometimes worth thousands of pounds. But,
as a rule, he can only gain these advantages at the cost of a lawsuit
recurring at short intervals of time, with the vexation and mischief this
brings with it, a lawsuit, too, of which the results may be more or less
doubtful. If, too, he is a saving and thrifty man he will hardly be able
to acquire lands for himself, as, in consequence of the right of 'free
sale,' the tenant right of these will have become immensely high; he will
be confined, in most instances, to the farm he holds. On the other hand,
if he be dishonest or imprudent, he will be tempted to run out and even to
injure his land, in order to effect a reduction of rent, or to sublet or
mortgage it should an opportunity be found.
The new Irish land code has thus had this special feature: it has done
infinite harm to the despoiled landlord, but the tenant has not gained the
expected benefits. Let us now see what effect it has had on the great
industry on which the Irish landed classes depend, the main source of the
wealth of their country. Unquestionably, as I have remarked, over and over
again, the tenant in Ireland makes, for the most part, the plant of his
farm a necessary incident of the small-farm system; but the Irish landed
gentry, in the last half century, have done a great deal in the work of
improvement. Whatever interested calumny may falsely assert, they have
expended millions, as unerring statistics show, in planting, enclosure,
and, especially, in arterial drainage, this last beyond the reach of the
common peasant; they have, in thousands of instances, made the breeds of
stock better; they have made large allowances as regards farm buildings.
All this is now a thing of the past; the sometime landowner, in a real
sense, has been divorced from his former estate; law has prohibited him
from doing anything for it; his only interest is to collect the
rent-charge called, in mockery, 'fair rent.' On the other hand, tenants in
Ireland have, in a great many cases--I have briefly glanced at the
conclusive evidence--positively wasted or neglected their holdings, for
the express purpose of working rent down; this shameful expedient has been
hardly checked; the deterioration of a large area of land has been thus
accomplished. And, at the same time, as 'fair rent' is much lower than the
rent of the market, a considerable minority of this class have sublet or
mortgaged their lands, in order to get advances of which they stand in
need; this, no doubt, is a violation of the law; but it is a violation
difficult to prove, and they run the risk. In this way, as I have shown,
in a preceding chapter, the husbandry of Ireland has declined of late
years; woodland has been cut down recklessly to a great extent; main
drainage has been largely neglected, a ruinous thing in a wet climate; in
thousands of cases the farming of tenants at 'fair rents' is wretched. The
face of the country reveals these facts: Ireland is worse cultivated than
it was twenty years ago; indeed, the best farming, in the island, by many
degrees, is that conducted by a small number of men of substance, who
still hold on the footing of free contract, having settled with their
landlords, and taken out leases, a significant commentary on Irish
legislation since 1881.
This subject, however, must be considered from a broader point of view,
and with reference to the community of Ireland, as a whole. A great
confiscation, I have said, has been wrought in the Irish land; the immense
fall in the value of the landlord's estate, and the immense rise in the
value of the tenant right, prove that property belonging to one class has
been transferred, wholesale, by law, to another, a result never
contemplated by responsible statesmen. And confiscation has produced its
inevitable effects; free dealing in land has been prevented; except to his
former tenants an Irish country gentleman cannot sell what remains to him
of his former estate, and that through the system of 'land purchase;'
capital shuns the Irish soil as if it were a quicksand; trustees and
mortgagees will not invest in it; in a word, as respects the class which
had been its owners, the Irish land has been bound in a kind of pernicious
mortmain. It is unnecessary to dwell on the resulting evils; one of the
sources of the wealth of Ireland has been made barren; a paralysis has
fallen on a member of Irish industry; what is, perhaps, even worse, a
sense of insecurity, of instability, of fear of unknown change, so widely
prevails in Irish landed relations, that they have become completely
unsettled, and are a mere chaos. And as vicious legislation has cut the
old landlord off from his estate, has assimilated him to the chief lord of
the eighteenth century, and is evolving, by degrees, the middleman, so the
effects of confiscation, by keeping land out of commerce, have unnaturally
limited and restricted its nominal ownership; in fact, many of the
features of the detestable penal laws of Ireland are reappearing in the
Irish land system, and are being reproduced by the modern Irish land code.
Another mischievous effect of this code, in another direction, requires
attention. The value of tenant right, we have seen, has enormously
increased; the sums paid by incoming to outgoing tenants, on the transfer
of farms, have, accordingly, become enormous; these purchasers, therefore,
are being subjected to heavy outlays, practically in the nature of
rack-rents, which hamper their industry, starve their capital, and most
injuriously affect good husbandry. One class of the community is thus
wronged for the behoof of another; and agriculture must, more or less,
suffer.
Not the least, however, of the manifold evils caused by this legislation
have to be yet noticed. The ancient divisions of race and faith in the
Irish land system still continue; what was most harsh and oppressive in
them has been effaced; but they have become wider and more marked in the
last twenty years; and this is largely to be ascribed to the present land
code. A mode of land tenure, which produces harassing litigation at short
intervals of time, and makes landed relations cockpits for legal
conflicts, necessarily sets the landed classes against each other; it has
aggravated the old differences deep-rooted in the Irish soil. The
Protestant gentleman and the Catholic peasant are more estranged from each
other, in the southern provinces, than they have been, I believe, within
living memory; the same remark, too, applies to Presbyterian Ulster, where
the gentry belong, for the most part, to the late Established Church, and
the tenant classes are of the faith of John Knox; the lines of distinction
between these orders of men have deepened; and this alienation, concurring
with another cause, has contributed to the cry for the confiscation of the
Irish land, which is now being very generally raised, and to which I shall
refer afterwards. Another mischief of this legislation, at which I have
already glanced, is the widespread demoralisation it has caused, from the
nature of the case. The litigation in the Courts where 'fair rents' are
being fixed, is often a miserable spectacle of hard and mendacious
swearing productive of the worst effects on the human character. Peasants,
as a rule, do not scruple to pledge their oaths that their rents ought to
be at most a fourth of the rents they had paid for perhaps half a century;
the witnesses they call as valuers usually repeat these statements. The
claims, too, for exemption from rent, on account of improvements, are
often ridiculous, often shameful; I have seen sums paid for manures twenty
years old, gravely put forward as creating a claim for exemption; and the
subject of the deterioration of farms is another fruitful source of
falsehood. It is hardly necessary to comment on the results, as regards
self-respect and the moral sense of men, which must follow proceedings of
this kind, carried on, over whole counties, in thousands of cases; they
are, inevitably, in a very high degree, unfortunate; but, when law
encourages dishonesty, they were to be only expected.
Such have been the fruits of the new Irish land code, on the side of the
occupation of the Irish land. Legislation, essentially faulty and unwise,
in conflict with economic science and the facts of the case, has taken
from the Irish landlords their chief proprietary rights, and forcibly
transferred these to their tenants; it has not conferred the benefits it
intended on an unfairly favoured class; it has wrought a revolution in the
Irish land system, in contravention to plain justice, and given it an
unnatural and evil aspect; it has caused iniquitous confiscation on a vast
scale and demoralisation profound and widespread, with the far-reaching
inherent mischiefs; and bad administration has made bad laws worse.
