THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (continued)—THE IRISH LAND ACT OF 1870—THE LAND LEAGUE AND THE NATIONAL LEAGUE—THE LAND OF 1881—SUBSEQUENT LEGISLATION AS REGARDS THE LAND SYSTEM OF IRELAND

Mr. Gladstone, after his conversion to Home Rule, more than once declared that, almost from early manhood he had given special attention to Ireland; either his memory was at fault, or he had kept the fact to himself. He had been a conspicuous figure in politics, for many years before 1868; but until he had been placed at the helm of the State, he had shown little acquaintance with Irish questions, and, indeed, had expressed few opinions on them. In 1866 he had said in the House of Commons, that the existence of the Anglican Irish Church would be probably long; he had been in high office almost since 1853, and, as a colleague of Lord Palmerston, had acquiesced in the philippics of that statesman against Irish tenant right, conduct that revealed ignorance of the land system of Ireland. But, in 1868, when the Fenian outbreak had caused the nation to demand large reforms in Ireland, he suddenly abandoned his attitude of reserve; he threw himself into Irish affairs; his zeal, it may be remarked, as often happened, fell in with his interests, and with those of the Liberal party, and gave him a leverage to drive Disraeli from office. During months before the General Election that ensued, the orator thundered on Irish grievances, and on the manifold ills of Ireland; in figurative and impassioned language, he said that the island was blighted by a huge upas tree, the Church, the land, and education being the three main branches. These harangues, addressed to the new democracy, contributed powerfully to the fall of the Conservative Ministry; it was little noticed, at the time, that one of the results was ere long to compel Mr. Gladstone himself to subject Ireland to severe repressive measures, for Whiteboy and agrarian outrages became frequent In 1869, the Minister addressed himself to the task of hewing down the first branch of the poisonous upas; he disestablished and disendowed the Protestant Church of Ireland. This is not the place to comment upon that great measure; it was well designed upon its professed principles; it dealt liberally, nay, generously, with the voluntary Church, which replaced the Church of the State it overthrew. But essentially it was a scheme of destruction, formed in Nonconformist not in Irish interests, and opposed to the views of generations of statesmen; it made no provision for the clergy of the Irish Catholic Church, a policy which Pitt, Castlereagh, and Lord John Russell had had at heart, which had been all but a condition of the Union, and which, if carried into effect, would have done much to strengthen and maintain that fundamental law, and to promote tranquillity in Ireland and her general welfare.

Mr. Gladstone now turned to the second branch of the upas, the land system of Ireland and her landed relations. His whole career, especially in its Home Rule phase, proves that his knowledge of Ireland was not exact or profound; at this time he had had little experience of the Irish land question. But the mind of England was still attracted to Irish affairs; a number of distinguished Englishmen and Scotchmen went to Ireland, to investigate the state of the country on the spot; the British Press sent some of its best contributors; the time was singularly opportune for a fair and complete inquiry; no Minister has had, before or since, such assistance in dealing with Irish problems. I must glance at the state of the Irish land system in 1869-70, as this was fully explored and made manifest.[55] The material progress being made, since about 1854, had been largely developed in by far the greatest part of the island. The population was being still diminished by emigration and other causes; the area for real husbandry had been greatly extended; the rural community, at least in its lower grades, was infinitely better off than it had been before the Famine. The look of the country, in most places, bore witness to a change beneficent in the main; it had been almost transformed since 1844-45. The cottar system, no doubt, was to be found in backward counties; but even in these it had been largely effaced; it was all but passing away in the more thriving counties; masses of indigence were to be seen only in tracts west of the Shannon; and these were aggregated on an area comparatively small. The general consolidation of farms had, meanwhile, gone on; and though Ireland remained, on the whole, a land of small farms, her land system had, from top to bottom, ceased to depend for its support on a perishable root. In every conceivable respect a marked improvement was visible in the state of the peasantry; they were by many degrees better clothed and fed than their fathers had been; the wages of agricultural labour were still rising, and were now paid in money, and not in plots of potatoes; and though the habitations of this whole class were, as a rule, still mean, the dwellings of the class of substantial farmers had shown signs of distinct social progress. At the same time agriculture had made a marked advance, owing to the influences I have referred to before; fine specimens of extensive farming were very commonly to be seen; thousands of acres had been reclaimed and enclosed of late years; at no period certainly had the landed gentry, in a great measure through moneys borrowed from the State, expended such large sums in improving their estates, especially in arterial drainage, and the introduction of the best breeds of stock of all kinds. The wealth of Ireland, too, was increasing, if not rapidly; and a change for the better might be traced in what we may describe as her general social life. Her middle class was still weak and small compared to that of England and Scotland; but it had been growing in wealth and power; and this, to some extent, had had a good effect on a community still mainly dependent on the land.

The material and even the social progress of Ireland, since the Famine, had thus been marked; it had been more decided than it has been, at any period, except, possibly, that from 1782 to 1800. Her land system, too, had become better in important parts; but in many respects it remained vicious; some of its vices had been aggravated, or were more sensibly felt. The hope that the land would pass generally into the hands of large farmers, able to develop its resources, had not been realised, or had been realised only to a relatively trivial extent; it was still held in the main by a peasantry of small occupiers of the soil, though the consolidation of farms had gone on over extensive areas, especially over wide tracts of pasturage, in the eastern, midland, and western counties, and this, in some instances, through a process of harsh eviction. The profound divisions of race and faith, the distinctive feature in the organic structure of the whole community, were at least as visible as ever in the land system; from causes I have pointed out before, they had, not improbably, been widened; this tended to increase the old dissension in landed relations, and the long-standing separation between the landed classes. Middleman tenures, with their mischievous effects, had, since the Famine, well-nigh disappeared; but the new landlord had largely replaced the middleman; absenteeism remained what it had been; and though absentee estates, as a rule, were under good agents, there was too much of that ‘absenteeism of the heart,’ condemned by Tocqueville as a grave social danger. The purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts, with some honourable exceptions, no doubt, were too often oppressive landlords; the old landlords, as a class, had, certainly, done much for their estates, but they had lost their political and largely their social influence; partly owing to apprehensions as regards tenant right, partly to the assurances of statesmen that their position was safe, they had become perhaps more exacting in their dealings with their dependents; in the existing situation, they more and more resembled a weak caste, controlled by the central Government, and isolated amidst a community, to a great extent, not friendly. All this tended to produce a want of stability and insecurity in the land system, which was ominous of social strife and trouble; but the most active element of disturbance was to be certainly found in the contact with the rebellious movement which Ireland had lately witnessed. Fenianism had been scotched, but by no means slain; and though the peasantry had held aloof from it, Fenian emissaries were going through the country, appealing to the passions and the greed of the occupiers of the soil, for different reasons not contented with their lot, hostile, in a great degree, to the order of things around them, and more alive to their grievances than in the past generation; at this very time a cry against the payment of rent, and against ‘landlordism,’ as it was called, was being heard in a few counties. It was significant that agrarian crimes—some of the worst type—and agrarian disorder were distinctly increasing; and it should be added, that, in spite of Cardinal Cullen, the younger Catholic priests, in some districts, were beginning to play the part of agitators again.

Passing from the general state of landed relations, the conditions of land tenure, briefly noticed before, had not improved of late years, and were, in some respects, worse. Rents had been rising for a considerable time: but except in comparatively few instances, they were not excessive, as affairs stood; whatever mendacious calumny has since maintained, Ireland, on the whole, was in no sense an over-rented land.[56] But the modes of occupation were essentially bad; they were open to the gravest objections; their vices had become more than ever apparent. The tenant right, under the Ulster custom, had, I have remarked, largely secured the tenant farmer, in parts of the province, what was generally known as the ‘Three F’s,’ Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, the power of a Free Sale of the holding;[57] though it should be especially borne in mind that the fair rent was never adjusted by an external agency, but was settled by what Adam Smith would have called ‘higgling’ between the owner and occupier of the soil. The custom, however, had been very powerful; its violation, on anything like a great scale, would have certainly caused a fierce war of classes; and it gave the Ulster tenant, in tens of thousands of cases, a real proprietary right in the land, whatever might be the terms of his contract; a right equivalent to more or less joint-ownership, and that might be described as a precious peculium, subject to conditions that long had made it practically secure. But this most important right, involving property worth many millions, still remained wholly unprotected by law; and though its value had enormously increased, as the wealth of Ulster had been developed, of late years, it was being ‘nibbled away’ on not a few estates, and restricted by limitations of many kinds that had greatly impaired it. An analogous right, like seed scattered by the winds, had partially spread into the southern provinces, as the natural result of the equitable claims, the occupiers of farms had repeatedly acquired, though this had not been recognised on many estates, and its efficacy was not as yet great; but this right, such as it was, like its fellow, was not law-worthy, and depended wholly on the will of the lord of the soil. In addition to the tenant right in the north and the south, the concurrent claims of the tenant farmers, throughout the country, in respect of improvements and of sums paid on the transfer of farms, for ‘good-will,’ had been greatly increasing of late years, especially as prosperity was advancing; and yet tenures had continued to become more precarious; leaseholds were being almost everywhere replaced by tenancies at will. These claims were never so extensive before; often equivalent to joint-ownership, in no doubtful sense, and, in almost all cases, of some value, they were, nevertheless, still outside the Ægis of the law, a fact that must ever be borne in mind; they could be destroyed or greatly reduced by the raising of rent, they could be annihilated by a notice to quit, if eviction followed. Unquestionably in the great mass of instances, these rights, whatever their nature, were not invaded; but they certainly had been in a certain number; a single case of invasion created alarm and distrust, and had a bad effect on landed relations; throw a stone into a pond, and it makes a ripple; it has a disturbing influence far beyond the surface it strikes. No wonder, then, that complaints of these modes of tenure had become very general, and were loudly expressed, not only by those who might suffer from them, but by intelligent minds which had mastered the subject. It was an exaggeration to assert, as was said at the time, that the peasant in Ireland lived under a sword of Damocles; but he lived under a system in which law and right were very plainly opposed.Only a revolution, which Parliament would not have sanctioned, could have effaced the inveterate ills of the Irish land system, running up to the conquests and the confiscations of the past, and the divisions of race and faith in the Irish land; the remark is as true now as it was thirty years ago; and a revolution of the kind, I am firmly convinced, would, even under the best conditions, make infinitely worse whatever was already bad. But it was possible for legislation to remove or mitigate the essential vices in the modes of Irish land tenure; Mr. Gladstone rightly confined himself to this object. He brought in his first Irish Land Bill in the early spring of 1870; he had to address a House of Commons not much in sympathy with a project of the kind. Many of the members were ignorant of the subject; many thought English land tenure perfect, and could not understand why it would not do for Ireland, a prejudice at least three centuries old; some believed Irish tenant right to be a violation of Free Trade, then in the ascendant in every phase of commerce. The Minister’s speech was adapted to those who heard it; it was tentative, moderate, not striking; he drew, indeed, very plain distinctions between British and Irish land tenure, and showed how the first could be no rule of right for the second; but if he enlarged on the just claims of the occupier of the Irish soil, he did not venture to maintain, what he probably felt, that these were often equivalent to a joint-ownership more or less developed. He was, in short, dexterous, but not profound; very inferior to Burke, who, a century before, had grasped the essential facts in this province, though the question was still in the remote future. The most important parts of Mr. Gladstone’s speech, and indeed, of those of his leading followers, regard being had to events by no means distant, were those in which he repudiated, with no doubtful censure, the whole theory of the ‘Three F’s,’ the extreme demand, at this time, of the tenant class in Ireland. ‘Fair Rent’ he argued, especially if adjusted by the State, deprives a landlord of his first proprietary right, and involves his expropriation in the long run; ‘Fixity of Tenure’ means a perpetuity for the tenant, to which he has no just claim, and involves confiscation hardly disguised; ‘Free Sale’ was but a corollary to legislation on these principles.[58] At the same time, Mr. Gladstone protested, with marked emphasis, that the Bill he was introducing was to be absolutely a final measure; it was to effect a permanent settlement of the Irish land; Irish landlords would have nothing more to apprehend, Irish tenants to expect. In this instance, as in that of Home Rule, the orator was to belie himself, and to be a curious example of the irony of Fate; within a few years he was to legislate on the lines he had denounced as dangerous and false; to carry into effect a scheme for dealing with the Irish land, infinitely worse than that of the ‘Three F’s;’ to scatter the ‘finality,’ to which he had pledged his word, to the winds.

