THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND (continued)—PROPOSED REFORM OF THE IRISH LAND SYSTEM
Retrospect of the present Irish land system—Position of the Irish landlords—Position of the Irish tenant class—This not as advantageous as might be supposed—The effects of the land code on Irish agriculture injurious—The effects on the general Irish community—Confiscation, violation of contracts, shock given to credit, increased alienation of classes, and demoralisation—The land system considered on the side of ownership—‘Voluntary purchase’—Mischief of this policy—It sets up a false standard against rent, and creates unjust distinctions between different classes of tenants—The results it has produced already—An instance of the system—The demand for the compulsory purchase of the Irish land caused by ‘voluntary purchase’—Compulsory purchase has some hold on opinion, but is an impossible, and would be a disgraceful and ruinous policy—It would ruin Irish landlords as a class—Instances—It would ultimately bring Ireland into the state in which she was before the Great Famine—Proposed plan for the reform of Irish land tenure—Questions as to the means of compensating Irish landlords, a deeply wronged order of men.
Having traced the attempts that have been made to reform Irish land tenure, in the last thirty years, and noticed the administration of the new Irish land code, I must, for the sake of clearness, take a short retrospect, and consider the Irish land system as it exists at this day; I shall review it on the side of occupation first, that is, in the relations of landlord and tenant. The agricultural rental of Ireland, we have seen, has been, or is being, reduced about 40 per cent. since 1881, through the operation of laws carried out by tribunals of the State; this proceeding, unexampled in civilised lands, has been the means, I have proved, of doing gross wrong to the Irish landed gentry. But this, if a signal, is only one of the many acts of injustice perpetrated on a cruelly injured body of men. The fee simple has been wrested from the Irish landlord, where he has been subjected to the legislation of late years; he has been deprived of the ownership which had been his birthright. An estate, nominally for fifteen years, but really capable of being renewed for ever, has been created against him by an unjust law; and this has been vested in his former tenants, subject to the mode of land tenure known as the ‘Three F’s,’ the chief of these being ‘fair,’ that is, State-settled rents, in the adjustment of which he has no voice. He may, no doubt, retain fragments of his old proprietary rights; parts of his estate may be excluded from the provisions of the law; he may be the lord of ‘future tenants;’ he is left ‘royalties,’ such as minerals, mines, and timber; he possesses most of his former legal remedies; and should the holders of the lands, which had been his own, who have obtained the benefits of the ‘Three F’s,’ infringe the statutory conditions imposed on them, they may be dispossessed, and he may enter upon their farms again. But, notwithstanding exceptions and possibilities like these, the Irish landlord has, for practical purposes, been well-nigh assimilated to a rent-charger, and his tenants have been nearly converted into owners of the soil, an utter revolution in the whole land system, in truth, turning it upside down. The status, indeed, of the Irish landed gentry now bears a strong resemblance to that of the chief landlords of the eighteenth century, who, separating themselves altogether from their lands, let them in perpetuity at low rents, and, as a necessary consequence, produced the middleman, the pest, as he has rightly been called, of Irish land tenure.The enormous and, as I believe, the unjust benefits secured by recent legislation to the Irish tenant, are not, however, so complete as they appear to be, and are not without disadvantages attendant on them. Tenants of holdings, to which the law does not apply, such as tenants of demesnes and large pastoral lands, if rightly excluded, nevertheless complain; and ‘future tenants,’ and petty occupants, who cannot afford to seek ‘fair rents’ from the Courts, have, from their point of view, solid grounds of complaint. The scope of the new land code is, therefore, to some extent, restricted; and if the law has actually caused a general reduction of rents, it has not secured the ‘Three F’s’ for a considerable body of farmers, not improbably a fourth or fifth part of the class as a whole. And even the occupiers of the Irish soil, who have obtained the advantages of the new mode of tenure, have not obtained these without a certain kind of drawback. Completely separated as they now are from their former landlords, they cannot expect indulgences from a class which considers itself to have been shamefully wronged; the allowances, which, whatever may be said, had been made to them, in thousands of cases, have, as a rule, been altogether withdrawn; they get no help in making improvements; they are usually obliged regularly to pay their ‘fair rents;’ above all, landlords, of a strict or harsh nature, are sometimes on the look-out to see if they do not violate the statutory conditions to which they are subject, in order to convert them into ‘future tenants,’ outside of the protection of the law, and even to reacquire their lands. These circumstances are not without adverse effects; though unquestionably they are far more than countervailed by the change which has been wrought in Irish land tenure, and has given the Irish tenant the benefits already described. Yet, even from this point of view, the law does not operate as unreservedly in his favour as might be supposed. He has his ‘fair rent,’ probably much too low; his ‘fixity of tenure,’ a perpetuity in all but name; his right to ‘free sale,’ sometimes worth thousands of pounds. But, as a rule, he can only gain these advantages at the cost of a lawsuit recurring at short intervals of time, with the vexation and mischief this brings with it, a lawsuit, too, of which the results may be more or less doubtful. If, too, he is a saving and thrifty man he will hardly be able to acquire lands for himself, as, in consequence of the right of ‘free sale,’ the tenant right of these will have become immensely high; he will be confined, in most instances, to the farm he holds. On the other hand, if he be dishonest or imprudent, he will be tempted to run out and even to injure his land, in order to effect a reduction of rent, or to sublet or mortgage it should an opportunity be found.
