THE REIGN OF VICTORIA (continued).

Law-making in 1870—The Queen's Speech—The Irish Land Problem—Diversities of Opinions—The Agrarian Agitation—Mr. Gladstone's Land Bill introduced—Its Five Parts—Grievances of the Irish Tenant—Free Contract—The Ulster Custom—Compensation for Eviction—The Landlord's Safeguards—The Irish Labourer—Mr. Gladstone's Peroration—Direct and Indirect Opposition—The Second Reading carried—Agrarian Outrages—Mr. Fortescue's Coercion Bill—Mr. Disraeli's Amendment to the Land Bill—A Clever Speech—Mr. Lowe's Reply—Progress of the Debate—The Bill through the Commons—Tactics of the Lords—Amendments proposed and withdrawn—Avoidance of a Collision between the Houses—The Bill becomes Law.

BY the side of the vast Continental events that made the year 1870 one of the memorable years of the world, domestic politics looked small and feeble. And yet they were by no means small; few years, in fact, had so much to show of work actually done and finished by the cumbrous Parliamentary machine. It was a well-known maxim of English politics, that a Ministry could never depend upon carrying more than one measure of first-rate importance in a single Session. Whatever nominal majority might sit behind a Minister, he knew that in the actual state of society interests were so complicated, prejudices so many-sided, that it was hard enough to lead the majority into the lobby once in the year on a great question, and he seldom attempted to do more. Yet the year 1870 presented the strange phenomenon of a Session marked by the carrying of two great measures, each of them met by vigorous opposition, each of them full of interference with vested interests—the Irish Land Act and the Education Act. Mr. Bright expressed the general sense of the difficulty of much legislation when he said at Birmingham, in January, "You cannot easily drive six omnibuses abreast through Temple Bar." But Mr. Forster happily took up his metaphor a short time afterwards: "Let the Irish Land omnibus pass through first, and Lord de Grey and I will drive our Education omnibus in afterwards."

Parliament met on the 8th of February, and the great measure of the Session—the Irish Land Bill—was soon afterwards brought forward. Of the three branches which, according to Mr. Gladstone's figure, had grown upon the tree of Protestant ascendency in Ireland, one—the Church—had fallen; there remained the Land and Education. The last, which proved in the end the most difficult question, was to be left to a future Session; but with regard to the Land the Queen's Speech was explicit. "It will be proposed to you," it said, "to amend the laws respecting the occupation and acquisition of land in Ireland, in a manner adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that country, and calculated, as her Majesty believes, to bring about improved relations between the several classes concerned in Irish agriculture, which collectively constitute the great bulk of the people. These provisions, when matured by your impartiality and wisdom, as her Majesty trusts, will tend to inspire, among persons with whom such sentiments may still be wanting, that steady confidence in the law, and that desire to render assistance in its effective administration, which mark her subjects in general; and thus will aid in consolidating the fabric of the Empire."

This utterance, clothed in the English peculiar to Speeches from the Throne, showed definitely that Government were committed to a measure of a comprehensive kind. All through the previous autumn and winter, in fact, public opinion had been ripening for such a measure. The newspapers began to be full of articles on the subject; statistics—official, semi-official, and unofficial—were being collected and published in all directions. The Times sent a special commissioner to Ireland, and published his letters in a place of honour. Pamphleteers abounded; every one, from crotchety landlords or crotchety tenant-right-men or peasant-proprietor-men, up to such authorities as Mr. (afterwards Sir) George Campbell, a well-known Indian administrator, wrote down their views. The class in possession were uneasy; and yet, as the event proved, there was very little for them to be uneasy about—or rather, the limitations that were finally imposed on them were not very severe. In fact, the history of the treatment of the Irish Land Question is throughout extremely singular. It is perfectly true, as Lord Cairns said, that "at all times and in all countries there is no kind of agitation which ever has been so serious or so difficult to deal with as an agitation on the subject of land." It is also true in a measure, to continue his words, that "for fourteen months this subject had been exciting the minds of the people." Agrarian crime was rife in Ireland—the Fenian spirit was for the moment all the more savage for the attempt at conciliation made in the passing of the Church Disestablishment Act. Fifty-nine grave cases—cases of delicta majora—were recorded in 1869; and of these, eighteen were murders, most of them agrarian. On the other hand, as we have said, the public press, both in England and in Ireland, was teeming with discussion of land problems, yet in spite of all this evidence of excitement, it is undoubtedly true that the Land Bill was passed through both Houses with far less difficulty than had been the case with the Church Bill; and that the debates upon it, the criticisms passed on it, and the reception it met with, were, on the whole, quiet, satisfactory, and dignified. The "agitation" of which Lord Cairns spoke was, except for the numerous single crimes that accompanied rather than belonged to it, singularly temperate. The importance of the occasion, the strong sense in almost every mind of a dangerous existing injustice, seemed to compel the advocates of both sides into a course of mutual forbearance. Fenianism had done at least that good: it had shown that Irish discontent was a reality and that its first element was an agrarian element.