The Bill thus launched was a comprehensive and wise measure, if not free from real, even grave, defects; it remains the only statesmanlike scheme for the settlement of Irish landed relations that hitherto has received the assent of Parliament.[59] It made the tenant right of Ulster, in its various forms, as these existed in different estates, law-worthy, and protected to the fullest extent; it gave the same sanction to the inchoate tenant right of the southern provinces. This was, in itself, an immense reform; but the Bill properly had a far wider sweep; it extended, with the exception of certain kinds of lands, such as demesnes, town parks, holdings of a residential type, and, in most cases, large pastoral holdings, to nearly all the occupiers of the Irish soil; even the excepted lands were partially within its scope. The first great object of the measure was to secure to the Irish tenant the rights he had acquired to improvements he may have made on his farm, a right hitherto not within the pale of the law; its provisions, in this respect, were, I think, excellent. With a true perception of the unquestionable fact that, though the Irish landlords, especially of late years, had expended considerable sums on their estates, still, as is inevitable under the small-farm system, the Irish tenant, as a general rule, had made the greatest part of the additions to the land, Mr. Gladstone provided that, subject to limitations by no means severe, in order that the law should not run wild, improvements made on farms, in the absence of proof to the contrary, should be deemed to be the tenant’s property, thus reversing the presumption of English law, iniquitous when applied to Irish tenures, that what is annexed to the soil belongs to the owner, and not to its occupant. The ground being, so to speak, cleared, the Bill declared that, in almost all cases, a tenant should have a right, when leaving his farm, even though dispossessed for the failure to pay his rent, to claim compensation, from his landlord, for his improvements; and facilities were offered to landlords to discharge these claims through loans from the State. In order, however, reasonably to secure right being done, in a complex and very difficult matter, the Bill proceeded to define improvements, and to impose restrictions on claims, to which objection could fairly be made. Apart from unexhausted tillages and manures, an improvement was to be a work ‘suitable to a holding, and adding to its letting value,’ a description as equitable and precise as could well be desired. And, speaking generally, claims in respect of improvements were not to be preferred were the improvement twenty years old, except in the case of buildings and the reclamation of waste land; nor if the improvement were prohibited by the landlord, under the conditions laid down; nor if it were made under a contract for value; nor if it were forbidden by a special contract; nor if, in certain cases, the landlord had agreed to make it; nor if the claim was barred by express written contract, in the case of improvements made before the Bill became law; nor, in the case, with some exceptions, of certain classes of leases; nor if the landlord, under certain conditions, permitted a tenant to dispose of his interest in his farm.

This measure, therefore, gave the Irish tenant farmer complete property in his improvements, within reasonable bounds, and yet did not here invade the just rights of the landlord; it was only to be regretted that it had not been proposed many years before. It proceeded, however, a great deal further, and asserted a principle, for the behoof of the tenant, which has since been very generally condemned,[60] though in my judgment, it was essentially right, if carried somewhat beyond proper and safe limits. Except in the case of leases granted before the Bill, and of a class of leases granted when it was to become law, Mr. Gladstone engrafted on the great mass of Irish tenancies what really was a new tenant right; he was probably convinced, though he did not say so, that this was to be an equivalent for the joint-ownership, more or less manifest, which, in innumerable instances, the Irish occupier had acquired in the soil. This tenant right was given the rather ambiguous name of ‘Compensation,’ in the event of ‘Disturbance;’ a sum varying in amount from seven to one year’s rent, according to the size of the holding, but in no case to exceed £250, was to be paid to a tenant when dispossessed by a notice to quit, and, in some circumstances, by other means; this was to be over and above any sum due in respect of improvements; but this, too, as in the case of the last-named sum, was to be paid only when the tenant was ‘quitting’ the land. Obviously this was a potential tenant right, if to be realised only in one way; it practically gave a quasi-proprietary right in the fee, as, when commenting on the Bill, I pointed out at the time; and I certainly thought that the compensation was very large, and introduced a principle into the Bill which might be abused. Two other provisions of the measure, with respect to the position of the Irish tenant, may be briefly noticed. No attempt was made to adjust rents, through the agency of the State, Mr. Gladstone having expressly denounced the idea; but in the case of petty occupiers, subjected to ‘exorbitant rents,’ compensation for disturbance might be adjudged to them, even if evicted for not paying the rent, that is, the landlord might be mulcted in very heavy penalties. In nearly all instances, too, the tenant was declared to be entitled to ‘his away-going crops,’ another privilege, sometimes of no little value, and analogous to that secured by usage in many parts of England. So far the Bill dealt with the Irish land on the side of occupation; but it dealt with it, also, on the side of ownership. John Bright had urged the expediency, during several years, of facilitating the transfer of the fee simple, in his holding, to the Irish tenant; this policy had been carried out, to some extent, by the Act disestablishing the Anglican Church in Ireland. The Bill of 1870 extended the principle; it provided that the State might advance moneys to Irish tenants, to enable them to become owners of their farms; but—and this should especially be kept in mind—the tenant was to supply a third part of the purchase money at least; and the transaction was to be effected by free contract, that is, by the voluntary act of the landlord disposing of his land. It remains to add, that the administration of the measure, was, for the most part—subject to an appeal to the Superior Courts—entrusted to the County Courts of Ireland, that is, to long-established tribunals of repute.

The Bill passed through both Houses with little change; it has long been known as the Irish Land Act of 1870. It was, in the main, I repeat, a great reforming measure; it effected a far-reaching improvement in the tenure of land in Ireland, and that without any marked infringement of the just rights of property. No impartial mind can fairly object to the protection given to the tenant right of the north and the south, or to the compensation secured for tenants’ improvements; if ‘Compensation for Disturbance’ was a bold experiment, still this Parliamentary tenant right, as it may be called, was in harmony with fact in nearly all instances. Nevertheless, the Act had three marked defects; these largely detracted from its practical value. It bristled with such exceptions and limitations that it was difficult even for the learned to understand; it seemed to the unlettered peasant a dangerous puzzle, involving him, perhaps, in lawsuits and costs; it did not strike his imagination as a substantial boon. Though, too, it annexed a real tenant right to nearly all farms, and thus secured to the Irish tenant, in almost all cases, any joint-ownership he may have acquired in the land, still this was intelligible only to educated men; ‘Compensation for Disturbance’ was to be given only when an occupier was about to leave his holding; but this was exactly what he could not bear to do; he was, therefore, ready to accept almost any terms, rather than face consequences he dreaded to think of. Mr. Gladstone, again, had, in this measure, shown that he wished to assimilate Irish to English land tenure in the long run; he sought to vindicate the just claims of the Irish tenant; but he desired ultimately to give him the status of his fellow in England, a long-standing, false conception of British statesmen. The Land Act, therefore, provided that most of the rights it conferred on the tenant might be commuted by the grant of a lease for thirty-one years or upwards; and it further enacted that tenants of the larger kind might ‘contract themselves out’ of the privileges it gave, by voluntary agreements made with their landlords. The object of this was to place the Irish land, by degrees, no doubt, under rather long leases, discharged from the tenant right and other claims; but in the circumstances of Ireland this was a mistake. This part of the Act was a temptation to landlords, to persuade or even to force tenants to accept leases under conditions which might be too severe, with respect to rent and many other things, and to forego rights they would otherwise have enjoyed, by a process which might not be a free contract; it encouraged, in a word, unfair evasion of the law. This flaw in the measure was pointed out from the first; Mr. Gladstone, however, denied its existence, and characteristically shut his ears to other schemes of reform, notably to an ingenious proposal of the late Judge Longfield to extend the Ulster tenant right to all Irish tenancies by a very simple and self-acting process, and to a proposal of Butt to convert tenancies at will into long leaseholds, at the rents then current. These projects certainly deserved attention; and, whatever their shortcomings, were easy to understand.