Political economy, spite of Mr. Gladstone, has not fled from this world at
his bidding; she looks on, so to speak, at the ruins in Ireland produced
by the violation of her most certain principles; I will add, she affirms
the claim to compensation of the Irish landlord, if the simplest equity is
not to be set at nought. As to the general situation evolved by the
present Irish land code, I may refer to these pregnant words of Mr. Lecky:
'It cannot be denied that this legislation has redressed some hard cases
and benefited a large number of tenants; and as few men look beyond
immediate consequences, or rightly estimate those which are indirect and
remote, this fact is accepted by many as its justification. For my own
part, I believe that it will one day be found that the evils resulting
from this policy have greatly outweighed its benefits, and that they will
fall far more heavily on another class than on the small class which was
directly injured. In a poor country, where increased capital, improved
credit, and secure industry are the greatest needs, it has shaken to the
very basis the idea of the sanctity and obligation of contract; made it
almost impossible to borrow any considerable sum on Irish land;
effectually stopped the influx of English gold; paralysed or prevented
nearly all industrial undertakings stretching into a distant future. It
has reacted powerfully upon trade, and thus contributed to impoverish the
Irish towns, while it has withdrawn the whole rental of Ireland from the
improvement of the soil, as the landlord can have no further inducement or
obligation to spend money on his estate. In combination, also, with the
Home Rule movement, it has driven much capital out of the land.'[143]
I pass on to the legislation of late years, with respect to the Irish
land, on the side of ownership. I have briefly described what that
legislation is: a Conservative Ministry, impressed with the wrong idea
that Mr. Gladstone had 'created dual ownership,' by the ill-conceived
measure of 1881, resolved to abolish this evil thing if they could, though
it is the natural mould of Irish land tenure; and Parliament has allotted
£40,000,000 to attain this object, through the operation of what is
falsely called 'land purchase.' The mode of proceeding has been explained:
an Irish landlord, who desires to sell his estate to his tenants, can
obtain an advance for this purpose from the State, through the agency of
the Land Commission; the tenants are then made owners of their farms,
without contributing any moneys of their own, and hold at terminable
annuities much lower than even 'fair rents.' The transaction, therefore,
we have seen, is, in no sense, a purchase; it is a gift, in the nature of
a bribe; it is completely different from the policy of John Bright and the
sales of land made to tenants before 1885, in which these men paid part of
the price at least, the only real security for thrift and honesty. Of the
£40,000,000, nearly half, I have said, has been spent; and out of the
486,000 agricultural Irish tenants, some 50,000 have acquired their
holdings, in fee, under these conditions. The law thus applies to a mere
fraction of the class; it is idle to assert that this can do much to
extinguish 'dual ownership' in all Ireland; the sum required would be many
times more than that which alone has been made available; and the
process, at the present rate of 'purchases,' would not be accomplished
within a century. We may, therefore, pass away from this part of the
subject; but let us see how 'land purchase,' effected in this way, bears
on the position of the Irish landed gentry. The immense majority of this
order of men still cling to their native country and their homes; they
hate the idea of parting with the rights they retain in the land, trampled
down and injured as they have been; this is especially the case with the
best and most solvent landlords. But as the terminable annuities payable
on 'land purchase' are not nearly so high as even very low rents, not to
speak of the other conditions of this mode of tenure, it follows that
tenants who have thus been made owners are infinitely better off than
tenants still subject to rent; one class has great advantages, of which
the other is deprived; as a necessary consequence an artificial standard
is set up against rent, which does wrong to the landlord, from the nature
of the case; gives every tenant on his estate a grievance; and not
improbably may expose him to a determined refusal to pay any rent
whatever.
'Land purchase,' therefore--the name is a mere untruth--has been a failure
as regards 'dual ownership;' and it is establishing against the Irish
landlord a false measure of rent, analogous to a base coinage, a strange
achievement of a Conservative Government. Let us next consider what has
been the working of this economic nostrum, with respect to the class, for
the benefit of which it was first prescribed, and which has reaped the
advantages it gives. The tenants, who have been made owners of their
farms, have, as a rule, discharged their obligations to the State very
well, though I could point to not a few exceptions; and there have been
strikes against the payment of the terminable annuities in some instances.
This may be sufficient for official bureaucrats; it is not sufficient for
those who know Ireland, and can impartially watch the course of events.
It was fondly expected that 'land purchase,' that is, bribing tenants in
Ireland to become owners of their farms, would create a powerful body of
freeholders loyal to the State; but this has already been seen to be a
mere delusion. As Parnell predicted would be the case, these 'purchasers'
are 'patriotic' in the highest degree; they fill the ranks of the United
Irish League, that is, of a conspiracy against our rule in Ireland, and
are numbered among its most efficient agents; human nature being what it
actually is, this is precisely what was to be expected. It was confidently
foretold, again, that these 'purchasers' would form a thriving class of
model farmers; and that their lands would be patterns of admirable and
improved peasant husbandry, but this forecast is being, in a great degree,
falsified. These men, 'rocked and dandled into their possessions,' in the
words of Burke, without a single guarantee for common prudence, and
especially without an effort of their own, have, in hundreds of instances,
turned out sorry failures; and it has been the almost universal practice
of the whole class to cut down every tree that grows on their lands, an
act of ruinous waste in a rain-drenched climate. Besides, as freehold
ownership is not an Irish idea--indeed, is opposed to Irish ideas--these
'purchasers' have, in many cases, following the example of tenants 'at
fair rents,' subdivided, sublet, or mortgaged their holdings; instead of
remaining owners in a true sense, they are becoming middlemen lording it
over rack-rented serfs. The agriculture, too, of hundreds of these farms
is slovenly in the extreme, for bribery does not promote industry; what is
'easy got, easy goes' is a true proverb; and, in addition, a number of
these men were really insolvent when they were made 'purchasers.' That
Ireland will blossom like a rose, under these conditions, is seen even now
to be a chimera; and there is much reason to believe that many of these
'purchasers' have become the prey of the race of local usurers, a
consummation that might have been predicted. 'I shall sell my estate,' a
witty Irishman once remarked, 'but I will keep two loan offices and four
public-houses; and in two generations my "purchasing" tenants will be too
happy to resell their lands to my grandsons.'