The debate on the Address showed clearly what the expectations of both parties in Parliament were: Mr. Disraeli's speech consisted of indications of what, according to him, the Government Bill ought not to be; and Mr. Gladstone's answer was an appeal for a patient hearing. On the 15th of February Mr. Gladstone brought forward his Land Bill—the anti-Fenian character of which was shown by a motion proposed a short time before by him, to the effect that O'Donovan Rossa, the Fenian convict, who had been elected member for Tipperary, "had become, and continued incapable of being elected or returned as a member of the House," and 293 members had voted for this motion against 16 on the other side. The formal motion of the Prime Minister was "to obtain leave to bring in a Bill to amend the law relating to the occupation and ownership of land in Ireland," and the Bill which he brought forward was divided into five parts. The first part (secs. 1—31) deals with the Law of Compensation to Tenants, giving a legal status to the "customs" known as the Ulster tenant-right custom and others that prevail in different parts of Ireland, and establishing the principle of compensation to the tenant for improvements and for disturbance by the act of the landlord. The second part deals with the Sale of Lands to Tenants; the third, with Advances by, and Powers of, the Board of Works; the fourth, with Legal Proceedings and the Court which was to try cases; the fifth, with miscellaneous questions relating to new tenancies. In his speech—as lucid and interesting as his great expository speeches always were—Mr. Gladstone began by a review of the history of the Parliamentary treatment of the question since the first Reform Act. That history was to be summed up in one word—procrastination. "What I hope is," he said, "that having witnessed the disaster and difficulty which have arisen from this long procrastination, we shall resolve in mind and heart by a manful effort to close and seal up for ever, if it may be, this great question which so intimately concerns the welfare and happiness of the people of Ireland." Government had certainly made, he declared, and were making, this "manful effort;" they had cleared their mind of all the anti-Celtic prepossessions so common in England; they had made themselves masters of all the facts which the recent voluminous literature of the question had brought to light. Then he passed to the "present sensitiveness" of Ireland, which he traced to recent interruptions of Irish prosperity, to evictions, and to the conversion of much land from tillage to pasture. But the flaws of existing legislation had much to do with it also; notably the Act which in some respects had done much good, the Encumbered Estates Act. This Act had sprung from a desire to introduce capital into Ireland, and it created great facilities in the sale of land owned by impoverished proprietors. But it contained "one fatal oversight." Lord Devon's Commission in 1845, endorsed by Sir Robert Peel's Government, had recognised the right of the tenant to be invested with a title to improvements—that is, to claim a full allowance for the value of improvements effected by him in the land he occupied. This claim, Mr. Gladstone said, was doubtless generally admitted by the landlords; but when the properties came, as they so often did, into the Encumbered Estates Court, the tenant found himself legally robbed of his equitable claim. The Court sold the lands just as they were, and took no notice of the distinction between the soil itself and the improvements made by the tenant. "So," he went on to say, "the improvements were sold away from the tenant to persons who paid a price for them and the price was paid to the outgoing landlord, who undoubtedly ought not to have been entitled to claim the property in them, and would not have been so entitled if the legislation recommended in 1845 had been adopted." In this and similar ways the Prime Minister showed that Acts which had been passed at various times with the most benevolent intentions towards Ireland, had defeated themselves, and helped ruin, instead of strengthening, the peace and prosperity of the country. The same thing, he added, might be said about emigration—a process natural and divinely beneficial when voluntary and free; but when compulsory, as was practically the case with Ireland, hardly to be distinguished from banishment.