The Act of 1870, like the Act dealing with the Protestant Church, was followed by a short-lived outbreak of agrarian crime put down only by severe coercive measures. This phenomenon has been common in Irish history, from the days of Tyrconnell to the present time; disorder has been the immediate result of concessions; peccant humours discharge themselves if you touch the head of an ulcer. There is some reason, too, to believe that in a few instances—and they were very few—wrongheaded landlords, alarmed at the prospect before them, began to harass and even to dispossess tenants; they aimed at ‘clearing’ their estates, in order to evade the law; conduct of this kind naturally provoked indignation in some places.[61] Nevertheless, the Land Act of 1870 was generally well received in Ireland, though it fell short of the popular demand, and it was ill understood by the tenant classes;[62] many farmers availed themselves of its benefits, especially those holding under the Ulster custom. Five or six years of prosperity followed, the brightest perhaps ever seen in Ireland; agricultural prices were high, harvests extremely good; the material progress of the country was decided; the peasantry seemed, as a rule, contented; agitation abandoned, as it were, the land, and concentrated itself on the Home Rule movement. Mr. Gladstone, always optimistic, and proud of his own offspring, boasted, towards the close of his first Ministry, that his recent legislation had done wonders; the Land Act had reconciled Irish landlords and tenants, and had greatly increased the selling price of land; he refused to see how much of all this was due to a cause wholly independent of himself, the comparative well-being of nearly all Ireland. As had happened in the period from 1854 to 1870, this tranquillity was not deeply founded or complete; as then, it was, in a great degree, deceptive. The peasantry were living fast in a good time; banks and traders had made large advances to them on the security of tenure the law had created; their position became such, in some districts, that a season of distress might reduce many to sudden poverty, and be productive of the necessarily resulting evils. Rents, again, were rising as the country grew in wealth, though except in comparatively few cases—a fact that should be steadily kept in view—they were still, as a rule, by no means excessive; they were far below the rents of thirty years before; but this gradual rise was of course not popular. In some instances, too—but these were very rare, as was conclusively proved at a subsequent time—tenants, under more or less pressure on the part of their landlords, had accepted leases excluding them from the advantages of the law, and not equitable in some respects, or had wholly ‘contracted themselves out’ of the Act; this naturally caused alarm and distrust in many peasant dwellings. But the principal reasons that content was really less than it seemed to be in landed relations were altogether of a different nature. Like too many even excellent reforms in Ireland, the Land Act of 1870 became law too late; twenty years before it would have been hailed as an extraordinary boon; it was now regarded as almost a half measure, in view of the socialistic ideas about the land afloat. At the same time, Fenianism continued to make its influence felt; Irish-Americans continued to flit through the country denouncing British rule and Irish landlords, and calling upon the peasantry, as in 1798, to rise. Even in these years of prosperity, though rents were well paid, there was a secret movement against rent beneath the surface of things, so well concealed that it was absolutely unknown by the Government.Meanwhile, in the midst of apparent peace, the elements of trouble in Ireland still quiescent were to come to a head and to give rise to a movement. The most formidable to British rule though skilfully masked, which had been seen since the rebellion of 1798. Revolutionary schemes in Ireland have always fastened on the land as the chief source from which they could derive strength; the United Irish movement as I have pointed out, was connected with a peasant movement against the payment of rent. This idea had been brought into marked prominence by John Finton Lalor, one of the rebels of 1848, a comparatively unknown but a sagacious man; ‘You must associate’ he wrote, ‘the cause of Irish liberty, for which the people really care little with a cause for which they care a great deal; an inert mass must be yoked to a powerful engine; the Irish landlord must be driven from the land and the peasant masses be made its owners; and the fall of English power will follow that of its landlord garrison.’ These words fell for the moment on unheeding ears; but the tradition has continued from that day to this the destruction of Irish ‘landlordism’ was one of the objects of the Fenian leaders of 1865-67, and they denounced the Irish gentry in atrocious language, though they did not know how to carry out their policy. This teaching was eagerly adopted by Michael Davitt, a Fenian, who had been convicted of a crime against the State; during a long imprisonment at Dartmoor, he brooded ‘on his country’s wrongs,’ but satisfied himself that if the independence of Ireland was a patriot’s first object, this could be attained only by uprooting the existing land system, by hounding on the occupiers of the soil against its owners, and by handing it over as spoil to the peasantry. Davitt was released from Dartmoor at the close of 1877; he attended a meeting in Dublin at which Parnell was present, and two of the assassins of the Phoenix Park tragedy; and he became supreme in the ranks of the Fenian societies, known as ‘the Irish Republican Brotherhood,’ which still retained a feeble life in Ireland, and even in England and Scotland. A short time afterwards he made his way to the United States, where he found the Fenians divided into two parties, known under the general name of the Clan na Gael, but having different objects, though with a common purpose. Both parties were for liberating Ireland ‘from the Saxon yoke;’ but the most violent and the most active sought to attain this end by expedients of desperate force; a ‘skirmishing fund’ had been established; ‘England was to be invaded’ by small bodies of ‘resolute men;’ her capital and chief towns were to be destroyed by dynamite. The other party, more prudent, but with similar aims, had been struck by Parnell’s attitude in the House of Commons, and by the success of his unscrupulous tactics; its leaders began to think that something might be done by ‘constitutional means;’ they gradually came to an agreement with Davitt, that ‘the overthrow of English domination’ was to be their ultimate end; but that efforts in this direction were to be linked with energetic efforts to subvert ‘the landlord system, a disgrace to humanity and to the civilisation of the present century;’ to banish the Irish landed gentry from their country, and to secure their estates for their tenantry. This movement, though rebellious in no doubtful sense, was nevertheless to have a legal disguise; the wolf was to wear sheep’s clothing; the ‘formation of a peasant proprietary, and the abolition of arbitrary evictions,’ were to be its proposed objects.[63]

Treason, seeking support from socialistic greed, was thus the origin of the Land League conspiracy, for this was its only legitimate name. I have glanced at this movement, on its political side, as it was associated with the cause of Home Rule; I must here consider it on its agrarian side, the most prominent, if not the most dangerous, to the State.[64] The compact between Davitt and the moderates of the Clan na Gael was called the ‘New Departure;’ Davitt returned to Ireland to stir up what became known as the ‘Land War;’ Fenian emissaries went to Ireland, about the same time, in order to collect arms and to drill peasants, with a view to a possible rising should the occasion be found. Meanwhile, Davitt had addressed himself to what was more immediately at hand; in the spring of 1879 he got a meeting together, in his native county, Mayo, at which ‘landlordism’ and all its works were savagely denounced; during the following months other meetings of the same sort were held, but as yet only in the western province of Connaught. At these gatherings the crusade against the landed gentry went on; rebellious utterances were blended with ferocious diatribes against[65] landlords sometimes marked out for vengeance by name; and the peasantry were called on to keep ‘a firm grip on their lands;’ these would become their own should they only be steadfast. The Land League movement was now launched on its course; but it was known to be an essentially Fenian movement; it was subsidised from Clan na Gael funds; it was supported by a murderous Clan na Gael print; it was condemned in the severest language by an aged Catholic prelate, one of the few of O’Connell’s surviving friends. The movement, however, as yet was not of much strength; Davitt had opinions about the ‘nationalisation of the land,’ which, like those of the Fenian leaders of 1865-67, were not to the mind of the peasantry; his efforts, hitherto, had not had much success. In this position of affairs he addressed himself to Parnell, who had had Fenian sympathies and associations for years, and had, we have seen, attracted Fenian admiration abroad; what passed between the two men has not transpired; but Parnell, if with reluctance, consented at last to become the head of the Land League and to direct the movement. The measures he adopted were skilfully designed, in harmony with the ‘New Departure,’ and with the double-dealing nature of a true conspirator. A Central Land League was established in Dublin; it was to have ‘branches’ extending through the country; it was to make a steady attack on the land system. Its professed objects, however, were constitutional, nay, fair; it was ‘to agitate against rack-rents and unjust evictions,’ and to ‘facilitate the ownership of the soil by its occupants.’ The ultimate purpose of the League, nevertheless, was that of the Fenian chiefs; of its seven high officers four were Fenians; it was wholly supported by Fenian moneys; its most prominent members made a boast of their Fenian sentiments.[66] It was, in a word, a rebellious organisation in a constitutional garb; it was the embodiment of what Parnell avowed afterwards: ‘A true revolutionary movement in Ireland should, in my opinion, partake both of a constitutional and an illegal character. It should be both an open and a secret organisation, using the Constitution for its own purposes, but also taking advantage of its secret combination.’[67]

The Land League established, under these auspices, gradually made some progress in the western parts of Ireland, always centres of poverty more or less developed. It had not, however, as yet, become a power in the land; Parnell went to the United States, as I have mentioned before, in order to obtain support for the ‘New Departure.’ He was the grandson of a distinguished American; the elections for a President were near; it was necessary to bid for the Irish vote; the chief of the League was invited to say what his Irish policy was in the Representative House of the people; and this he did in moderate and carefully chosen language. His real attitude, however, was very different; he associated with well-known Fenian leaders, became acquainted with a contributor to the Irish World, the worst journal of the Clan na Gael press; and more than once gave utterance to what was plain treason, notably to the ‘last-link’ speech already referred to. He obtained considerable funds for the League in Ireland, and before long founded a similar League in America, which became a Fenian organisation of the very worst type. Meanwhile a season of distress had visited Ireland; this quickened the elements of disorder being already let loose. The harvest of 1878 was not good; that of 1879 was the worst known since the Great Famine; the prosperity of the country suddenly came to an end. There was a universal calling in of demands, especially from tenant farmers, who, I have said, had been rather extravagant, and had become involved in debt;[68] the whole class suffered more or less, though there was very little extreme indigence, and Lord Beaconsfield’s Government was not slow in providing relief, which private charity largely increased. In these circumstances the landed gentry acted as any class would naturally act; a considerable number made remissions of rent; if a large majority, as certainly was the case, insisted upon their legal rights—conduct which must be pronounced unfortunate—it must be recollected that an agitation of extreme violence had been directed against the whole order; and that Mr. Gladstone had declared that, after the Land Act, there were to be no more concessions. The League now acquired new power; its branches spread over large parts of the west; its directors, from members in the House of Commons, to its avowed agents, and to the ‘village ruffians,’ who carried out its bidding in many places, rioted in atrocious threats against landlords whether good or bad; and a movement against the payment of rent began. The teaching which had been spread abroad during many months, bore the fruits which were to be expected from it; there was a sudden outbreak of agrarian crime, and of Whiteboyism in its worst aspect; it deserves special notice that this was confined to the counties where the League was in real force. The landlords, under these conditions, were often driven to enforce their claims; attempts were made to show that the evictions that followed were the sole causes of this social disorder. But it is absolutely certain that this was not the case; it was the Land League which provoked the evictions, and was responsible for the incidental crime.[69]