The new Irish land code has thus had this special feature: it has done infinite harm to the despoiled landlord, but the tenant has not gained the expected benefits. Let us now see what effect it has had on the great industry on which the Irish landed classes depend, the main source of the wealth of their country. Unquestionably, as I have remarked, over and over again, the tenant in Ireland makes, for the most part, the plant of his farm a necessary incident of the small-farm system; but the Irish landed gentry, in the last half century, have done a great deal in the work of improvement. Whatever interested calumny may falsely assert, they have expended millions, as unerring statistics show, in planting, enclosure, and, especially, in arterial drainage, this last beyond the reach of the common peasant; they have, in thousands of instances, made the breeds of stock better; they have made large allowances as regards farm buildings. All this is now a thing of the past; the sometime landowner, in a real sense, has been divorced from his former estate; law has prohibited him from doing anything for it; his only interest is to collect the rent-charge called, in mockery, ‘fair rent.’ On the other hand, tenants in Ireland have, in a great many cases—I have briefly glanced at the conclusive evidence—positively wasted or neglected their holdings, for the express purpose of working rent down; this shameful expedient has been hardly checked; the deterioration of a large area of land has been thus accomplished. And, at the same time, as ‘fair rent’ is much lower than the rent of the market, a considerable minority of this class have sublet or mortgaged their lands, in order to get advances of which they stand in need; this, no doubt, is a violation of the law; but it is a violation difficult to prove, and they run the risk. In this way, as I have shown, in a preceding chapter, the husbandry of Ireland has declined of late years; woodland has been cut down recklessly to a great extent; main drainage has been largely neglected, a ruinous thing in a wet climate; in thousands of cases the farming of tenants at ‘fair rents’ is wretched. The face of the country reveals these facts: Ireland is worse cultivated than it was twenty years ago; indeed, the best farming, in the island, by many degrees, is that conducted by a small number of men of substance, who still hold on the footing of free contract, having settled with their landlords, and taken out leases, a significant commentary on Irish legislation since 1881.
This subject, however, must be considered from a broader point of view, and with reference to the community of Ireland, as a whole. A great confiscation, I have said, has been wrought in the Irish land; the immense fall in the value of the landlord’s estate, and the immense rise in the value of the tenant right, prove that property belonging to one class has been transferred, wholesale, by law, to another, a result never contemplated by responsible statesmen. And confiscation has produced its inevitable effects; free dealing in land has been prevented; except to his former tenants an Irish country gentleman cannot sell what remains to him of his former estate, and that through the system of ‘land purchase;’ capital shuns the Irish soil as if it were a quicksand; trustees and mortgagees will not invest in it; in a word, as respects the class which had been its owners, the Irish land has been bound in a kind of pernicious mortmain. It is unnecessary to dwell on the resulting evils; one of the sources of the wealth of Ireland has been made barren; a paralysis has fallen on a member of Irish industry; what is, perhaps, even worse, a sense of insecurity, of instability, of fear of unknown change, so widely prevails in Irish landed relations, that they have become completely unsettled, and are a mere chaos. And as vicious legislation has cut the old landlord off from his estate, has assimilated him to the chief lord of the eighteenth century, and is evolving, by degrees, the middleman, so the effects of confiscation, by keeping land out of commerce, have unnaturally limited and restricted its nominal ownership; in fact, many of the features of the detestable penal laws of Ireland are reappearing in the Irish land system, and are being reproduced by the modern Irish land code. Another mischievous effect of this code, in another direction, requires attention. The value of tenant right, we have seen, has enormously increased; the sums paid by incoming to outgoing tenants, on the transfer of farms, have, accordingly, become enormous; these purchasers, therefore, are being subjected to heavy outlays, practically in the nature of rack-rents, which hamper their industry, starve their capital, and most injuriously affect good husbandry. One class of the community is thus wronged for the behoof of another; and agriculture must, more or less, suffer.
Not the least, however, of the manifold evils caused by this legislation have to be yet noticed. The ancient divisions of race and faith in the Irish land system still continue; what was most harsh and oppressive in them has been effaced; but they have become wider and more marked in the last twenty years; and this is largely to be ascribed to the present land code. A mode of land tenure, which produces harassing litigation at short intervals of time, and makes landed relations cockpits for legal conflicts, necessarily sets the landed classes against each other; it has aggravated the old differences deep-rooted in the Irish soil. The Protestant gentleman and the Catholic peasant are more estranged from each other, in the southern provinces, than they have been, I believe, within living memory; the same remark, too, applies to Presbyterian Ulster, where the gentry belong, for the most part, to the late Established Church, and the tenant classes are of the faith of John Knox; the lines of distinction between these orders of men have deepened; and this alienation, concurring with another cause, has contributed to the cry for the confiscation of the Irish land, which is now being very generally raised, and to which I shall refer afterwards. Another mischief of this legislation, at which I have already glanced, is the widespread demoralisation it has caused, from the nature of the case. The litigation in the Courts where ‘fair rents’ are being fixed, is often a miserable spectacle of hard and mendacious swearing productive of the worst effects on the human character. Peasants, as a rule, do not scruple to pledge their oaths that their rents ought to be at most a fourth of the rents they had paid for perhaps half a century; the witnesses they call as valuers usually repeat these statements. The claims, too, for exemption from rent, on account of improvements, are often ridiculous, often shameful; I have seen sums paid for manures twenty years old, gravely put forward as creating a claim for exemption; and the subject of the deterioration of farms is another fruitful source of falsehood. It is hardly necessary to comment on the results, as regards self-respect and the moral sense of men, which must follow proceedings of this kind, carried on, over whole counties, in thousands of cases; they are, inevitably, in a very high degree, unfortunate; but, when law encourages dishonesty, they were to be only expected.Such have been the fruits of the new Irish land code, on the side of the occupation of the Irish land. Legislation, essentially faulty and unwise, in conflict with economic science and the facts of the case, has taken from the Irish landlords their chief proprietary rights, and forcibly transferred these to their tenants; it has not conferred the benefits it intended on an unfairly favoured class; it has wrought a revolution in the Irish land system, in contravention to plain justice, and given it an unnatural and