These being some among the practical grievances of the Irish people with regard to their land, it was proposed to do away with them, or at least to diminish their force, by law. Free contract, said Mr. Gladstone, is undoubtedly the best arrangement, ideally speaking, in the relations between landlord and tenant, as in the other relations of life; but free contract is often practically impossible, and in some cases is with general approval overridden by the law. "You will not allow the man who has a factory to contract with the persons he employs on terms which suit their inclinations, but which you have forbidden.... These are cases which justify interference; but much stronger is the case for Ireland, because in substance these contracts, though nominally free, have not been really free under the peculiar conditions of life which that country offers." The Irishman is practically dependent on the soil—he has no choice of careers as he has in a mining and manufacturing country. "Strict freedom of contract, then, having been proved to be a great evil, what is the precise nature of that evil? The Devon Commission has pointed it out. It is that insecurity of tenure which not only abridges the comforts of the cultivator of the soil, but which limits and paralyses his industry, and at the same time vitiates his relations in a number of cases with the landlord, and in a still greater number with the law under which and the society in which he lives." To remedy this insecurity, a number of plans were extant; and already some were crying out for stability, some for perpetuity, some for fixity of tenure—phrases which all meant the same thing, the conversion of occupiers into owners. These plans Mr. Gladstone rejected, and went on to ask if no more moderate arrangement had been discovered, or could be found in the actual facts of Ireland. Certainly such arrangement could be found, notably in the "Custom of Ulster," and in the customs more or less analogous to it prevailing in other parts of Ireland; and to lands held under these customs Mr. Gladstone first looked. "It is not necessary at present," he said, "to investigate the history of the Ulster custom; whether it represents the ancient Irish ideas derived from the period of tribal possession; whether it represents the covenants which were inserted by James I. in the Charters granted to the settlers in the province; whether it has grown out of the happy political relations subsisting, for the most part, between the landlords and the occupiers, which have induced landlords to view favourably the growth of such a usage; or whether, lastly, it represents the payment of a kind of insurance for the safety of the incoming tenant when he obtains that possession of land which is so prized and valued in that country." Whatever were the origin of the custom, Government was content to take the Ulster custom as matter of fact, to convert it into a law, and to allow it to be examined into as a simple question of fact, in cases where a dispute might arise, by the Courts which would be established under this Bill. As such the Ulster custom would be regarded, where it existed, as including two elements—compensation for improvements, and the price of goodwill. The customs which prevailed in other parts of Ireland, being all of them much more partial, vague, and uncertain, were only to be made law under certain conditions. First, under such customs, a tenant was only to be allowed to claim payment of money on leaving his holding if he was disturbed in his tenancy by the act of his landlord. Secondly, he was not to be allowed to claim if evicted for non-payment of rent. Thirdly, he was not to be allowed to claim if he sublet his land (except for cottages) without his landlord's consent. Fourthly, not only arrears of rent, but damages done to the farm, might be pleaded by the landlord as a set-off. Fifthly, a landlord might bar the pleading of any such custom if he gave the tenant a lease, under certain conditions, of not less than thirty-one years.