The spring of 1880 had come; Lord Beaconsfield had been driven from office, in an evil day for the renown of England; Mr. Gladstone had been returned again to power, on the flood of a tide of democratic sympathy. Lord Beaconsfield was not an author of any very large Irish reform, but he understood Ireland much better than his impetuous rival; he had seen from the first the real nature of the Land League movement; in his address to the nation, when he dissolved Parliament, he declared that an ‘attempt scarcely less dangerous than famine and pestilence’ was being made to separate Ireland from Great Britain, words treated by Mr. Gladstone with scornful ridicule, but words of real truth. The incoming Minister had of late taken little heed of Irish affairs; he had been engaged in his crusade in Midlothian, and in stirring up the multitude on the Eastern question; but he had clung to his optimistic Irish faith; he had solemnly announced that Ireland was ‘contented and happy,’ when the country was suffering from unquestionable distress; he had even refused to renew a measure for the repression of agrarian crime, when agrarian crime was formidably on the increase, and the Land League was rapidly growing in strength. At last, however, partly opening his eyes to the facts, he appointed a Commission charged to report on Irish land tenure; and he introduced a Bill slightly to amend the Land Act of 1870, showing thus from the outset that he choose to regard a conspiracy against the State on its economic side mainly, and not in its far more grave political aspect. A word must be said on this measure, which had its origin, to a great extent, in sheer and audacious falsehood. By this time Parnell was at the head of some sixty adherents in the House of Commons; he had linked the Home Rule and the Land League movements; his followers were, in many instances, chiefs of the League; they induced Mr. Gladstone to listen to them, on representations characteristically untrue. Evictions were on the increase in Ireland, owing to the onslaught made by the League on the landed gentry; Parnell and his band unscrupulously exaggerated the number, perhaps twenty-fold, by confounding ejectment decrees of the Courts with evictions actually carried out; Mr. Gladstone appears to have accepted this shameful statement. The new ‘Compensation for Disturbance’ Bill, as it was called, provided that in the case of certain classes of tenants, although they had failed to pay their rents, compensation, withheld, we have seen, under the Act of 1870, might be afforded them, under rather strict conditions; this was certainly an innovation of a startling kind, but something was to be said for it, in the existing position of affairs. The House of Commons, however, disliked a measure nicknamed ‘payment by reason of non-payment,’ and limited its application in many ways; and the House of Lords, unfortunately, I think, threw it out.

This Bill, closely circumscribed as it was, would not have extended, perhaps, to many tenants; it was condemned by Parnell and his satellites as a sham. Its rejection, however, gave an opportunity to the League; its leaders proclaimed at meetings, never so frequent before, that Ireland had nothing to expect from a foreign Parliament; the attack on ‘landlordism’ became more intense; treasonable and predatory harangues increased in vehemence. The influence of the conspiracy spread beyond Connaught, over nearly all Munster, and parts of Leinster; wherever it was felt it was attended with agrarian crime; ‘crime,’ as Mr. Gladstone exclaimed, ‘always dogged its footsteps.’ Offences of this kind portentously multiplied; they had been eight hundred and sixty-three at the close of 1879; they were two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine at the close of 1880;[70] and these included a number of barbarous murders, and of other atrocious deeds of outrage and blood, especially of the mutilation of the cattle of those opposed to the League. A kind of servile war springing from the land had set in; and during this whole period the spokesmen of the League, whether in the highest or the lowest grades, continued to denounce the landed gentry, though they knew that their utterances were the direct incentive to far-spreading crime. Parnell, however, infinitely the ablest of the conspirators, perceived that this brutal disorder would incense Parliament, and, besides, could not have decisive results; the cool, calculating schemer laid down a plan of operations for the League, which he hoped would be less openly detestable, and much more effective. Orders were issued that tenants should, in every part of Ireland, repudiate the rents they had agreed to pay, and should pay only such sums as had been assessed on land by a valuation made by the State for rates, a standard long acknowledged to be much too low; every landlord who should reject these terms was to incur the vengeance of the League. By these means Parnell expected, and not without reason, that a great combination for the forcible reduction of rent would be formed, and that numbers of farmers would flock in to the League, but he knew that his proposal was simply a defiance of the law, and that it would be resisted by many of the landed gentry; he hit on an expedient through which he believed he would attain his end. Should any landlord refuse to accept the sum offered instead of the proper rent, and should proceed to dispossess the defaulting tenant—and practically he could have no other remedy—the evicted farm was to be left derelict; it was to be smitten, as it were, by the interdict of the League; and any wretch who should dare to take it was to be banned by the whole neighbourhood; he and his, and those who dealt with him, ‘were to be shunned as lepers,’ and ‘treated as traitors to the cause.’[71] In this way, the crime of ‘boycotting,’ as it has ever since been called—its origin may be traced to the great Tithe War in Ireland—was made part of ‘the unwritten law’ of the League; and Parnell professed, whether sincerely or not, that through this device the League would baffle the law, and the landlords, as a class, as unhappily it did, in too many instances. Having thus armed the conspiracy with increased power, he cynically began to deprecate crimes of violence: the device of ‘boycotting’ was a more excellent way; it would before long ‘bring landlords to their knees,’ and would ultimately ‘plant the tenant in his farm to be held at a nominal rent,’ should he only be true to the League. At the same time the astute plotter found other means to extend his authority and that of the conspiracy he ruled. He appealed to the elective Local Boards in each county, composed for the most part of tenant farmers, to join the League, and to carry out his policy; and continuously but steadily he brought the force of the League to bear upon the administration of the law, by the intimidation of juries, magistrates, and even judicial persons.

The teaching of Parnell was disseminated by the League and its agencies, especially at gatherings of peasant mobs; it was largely followed wherever the League prevailed. In hundreds of instances tenant farmers were compelled or induced to tender sums, ‘at Griffith’s valuation,’ as it was called, in lieu of the rents they were bound to pay; and on the rejection of the offer, refused to pay anything. A widespread combination against rent was thus set on foot, sustained by a principle of greed which held it together; the League was more completely organised than it had been before; it made its way into ten or eleven counties, the only centres in which it was formidably strong. In these circumstances the landed gentry acted, as an order of men so assailed would act; not a few accepted the terms imposed on them, and took their rents at the reduced scale, the majority resisted the mandates of the League, and appealed to the law to enforce their rights. The terrors of the League were at once directed against those who had dared to defy it; in a certain number of instances landlords and agents were brutally murdered, for popular passions had been let loose for years; in many more ‘boycotting’ was carried out with such fatal effect that scores of families were driven out of Ireland, banned, persecuted, deprived even of the necessaries of life; in many others the demesnes of gentlemen were ravaged by ‘Land League hunts,’ overrun and half destroyed by savage mob gatherings. Evictions of course increased as the law was being trampled under foot; it is hardly necessary to say that Parnell’s doctrine was here ruthlessly applied; evicted farms were left deserted and waste over thousands of acres; the fears caused by ‘boycotting’ had become so intense, that no ‘land-grabber,’ as the name was, would dare to take them; the success of the League was in this respect remarkable. The vengeance of the conspiracy, too, was extended universally to another class of persons. Tenants in numbers of instances paid their rents, either from an honest motive, or through dread of eviction; the payment was often made at night, and under a pledge of secrecy; but wherever they were discovered the League marked ‘the traitor’s doom;’ they were sometimes ‘boycotted’ almost to death; sometimes murdered, often visited by gangs of ruffians—significantly known as Parnell’s police; the victims were shot in the legs, or the hair of their women was cut off, or their cattle were cruelly mutilated and maimed. It deserves special notice that, as was to be expected, Parnell’s warning against open crime was but little heeded; ‘boycotting,’ as Mr. Gladstone said, truly ‘was but a passive thing;’ it ‘required assassination as its sanction;’ the peasantry had been stirred up, in places, to frenzy; although Parnell made few violent speeches at the time, his satellites still gave a free rein to their wicked licence. Agrarian crime increased to an appalling extent; it had reached in 1881 a total of four thousand four hundred and thirty-nine cases, nearly two thousand more than those of the preceding year.[72]