evil aspect; it has caused iniquitous confiscation on a vast scale and demoralisation profound and widespread, with the far-reaching inherent mischiefs; and bad administration has made bad laws worse. Political economy, spite of Mr. Gladstone, has not fled from this world at his bidding; she looks on, so to speak, at the ruins in Ireland produced by the violation of her most certain principles; I will add, she affirms the claim to compensation of the Irish landlord, if the simplest equity is not to be set at nought. As to the general situation evolved by the present Irish land code, I may refer to these pregnant words of Mr. Lecky: ‘It cannot be denied that this legislation has redressed some hard cases and benefited a large number of tenants; and as few men look beyond immediate consequences, or rightly estimate those which are indirect and remote, this fact is accepted by many as its justification. For my own part, I believe that it will one day be found that the evils resulting from this policy have greatly outweighed its benefits, and that they will fall far more heavily on another class than on the small class which was directly injured. In a poor country, where increased capital, improved credit, and secure industry are the greatest needs, it has shaken to the very basis the idea of the sanctity and obligation of contract; made it almost impossible to borrow any considerable sum on Irish land; effectually stopped the influx of English gold; paralysed or prevented nearly all industrial undertakings stretching into a distant future. It has reacted powerfully upon trade, and thus contributed to impoverish the Irish towns, while it has withdrawn the whole rental of Ireland from the improvement of the soil, as the landlord can have no further inducement or obligation to spend money on his estate. In combination, also, with the Home Rule movement, it has driven much capital out of the land.’[143]
I pass on to the legislation of late years, with respect to the Irish land, on the side of ownership. I have briefly described what that legislation is: a Conservative Ministry, impressed with the wrong idea that Mr. Gladstone had ‘created dual ownership,’ by the ill-conceived measure of 1881, resolved to abolish this evil thing if they could, though it is the natural mould of Irish land tenure; and Parliament has allotted £40,000,000 to attain this object, through the operation of what is falsely called ‘land purchase.’ The mode of proceeding has been explained: an Irish landlord, who desires to sell his estate to his tenants, can obtain an advance for this purpose from the State, through the agency of the Land Commission; the tenants are then made owners of their farms, without contributing any moneys of their own, and hold at terminable annuities much lower than even ‘fair rents.’ The transaction, therefore, we have seen, is, in no sense, a purchase; it is a gift, in the nature of a bribe; it is completely different from the policy of John Bright and the sales of land made to tenants before 1885, in which these men paid part of the price at least, the only real security for thrift and honesty. Of the £40,000,000, nearly half, I have said, has been spent; and out of the 486,000 agricultural Irish tenants, some 50,000 have acquired their holdings, in fee, under these conditions. The law thus applies to a mere fraction of the class; it is idle to assert that this can do much to extinguish ‘dual ownership’ in all Ireland; the sum required would be many times more than that which alone has been made available; and the process, at the present rate of ‘purchases,’ would not be accomplished within a century. We may, therefore, pass away from this part of the subject; but let us see how ‘land purchase,’ effected in this way, bears on the position of the Irish landed gentry. The immense majority of this order of men still cling to their native country and their homes; they hate the idea of parting with the rights they retain in the land, trampled down and injured as they have been; this is especially the case with the best and most solvent landlords. But as the terminable annuities payable on ‘land purchase’ are not nearly so high as even very low rents, not to speak of the other conditions of this mode of tenure, it follows that tenants who have thus been made owners are infinitely better off than tenants still subject to rent; one class has great advantages, of which the other is deprived; as a necessary consequence an artificial standard is set up against rent, which does wrong to the landlord, from the nature of the case; gives every tenant on his estate a grievance; and not improbably may expose him to a determined refusal to pay any rent whatever.
‘Land purchase,’ therefore—the name is a mere untruth—has been a failure as regards ‘dual ownership;’ and it is establishing against the Irish landlord a false measure of rent, analogous to a base coinage, a strange achievement of a Conservative Government. Let us next consider what has been the working of this economic nostrum, with respect to the class, for the benefit of which it was first prescribed, and which has reaped the advantages it gives. The tenants, who have been made owners of their farms, have, as a rule, discharged their obligations to the State very well, though I could point to not a few exceptions; and there have been strikes against the payment of the terminable annuities in some instances. This may be sufficient for official bureaucrats; it is not sufficient for those who know Ireland, and can impartially watch the course of events. It was fondly expected that ‘land purchase,’ that is, bribing tenants in Ireland to become owners of their farms, would create a powerful body of freeholders loyal to the State; but this has already been seen to be a mere delusion. As Parnell predicted would be the case, these ‘purchasers’ are ‘patriotic’ in the highest degree; they fill the ranks of the United Irish League, that is, of a conspiracy against our rule in Ireland, and are numbered among its most efficient agents; human nature being what it actually is, this is precisely what was to be expected. It was confidently foretold, again, that these ‘purchasers’ would form a thriving class of model farmers; and that their lands would be patterns of admirable and improved peasant husbandry, but this forecast is being, in a great degree, falsified. These men, ‘rocked and dandled into their possessions,’ in the words of Burke, without a single guarantee for common prudence, and especially without an effort of their own, have, in hundreds of instances, turned out sorry failures; and it has been the almost universal practice of the whole class to cut down every tree that grows on their lands, an act of ruinous waste in a rain-drenched climate. Besides, as freehold ownership is not an Irish idea—indeed, is opposed to Irish ideas—these ‘purchasers’ have, in many cases, following the example of tenants ‘at fair rents,’ subdivided, sublet, or mortgaged their holdings; instead of remaining owners in a true sense, they are becoming middlemen lording it over rack-rented serfs. The agriculture, too, of hundreds of these farms is slovenly in the extreme, for bribery does not promote industry; what is ‘easy got, easy goes’ is a true proverb; and, in addition, a number of these men were really insolvent when they were made ‘purchasers.’ That Ireland will blossom like a rose, under these conditions, is seen even now to be a chimera; and there is much reason to believe that many of these ‘purchasers’ have become the prey of the race of local usurers, a consummation that might have been predicted. ‘I shall sell my estate,’ a witty Irishman once remarked, ‘but I will keep two loan offices and four public-houses; and in two generations my “purchasing” tenants will be too happy to resell their lands to my grandsons.’