But what was to be done where no such protecting custom could be pleaded? Outside Ulster—outside the shelter of similar usages—the tenant, if not protected by any lease, "felt the full force of that tremendous evil of insecurity of tenure." To meet the case of such persons, Government proposed a scale of damages for evictions, with power to those tenants "having a farm not rented, but valued in the public valuation at £100 and upwards, to contract themselves out of this section of the Act." This was the most important clause in the Bill, and, as will appear, the most memorable divisions afterwards took place upon it and in connection with it in committee and in the Lords. The compensation was of course to be decided by the Courts established by the Bill; and in applying the scale, the judge, said Mr. Gladstone, "is required by the Act to have regard to two things—first, the improvements which have been executed by the tenant on his farm; and, secondly, the loss which the occupier is about to sustain by being ejected from his holding." The "improvements" were to include ordinary improvements, such as draining and fencing, and also the greater improvements, such as permanent buildings and reclamation of land. The scale was to be—if the holding was valued in the public valuation at over £10, the judge might award to the tenant a sum not exceeding seven years' rent; if the holding was between £10 and £50, he might award a sum not exceeding five years' rent; if between £50 and £100, a sum not exceeding three years' rent; if above £100, a sum not exceeding two years' rent. "In the ordinary case of eviction for non-payment of rent," Mr. Gladstone added, "or for subdividing the land, the House will understand that the scale does not apply at all." Moreover, the word "improvement" was rigidly defined, and was to be taken to mean "something which would add to the letting value of the land, and suitable to the nature of the holding as an agricultural holding"—not any fancy improvements which were not suitable to the purposes of agriculture. The great change which the Bill effected was, in fact, a change in the legal presumption. Previously, as Mr. Gladstone said, the law had presumed all improvements to be the work of the landlord, and had given them to him. The Bill proposed to reverse this presumption, and to presume that improvements were the work of the occupier, giving to the landlord the business of showing the presumption wrong in any special case.

The importance which Government attached to these enactments about improvements is shown by the elaborate machinery which they devised to enable the landlord, if he chose, to bar the claim. This was a machinery of leasehold tenure, which was to allow the landlord to keep the general claim for goodwill off his estate. "This cannot be done by one lease," said Mr. Gladstone, "for if the landlord, at the end of one of these statutory leases, does not think fit to continue the system of leases, goodwill will immediately grow up as a plant grows from the ground." A series of leases would be required to do it, and, by continuous leases, a landlord might keep his land perfectly free from any claim to goodwill.

"I may now, perhaps, be asked," added Mr. Gladstone, "what we have done for the Irish labourer. For him we have done what the case will permit. We have allowed the tenant to subdivide and sublet for cottages and gardens.... We have offered advances from the Public Funds.... But the one great boon—and it is a great boon—which it is in the power of the Legislature to give to the agricultural labourer in Ireland, is to increase the demand for his labour, and, by imparting a stimulus to that part of the country, to insure its requiring more strong arms to carry it on, and thereby to bring more bidders into the market for those arms, and raise the natural and legitimate price of their labour.... If we can only convince every man that, from the time this Act passes, he will be able to prosecute his industry in security and in the manner most advantageous to himself, we shall confer upon the agricultural labourer the greatest boon which it is in our power to bestow."

These were the main features of the Bill which Mr. Gladstone committed to the House in a peroration singularly dignified and self-restrained. It was not, he said, to be expected that evils of such long standing as Irish evils were should be cured in a day, and it was impossible that they should be cured if the Bill were to be "poisoned by the malignant agency of angry or bitter passions." The passing of the Bill was to be looked on, not as the triumph of party over party, but "as a common work of common love and goodwill to the common good of our common country." "With such objects and in such a spirit," he concluded, "the House will address itself to the work and sustain the feeble efforts of Government. And my hope, at least, is high and ardent that we shall live to see our work prosper in our hand; and that in that Ireland which we desire to unite to England and Scotland by the only enduring ties—those of free will and free affection—peace, order, and a settled and cheerful industry will diffuse their blessings from year to year and from day to day over a smiling land."