In the spring and summer of 1881, the power of the League was at its height; in its organisation and working it bore a strong resemblance to the Jacobin societies of the Revolution in France. It was directed by a council from a central office in Dublin; its orders were sent thence to the bodies connected with it; these, scattered over many parts of the country, enforced its decrees through ‘boycotting’ crime, and terror. ‘Obnoxious’ persons, landlords, agents, ‘land-grabbers,’ and tenants who had paid their rents, were denounced and exposed to the League’s vengeance; officers of the law and of justice were especially banned; even those thought to be ‘luke-warm’ in the cause were declared ‘suspected.’ In some districts the regular government was practically superseded by the government of the league, described by Mr. Gladstone as ‘a scheme of anarchic oppression;’ in these a Reign of Terror was really supreme. It will never be known to what extent the League made use of Whiteboyism and its secret conclaves in order to carry out its purposes; the central body, controlled by Parnell, probably did not, but the affiliated bodies certainly did; it is impossible to account otherwise for the enormous increase of agrarian crime; the branches of the League, it is generally supposed, overshadowed, so to speak, the Whiteboy societies; these were active agents in the atrocious deeds that were done. It is scarcely necessary to refer to what the condition of social life was wherever the influence of the League was great; despair settled on the hearts of thousands, who felt themselves exposed to unseen perils, and existed, as it were, in an atmosphere of crime; and it must be borne in mind that for one member of the better class, fifty probably of the humbler, who had transgressed the law of the League, were kept in a state of moral dread and torture. By this time the Fenian League in the United States, formed by Parnell, but ruled by the Clan na Gael, had completely joined hands with the League at home; its emissaries were found in many parts of Ireland; its organ, the Irish World, ‘spread what it called the light,’ the teaching of treason, murder, and dynamite; and it supplied the parent League with, probably, nine-tenths of its funds, for it is a significant fact, deserving special notice, that the contributions of the peasantry to the League were, from first to last, small. Large parts of Ireland were thus in a deplorable state; but it is a complete mistake to suppose, as has been asserted, that the authority of the League was general throughout the whole island. Protestant Ulster, with a true instinct of what the conspiracy was, a movement against British rule in Ireland, kept aloof from the League, in angry contempt; and though its influence was more widely diffused, it was confined, I have said, to comparatively few counties if regarded as a dangerous and formidable power. It is also absolutely untrue that the movement was the uprising of an injured peasantry against oppressive landlords. There was little distress in 1880 and 1881, when the League was rapidly growing in strength, for the harvests of those years were above the average; and the Commission lately appointed by Mr. Gladstone had reported that over-renting in Ireland was not common, though instances of over-renting were of course to be found.[73]The centre of disturbance formed by the Land League was, I have said, comparatively small; and it was, for the most part, limited to backward and poor districts; its wicked and sordid teaching did not command the sympathies of the more intelligent and better parts of Ireland. Its influence, however, spread, in different degrees of strength, over nearly the whole of Catholic Ireland, and it was more or less supported by the Catholic priesthood, in many instances yielding to the pressure of their flocks. Within the bounds where it did not create a Reign of Terror, it was joined by thousands who thought it a constitutional movement, especially by peasants only seeking an improved tenure; and it is not pretended that even a majority of those who took part in it had treasonable or rebellious objects in view. But it was not the less a conspiracy hatched abroad, and aiming at the subversion of British power in Ireland; this was the policy its leaders avowed; and a conspiracy must be judged by the acts and words of those who direct it. The state of anarchy in Ireland had become such, in the spring of 1881, that the Government was compelled to try to put it down; a prosecution against Parnell and his chief lieutenants had failed; a Bill, resisted by obstruction, more persistent than had been ever known before, passed through Parliament with the object of repressing the Land League. The measure, however, was not well designed; minor agents of the League, ‘village ruffians,’ ‘Parnell’s police,’ and the like, were imprisoned in large numbers, no real punishment; but the chiefs of the conspiracy were not brought within the law; the funds of the League were removed to Paris; the movement went on in its destructive course. ‘Coercion,’ nevertheless, was beginning to produce its effects, as it has always done in Irish disorders, when Mr. Gladstone made a sudden change in his policy, never made before by a Minister at the head of the State. He had denounced the conspiracy in passionate language; he had partly at least seen what its objects were; ‘it aimed at dismemberment through rapine;’ but always a man of phrases and not of action, he had shrunk in every passage of his career from facing difficulties where popular feelings were involved; and while Ireland was still in a terrible state, he resolved to make a great concession to the League, and to effect a complete revolution in the Irish land. It was a surrender akin to that of Majuba, made with little information, and without mature reflection; whether its author believed, as I have remarked, that the conspiracy was most dangerous on its agrarian side, or was willing to propitiate Parnell, at the expense of the Irish landed gentry, he inaugurated the legislation, ever since pursued, which has resulted in destroying the property of the Irish landlord, without gaining the sympathy of the occupier of the Irish soil, has reduced the land system of Ireland to a ruinous chaos, and has, in essential respects, been an absolute failure.

Mr. Gladstone’s position was difficult when he introduced his new Irish Land Bill; his speech in the House of Commons, lucid as regards details, was apologetic, ambiguous, often beside the subject. He went out of his way to praise Irish landlords, ‘acquitted,’ he declared, by the late Commission; he deeply regretted a new experiment on the Irish land. He retained his admiration for the Act of 1870, but insinuated that it had been injured in the House of Lords; had this not been the case, it would have settled the Irish land question. He passed over his solemn pledges, on the faith of which millions had been lent on Irish estates, that the legislation of eleven years before was final; here he took refuge in appeals to ‘Divine Justice,’ in the ‘light of which’ a statesman must walk, as if Divine Justice was an excuse for a gross breach of faith. He then unfolded his plan of reform; he endeavoured, with an ingenuity all his own, to distinguish it from the schemes he had emphatically condemned in 1870; but in this respect mystification was at fault; the measure was a clumsy imitation of the ‘Three F’s,’ and where it differed, it differed greatly for the worse. Anticipating objections certain to be made, the orator dismissed ‘political economy to Saturn’ with a confident gesture; for some untold reason the philosophy of Adam Smith could not possibly apply to the order of things in Ireland. But by many degrees the most important part of the speech, in view of events which have since happened, was that in which Mr. Gladstone announced that should the measure really injure the Irish landlord, the State was bound to provide an indemnity. He denied, indeed, that the Bill could have any such effect; it would be a boon, he gravely said, to the Irish landed gentry; but should the contrary be the case, ‘compensation’ would be clearly their right. ‘I do not hesitate to say’—these were his very words spoken after the Bill had made much progress—‘that if it can be shown, on clear and definite experience, at the present time, that there is a probability, or if after experience shall prove that, in fact, ruin and heavy loss has been brought on any class in Ireland by the direct effect of this legislation, that is a question which we ought to look very directly in the face.’ The same meaning was even more clearly expressed: ‘I should certainly be very slow to deny that where confiscation could be proved, compensation ought to follow,’ and several of Mr. Gladstone’s lieutenants spoke in the same sense.[74]

The Bill, I have said, applied the principle of the ‘Three F’s’ to the relation of landlord and tenant in by far the greatest part of Ireland. As in the case of the Land Act of 1870, it excluded certain classes of lands from its scope, demesnes, residential holdings, town parks, and large pastoral farms; it extended also only to tenants at will, that is, subject to a notice to quit; it left tenants under leases outside its purview. It was confined, too, to ‘present tenants in occupation,’ at or near the existing time; it had no reference to ‘future tenants,’ that is, to tenants holding by contracts made after the Bill should pass, or a few months afterwards. Subject, however, to these exceptions, on the whole not large, the measure placed tenancies in Ireland under the ‘Three F’s,’ but with conditions of tenure peculiar to itself, and hitherto unknown in Ireland, or in any part of Europe. ‘Fair Rent,’ which, under the Ulster Custom, was settled by a bargain between landlord and tenant, was to be adjusted through the intervention of the State, legislation akin to the mediÆval statutes regulating the price of bread, and the wages of labour. ‘Fixity of Tenure’ was not to be a perpetuity in name; Mr. Gladstone feared that the speeches would be thrown in his teeth, in which he had declaimed against the idea; it was to be a lease for fifteen years, but capable of being renewed for ever, as a rule, through a periodical and costly lawsuit. ‘Free Sale’ was to be conceded under somewhat strict conditions; and the landlord was to be afforded a right of pre-emption in the case of such sales, in accordance with the analogy of the Ulster Custom. An estate virtually perpetual, at a State-settled rent, was thus to be carved out of the landlord’s fee, and given to tenants actually in possession of the land; it was created in absolute derogation from the landlord’s rights; it was a large if partial expropriation, in no doubtful sense. As to the interest of landlords in what was left of their property, they were to retain what are usually known as ‘royalties’—timber, minerals, mines, and privileges of sport; they were to have the ordinary remedies for enforcing payment of rent; and the statutory leases were to be subject to certain conditions, taken, for the most part, from the Ulster Custom, the violation of which might lead to their forfeiture. A tribunal, called the Land Commission, was to be set up to carry the law into effect, that is, to ‘fix fair rents,’ and to make tenures ‘fixed;’ it was to be assisted by dependent agencies, known as Sub-Commissions, which, Mr. Gladstone intimated, were to be quite subordinate, and from which appeals to the Land Commission were to run; but a sinister feature of an untried revolutionary scheme—the decision of the Land Commission as respects ‘fair rent’—was to be final. Subject to an appeal to the Land Commission, the Irish County Courts were empowered to administer the law; but it was foreseen that they would not do much in this province. The new modes of tenure might be applied to lands, by agreements between landlords and tenants carefully guarded; and Mr. Gladstone believed that this would be the ordinary course of dealing. The Bill, he thought, would not cause litigation to any great extent; it would operate as a self-acting force to lead to friendly contracts.[75]