A singular instance of ‘land purchase,’ and, indeed, of the working of another part of the land code, has come under my notice of late; I can answer for the accuracy of what I write; scores of similar cases could be, probably, found. In 1852, an industrious Scottish tradesman invested the savings of years of his life in buying a chief rent under the Encumbered Estates Act; he gave £5000 for a perpetual rent-charge of £192, that is, not quite 4 per cent. on his capital. The tenant of the lands subject to the rent was a middleman, with an estate of about £3000 a year; he had sublet the lands to a tenant in occupation of them, a slovenly, ill-conditioned, and indolent farmer. The Land Act of 1887 passed; the wealthy middleman, an excellent ‘mark’ for the chief rent, who, therefore, had been obliged to pay the £192 a year, was empowered by the new law to evade his contract, and practically to get rid of his interest; the owner of the chief rent, therefore, had only the tenant in occupation to look to for the discharge of his claim. This person was succeeded by his son, a good-for-nothing and drunken man, who soon became head over ears in debt; but he was declared ‘a purchaser’ by the Land Commission, and, subject to a terminable annuity, was made owner of the lands. But the advance made was not more than £2300; the representative of the hardworking Scotchman, who had bought property, as secure, at the time, as Consols, was a loser of more than half of his capital; he was simply cheated out of £2700, through the operation of an iniquitous law; his indignant protests may well be conceived. The subsequent history of this so-styled ‘purchase’ is significant, and not without interest. The worthless owner took possession of the lands; his first step was to cut down the woodland, until he was stopped by a creditor to whom he owed a mortgage. Since that time he has become insolvent in all but name, and cannot pay the annuity due to the State; the Land Commission has been trying to sell the lands; but the attempt has, hitherto, been a failure; the lands have been ‘boycotted,’ and the market has been closed against a sale. These proceedings do not require a word of comment; they strikingly illustrate how the agrarian code of Ireland makes havoc of capital, annuls contracts, and confiscates property for the behoof of dishonest thriftlessness. Meanwhile the happy middleman enjoys his £3000 a year; I dare say he licks his lips as he thinks of the Land Act of 1887, which scattered a just liability to the winds.
The most remarkable and the worst effect—with a revolutionary tendency in no doubtful sense—of this mischievous system has, however, to be still noticed. About one out of ten of the agricultural tenants of Ireland have ‘purchased’ their farms in the way described; the fund available for ‘land purchase’ cannot include more than one in five; and the process is and must be slow, owing to the law’s delay. Legislation, therefore, with a singular want of insight, has drawn, and is drawing, an unjust distinction between ‘purchasing’ and rent-paying tenants; it is dividing them into a small favoured class, and a multitude harshly left out in the cold—fat sheep in one fold, lean goats in another; as the inevitable result, the rent-paying tenant resents the benefits obtained by ‘the purchaser;’ and the immense majority of the farmers of Ireland are made discontented with their lot, from their point of view not without reason. It is idle to say to this great body of men that they have already gained advantages from the State, on which they never reckoned thirty years ago, and that they have the ‘Three F’s,’ and all that the phrase implies; those who have secured much are eager to secure more; the unfair distinction arbitrarily made against them is unintelligible and exasperating, man being what he is. The policy of ‘voluntary purchase,’ as it is called, has, accordingly, from the very nature of the case, provoked and called into being the cry for the ‘compulsory purchase’ of the Irish land, now being heard far and wide in Ireland—that is, for the forcible expropriation of all Irish landlords, and for placing all their tenants, in their stead, as owners of their estates. This demand has as yet been rejected by statesmen, and is, I believe, both hopeless and shameful; but it has, nevertheless, some logic on its side; it is a corollary from legislation essentially bad; and, backed as it is by a large force of Irish opinion, it cannot be ignored or treated with contempt. It is simply extraordinary that many Irish landlords have been encouraging, and still encourage, ‘voluntary purchase,’ on its existing lines, and will not perceive that it leads to ‘compulsory purchase;’ either from a desire to dispose of parts of their estates, or from motives not easy to understand, they are promoting a revolution, which, if accomplished, would assure their ruin, as I shall conclusively prove afterwards. But the well-informed and most thoughtful members of their class are not flies lured into a bottle by a bit of sugar; they are alive to all that is involved in what is called ‘land purchase.’ Many years ago, when Parliament was voting funds for ‘voluntary purchase,’ on the present system, I indicated what would be the results; I only claim credit for some share of common sense: ‘Law will have been severing the occupiers of the soil by an arbitrary process into a pampered caste, marked off from a disfavoured multitude; and, as a necessary consequence, the mass of tenants, kept in an inferior position, will be filled with discontent—and from their point of view with perfect justice—when, as the advances from the State run short, their prospects of “land purchase” shall wane and diminish. An “ugly rush” will be made throughout the country to force landlords, as a class, to sell, in order to get a chance of buying; in Ulster the cry for “compulsory purchase,” already heard, will swell high and fierce.’[144]