A singular instance of 'land purchase,' and, indeed, of the working of
another part of the land code, has come under my notice of late; I can
answer for the accuracy of what I write; scores of similar cases could be,
probably, found. In 1852, an industrious Scottish tradesman invested the
savings of years of his life in buying a chief rent under the Encumbered
Estates Act; he gave £5000 for a perpetual rent-charge of £192, that is,
not quite 4 per cent. on his capital. The tenant of the lands subject to
the rent was a middleman, with an estate of about £3000 a year; he had
sublet the lands to a tenant in occupation of them, a slovenly,
ill-conditioned, and indolent farmer. The Land Act of 1887 passed; the
wealthy middleman, an excellent 'mark' for the chief rent, who, therefore,
had been obliged to pay the £192 a year, was empowered by the new law to
evade his contract, and practically to get rid of his interest; the owner
of the chief rent, therefore, had only the tenant in occupation to look to
for the discharge of his claim. This person was succeeded by his son, a
good-for-nothing and drunken man, who soon became head over ears in debt;
but he was declared 'a purchaser' by the Land Commission, and, subject to
a terminable annuity, was made owner of the lands. But the advance made
was not more than £2300; the representative of the hardworking Scotchman,
who had bought property, as secure, at the time, as Consols, was a loser
of more than half of his capital; he was simply cheated out of £2700,
through the operation of an iniquitous law; his indignant protests may
well be conceived. The subsequent history of this so-styled 'purchase' is
significant, and not without interest. The worthless owner took possession
of the lands; his first step was to cut down the woodland, until he was
stopped by a creditor to whom he owed a mortgage. Since that time he has
become insolvent in all but name, and cannot pay the annuity due to the
State; the Land Commission has been trying to sell the lands; but the
attempt has, hitherto, been a failure; the lands have been 'boycotted,'
and the market has been closed against a sale. These proceedings do not
require a word of comment; they strikingly illustrate how the agrarian
code of Ireland makes havoc of capital, annuls contracts, and confiscates
property for the behoof of dishonest thriftlessness. Meanwhile the happy
middleman enjoys his £3000 a year; I dare say he licks his lips as he
thinks of the Land Act of 1887, which scattered a just liability to the
winds.
The most remarkable and the worst effect--with a revolutionary tendency in
no doubtful sense--of this mischievous system has, however, to be still
noticed. About one out of ten of the agricultural tenants of Ireland have
'purchased' their farms in the way described; the fund available for 'land
purchase' cannot include more than one in five; and the process is and
must be slow, owing to the law's delay. Legislation, therefore, with a
singular want of insight, has drawn, and is drawing, an unjust distinction
between 'purchasing' and rent-paying tenants; it is dividing them into a
small favoured class, and a multitude harshly left out in the cold--fat
sheep in one fold, lean goats in another; as the inevitable result, the
rent-paying tenant resents the benefits obtained by 'the purchaser;' and
the immense majority of the farmers of Ireland are made discontented with
their lot, from their point of view not without reason. It is idle to say
to this great body of men that they have already gained advantages from
the State, on which they never reckoned thirty years ago, and that they
have the 'Three F's,' and all that the phrase implies; those who have
secured much are eager to secure more; the unfair distinction arbitrarily
made against them is unintelligible and exasperating, man being what he
is. The policy of 'voluntary purchase,' as it is called, has, accordingly,
from the very nature of the case, provoked and called into being the cry
for the 'compulsory purchase' of the Irish land, now being heard far and
wide in Ireland--that is, for the forcible expropriation of all Irish
landlords, and for placing all their tenants, in their stead, as owners of
their estates. This demand has as yet been rejected by statesmen, and is,
I believe, both hopeless and shameful; but it has, nevertheless, some
logic on its side; it is a corollary from legislation essentially bad;
and, backed as it is by a large force of Irish opinion, it cannot be
ignored or treated with contempt. It is simply extraordinary that many
Irish landlords have been encouraging, and still encourage, 'voluntary
purchase,' on its existing lines, and will not perceive that it leads to
'compulsory purchase;' either from a desire to dispose of parts of their
estates, or from motives not easy to understand, they are promoting a
revolution, which, if accomplished, would assure their ruin, as I shall
conclusively prove afterwards. But the well-informed and most thoughtful
members of their class are not flies lured into a bottle by a bit of
sugar; they are alive to all that is involved in what is called 'land
purchase.' Many years ago, when Parliament was voting funds for 'voluntary
purchase,' on the present system, I indicated what would be the results; I
only claim credit for some share of common sense: 'Law will have been
severing the occupiers of the soil by an arbitrary process into a pampered
caste, marked off from a disfavoured multitude; and, as a necessary
consequence, the mass of tenants, kept in an inferior position, will be
filled with discontent--and from their point of view with perfect
justice--when, as the advances from the State run short, their prospects
of "land purchase" shall wane and diminish. An "ugly rush" will be made
throughout the country to force landlords, as a class, to sell, in order
to get a chance of buying; in Ulster the cry for "compulsory purchase,"
already heard, will swell high and fierce.'[144]
These, therefore, have been the fruits of the system called 'land
purchase' with euphemistic falsehood. 'Compulsory purchase,' a demand
caused by an unwise policy, is a question that must be fairly discussed;
it is nothing to the purpose that it has as yet made little way in
Parliament. This claim would have been regarded as sheer insanity thirty
years ago; it was scouted by John Bright as in the highest degree
mischievous, though John Bright was the first statesman who proposed
making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, but through a real, not a
sham, mode of purchase. The compulsory purchase of the rented land of
Ireland is a policy that has advocates even in England and Scotland; and
it is lamentable to observe how British opinion seems to take little heed
how a measure of this kind would affect the position of the Irish
landlord, another of the many instances of its habitual disregard of the
plainest rights of property in land in Ireland. A set of doctrinaires,
ignorant of Irish nature and of the Irish land, imagine that 'the creation
of a peasant proprietary,' in all parts of Ireland, as the cant phrase is,
would, in any case, make the Union secure, and would promote tranquillity,
industry, and content. Some politicians still cherish the fond belief,
that thrusting Irish tenants, wholesale, into the place of their
landlords, by an act of violence without a parallel, would make Irish
government and administration more easy; and shut their eyes to the nature
of this policy. English and Scottish capitalists, who have made advances
on Irish estates, see in compulsory purchase the best probable means of
realising securities now in danger; a few great absentee landlords, eager
to part with their possessions in Ireland, at almost any price, are
possibly not opposed to this scheme; and so maybe a few bankrupt Irish
landlords, hoping to get a trifle out of a general shipwreck. The demand,
however, for compulsory purchase has its only real strength in Ireland;
and unquestionably it is widespread and far-reaching. The conspiracy
against British rule in Ireland, which has made the annihilation of Irish
'landlordism' one of its main objects, calls for compulsory purchase, as a
matter of course; it finds no difficulty in banding together the peasantry
of the southern provinces in support of a cry which means for this class
an improvement in their lot, and appeals to deep-rooted sentiments of
human nature. The Irish Catholic priesthood, too, back the movement to a
man, and so do the local Nationalist boards; for obvious reasons, both
these orders of men seek to drive the Irish landed gentry from their
homes, and to replace them by dependents in sympathy with them. The demand
has also extended to Ulster, chiefly on account of the harsh distinction
drawn between 'purchasing' and 'non-purchasing' tenants; it is economic
rather than social or political; but the cry for compulsory purchase is
perhaps loudest in parts of the northern province. Its principal champion,
at present, is an enthusiast, sincere, indeed, if without judgment and
insight; but he is sustained by bodies of farmers formidable in numbers at
least.