So much for the scope of the Bill and the classes of tenants to which its benefits were to extend. A most important change was made in the measure, which contained, originally, nothing of the kind; this has been attended with far-reaching results. As we have seen, tenants were to be compensated for their improvements, under the Act of 1870; but the compensation was to be paid only when they were leaving the land; Mr. Healy, one of the ablest of Parnell’s lieutenants, induced Parliament to accept a provision exempting tenants’ improvements from rent, when the adjustment of ‘fair rent’ was to be made. However equitable in principle this might appear to be, it was, in the peculiar state of Irish land tenure, unjust in the extreme to landlords, as I shall endeavour to point out afterwards; and it has been a source of litigation, as mischievous and demoralising as can well be conceived. The Bill, like the Act of 1870, prohibited the subdivision and subletting of farms—an inveterate evil practice of the Irish peasant—under conditions possibly rather too strict; and it made changes, in that statute, which require attention. It added weight, so to speak, to the law, in the tenant’s interest; it increased the amount of compensation in respect of disturbance; it limited the power of ‘contracting out,’ to a smaller class of tenants than had been the case before, in fact, to large capitalist farmers; and it provided that tenants, who had accepted leases excluding them from the benefits of the Act of 1870, through illegitimate conduct on the part of their landlords, should be exonerated from such unfair contracts. It thus greatly amended the original Land Act; but it left many of its defects untouched; it is only right here to add that despite the lying clamour raised by the subsidised Press of Parnell—lying has ever since been part of its stock-in-trade—the instances were exceedingly few in which ‘forced leases,’ as they were called, were set aside by the Courts. A remarkable feature of the Bill has yet to be noticed: Mr. Gladstone, as was the case eleven years before, had still the wish, so characteristic of British statesmen, to assimilate Irish to English land tenure; for this reason, as I said, he deprived ‘future tenants’ of the advantages of the Bill; these were to hold their farms on the footing of pure contract. This was a shortsighted and bad arrangement; it tempted directly ill-conditioned landlords to dispossess tenants, whenever a chance offered, and to create ‘future’ tenants so as to discharge their estates from a burden; it revealed marked ignorance of the affairs of Ireland. The Bill dealt, also, with the land on the side of ownership; it gave additional facilities to tenants to purchase their holdings; the State was empowered to advance three-fourths of the moneys; but the tenants were to find the remaining fourth; the transaction was to be still a purchase, and not in the nature of a gift.[76]

The Bill became law, with very little change; the House of Lords, though fully alive to its evils, did not amend it in any important respect; the Peers had in mind, perhaps too much, what had followed the rejection of the Bill of the year before. Mr. Gladstone and his followers maintained at the time, and the statement has been ever since repeated, that the Land Act of 1881, its popular title, was but a natural development of the original Act of 1870; but this assertion is not only untrue, but absolutely contrary to the truth. The Act of 1870, no doubt, considered as a whole, annexed a large tenant right to the estate of the landlord, and to that extent placed a burden on it; but it preserved for the landlord the ownership of the land; it did not interfere with his rent, his first proprietary right; above all, it was, in the main, in accord with fact, and just. The Act of 1881 was almost the exact opposite; it deprived the landlord of the ownership of his land, and nearly converted him into a mere rent-charger; it created against him a perpetuity at a State-settled rent; it really all but made the tenant the owner of the land; it was, in short, inconsistent with fact, and essentially unjust. The Act of 1881, too, established a principle, never heard of before in civilised countries, that tribunals of the State were to fix the rate of rent; this not only annihilated the most important of landed contracts, entirely to the landlord’s detriment, it inevitably tended to cut down rents wholesale, as Judge Longfield had predicted would be the case. ‘It is probable,’ wrote that great authority, ‘that the value of land, as fixed by any tenant-right measure, would be less than half the rent, which a solvent tenant would be willing to pay;’[77] the prediction has been too well verified. The Act of 1870, in a word, was a remedial law, fairly adjusting the rights of landlord and tenant; the Act of 1881 was a socialistic law, despoiling the landlord of his property wholesale, and handing it over to a dependent who had no claim to it; it was sheer confiscation hardly disguised; and it should be added that the exemption of tenants’ improvements from rent, as affairs stood in Ireland, was a grave wrong to the landlord. The Act of 1881, to speak plainly, transformed the Irish land system iniquitously for the benefit of a single class; and it directly promoted litigation of the very worst kind, on an enormous scale, embittering, and still further dividing, the classes connected with the land. The evils of this legislation, a monument of reckless unwisdom, were at once manifest to well-informed persons; the Duke of Argyll and Lord Lansdowne resigned office rather than take part in a measure of the kind; Lord Ashbourne, the present holder of the Great Seal in Ireland, caustically remarked that Parliament would do much better should it deprive Irish landlords of a fourth part of their rents on the spot. The verdict of enlightened and impartial opinion in Ireland was very much the same.

I shall comment on the administration of this law in another chapter; enough to say here that what was bad was made, by many degrees, worse. The conduct of Parnell, as regards the measure, was characteristic; he assumed an attitude of moderation, and proposed to make ‘a trial of the Act by test cases;’ he wrote to his Fenian friends in the Far West that the Act was a mockery; he allowed the Land League to riot in lawlessness as before. Mr. Gladstone, always incensed when his will was crossed, shut him up in prison under the recent statute, with several prominent leaders of the League; the reply was a manifesto against the payment of any rent, unhappily obeyed in some districts, though every symptom of exceptional distress had passed away. A brief but violent struggle was the result; the peasantry refused to pay a shilling in several counties; and as the principal agents of the League were within four walls, flights of viragoes, like those of the French Revolution, were let loose to preach, far and near, the evangel of ‘no rent.’ This conflict, however, was not lasting; agrarian crime and disorder, indeed, still continued frequent; but the Government was too strong for the ‘Ladies’ Land League;’ by the spring of 1882 its triumph appeared to be certain. But Mr. Gladstone, ‘unstable as water’ in view of what he deemed popular movements, would not steadily persist in vindicating the law; the imprisonment of the chiefs of the conspiracy and their subordinates, in large numbers, seems to have made him feel sore if unworthy misgivings; he surrendered to the enemies of the State, for the second time, and entered with Parnell into the famous ‘Kilmainham Treaty,’ as shameful as the Glamorgan Treaty which cost Charles I. his head. The ‘Suspects,’ as they were called, were set free in scores; the Lord-Lieutenant and the Chief Secretary indignantly left their posts; a new Government for Ireland was formed, charged to carry ‘conciliation,’ as the phrase was, out, that is, to make fresh concessions to Parnell and his creatures. But the auspicious prospect was suddenly darkened by the frightful assassinations of the Phoenix Park; these cannot be justly laid to the charge of the League, indeed were against Parnell’s interest, for it was generally expected he would obtain high office; but two agents of the League were implicated in the crime; and the Press of the League began soon to plead for the murderers. The mind of England was now thoroughly roused; Mr. Gladstone, bowing at once to England’s will, carried through Parliament the severest repressive measure that has ever, perhaps, been applied to Ireland. The battle with the League was soon brought to a close; the conspiracy indeed resisted for a time, and crime, as always, was attendant on it; and the Clan na Gael gave it all the assistance it could, in large subsidies which had never ceased, in the dissemination in Ireland of its incendiary journals, and especially by ‘carrying the war into England,’ and fulfilling its threats to attack her chief towns by fire and dynamite, outrages, however, that really came to nothing. But ‘coercion,’ as has been invariably the case in Ireland, produced its effects; agrarian crimes, which, in 1882, if less than those of the year before, were, nevertheless, three thousand four hundred and thirty-two in number, had fallen to eight hundred and seventy in 1883.[78]

The Land League was paralysed, if not destroyed; its organisation was, in name, suppressed by its framers. It reappeared, however, at once, in a new form; the skill of Parnell in masking a conspiracy was never more fully displayed. He felt that the Land League could not cope with the law; that the crimes of violence and blood, which attended its course, gave the Government opportunities to put it down; that its openly avowed purposes were a danger to it. He set up, therefore, the ‘National League’ in its stead; the professed object of the association was to promote ‘Home Rule,’ while it upheld the rights of the occupiers of the Irish soil, and kept the Irish land, so to speak, in view; it was thus apparently a mere centre of a constitutional movement. Through these means, and under these pretences, the astute and able plotter swept into his net thousands who had held aloof from the Land League; many of the middle classes joined the National League, notably hundreds of the clergy of the Catholic Church in Ireland; the peasantry gave it increased support; its influence spread beyond its predecessor’s limits. The National League, however, was only the Land League under another name;[79] its leaders and officials were the same men; its ‘branches’ were those of the League it replaced; its real objects were exactly the same, the overthrow of British rule in Ireland, and the annihilation of the Irish landed gentry. But the methods it employed to work out its ends were, to a great extent, different; open agitation was kept down; public meetings, likely to be violent, were not held; the perpetration of agrarian crime was not encouraged. The movement, in a word, was comparatively secret and below the surface; but it was essentially the successor of the Land League in its aims; we may say of it, with a slight change, in the words of the poet—

‘Facies non una sororum,
Nec diversa tamen.’

‘Boycotting’ was now made the chief weapon of the reformed conspiracy; ‘National League Courts’ were held regularly in many districts, at which this barbarous interdict was systematically pronounced on persons violating ‘the unwritten law’ of the old League; the persecution against landlords, agents, ‘land-grabbing’ peasants who were ‘disloyal and traitors,’ and traders suspected of dealing with ‘rotten sheep,’ was carried on with a pertinacity and ingenuity hardly known before; the number of derelict farms augmented; and the Government found it far from easy to deal with these crimes. At the same time, ‘the Nationalist Press,’ as it had been named, fully revealed the purpose of the conspirators; trusting to impunity, under the law of libel, which depended upon the will of juries, it was even more treasonable and seditious than before; and it gave infamous license to defamation of personages in high places, worthy of the abominations of the PÈre Duchesne.[80] Ireland, however, remained in comparative peace while the recent measure of repression continued in force; but this was injudiciously allowed to expire in 1885—a strange act on the part of a Conservative Ministry; and in a short time agrarian disorder broke out afresh. Crimes of this class had fallen, in 1884, to seven hundred and sixty-two in number; they were one thousand and fifty-six in 1886; and ‘boycotting’ had increased fourfold.[81]The National League remained quiescent, while Mr. Gladstone was making another surrender, and endeavouring to carry Home Rule through Parliament. Upon the rejection of the measure of 1886, its activity was renewed; and it found considerable support from the American Fenians, who, from first to last, had been its chief paymasters. I have referred to the Convention at Chicago graced by Parnell’s envoys, and to the wild boast that the English ‘government of Ireland was to be made impossible;’ the treasonable aspect of the conspiracy became at once manifest. The League was assisted by another season of distress, from 1886 to 1888; the number of its adherents greatly increased; it began, like its predecessor, to defy the authority of the State. I have already dealt with this movement on its political side; I shall not repeat what I have already written: how the League endeavoured to stir up disorder in Ireland; how it declared open war against the Castle; how it tried to terrorise the ministers of the law; how it made ‘boycotting’ more effective than it had ever been; how, if responsible for many grave deeds of blood, it mainly relied on this malign influence, which tortured hundreds of victims in many districts, and was fitly compared to ‘the pestilence that walks in darkness;’ how Mr. Gladstone and the Opposition, to the disgrace of both, gave the conspiracy their support and excused its crimes; and how it was ere long put down by Mr. Balfour strongly seconded by Rome. But I must say a word on the agrarian side of the movement; for this illustrated the increased ingenuity of the League. Some of its leaders issued a mandate against the payment of rent, except upon reductions to an enormous extent; should the landlords refuse, the tenants, on every estate, were to lodge their rents into what was called the ‘War chest,’ a common fund to be held in trust; the object of this being to prevent the secret payment of rent, which had repeatedly, we have seen, taken place, and to put a stop to ‘defection from the cause.’ The ‘Plan of Campaign’ as was its name, was thus ushered on; it was a criminal plot of the very basest kind; but though it proved successful in some instances, and it caused much agrarian disorder and crime, it was, on the whole, a comparative failure. The peasantry, close-fisted and shrewd, distrusted the so-called ‘trustees of the War chest;’ they generally declined to put their money in it; the ‘Plan’ was only carried out on few estates, though it compelled many landlords to make reductions of rent; it is remarkable that Parnell did not approve of the swindle. Long, however, before the defeat of the League, there had been a thousand instances of agrarian crime: five thousand miserable beings had been ‘boycotted,’ in many cases with frightful results; a thousand had been placed under the protection of the police. As had happened during the rÉgime of the Land League, these victims were nearly all of the humble classes.