These, therefore, have been the fruits of the system called ‘land purchase’ with euphemistic falsehood. ‘Compulsory purchase,’ a demand caused by an unwise policy, is a question that must be fairly discussed; it is nothing to the purpose that it has as yet made little way in Parliament. This claim would have been regarded as sheer insanity thirty years ago; it was scouted by John Bright as in the highest degree mischievous, though John Bright was the first statesman who proposed making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, but through a real, not a sham, mode of purchase. The compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland is a policy that has advocates even in England and Scotland; and it is lamentable to observe how British opinion seems to take little heed how a measure of this kind would affect the position of the Irish landlord, another of the many instances of its habitual disregard of the plainest rights of property in land in Ireland. A set of doctrinaires, ignorant of Irish nature and of the Irish land, imagine that ‘the creation of a peasant proprietary,’ in all parts of Ireland, as the cant phrase is, would, in any case, make the Union secure, and would promote tranquillity, industry, and content. Some politicians still cherish the fond belief, that thrusting Irish tenants, wholesale, into the place of their landlords, by an act of violence without a parallel, would make Irish government and administration more easy; and shut their eyes to the nature of this policy. English and Scottish capitalists, who have made advances on Irish estates, see in compulsory purchase the best probable means of realising securities now in danger; a few great absentee landlords, eager to part with their possessions in Ireland, at almost any price, are possibly not opposed to this scheme; and so maybe a few bankrupt Irish landlords, hoping to get a trifle out of a general shipwreck. The demand, however, for compulsory purchase has its only real strength in Ireland; and unquestionably it is widespread and far-reaching. The conspiracy against British rule in Ireland, which has made the annihilation of Irish ‘landlordism’ one of its main objects, calls for compulsory purchase, as a matter of course; it finds no difficulty in banding together the peasantry of the southern provinces in support of a cry which means for this class an improvement in their lot, and appeals to deep-rooted sentiments of human nature. The Irish Catholic priesthood, too, back the movement to a man, and so do the local Nationalist boards; for obvious reasons, both these orders of men seek to drive the Irish landed gentry from their homes, and to replace them by dependents in sympathy with them. The demand has also extended to Ulster, chiefly on account of the harsh distinction drawn between ‘purchasing’ and ‘non-purchasing’ tenants; it is economic rather than social or political; but the cry for compulsory purchase is perhaps loudest in parts of the northern province. Its principal champion, at present, is an enthusiast, sincere, indeed, if without judgment and insight; but he is sustained by bodies of farmers formidable in numbers at least.
The sharp and, as I think, the unfair distinction drawn by the present law between tenant ‘purchasers’ and tenants still subject to the payment of rent, has created, it cannot be said too often, the demand for the compulsory purchase of the Irish land, and for this Lord Salisbury’s Government is largely responsible. But because an Irish peasant, on one side of a fence, cannot obtain the benefits of land tenure, which his neighbour, on the other side, has obtained, and may even have a right to complain, it does not follow that compulsory purchase is a possible, or aught but a disgraceful policy; other interests and considerations must be taken into account. Let us first see how compulsory purchase would affect the financial position of the Three Kingdoms. Great as the prosperity of the Empire is, the strain on its resources is immense; the expenditure of the State at home is vast, and on the increase; the war in South Africa, and the settlement of that huge region, will cost unknown millions; the reform of our military and even of our naval system, necessary to our safety, will be a weighty burden for years; every Chancellor of the Exchequer has declared that fiscal economy, as far as possible, is his first duty. But what does the compulsory purchase of the Irish land involve, and what, confessedly, are its essential conditions? Mr. Gladstone, I have said, asserted, long ago, that the value of the agricultural area of Ireland was £300,000,000; this estimate, I believe, is too high; but, in the opinion of competent judges, it cannot be deemed less than £150,000,000. But the forcible expropriation of the Irish landed gentry on every principle of civilised law, as, indeed, Sir Michael Hicks Beach has already insisted, would imply giving them a large additional bonus; this probably would not be less than £50,000,000; the sum, therefore, required for compulsory purchase, would, it may be assumed, be not less than £200,000,000. Now, can any one imagine that the general taxpayer, in the financial situation in which we are, and shall be for years, will make himself liable for this colossal charge, equal to the ransom Germany extorted from France, in order to bribe Irish peasants into the ownership of their farms, and to effect an agrarian revolution, in which he has no interest? I should like to see the Minister who would go to the country on such an insane policy, and who would call on the hardly taxed millions of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to burn huge holes in their pockets for such an object, for simply robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that without a pretence of right, or any conceivable good. And what security would the Irish land afford for the payment of this enormous impost? The terminable annuities due from the ‘purchasing’ tenants would, it has pleasantly been said, be a sufficient guarantee; but men of common sense are not to be caught by chaff; the idea is a vain and worthless delusion. The ‘No Rent Manifesto’ and the ‘Plan of Campaign’ were movements of Irish peasants, so to speak, of yesterday; what if another Parnell were to arise and to issue a ukase that ‘a foreign and alien Government had no right to an unjust tribute;’ and how could this be collected by a Department of an absentee State?