The sharp and, as I think, the unfair distinction drawn by the present law
between tenant 'purchasers' and tenants still subject to the payment of
rent, has created, it cannot be said too often, the demand for the
compulsory purchase of the Irish land, and for this Lord Salisbury's
Government is largely responsible. But because an Irish peasant, on one
side of a fence, cannot obtain the benefits of land tenure, which his
neighbour, on the other side, has obtained, and may even have a right to
complain, it does not follow that compulsory purchase is a possible, or
aught but a disgraceful policy; other interests and considerations must be
taken into account. Let us first see how compulsory purchase would affect
the financial position of the Three Kingdoms. Great as the prosperity of
the Empire is, the strain on its resources is immense; the expenditure of
the State at home is vast, and on the increase; the war in South Africa,
and the settlement of that huge region, will cost unknown millions; the
reform of our military and even of our naval system, necessary to our
safety, will be a weighty burden for years; every Chancellor of the
Exchequer has declared that fiscal economy, as far as possible, is his
first duty. But what does the compulsory purchase of the Irish land
involve, and what, confessedly, are its essential conditions? Mr.
Gladstone, I have said, asserted, long ago, that the value of the
agricultural area of Ireland was £300,000,000; this estimate, I believe,
is too high; but, in the opinion of competent judges, it cannot be deemed
less than £150,000,000. But the forcible expropriation of the Irish landed
gentry on every principle of civilised law, as, indeed, Sir Michael Hicks
Beach has already insisted, would imply giving them a large additional
bonus; this probably would not be less than £50,000,000; the sum,
therefore, required for compulsory purchase, would, it may be assumed, be
not less than £200,000,000. Now, can any one imagine that the general
taxpayer, in the financial situation in which we are, and shall be for
years, will make himself liable for this colossal charge, equal to the
ransom Germany extorted from France, in order to bribe Irish peasants into
the ownership of their farms, and to effect an agrarian revolution, in
which he has no interest? I should like to see the Minister who would go
to the country on such an insane policy, and who would call on the hardly
taxed millions of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to burn huge holes in
their pockets for such an object, for simply robbing Peter to pay Paul,
and that without a pretence of right, or any conceivable good. And what
security would the Irish land afford for the payment of this enormous
impost? The terminable annuities due from the 'purchasing' tenants would,
it has pleasantly been said, be a sufficient guarantee; but men of common
sense are not to be caught by chaff; the idea is a vain and worthless
delusion. The 'No Rent Manifesto' and the 'Plan of Campaign' were
movements of Irish peasants, so to speak, of yesterday; what if another
Parnell were to arise and to issue a ukase that 'a foreign and alien
Government had no right to an unjust tribute;' and how could this be
collected by a Department of an absentee State?
The general taxpayer, therefore, who, thirteen years ago, grumbled at a
demand of £5,000,000 only, will assuredly not fling £200,000,000, or half
that sum, into the Serbonian bog of the Irish land. It is hardly necessary
to dwell on so small a fact, 'that compulsory purchase would reduce the
income tax of Ireland about one-half, for nine-tenths of the tenant
'purchasers' would be below its level;' but even this cannot be left out
of sight. Conservative statesmen, it should be added, are especially bound
to reject this scheme; in 1886 they denounced, in emphatic language, Mr.
Gladstone's far less dangerous plan of making the State liable for
£50,000,000, to buy out Irish landlords; flagrant inconsistency in
politics should be eschewed. The probably fixed purpose of the general
taxpayer not to mulct himself heavily to fling the Irish soil to a mass of
peasants, is doubtless, and I say it with regret, the best security
against the destruction of the Irish landlords; this despoiled and
maltreated body of men just now fill the place in Irish affairs of the
'Injured Lady' of Swift's satire, gravely told by her lover across the
Channel that 'I had cost him ten times more than I was worth to maintain
me, and that it had been much better for him if I had been damned, or
burnt, or thrown to the bottom of the sea.'[145] Nevertheless, I have
faith in right-minded Englishmen, however prejudiced or ill-informed about
an unpopular class, if plain facts and figures are set before them; let us
see how it would fare with the Irish landlord were he forcibly
expropriated under compulsory purchase. I will take the case of an Irish
country gentleman, who, in the period between 1868 and 1878, had an income
from his estate of £1500 a year, subject to a family charge of £10,000 at
4 per cent., that is, had a net annual income of £1100. Owing to the
depression of agriculture since 1879, his rents would have naturally
fallen about £300 a year; but let us suppose that, through the operation
of the new Irish land code, they have been cut down to 'fair rents' of
£900 a year only. His annual income, therefore, would be £900 less by
£400, that is, he would still have £500 a year he could call his own; how
would it be with him were he forcibly sold out? Admit that his estate
would fetch eighteen years' purchase--the present average rate is
seventeen--that is, would realise £16,200; deducting, say, £200 for law
costs, this would be a net residue of £16,000. But the family charge would
absorb £10,000; the surplus would be £6000 only, producing, let us
calculate, £4 per cent.; this ruined man, therefore, who, little more than
twenty years ago, possessed an income of £1100 a year, would be left £240
at the very utmost. I have taken care to understate the case; I challenge
attention to my figures; I ask honest Englishmen would not this be sheer
robbery, accomplished, to the disgrace of the State, in its name?
It has been urged, however--and to those who know the facts, the statement
is cruel and shameful mockery--that the Irish landlord would only lose his
rented lands, and that 'he could live happily on the demesne land, which
he would still retain.' This would be simply impossible in the case of
nineteen-twentieths of the class; they would not have the means to keep
their demesnes up; they would be compelled to part with them at almost any
price; and the few, who would have the means, would, all but certainly,
with their beggared fellows, leave a country in which they had been foully
betrayed. It is notorious, indeed, that Irish Nationalist leaders, knowing
what compulsory purchase means, have marked down the demesnes of the Irish
landed gentry as their prey; associates of American Fenians and of the
Clan na Gael are to revel in the mansions of the Geraldines, the Butlers,
the O'Connors, the O'Neills, as Jacobins revelled in the mansions of the
La Tremouilles and the De Noailles. But man does not live by bread alone;
the material ruin of the Irish landlord would be bad enough; but the moral
consequences of his expropriation must not be left out of sight. Few of
the purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts care probably much about
the lands they have bought; the same remark probably applies to most Irish
absentees. But an immense majority of the Irish landed gentry are deeply
attached to their hearths and their homes; they are bound to their lands
by innumerable ties; they have been brought up with the sentiments which
property in land creates; in the pathetic words of an old chronicler,
'They do not wish to pray in foreign churches, or to lie in foreign
graves;' their hope has been to live and die amidst their ancestral
surroundings. The State has, in a special manner, encouraged this belief;
it rooted the Irish landlord in the soil to be its supporter; is it to
expel him from the position it has made for him, without a thought of the
shock to his best feelings this must produce? Would not such an act be
dishonourable, nay, infamous? Let us hear what the deepest of our
political thinkers, Burke, has written upon a somewhat parallel case:
'When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the
existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation--when
they have accommodated all their ideas, and all their habits to it, ... I
am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a
sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade
them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and
infamy that character and those customs, which before had been made the
measure of their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expulsion
from their habitations, and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not
sagacious enough to discover how this despotick sport, made of the
feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be