A Bill of this complicated kind could obviously not be discussed on the first reading, so no debate took place until the second reading on the 7th of March. From the reception given to Mr. Gladstone's statement on February 15th, it was clear that the Conservatives did not mean to offer a point-blank opposition to the principle of the Bill. Mr. Gathorne Hardy, who acted as leader of the Opposition on that night, owned that his party "had a keen sense of the evils existing among the landlords, tenants, and labourers of Ireland at present," and hinted that they would reserve their principal criticisms till the Bill was in committee. The direct hostility to the Bill came from another quarter—from the extreme Irish party. Mr. Bryan, who was one of them, and Captain White, member for Tipperary, proposed and seconded an amendment to the second reading, to the effect that the Bill should be read again that day six months. But the views of members who protested against the principle of a landlord being ever allowed to raise his rents, and who openly asked not only for "fixity of tenure," but for fixity at nominal payments, could hardly hope to find favour in a Parliament of landlords. The principal speakers who criticised the Government plan were men of quite other views. Dr. Ball, Colonel Wilson-Patten, Mr. Henley, Mr. Ward Hunt, and Mr. Disraeli protested, not against the insufficient rights bestowed upon the occupier, but against the injury done to the landlord. Dr. Ball, the member for Dublin University, who brought to the Conservative side a remarkable contribution of eloquence and force, protested very strongly against the principle of interfering with freedom of contract. "You in England," he said, "have been working for centuries to make landlord and tenant not ascertain their rights by litigation, but have them established on the solid basis of contract.... I say you have got the best system; and I believe it to be the best because I believe that Englishmen, having set their hearts on the best system, would be content with nothing less. What do I ask for my country? I ask the right to rise to the same standard as yourselves. I demand that you will not lay down a rule of this kind and say, 'This is good enough for Ireland. There is a positive incapacity in the Irish landlord to deal with his tenants by contract, and in the Irish tenant to take care of himself by contract. The Scotch and English are able to do it. Therefore the true system shall be reserved as a privilegium for them; but the Irish shall not be able to attempt it, because we shall put a clause in an Act of Parliament to prevent it.'" And Mr. Disraeli, in a similar strain, protested both against legalising the custom of Ulster ("because it does not exist," he said) and against interference with the freedom of contract. And yet, as we said, it was plain that the Conservative party were too well convinced of the strength of Government to attempt a wholesale rejection of the Bill. In the division that closed the debate on the second reading, Mr. Gladstone carried them into the lobby with him, and the principle of the Bill was affirmed by 442 against 11.

This majority was a clear enough intimation that the principles of the Government Bill were accepted by the House. Among the eleven "Noes" were found only three Tories—among them the veteran Mr. Henley, whose staunch adherence to landlord-right was not to be shaken by any amount of "political necessity," such as Mr. Disraeli talked of. But Mr. Henley, Sir W. Bagge, and Mr. Lowther—who for once found themselves in the strange company of the Extreme Left of Home Rulers and Roman Catholics—could only offer an ineffectual protest against the "tenants' Bill." The principle, that of legalising customs of compensation where found, and of making a statutory scale of compensation for loss of occupancy in the absence of any custom, had been once for all affirmed. It was evident, however, that the Bill would be severely handled in committee; and the prospect became all the clearer from certain fresh signs of agrarian terrorism which began to appear just after the second reading. County Mayo began to be disturbed by the visits of masked and armed men to the farmhouses, with the object of making the farmers swear to "break up their pasture lands." These outrages—more like the proceedings of Australian bushrangers or American Ku-klux men than of inhabitants of these islands—did not dispose Parliament to leniency in regard to Irish disaffection. Mr. Chichester Fortescue proposed, on the 17th of March, a Bill which would effectually meet these agrarian cases; and in a fortnight it became law. Its effect was to place certain districts of Ireland practically in a state of siege; it forbade the possession of firearms by unlicensed persons; it gave rights of search to constables; it took more stringent measures against threatening letters; it allowed discretionary arrests of suspected persons; it allowed the grand jury to give damages, chargeable on the county, to the families of murdered men; and it increased almost indefinitely the right of Government to seize newspapers. This Bill, which nothing but extreme necessity could have justified, passed Commons and Lords almost without a struggle; the Lords especially agreeing with Lord Salisbury, who said, "You must teach the Irish people to fear the law before you can induce them to like it."