The general taxpayer, therefore, who, thirteen years ago, grumbled at a demand of £5,000,000 only, will assuredly not fling £200,000,000, or half that sum, into the Serbonian bog of the Irish land. It is hardly necessary to dwell on so small a fact, ‘that compulsory purchase would reduce the income tax of Ireland about one-half, for nine-tenths of the tenant ‘purchasers’ would be below its level;’ but even this cannot be left out of sight. Conservative statesmen, it should be added, are especially bound to reject this scheme; in 1886 they denounced, in emphatic language, Mr. Gladstone’s far less dangerous plan of making the State liable for £50,000,000, to buy out Irish landlords; flagrant inconsistency in politics should be eschewed. The probably fixed purpose of the general taxpayer not to mulct himself heavily to fling the Irish soil to a mass of peasants, is doubtless, and I say it with regret, the best security against the destruction of the Irish landlords; this despoiled and maltreated body of men just now fill the place in Irish affairs of the ‘Injured Lady’ of Swift’s satire, gravely told by her lover across the Channel that ‘I had cost him ten times more than I was worth to maintain me, and that it had been much better for him if I had been damned, or burnt, or thrown to the bottom of the sea.’[145] Nevertheless, I have faith in right-minded Englishmen, however prejudiced or ill-informed about an unpopular class, if plain facts and figures are set before them; let us see how it would fare with the Irish landlord were he forcibly expropriated under compulsory purchase. I will take the case of an Irish country gentleman, who, in the period between 1868 and 1878, had an income from his estate of £1500 a year, subject to a family charge of £10,000 at 4 per cent., that is, had a net annual income of £1100. Owing to the depression of agriculture since 1879, his rents would have naturally fallen about £300 a year; but let us suppose that, through the operation of the new Irish land code, they have been cut down to ‘fair rents’ of £900 a year only. His annual income, therefore, would be £900 less by £400, that is, he would still have £500 a year he could call his own; how would it be with him were he forcibly sold out? Admit that his estate would fetch eighteen years’ purchase—the present average rate is seventeen—that is, would realise £16,200; deducting, say, £200 for law costs, this would be a net residue of £16,000. But the family charge would absorb £10,000; the surplus would be £6000 only, producing, let us calculate, £4 per cent.; this ruined man, therefore, who, little more than twenty years ago, possessed an income of £1100 a year, would be left £240 at the very utmost. I have taken care to understate the case; I challenge attention to my figures; I ask honest Englishmen would not this be sheer robbery, accomplished, to the disgrace of the State, in its name?
It has been urged, however—and to those who know the facts, the statement is cruel and shameful mockery—that the Irish landlord would only lose his rented lands, and that ‘he could live happily on the demesne land, which he would still retain.’ This would be simply impossible in the case of nineteen-twentieths of the class; they would not have the means to keep their demesnes up; they would be compelled to part with them at almost any price; and the few, who would have the means, would, all but certainly, with their beggared fellows, leave a country in which they had been foully betrayed. It is notorious, indeed, that Irish Nationalist leaders, knowing what compulsory purchase means, have marked down the demesnes of the Irish landed gentry as their prey; associates of American Fenians and of the Clan na Gael are to revel in the mansions of the Geraldines, the Butlers, the O’Connors, the O’Neills, as Jacobins revelled in the mansions of the La Tremouilles and the De Noailles. But man does not live by bread alone; the material ruin of the Irish landlord would be bad enough; but the moral consequences of his expropriation must not be left out of sight. Few of the purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts care probably much about the lands they have bought; the same remark probably applies to most Irish absentees. But an immense majority of the Irish landed gentry are deeply attached to their hearths and their homes; they are bound to their lands by innumerable ties; they have been brought up with the sentiments which property in land creates; in the pathetic words of an old chronicler, ‘They do not wish to pray in foreign churches, or to lie in foreign graves;’ their hope has been to live and die amidst their ancestral surroundings. The State has, in a special manner, encouraged this belief; it rooted the Irish landlord in the soil to be its supporter; is it to expel him from the position it has made for him, without a thought of the shock to his best feelings this must produce? Would not such an act be dishonourable, nay, infamous? Let us hear what the deepest of our political thinkers, Burke, has written upon a somewhat parallel case: ‘When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation—when they have accommodated all their ideas, and all their habits to it, ... I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character and those customs, which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations, and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotick sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.’[146]
I have referred to an instance, within my knowledge, of the operation of the new Irish land code, in the case of a middleman, his under-tenant, and a despoiled owner of a rent. I now refer to an instance, also within my knowledge, of what compulsory purchase would do in the case of an Irish landlord. This person is a scion of one of the princely Irish-Milesian houses; his forefathers were lords of a tract extending from the Boyne to the Shannon. They belonged to one of the famous ‘five bloods of Ireland,’ acknowledged to be half-royal by Henry of Anjou; they intermarried with the great Norman-Irish noblesse; one of their matronage was half-sister of Surrey’s fair Geraldine; the ruins of the abbeys they founded are still to be seen. Their domains were torn from them in the reign of Mary Tudor; but they fought stubbornly with their tribe in the great Desmond war; they retained, though proscribed, the rank of princes, until the close of the sixteenth century; leaders of the house then carried their swords into foreign armies, and have given a field marshal to Austria and grandees to Spain. The direct line of the chiefs, however, remained in Ireland; it vegetated in obscurity until the Irish rising of 1689-90; one of its members then appeared in the Parliament of James II. in Dublin, and perished, at the head of his regiment, it is said, at Aughrim. The fortunes of his descendants are not without interest; one is believed to have been a companion-in-arms of Villars at Malplaquet and DÉnain; two of his remote offspring, the tradition exists, perished in the ranks of Napoleon’s armies. But the heir of the family bowed under the yoke of the Irish penal laws, and became a Protestant, at least in name; his near kindred gave Ireland Anthony Malone, one of the most illustrious Irishmen of the eighteenth century, and gave England the best commentator on her most immortal poet. One of his representatives, the person of whom I write, still possesses a fragment of the immense possessions his fathers ruled; of more than thirty of their castles he has the wreck of one; a scroll on the roof of his house bears the touching legend that he has sprung from the loins of the old Milesian princes. He is not wholly unknown as an Irish landlord of this day; curiously, too, his rental has been hardly reduced by the visitations of the Land and the Sub-Commissions. Is this scion of the best and the most ancient noblesse of Ireland to be banished in his old age from his home, and to be replaced in it by ornaments of the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, for this would be one result of compulsory purchase?