discriminated from the rankest tyranny.'[146]
I have referred to an instance, within my knowledge, of the operation of
the new Irish land code, in the case of a middleman, his under-tenant, and
a despoiled owner of a rent. I now refer to an instance, also within my
knowledge, of what compulsory purchase would do in the case of an Irish
landlord. This person is a scion of one of the princely Irish-Milesian
houses; his forefathers were lords of a tract extending from the Boyne to
the Shannon. They belonged to one of the famous 'five bloods of Ireland,'
acknowledged to be half-royal by Henry of Anjou; they intermarried with
the great Norman-Irish _noblesse_; one of their matronage was half-sister
of Surrey's fair Geraldine; the ruins of the abbeys they founded are still
to be seen. Their domains were torn from them in the reign of Mary Tudor;
but they fought stubbornly with their tribe in the great Desmond war; they
retained, though proscribed, the rank of princes, until the close of the
sixteenth century; leaders of the house then carried their swords into
foreign armies, and have given a field marshal to Austria and grandees to
Spain. The direct line of the chiefs, however, remained in Ireland; it
vegetated in obscurity until the Irish rising of 1689-90; one of its
members then appeared in the Parliament of James II. in Dublin, and
perished, at the head of his regiment, it is said, at Aughrim. The
fortunes of his descendants are not without interest; one is believed to
have been a companion-in-arms of Villars at Malplaquet and Dénain; two of
his remote offspring, the tradition exists, perished in the ranks of
Napoleon's armies. But the heir of the family bowed under the yoke of the
Irish penal laws, and became a Protestant, at least in name; his near
kindred gave Ireland Anthony Malone, one of the most illustrious Irishmen
of the eighteenth century, and gave England the best commentator on her
most immortal poet. One of his representatives, the person of whom I
write, still possesses a fragment of the immense possessions his fathers
ruled; of more than thirty of their castles he has the wreck of one; a
scroll on the roof of his house bears the touching legend that he has
sprung from the loins of the old Milesian princes. He is not wholly
unknown as an Irish landlord of this day; curiously, too, his rental has
been hardly reduced by the visitations of the Land and the
Sub-Commissions. Is this scion of the best and the most ancient _noblesse_
of Ireland to be banished in his old age from his home, and to be replaced
in it by ornaments of the Land, the National, and the United Irish
Leagues, for this would be one result of compulsory purchase?
Let us imagine, however, that, owing to the malign influence which,
Spenser said, attends England in Irish affairs, the Irish landed gentry
were removed from the land, and their former tenants were put in their
place as owners. What would be the consequences, economic, social,
political, of this sudden agrarian revolution in one of the Three
Kingdoms? The distribution of the Irish soil between the classes which
would possess it, would be unfavourable, in the highest degree, to the
establishment of a 'peasant proprietary,' the common name in use on this
subject. Of the 486,000 tenant farmers in Ireland, some 132,000 hold
patches of from less than one to five acres in extent; are these to be
stereotyped as real land owners? More than 90,000 occupy from fifty to
five hundred acres and upwards; these include the great graziers of the
rich tracts of pasturage; do these supply elements of a 'peasant
proprietary' in any rational sense? The only class which even on
plausible, _a priori_ grounds could be made occupying owners of the land
would contain much less than 300,000 families; and probably it occupies
less than two-thirds of the island as a whole. Are all these bodies of men
to be lumped, so to speak, together, and universally to receive the
ownership of the soil; would not compulsory purchase, even on these
conditions, be the sheerest folly? Furthermore, the configuration of
Ireland and her climate make it next to impossible that a 'peasant
proprietary' could generally thrive within her borders; Nature herself
forbids an attempt to carry out, on a large scale, a settlement of the
kind. The central area of the island is a low watershed of wide extent,
from which a succession of streams descends through vast tracts of morass
and bog; in other parts of the country there are large and deep rivers,
curving as they approach the sea, and flowing through mountain spaces; the
lands they traverse are swampy, and require main drainage; a large part of
Ireland is composed of wild hill ranges only fit for the rearing of young
and coarse breeds of cattle; she possesses a fine area of the best
pasturage, confined, however, to a few counties; her true agricultural
area is comparatively small. Her climate, moreover, is wet to a proverb;
torrents of rain from the Atlantic fall on her plains for months; above
all, her inland towns are far from each other, and petty; scarcely one is
peopled by more than 10,000 souls. Any well-informed and right-judging
person who knows the conditions under which a 'peasant proprietary' can
alone flourish, must know that, from the nature of the case, it would be
a failure, in the circumstances in which it would be necessarily placed,
were it forcibly established in every part of Ireland. Ireland has little
in common with Belgium, with Northern Italy, with France; this settlement
of confiscation would go the way of the Englishry of the Middle Ages and
the Cromwellian colonists.
The most conclusive argument against compulsory purchase has,
nevertheless, to be yet put forward. The state of things 'voluntary
purchase' is evolving would assuredly be aggravated a hundred-fold were
every tenant in Ireland made the owner of his farm by a revolutionary act
on the part of the State. It is significant, in the highest degree, that
from the time of the 'New Departure' to this hour, the conspiracy against
our rule in Ireland has clamoured for the expropriation of the Irish
landed gentry by force, and for the conversion of their tenants into
possessors of these estates; far better informed than British statesmen,
it has rightly calculated that this violent change would increase the
'Nationalist' sympathies of the Irish peasant; and this opinion is being
confirmed, to a great extent, by the results of 'voluntary purchase' being
now developed. The coarse materialist view that bribery will make a class
law-abiding and loyal, is opposed to human nature and fact; bribery will
not efface ideas, feelings, and tendencies, deep-rooted in history and
ancient tradition; above all, if it is a concession to agitation and a
rebellious movement, it will only quicken the animosity to the State and
the greed of the favoured class. Parnell, I have said, had his mind made
up on this subject; he always insisted that the Irish tenant, wherever his
holding had been made his own, would be 'more true to the cause than
ever;' it is curious that the confident prediction of a most able man
appears to have been persistently ignored. For the rest, the mischief
'voluntary purchase' is already doing would be enormously aggravated by
the effects of compulsory purchase. The Irish tenant farmers, made owners
of the land everywhere, would, like the present 'purchasers,' cut down
woodland wholesale; the country would be disafforested over an immense
area; the consequences to agriculture would be as bad as possible.
Arterial and main drainage too would, as a rule, be neglected; but these
would, comparatively, be trifling results; the compulsory purchaser would
deal with the land as their 'voluntary' fellows are now largely dealing,
but, in all probability, more generally, and in much a greater proportion.
Holding as they would nine-tenths of the Irish soil at terminable
annuities much lower than any rent, they would inevitably subdivide,
sublet, and mortgage their farms in tens of thousands of cases; they would
become middlemen, over whole counties, the harsh oppressors of a multitude
ground down by rack-rents; the worst kind of 'landlordism' would be
reproduced in the worst aspect. The tendency of events is even now
confirming what I wrote a long time ago on this subject: 'Freehold
ownership, therefore, would disappear more or less quickly over extensive
tracts, the "yeomen" would become a diminishing quantity, and these would
be replaced by a new class of landlords with tenants at competition rents,
that is, determined by the land hunger of the Celt. The transformation
would inevitably go on, for its causes would operate with intense force;
and before many years probably two-thirds of Ireland would have become a
land of mere peasant landlords placed over a mass of rack-rented
tenants.'[147] The creation of a universal 'peasant proprietary,' by
force, would, in fact, bring the Irish land system back by degrees into
the state in which it was before the Great Famine, when millions of
serfdom squatted on the soil, disorganising agriculture and preventing
social progress.