In 1887 another change was made in the Irish land system, essentially a development of the Land Act of 1881. That measure, I have said, applied to tenants at will only, that is, liable to be dispossessed by a notice to quit; it did not apply to tenants under leasehold tenures. A sharp distinction, therefore, was drawn between the two classes; a farmer, with land on one side of a ditch, could secure the advantages of the ‘Three F’s;’ his neighbour, on the other side, could not; the distinction was so palpably harsh, that many landlords in Ireland saw its injustice, and enabled leasehold tenants to obtain the benefits of the law. An Act, prepared by Lord Salisbury’s Government, brought ordinary Irish leaseholders within the Land Act of 1881; these were given a right to have ‘fair rents’ fixed, and ‘fixity of tenure’ and ‘free sale’ under certain conditions. The Act of 1887, also, empowered the Courts to set aside perpetual leases unfairly obtained; and it relaxed the restrictions of the Act of 1881 with respect to subletting and subdivision, and the exclusion of ‘town parks.’ It improved, moreover, the law of ejectment, facilitating the vindication of the rights of the landlord; and—a strange provision—it enabled a middleman, in certain events, to creep out of his contract, and to free himself from the rent due to his superior landlord. In consequence of the fall of prices that had lately occurred, and the depression of agriculture that had been the result, the Act, too, reduced, for a short period of time, ‘fair rents’ that had been already fixed; and it contained other enactments wholly in the interest of the occupier of the Irish soil. Regarded as a whole, something was to be said for the measure, on the principles of the legislation of 1881; but the liberation of the middleman from the payment of a debt has been attended with grave wrong, and was an ominous precedent leading to others of the kind. The new law was, of course, another inroad on the rights of the Irish landlord, another innovation made against his interests; it has certainly strengthened his claim to compensation for the loss of his property, acknowledged by Mr. Gladstone to be unquestionable, should it be reasonably made out. For the rest, the National League made a boast that the Act had been wrung by its efforts from a foreign Parliament; the Act certainly, like that of 1881, was a concession, derogating from the rights of a powerless class, in the hope of weakening a conspiracy against the State, by detaching from it large classes supported by it, and handing over to these what had belonged to the Irish landed gentry.[82]

The Land Act of 1887, it has been alleged, was the principal cause that disorder in Ireland was suppressed, and that comparative peace was restored. The measure may have had effects in this direction; but these assuredly were not great; the number of leaseholders was not large; the reductions made in ‘fair rents’ were temporary and small. In truth, as agrarian war, stirred up by the Land League, did not diminish when the Act of 1881 was passed, but was brought to an end by what is called coercion, the agrarian war, stirred up by the National League, was quelled, not by the Act of 1887, but by resolute government, assisted by a repressive measure infinitely less stringent than that of 1882, and, in some degree, I have said, by Rome. It is worse than unwise to ignore plain facts; grave outbreaks of disorder and crime in Ireland can only be put down by severe means, and invariably have been put down by these; that ‘force is no remedy’ is mere false sentiment. The violence, nay, the power, of the National League decreased rapidly and greatly after about 1889; the conspiracy seemed well-nigh to have dwindled away. This was partly because Parnell, negotiating with Mr. Gladstone, in the hope of obtaining Home Rule, discouraged agitation of every kind in Ireland, and in order to hoodwink the English people, and to bring about the ‘Union of Hearts,’ represented, with his followers, that Ireland was at perfect peace, and only awaited ‘self-government’ to be completely happy. But infinitely the most potent reason was that the fall of Parnell almost broke up the League; his creatures split into angry factions, exasperated against each other by furious discord; as the result the organisation of the League was shattered; the peasantry and the Catholic priesthood fell away from it. At the same time the Fenians in the United States, much its best supporters, withdrew the subsidies they had hitherto lavished; the League became penniless and almost powerless. By 1895 the conspiracy showed scarcely a sign of life; agrarian crime had sunk to a very low ebb; there was no sign of a movement against the payment of rent; order prevailed, it may be said, throughout the community. The conspiracy, nevertheless, was not dead; its leaders, if quiescent, had not disappeared; well-informed observers knew that the end had not come. I have described in another chapter, by what means, and through what conditions, it revived gradually under Lord Salisbury’s third Government, and acquired strength that may be on the increase; it is not yet formidable, in any real sense, and its leaders are not to be named with Parnell; it is not receiving funds as yet from America; but the United Irish League is its true successor; and this commands eighty votes in the House of Commons. Time only can show if a period of agrarian strife and crime may not be about to open again for Ireland; it is foolish optimism to assert that this is impossible, or to contend that the agrarian legislation of the last twenty years, as regards the Irish land, will necessarily, or even probably, produce this fortunate result.

In 1891 another change was effected in Irish landed relations, as usual in the interest of the tenant, and against his landlord. Middleman tenures had well-nigh been extinguished; but some hundreds, probably, were still to be found; and as a middleman, through the legislation of 1887, was enabled to repudiate his contract, in certain cases, and to escape the payment of rent to his superior landlord, he was now to obtain an advantage in other instances. The large majority of this class of intermediate owners, originally created in the eighteenth century, held, at least, in present times, by perpetual leases, which had long ago, as a rule, been converted into estates in fee farm, that is, estates in fee, subject to a perpetual rent; Parliament passed an Act in 1891, enlarged and amended five years afterwards, declaring that, in cases in which tenants of this kind were ‘in bon fide occupation’ of lands, under rents which, in the judgment of the Land Commission, should be ‘a full agricultural rent,’ they might either agree with their landlords to redeem the rent at a price to be determined by that tribunal, or, should the landlords refuse their consent, might have ‘fair rents’ fixed as in the instance of common farming tenants.[83] The application of this law could not extend far, for tenants of this description were very few; but it asserted a strange, and, I think, a most vicious principle. The Act practically forced a superior landlord, often a poor man, either to accept a price assessed by a Court over which he had no control, in lieu of a rent, in all probability reasonably well secured, or, as an alternative, to submit to have a ‘fair rent’ fixed on the land, the rent to be discharged from improvements made by the tenant. If, therefore, a tenant of this kind had built, say, a valuable house, on his holding, which would thus largely add to the security for the rent, this—at least, so it is generally believed—was not to be taken into account in fixing ‘the fair rent;’ and this principle, it may confidently be predicted, will be extended further. Should a tenant, at a ‘fair rent,’ in this predicament, be evicted for the failure to pay the rent, a law, in all human probability, will be made, to obtain for him compensation, under the Act of 1870, from the benefits of which he would be, as affairs stand, excluded. The result might be that if, as would often happen, the improvements he had made were of great value—his interest, in the land, being a perpetual interest—the sum the landlord would be adjudged to pay, might swallow up the whole value of the rent, and practically confiscate his whole property.[84]

In 1896 another inroad was made on the rights of Irish landlords, and another dole given to the tenant class in Ireland; the descent to Avernus had proved easy; a Conservative Government had followed it since 1887. This fresh legislation was mainly in the interest of the Presbyterian farmers of Ulster, who had supported the Union almost to a man, and possessed no little political weight; but who, always separated more or less from their landlords, had shown dissatisfaction with the fixing of ‘fair rents,’ and had begun to cry out for what is called ‘the compulsory purchase’ of the estates of their landlords, a policy on which I shall comment afterwards. The Bill contained just and well-devised provisions; it improved the procedure for fixing ‘fair rents,’ if not nearly as thoroughly as it ought to have done; it protected the leases creating ‘fixity,’ under the new tenure—Mr. Gladstone, flying in the face of the ablest lawyers, had passionately declared that these were sacrosanct—in instances in which these might have been annulled; it proposed, what I had always considered right, that old arrears of rent ought not to be allowed to hang over the heads of tenants, and that rent could not be recovered on eviction, if due for upward of two years.[85] But the Bill abounded in principles dangerous and false; it was, taken as a whole, a mischievous measure; it was another mine sprung upon the Irish landed gentry. Lands hitherto excluded from the benefits of the ‘Three F’s,’ under the Acts of 1881 and 1887—that is, demesnes, town parks, residential, and pastoral holdings—were largely brought within the scope of the Bill, that is, they were made subject to ‘fair rents,’ and, if held by tenants, were practically taken away from the landlords; the provisions of the Bill, as to demesnes, were especially harsh; many a mansion and demesne, which might happen to be let, would really become the property of the tenant, the owner being put off with a rent-charge. The worst proposals of this measure, however, were those relating to improvements made by tenants, exempted from rent, we have seen, by the Act of 1881. The Courts of Justice in Ireland had rightly declared with one voice, that improvements of this kind were not to be discharged from rent, unless they were the improvements treated by the Act of 1870, that is, rents might be charged on tenants’ improvements, if these did not fall within the definition laid down by that law, or if they were outside the limitations it had imposed, in order to shut out obsolete and unjust claims, which might harass and do grievous wrong to landlords. All this was completely changed by the new measure; the definition of improvements was wholly altered, in order to secure their being exempted from rent; the restrictions in point of time, and many other matters, as regards claims for improvements, were largely swept away, and the power of ‘contracting out’ of such claims was still further abridged. The whole law, in a word, as to tenants’ improvements, as these were to create exemption from rent, was placed on altogether a new basis; this was detrimental in every respect to the landlord, and gave advantages to the tenant, in my judgment, utterly unjust.[86]