Let us imagine, however, that, owing to the malign influence which, Spenser said, attends England in Irish affairs, the Irish landed gentry were removed from the land, and their former tenants were put in their place as owners. What would be the consequences, economic, social, political, of this sudden agrarian revolution in one of the Three Kingdoms? The distribution of the Irish soil between the classes which would possess it, would be unfavourable, in the highest degree, to the establishment of a ‘peasant proprietary,’ the common name in use on this subject. Of the 486,000 tenant farmers in Ireland, some 132,000 hold patches of from less than one to five acres in extent; are these to be stereotyped as real land owners? More than 90,000 occupy from fifty to five hundred acres and upwards; these include the great graziers of the rich tracts of pasturage; do these supply elements of a ‘peasant proprietary’ in any rational sense? The only class which even on plausible, a priori grounds could be made occupying owners of the land would contain much less than 300,000 families; and probably it occupies less than two-thirds of the island as a whole. Are all these bodies of men to be lumped, so to speak, together, and universally to receive the ownership of the soil; would not compulsory purchase, even on these conditions, be the sheerest folly? Furthermore, the configuration of Ireland and her climate make it next to impossible that a ‘peasant proprietary’ could generally thrive within her borders; Nature herself forbids an attempt to carry out, on a large scale, a settlement of the kind. The central area of the island is a low watershed of wide extent, from which a succession of streams descends through vast tracts of morass and bog; in other parts of the country there are large and deep rivers, curving as they approach the sea, and flowing through mountain spaces; the lands they traverse are swampy, and require main drainage; a large part of Ireland is composed of wild hill ranges only fit for the rearing of young and coarse breeds of cattle; she possesses a fine area of the best pasturage, confined, however, to a few counties; her true agricultural area is comparatively small. Her climate, moreover, is wet to a proverb; torrents of rain from the Atlantic fall on her plains for months; above all, her inland towns are far from each other, and petty; scarcely one is peopled by more than 10,000 souls. Any well-informed and right-judging person who knows the conditions under which a ‘peasant proprietary’ can alone flourish, must know that, from the nature of the case, it would be a failure, in the circumstances in which it would be necessarily placed, were it forcibly established in every part of Ireland. Ireland has little in common with Belgium, with Northern Italy, with France; this settlement of confiscation would go the way of the Englishry of the Middle Ages and the Cromwellian colonists.
The most conclusive argument against compulsory purchase has, nevertheless, to be yet put forward. The state of things ‘voluntary purchase’ is evolving would assuredly be aggravated a hundred-fold were every tenant in Ireland made the owner of his farm by a revolutionary act on the part of the State. It is significant, in the highest degree, that from the time of the ‘New Departure’ to this hour, the conspiracy against our rule in Ireland has clamoured for the expropriation of the Irish landed gentry by force, and for the conversion of their tenants into possessors of these estates; far better informed than British statesmen, it has rightly calculated that this violent change would increase the ‘Nationalist’ sympathies of the Irish peasant; and this opinion is being confirmed, to a great extent, by the results of ‘voluntary purchase’ being now developed. The coarse materialist view that bribery will make a class law-abiding and loyal, is opposed to human nature and fact; bribery will not efface ideas, feelings, and tendencies, deep-rooted in history and ancient tradition; above all, if it is a concession to agitation and a rebellious movement, it will only quicken the animosity to the State and the greed of the favoured class. Parnell, I have said, had his mind made up on this subject; he always insisted that the Irish tenant, wherever his holding had been made his own, would be ‘more true to the cause than ever;’ it is curious that the confident prediction of a most able man appears to have been persistently ignored. For the rest, the mischief ‘voluntary purchase’ is already doing would be enormously aggravated by the effects of compulsory purchase. The Irish tenant farmers, made owners of the land everywhere, would, like the present ‘purchasers,’ cut down woodland wholesale; the country would be disafforested over an immense area; the consequences to agriculture would be as bad as possible. Arterial and main drainage too would, as a rule, be neglected; but these would, comparatively, be trifling results; the compulsory purchaser would deal with the land as their ‘voluntary’ fellows are now largely dealing, but, in all probability, more generally, and in much a greater proportion. Holding as they would nine-tenths of the Irish soil at terminable annuities much lower than any rent, they would inevitably subdivide, sublet, and mortgage their farms in tens of thousands of cases; they would become middlemen, over whole counties, the harsh oppressors of a multitude ground down by rack-rents; the worst kind of ‘landlordism’ would be reproduced in the worst aspect. The tendency of events is even now confirming what I wrote a long time ago on this subject: ‘Freehold ownership, therefore, would disappear more or less quickly over extensive tracts, the “yeomen” would become a diminishing quantity, and these would be replaced by a new class of landlords with tenants at competition rents, that is, determined by the land hunger of the Celt. The transformation would inevitably go on, for its causes would operate with intense force; and before many years probably two-thirds of Ireland would have become a land of mere peasant landlords placed over a mass of rack-rented tenants.’