These considerations, however, by no means exhaust the case against the
compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland. Irish landlords have
been decried, for an evil purpose, during many years; their position is
difficult and open to attack; but if they are an unpopular class, they
have been a civilising influence in Ireland of real value, the most
civilising influence, perhaps, in her three southern provinces. Their
annihilation, despoiled and impoverished as they are, would still withdraw
a large fund from Irish rural labour; and it would be most injurious to
agriculture in many ways, especially as regards main and arterial
drainage, an absolute necessity for the Irish soil, and scarcely possible
except under a system of large estates. Their extinction, too, Englishmen
ought not to forget, would deprive the State of one of its mainstays in
Ireland; the idea to the contrary growing up is a mere delusion; it was
not for nothing that Parnell and Davitt described this order of men as
'the British garrison' and insisted that were it once out of the fortress
the power of England in Ireland would certainly perish. The conversion of
Irish farmers universally into landowners would also have a ruinous effect
on many Irish industries. It would do infinite harm to many branches of
commerce, especially to trades of the higher type; it would be disastrous
to such towns as Dublin and Belfast, already beginning to protest against
it; and, whatever may be said, the prospect of it is dreaded by
agricultural Irish labourers as a class, which has always been ill-treated
by their masters, the farmers, though, owing to the influence of priests
and demagogues, they are unwilling to express the sentiments they really
feel. Compulsory purchase, in fact, is by no means so generally asked for
in Ireland as is supposed; her representation demands it by a great
majority of votes; but this representation, as I have pointed out before,
is not a true index of Irish opinion. Another consideration, too, should
be taken into account in coming to a reasonable conclusion on this
subject. The land system of England and Scotland, from a variety of causes
sufficiently known, is essentially different from that of Ireland;
politically, socially, economically, it has little in common with it. But
were Parliament to declare that the whole tenant class of Ireland were to
be transformed into fee simple owners, subject only to renders, much less
than true rents, and payable for a short space of time, I much doubt if
English and Scottish tenants would acquiesce, and would not agitate for
legislation of a similar kind, especially as British agriculture is still
heavily depressed. Leaseholders of large houses in towns, for long terms
of years, at ground rents, and a whole class of builders, assuredly would
join in such a demand; the contagion of revolution and socialism is always
perilous. English and Scottish landlords have usually played the part of
the Jew to the Samaritan as regards their Irish fellows; but 'proximus
ardet Ucalegon' might be borne in mind.[148]
The Irish land system, therefore, from every point of view, is simply in a
deplorable state; it is an economic and social chaos, pregnant with
mischiefs and dangers of many kinds. Confiscation has wrought its work on
the Irish landlord; has shaken the structure of Irish society; and has
produced its inevitable results in banishing capital from the land, and in
dealing a weighty blow to Irish credit. The legislation of 1881, and of
subsequent years, has conferred immense advantages on the tenant class in
Ireland; but these have fallen short of what might be supposed; this class
declares itself to be dissatisfied with its lot; it is clamouring for the
wholesale transfer to itself of the rented lands of Ireland, through what
is known as compulsory purchase, that is, corruption and spoliation
combined in an act of the State. And these efforts of legislation,
essentially unwise, in direct conflict with fact and economic science, a
mere makeshift to stave off agitation and trouble, are, in all
probability, by no means the worst. Demoralisation has spread throughout
Irish landed relations, affecting them, unfortunately, in many ways;
divisions of class have been made worse, as well as the old divisions of
race and faith; respect for contracts and obligations has been destroyed;
dishonesty and thriftlessness have been favoured, and industry and honesty
not encouraged; an evil spirit of discontent and desire for change is
abroad; agriculture is plainly on the decline; there is nothing secure or
settled in the land. Vicious as the Irish land system unquestionably was
before Mr. Gladstone first took it in hand, I believe that, having regard
to the general interests of the State, it is still more vicious at the
present time; it has been transformed, but, on the whole, transformed for
the worse. As I wrote before, when commenting on the position of affairs
in Ireland, before the Land Act of 1870, a revolution only could have
removed the deep-rooted ills in all that related to the land; a revolution
alone could remove them now. But in the one instance, as in the other, the
evil caused by a revolution would be infinitely greater than the good; a
new agrarian revolution in Ireland would be a curse to her; it is better,
as Burke has remarked, to try to repair even ruins than to blot out every
trace of the edifice. Still, taking it as we find it, can nothing be done
to amend, in some measure, at least, the existing land system? Much of it,
I admit, must be left untouched; the principle of settling rent, through
the agency of the State, false as it is, must continue to work; the
principle of so-called 'land purchase' must, within reasonable limits, be
still given free scope. But something in the nature of reform is, I think,
possible; the discussion of the subject may be of use; I contribute my
mite to it, if with unfeigned diffidence.
In order to find out the truth, and thoroughly to clear the ground, a
Commission, I suggest, ought to be appointed, as important as the Devon
Commission of nearly sixty years ago; it should investigate the Irish Land
Question in all its branches. Its President should be a great English
nobleman--the nation would have confidence in the Duke of Bedford, a
princely and most liberal English landlord; but the judicial element
should be strong in it; English and Irish judges should be among its
members; it should include trained agricultural experts: it should have
representatives of Irish landlords and tenants. It should examine the
Irish land system as this existed before 1870; should review the whole
series of Irish Land Acts, from 1870 to the present time, and inquire into
their results and tendencies; should carefully consider the operation of
the tribunals selected to carry out the new Irish land code, especially as
regards the fixing of 'fair rents,' and that not with respect to their
procedure only, an unjust limit imposed on the Fry Commission, but with
respect to the principles that have been adopted and the methods pursued;
it should deal exhaustively with the subject of so-called 'land purchase,'
and see whether it has not directly led to the demand for compulsory
purchase; it should take evidence as to 'peasant proprietary' and its
creation; and it should make a complete and searching report, with a view
to the legislation it might recommend. And if I am not altogether
mistaken, such a Commission would state, in emphatic language, that the
present Irish land code was ill designed, even if it cannot be now much
changed; that its administration has been attended with grave errors; that
cruel wrong has been done to Irish landlords, while Irish tenants have not
obtained what was hoped for; that the economic and social results have
been deplorable; that if 'land purchase' cannot be stopped, it is a bad
expedient on its present lines, and that the cry for compulsory purchase
has been its evident effect; and that extensive, still more universal
peasant ownership, is an impossible and would be a pernicious policy.
Finally, if I am not much mistaken again, such a Commission would report
that a reform of the Irish land system, if very difficult, should be
attempted; and that, in its main scope and operation at least, it should
be carried out on the side of land tenure, that is, in the relations of
landlord and tenant, as has been the opinion of every thinker from Burke
onwards, who has not been swayed by the exigencies of agitation, or of
party politics.