The Bill contained other provisions, all in the same direction, that is, for the advantage of the Irish tenant, and to his landlord’s loss, especially one relaxing the law as to the subdivision and subletting of farms, an inveterate and very pernicious practice. It introduced, also, a new principle, on which I shall say some words afterwards, with respect to another experiment on the Irish land, that is, what is called Land Purchase, under conditions, not thought of before, until they were laid down by a Conservative Government. The measure was hustled through the House of Commons with such indecorous haste, that Sir Edward Carson, now a law-officer of the Crown, walked out of that Assembly to express his disgust; it narrowly escaped defeat in the House of Lords, loyal as the Peers to Lord Salisbury are; indeed, though hardly debated, its vices were soon made manifest. It is unnecessary to point out what the general character of the Act is; it enlarged very considerably the sphere of the ‘Three F’s,’ greatly increasing the wrong done to the Irish landlord, by doing away with the restrictions, placed by Mr. Gladstone, in 1870, on illegitimate claims in respect of improvements; its direct tendency was to reduce rents wholesale, and to promote more litigation between landlord and tenant; and if it encouraged tenants to make improvements on their farms, its plain effect, I will not say its purpose, was to ‘improve the Irish landlords out of their estates,’ the contemptuous phrase of a great master of Equity. Its mischief, however, went a great deal further; tenants making improvements are only exempted from rent, in respect of these, by this Act; they are not within the protection of the Act of 1870, if improvements of any kind are excluded by it; if a tenant, therefore, makes an improvement on his farm, which is not ‘suitable’ to it in a real sense, say, builds a mansion upon a petty holding, he will not be entitled to compensation, should he quit it, even though dispossessed for non-payment of his rent. But tenants, in these circumstances, like those I have referred to before, would assuredly proclaim that they had here a great and real grievance; and they would be relieved from it, doubtless, by another law, giving them compensation, perhaps, to their landlord’s ruin. A dangerous principle is thus hidden within the Act; this will probably be asserted against the owners of ground rents, not only in Ireland, but in England and Scotland; and the law, taken as a whole, has strengthened the claim of the Irish landed gentry to be indemnified, as was solemnly promised, for what they have suffered from the legislation begun in 1881.

While the Irish land system was thus being dealt with, on the side of occupation, during many years, experiments were made on it, likewise on the side of ownership. Resenting the legislation that had produced the ‘Three F’s,’ Conservative politicians took it into their heads that Mr. Gladstone had ‘created’ ‘dual ownership,’ as they gave it the name, in Ireland; they insisted that this was simply an intolerable thing. Unfortunately Mr. Gladstone had no more ‘created dual ownership’ than he had created the mountains and lakes of Ireland; he had only developed the joint ownership, which the Irish tenant possessed in his holding, in thousands of instances, if he had developed it under the very worst conditions. This theory, however, at which Burke would have laughed with contempt, and which revealed the incapacity to understand Irish land tenure, ingrained, it would appear, in the English mind, was eagerly taken up and found much support; it was resolved to extend the process of converting tenants in Ireland into owners of their farms, by a method hitherto untried, and unknown in any part of Europe. Under the Church Disestablishment Act, and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, the State had advanced money to the occupier of the Irish soil, in order to enable him to acquire his farm; but it had made it incumbent on him to contribute part of the price; the transaction, therefore, was, in a real sense, a purchase. This, the only security for honesty and thrift, was taken away in 1885; Parliament passed an Act enabling the Irish tenant to become owner of his holding without paying down a shilling; the State was to advance the whole price; and the State was to be repaid by a terminable annuity, charged on the land, and extinguished at the end of less than half a century. This terminable annuity was to be much less than a true rent, or even than a ‘fair rent’ adjusted by the State; the transaction, therefore, was not a purchase, but a gift, akin to a bribe, another largess bestowed on the tenant class in Ireland, and another injury, as I shall prove, inflicted on the Irish landed gentry. This ‘Land Purchase,’ as it was falsely called, was to be voluntary on the part of landlord and tenant; it was to be conducted on the footing of free contract, as had been the case under the preceding statutes; the State was to obtain a guarantee from the landlord; and Parliament voted £5,000,000 to carry out this policy.

Exactly as had happened in the case of the Encumbered Estates Act, this scheme of ‘Land Purchase’ was pronounced successful; some scores of landlords sold land, some hundreds of tenants bought it; the real nature of the proceeding and its inevitable results were ignored; it was even boasted that ‘dual ownership’ would be got rid of, nay, that the Irish Land Question was being finally ‘settled.’ But when the first sum of £5,000,000 had been expended, and Parliament was asked to vote a second sum, it began to hesitate as to this dealing with the Irish land; the British taxpayer demurred and growled; with a true instinct he disliked the security; it was found very difficult to procure the funds required, large as the majority was of Lord Salisbury’s Government. His Ministry, however, adhered to the new policy; and Parliament enacted a measure in 1891, which I have always thought unconstitutional in the highest degree, not to speak of the evils it was certain to produce. By this Act a sum of about £30,000,000 was made forthcoming to facilitate ‘Land Purchase,’ to abolish ‘dual ownership,’ and to change Irish tenants into owners of land; this sum was to be secured by the methods before referred to, that is, by terminable annuities less than any equitable rent, and by guarantees on the part of selling landlords; but, furthermore, a whole series of funds, devoted to Ireland, for Irish purposes, and absolutely essential to her most important needs, were appropriated to make good any default on the part of ‘purchasing’ tenants, in the payment of annuities charged on their farms; and even the Irish counties were rendered liable in the last resort. Should, therefore, tenants in Ireland, who had acquired the ownership of their farms, refuse to pay those annuities on any pretence, say, through an appeal made by a Land League conspiracy—the manifesto against all rent cannot be forgotten—this extraordinary spectacle would then be seen: the State would have a right to seize upon the grants made for National schools and lunatic asylums throughout Ireland; these institutions would be shut up; children and madmen would be let loose through the country; and the owner of an Irish estate would have to pay for the dishonesty perhaps of his former tenants. The late Lord Randolph Churchill severely condemned this scheme; I agree with him it was utterly unjust, and but too characteristic of the contempt of the rights of Ireland, unhappily often displayed by British statesmen.

Only a sum, it will be observed, of about £40,000,000, that is, two of £5,000,000, and some £30,000,000 more, has thus been made available for ‘Land Purchase;’ this obviously could not transfer even a fourth part of the Irish land, valued, we have seen, by Mr. Gladstone at £300,000,000—in a remarkable speech in reply to Lord George Hamilton—and almost certainly worth from £150,000,000 to £200,000,000. The process of doing away with ‘dual ownership’ and making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, having been pronounced by its authors slow, the Act of 1896, referred to before, enabled the landlord’s guarantee to be dispensed with, and provided that, in the case of hopelessly embarrassed landlords, whose estates were being offered for sale in the Courts, the tenants should virtually have a right of pre-emption, thus asserting a principle, on which I shall dwell afterwards, and known as the ‘Compulsory Purchase’ of the Irish land. I shall point out, in another chapter, the present and the inevitable future results of this policy of so-styled ‘Land Purchase;’ suffice it to say here, that, in my judgment, it betrays utter ignorance of the Irish land system, and of the customs and inclinations of the Irish peasant; that it proceeds on an essentially immoral principle, the bribery of a class to promote its welfare; that, from the very nature of the case, it cannot abolish ‘dual ownership;’ that, human creatures being what they are, it cannot, as is being already proved, establish a thriving body of occupying owners on the Irish soil; that it must create sharp and unjust distinctions in Irish land tenure, iniquitous to the landlord and to every tenant, who may be excluded from its benefits; that it must directly tend, as it is even now tending, to arouse a cry for a wholesale confiscation of Irish estates, the most shameful and wrongful Ireland has yet witnessed; and that so far from settling the Irish Land Question, it must necessarily unsettle it from top to bottom. As respects the legislation I have briefly described, on the side of the occupation of the Irish land—by many degrees the most important—I shall also comment upon its results in a subsequent chapter, after examining its administration by the tribunal it has set up. But a word may be said, in this place, on its essential character: from 1881 to the present time, it is absolutely without a precedent in civilised lands; it has trampled on economic science and the truths it teaches, as, indeed, its chief author made his boast; it has created a mode of land tenure in Ireland not in accord with fact, which has virtually deprived the Irish landlord of real ownership in his estate, has turned him into a kind of annuitant, and has virtually changed the Irish tenant into a kind of owner, but under conditions absolutely bad; its inevitable tendency was to cut down rents wholesale, without regard to the simplest justice; it established a system of mischievous litigation between landlord and tenant, demoralising and increasing the division of classes; it exhibited, on an enormous scale, characteristic contempt of Irish rights of property; and finally, if Parliamentary pledges are to be fulfilled, and gross wrong is not to be consecrated by law, it has given the Irish landlord a great and legitimate claim to compensation from the State. As we survey this unwise and destructive medley of law, we are forcibly reminded of the words of Burke:—‘I am unalterably persuaded that the attempt to oppress, degrade, impoverish, confiscate, and extinguish the original gentlemen, and landed property of a whole nation, cannot be justified under any form it may assume.’[87]