Never has a Bill been visited with a more imposing show of amendments than the Land Bill in committee. Three hundred alterations, like the three hundred conspirators against King Porsenna, were banded together to work its fall, or at least to hamper its activity. The Ulster custom was debated for many hours, and met with all kinds of observations—from those alike who said with Mr. Disraeli, "You cannot legalise the custom of Ulster, because it does not exist," and those who regarded the Bill as a poor instalment of reform, to be accepted under protest. When the third clause came before the House, Mr. Disraeli brought forward an important amendment, directed against the principle of compensation for eviction as distinguished from compensation for improvements. He wished to insert the words, limiting the compensation, "in respect of unexhausted improvements made by him, or any predecessor in title, and of interruption in the completion of any course of husbandry suited to the holding." Mr. Disraeli charged Government with changing their original Bill in one most important point—namely, with intending to bring in a new clause practically extending the Ulster custom to the other parts of Ireland. The third clause, as originally drawn, proposed to give the outgoing tenant compensation for the improvements—"a subject on which both sides were unanimous; the marrow of all Land Bills; the result on which investigation and discussion have enabled the country to arrive at a mature conclusion, and which, if secured," said Mr. Disraeli "would, in my opinion, do all that in justice is required." But there were words at the end of the original clause which were ambiguous; "that compensation should be given for the loss sustained by the tenant on quitting his holding." These words Mr. Disraeli declared that he and his friends had understood to mean what his amendment now stated—namely, that over and above receiving compensation for his improvements, "the tenant would, on quitting his holding, be secured the fair usufruct of any husbandry or skill in the tillage of the land which he had not yet received." So that Mr. Disraeli had originally intended his amendment to be a mere declaratory amendment, for the removal of a verbal ambiguity. But to his great surprise, he found that at the last moment Government had themselves amended the clause; that they had thrown the proposal for compensation for improvements into the background, and brought out as a chief part of the clause "that compensation is to be given to any tenant at the termination of his lease, on the assumption that the termination of his occupancy is a grievance for which the tenant ought to be compensated. This clause, then, in its later form, is a clause which does not conceal that, in the opinion of the framers of the Bill, occupation involves a right of property."

Here was ground on which the question of the Bill might very well have been fought on the second reading; and it is not unlikely that, if the clause had originally been drawn as it afterwards was, Government would not have been allowed to wait so long without a struggle. That "occupation should be held to involve a right of property"—that a tenant should have a right to claim part-ownership in the land he occupied—was a notion which the English landlord shuddered to contemplate. Mr. Disraeli played very skilfully upon that landlord sentiment. He dwelt upon the fact that the principle was "opposed to all the fundamental principles of our legislation for the country generally;" and protested against applying principles to Ireland without considering their effect upon England and Scotland. And even in Ireland, he maintained, this admission of tenant-right in so extreme a form would have disastrous results. The landlord, finding that the new law gave his tenant a right to a third of his freehold—seven years' rent; twenty-one years' rent being the average value of a freehold in Ireland—and seeing an escape from this claim in the clause which barred the right in the case of non-payment of rent, would take advantage of this, "the only position of strength left him." He would wait till the tenant did not pay his rent—a very frequent occurrence in Ireland—and then he would evict mercilessly. To escape a repetition of the danger he would consolidate his farms, and the old tenants would have to wander away to new homes. They, to avoid this last extremity, would appeal to "those rural ethics with the consequences of which we are all familiar." The rural logic of the Irish tenant would run thus: "I have lost my holding because I did not pay my rent. Can anything be more flagrantly unjust than that a man should be deprived of his contingent right to a third of the freehold because he does not pay his rent?" Or in other words, "Am I to lose seven years' rent because I have failed to pay half a year's?" As a consequence the Irish tenant would act upon his rural ethics, and either have his landlord's land or his life. "So far from the improvement of the country, so far from terminating all these misunderstandings and heartburnings which we seem now so anxious upon both sides of the House to bring to a close, you will have the same controversies still raging, only with increased acerbity, and under circumstances and conditions which inevitably must lead to increased bitterness and increased perils to society."

AN EVICTION IN IRELAND.