I proceed briefly to put my scheme forward, assuming that I have made a
reasonably correct forecast. I may say it has been a subject of reflection
during many years, indeed, since the legislation of 1881; Mr. Gladstone,
in his place in the House of Commons, pointedly approved of a tract in
which I set forth my views; and so, curiously enough, did Parnell. It is
impossible, I have said, to transform the existing system of Irish land
tenure; a wide departure from it cannot be made; but improvement is really
feasible within certain limits. My object would be to get rid of palpable
evils, inseparable from the present state of things; to make the positions
of both Irish landlords and tenants in some degree better than they now
are; to place the Irish land system on a somewhat less precarious basis.
In the first place, the law as to the exemption of tenants' improvements
from rent, an excrescence on the Land Act of 1881, and made extravagant by
the Land Act of 1896, should be restricted in its application to some
extent; as it stands, it is a fruitful cause of injustice, of
demoralisation, and of hard swearing, producing endless litigation to very
little purpose; claims in respect of improvements ought to be more
limited, in point of time, than they are; a check should be placed on
obsolete and illusory claims; this would be advantageous, I think, to all
interests involved. Again, it would be impracticable to exclude from the
operation of the present land code lands that have been already brought
within its scope; but a more precise definition should be made of the
lands that are intended to be now excluded--demesnes, town parks,
residential holdings, and large pastoral farms; the decisions of the
Courts, in this province, are very perplexing; a good definition would
make litigation very considerably less. These changes, I am convinced,
would do much appreciable good; but I would go a long way farther in
attempting to make the status of both landlord and tenant in Ireland less
insecure and vexatious than it now is. In the first place, leaving lands
now excluded out, I would make all agricultural and pastoral Irish tenants
entitled to the tenure of the 'Three F's,' removing the prohibition as to
'future tenants,' a distinction that never ought to have been made, and,
as far as possible, securing this mode of tenure to the poorest tenants,
by means to which I shall advert afterwards. In the next place, I would
make an earnest effort to lessen the ruinous litigation and the
instability caused by the statutory leases renewable at short intervals of
time. The tenant should have 'fixity of tenure' in a real sense; the
estate created in his favour against the landlord ought not to be one of
fifteen years only, however indefinitely it may be extended; I would
prefer to see it an estate for ever; but, as in the present state of
agriculture, there would be objections to this, on account of the
uncertainty of the rate of rent, it might be an estate for a limited term.
But the term ought not to be less than thirty years at least, renewable,
of course, like the shorter term of fifteen; this would quiet possession
and get rid of lawsuits for the period of a generation of men. The tenant
should retain his right of 'free sale;' but I would make the conditions
less stringent than they are under the existing law.
The position of the Irish tenant would thus be greatly improved; the
sphere of the 'Three F's' would be largely extended; he would have 'fixity
of tenure,' for a long time, at least, without the hazard and loss of
litigation every fifteen years; his right of 'free sale' would be less
restricted; and he would have distinct advantages, as respects 'fair
rent,' under the part of my plan I am about to explain. I turn to the
position of the Irish 'landlord'--I still use this expression and that of
'tenant,' though both words are hardly applicable to existing facts; this,
too, in my judgment, would be made much better. The estate that is now
created against him would still be preserved; I wish it were a perpetual
estate, but it would be one for thirty years at least; he would,
therefore, remain assimilated to a rent-charger, as he is at present. But
like his tenant he would be comparatively free from lawsuits; he would be
less harassed by claims in respect of improvements; he would have, in many
particulars, a more stable tenure. He should, of course, retain the
'royalties' still reserved to him--mines, minerals, timber, and such
things; and he should have the title to the statutory conditions he now
has; but as his reversionary rights would be somewhat lessened, he should
be compensated for these by a small money payment. With one great
exception he should have the legal remedies to enforce the rights he now
possesses; and that exception would be of great importance. I have always
thought the law of ejectment for non-payment of rent harsh; it is an
innovation on the ancient Common Law; it sometimes causes forfeitures far
from just; it is not properly applicable to tenancies of long duration. I
would certainly abolish this mode of procedure; I would instead of it give
the landlord a power to sell the tenant's lands, by a procedure analogous
to that of bankruptcy, should default be made in the payment of the rent,
or rather the rent-charge that might be due. The advantage to both
landlord and tenant would be great: the first would have a remedy more
expeditious and just than he has; the second, should the land be sold and
lost to him, would, as a rule, have a surplus over and above his debts;
unlike what is sometimes the case in evictions, he would realise for
himself his whole legitimate interest in the land. This single reform
would do much to make 'fair rent' a less onerous charge than it now is.
By these means the status of the Irish landlord would be made by many
degrees more secure; the Irish tenant would acquire an interest in the
land much more durable and stable than he has now, in fact, nearly
equivalent to full ownership, subject to a rent-charge; and if his
interest were made a perpetuity, as I hope would be the case at last, he
would be assimilated to an owner subject to a perpetual rent, or to an
English copyholder subject to a similar render. This is the position Burke
proposed he should have, considerably more than a century ago;[149] it is
that which has been advocated by John Stuart Mill, and, I am happy to add,
by Mr. John Morley; it is the only position, compatible with common sense
and justice, which the new Irish land code has left possible, for I put
the quackery of compulsory purchase out of sight, and voluntary purchase
is a bad half-measure. The great subject of fixing rent by the State would
remain; for, unjustifiable as this expedient is, it is impossible, after
what has happened, to dispense with it. Without imputing personal motives
or moral blame to any one, the Land Commission and its Sub-Commissions
ought, I am convinced, to cease to be the agency to fix 'fair rents;'
however unconsciously, in my judgment, they have often proceeded on false
principles, and have done immense, if not wilful wrong; they are decried
by landlords and tenants alike in Ireland. Besides, there is a
constitutional objection to their adjusting rent; the Land Commission is
entrusted with the task of carrying out 'land purchase;' it has a direct
inducement to whittle rents away, in order to facilitate the sale of land;
its interest and its duty are thus placed in conflict. Be this as it may,
my plan for fixing 'fair rents' in Ireland by the State would be
altogether different. In the first place, a definition of 'fair rent'
should be made by statute, and should dominate, so to speak, the subject;
the omission of this criterion has caused grave injustice. This having
been made, I would adjust Irish rents by a method much better, I believe,
than that now in existence. A body of competent and well-paid valuers of
land should be formed--there would be no difficulty about this in
Ireland; these men should visit, when required, estates; and having heard
what landlords and tenants had to say on the spot, should declare what
they consider the 'fair rents' of farms, making a deduction for
improvements as arranged by a reformed law, and taking waste and
deterioration into account. The reports made by the valuers should be
complete and explicit; they would probably satisfy landlords and tenants
in most instances; but dissatisfied persons should have a right to an
appeal, which should be a full rehearing of all the facts in issue; but
the appeal should be at the peril of costs against unsuccessful suitors.
The tribunals to decide the appeals should, I suggest, be composed of two
eminent judges, for each of the four provinces, assisted by trained
agricultural experts; but the authority of the judges should prevail on
all questions. From these Courts a further appeal should run to the Court
of Appeal in Ireland, on all matters of law and fact, and ultimately
should run to the House of Lords; the present restricted appeal to the
Land Commission has been little better than a sorry mockery of right.
The scheme I propose has obvious defects; it sanctions the vicious
principle of State-settled rents, a thing unknown in lands outside of
Ireland, a defiance of the simplest axioms of economic science. But it
endeavours at least to improve a bad system of tenure dealing with
accomplished facts now beyond recall; I certainly think it would make the
relations of Irish landlords and tenants better than they are, and would
tend to place both classes in the positions which, as affairs now stand,
they will probably, in the long run, occupy. As regards 'alternative
policies,' as they have been called, I have set forth the reasons that the
compulsory purchase of the Irish land would be, I believe, impossible,
and, were it possible, would be a confiscation of the foullest kind,
ruinous to Great Britain and Ireland alike. I have also shown how the
present system of so-styled 'voluntary purchase' is, in my judgment,
essentially immoral, and pregnant with dangers; and I have indicated the
results being already produced. That system, however, must go on; for the
present it cannot be arrested; a Conservative Government still pins its
faith on it, as a Whig Government, half a century ago, pinned its faith on
the Encumbered Estates Act; but a 'peasant proprietary' rooted in
corruption will hardly succeed, and 'voluntary purchase' draws the worst
kind of distinctions in Irish land tenure. The acceleration, indeed, of
this 'remedy' has been deemed advisable; and as long as the sum voted by
Parliament is not expended, the system evidently must continue in force.
Some of its evils, however, would be lessened were the State to reserve to
itself the woodland, which tenant 'purchasers,' as a rule, cut down and
sell; and if tenants proved to be solvent were compelled to advance part
of the money required to transfer their lands to themselves. It is
revolting to my mind to see a wealthy Irish farmer bribed into the
ownership of his farm by an Act of the State, without having paid a
shilling of the price. I commend this spectacle to the hard-pressed
general taxpayer.
I need hardly say that, under the scheme I propose, existing interests of
tenants should remain intact, and statutory leases should be allowed to
come to an end, before a change should be made by law in the position they
hold. The question of compensating the Irish landlords would remain; a
very few words on this will suffice. I must remind the reader, as I have
already shown, that the Land Act of 1881 was passed on the condition that,
should experience prove that real injury had been done to this order of
men, their right to indemnity would be plain; Mr. Gladstone's language was
unequivocal; the House of Commons approved. Nor can any reasonable doubt
exist that the course of legislation from 1881 to 1896 has confiscated the
property of the class to an immense extent; the simple fact that the
value in Ireland of the fee simple in land has been reduced by a third at
least, and that the value of the tenant right has been increased in about
the same proportion, points to a conclusion evident to impartial minds. I
am satisfied as to what would be the report on this subject of the
Commission I should wish to see appointed; it could not avoid drawing an
inference that cannot be resisted. The question, therefore, will have to
be faced; the good faith of Parliament is virtually at stake; and if a
pledge made in the name of the State is not to be broken, the right of the
Irish landlords to compensation is complete. Independently, too, of
considerations of this kind, it is a recognised principle that should a
policy have caused loss to a class, the State is morally bound to make the
loss up; a violation of this principle is unjust and dangerous alike. I
quote from John Stuart Mill on this very question: 'The principle of
property gives the landowners no right to the land, but only a right to
compensation for whatever portion of their interest in the land it may be
the policy of the State to deprive them of. To that their claim is
indefeasible. It is due to landowners and to owners of any property
whatever, recognised as such by the State, that they should not be
dispossessed of it without receiving its pecuniary value, or an annual
income equal to what they have derived from it. If the land was bought
with the produce of the labour of themselves or their ancestors,
compensation is due to them on that ground; even if otherwise, it is still
due on the ground of prescription. Nor can it ever be necessary for
accomplishing an object by which the community altogether will gain, that
a particular portion of the community should be immolated. When the
property is of a kind to which peculiar affections attach themselves, the
compensation ought to exceed a bare pecuniary equivalent.... The
legislature, which, if it pleased, might convert the whole body of
landlords into fundholders or pensioners, might, _à fortiori_, commute
the average receipts of Irish landowners into a fixed rent-charge, and
raise the tenants into proprietors; supposing always that the full market
value of the land was tendered to the landlords, in case they preferred
that to accepting the conditions proposed.'[150]
Assuming, then, the case for compensating the Irish landlords to have been
made out, compensation can be afforded without the loss of a shilling to
the State. The _bonâ fide_ encumbrances on their estates, that is, those
which represent advances in cash, are now at an interest of from 4 to 5
per cent.; the State could pay off those which were perfectly secure at an
interest of 2-1/4 per cent., and could make the landlords chargeable with
interest at 3 per cent., in order to provide against possible loss. As for
encumbrances that were not perfectly secure, the State should only pay off
what was well charged; but it should do this on the same conditions; and
it should declare hopeless encumbrances extinct. This would be a
considerable and just boon to the Irish landlords; the securities taken
by the State should be in the form of debentures, which would pass from
hand to hand in the market; and many owners of encumbrances would no doubt
accept sums less than their full demands, for these, they well know, are
at present in danger. I would go, however, farther in relieving the Irish
landlords; their estates are subject to a mass of family charges created
under a different order of things; if the State has arbitrarily cut down
the fund set apart for these, by a wholesale reduction of rents, I cannot
understand how it is not the simplest justice to cut the charges down in
some fair proportion. At all events, I make these suggestions for what
they may be worth; if right is to be done to the Irish landed gentry, and
a gross breach of public faith is not to be made, some relief of this kind
should be extended to them. Very possibly this will not be afforded; but I
venture to remind politicians that even an unpopular class cannot be
cruelly wronged and sacrificed, without doing injury to all classes, and
shaking to their foundations the clear rights of property. And I openly
avow that, in my judgment, it would be in the highest degree against the
national interest to annihilate this body of men, as must probably happen,
should things in Ireland be left as they are. What if they are the heirs
of conquest and confiscation in the past? Is that a reason for destroying
them after the lapse of centuries, and when England planted them in the
land to be her mainstay? What if, in instances, comparatively few in the
extreme, they have abused the social trust imposed on them? Was not this
because the opportunity was given by law, and was not the law the work of
successive Parliaments? Is it not a fact that British ministers, so to
speak, of yesterday, declared that they were secure in their proprietary
rights; and that Mr. Gladstone solemnly acquitted them of what had been
laid to their charge? On the other hand, have they not been for ages the
staunchest friends of England in Irish affairs, especially in troubled
and perilous times? Is it for nothing that they have been called the
British garrison by her foes, the strongest obstacle to rebellion and
treason? And is a class, which has, on the whole, been a civilising
influence, for many years, in Ireland, and which has given the State far
more than a due proportion of worthies--warriors, orators, statesmen,
thinkers, men of eminence in all the arts of life--to be sacrificed at the
bidding of a conspiracy bent on subverting British rule in Ireland, or in
deference to false and perilous theories?