[147] The creation of a universal ‘peasant proprietary,’ by force, would, in fact, bring the Irish land system back by degrees into the state in which it was before the Great Famine, when millions of serfdom squatted on the soil, disorganising agriculture and preventing social progress.These considerations, however, by no means exhaust the case against the compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland. Irish landlords have been decried, for an evil purpose, during many years; their position is difficult and open to attack; but if they are an unpopular class, they have been a civilising influence in Ireland of real value, the most civilising influence, perhaps, in her three southern provinces. Their annihilation, despoiled and impoverished as they are, would still withdraw a large fund from Irish rural labour; and it would be most injurious to agriculture in many ways, especially as regards main and arterial drainage, an absolute necessity for the Irish soil, and scarcely possible except under a system of large estates. Their extinction, too, Englishmen ought not to forget, would deprive the State of one of its mainstays in Ireland; the idea to the contrary growing up is a mere delusion; it was not for nothing that Parnell and Davitt described this order of men as ‘the British garrison’ and insisted that were it once out of the fortress the power of England in Ireland would certainly perish. The conversion of Irish farmers universally into landowners would also have a ruinous effect on many Irish industries. It would do infinite harm to many branches of commerce, especially to trades of the higher type; it would be disastrous to such towns as Dublin and Belfast, already beginning to protest against it; and, whatever may be said, the prospect of it is dreaded by agricultural Irish labourers as a class, which has always been ill-treated by their masters, the farmers, though, owing to the influence of priests and demagogues, they are unwilling to express the sentiments they really feel. Compulsory purchase, in fact, is by no means so generally asked for in Ireland as is supposed; her representation demands it by a great majority of votes; but this representation, as I have pointed out before, is not a true index of Irish opinion. Another consideration, too, should be taken into account in coming to a reasonable conclusion on this subject. The land system of England and Scotland, from a variety of causes sufficiently known, is essentially different from that of Ireland; politically, socially, economically, it has little in common with it. But were Parliament to declare that the whole tenant class of Ireland were to be transformed into fee simple owners, subject only to renders, much less than true rents, and payable for a short space of time, I much doubt if English and Scottish tenants would acquiesce, and would not agitate for legislation of a similar kind, especially as British agriculture is still heavily depressed. Leaseholders of large houses in towns, for long terms of years, at ground rents, and a whole class of builders, assuredly would join in such a demand; the contagion of revolution and socialism is always perilous. English and Scottish landlords have usually played the part of the Jew to the Samaritan as regards their Irish fellows; but ‘proximus ardet Ucalegon’ might be borne in mind.[148]
[Pg 257 & 258]The Irish land system, therefore, from every point of view, is simply in a deplorable state; it is an economic and social chaos, pregnant with mischiefs and dangers of many kinds. Confiscation has wrought its work on the Irish landlord; has shaken the structure of Irish society; and has produced its inevitable results in banishing capital from the land, and in dealing a weighty blow to Irish credit. The legislation of 1881, and of subsequent years, has conferred immense advantages on the tenant class in Ireland; but these have fallen short of what might be supposed; this class declares itself to be dissatisfied with its lot; it is clamouring for the wholesale transfer to itself of the rented lands of Ireland, through what is known as compulsory purchase, that is, corruption and spoliation combined in an act of the State. And these efforts of legislation, essentially unwise, in direct conflict with fact and economic science, a mere makeshift to stave off agitation and trouble, are, in all probability, by no means the worst. Demoralisation has spread throughout Irish landed relations, affecting them, unfortunately, in many ways; divisions of class have been made worse, as well as the old divisions of race and faith; respect for contracts and obligations has been destroyed; dishonesty and thriftlessness have been favoured, and industry and honesty not encouraged; an evil spirit of discontent and desire for change is abroad; agriculture is plainly on the decline; there is nothing secure or settled in the land. Vicious as the Irish land system unquestionably was before Mr. Gladstone first took it in hand, I believe that, having regard to the general interests of the State, it is still more vicious at the present time; it has been transformed, but, on the whole, transformed for the worse. As I wrote before, when commenting on the position of affairs in Ireland, before the Land Act of 1870, a revolution only could have removed the deep-rooted ills in all that related to the land; a revolution alone could remove them now. But in the one instance, as in the other, the evil caused by a revolution would be infinitely greater than the good; a new agrarian revolution in Ireland would be a curse to her; it is better, as Burke has remarked, to try to repair even ruins than to blot out every trace of the edifice. Still, taking it as we find it, can nothing be done to amend, in some measure, at least, the existing land system? Much of it, I admit, must be left untouched; the principle of settling rent, through the agency of the State, false as it is, must continue to work; the principle of so-called ‘land purchase’ must, within reasonable limits, be still given free scope. But something in the nature of reform is, I think, possible; the discussion of the subject may be of use; I contribute my mite to it, if with unfeigned diffidence.
In order to find out the truth, and thoroughly to clear the ground, a Commission, I suggest, ought to be appointed, as important as the Devon Commission of nearly sixty years ago; it should investigate the Irish Land Question in all its branches. Its President should be a great English nobleman—the nation would have confidence in the Duke of Bedford, a princely and most liberal English landlord; but the judicial element should be strong in it; English and Irish judges should be among its members; it should include trained agricultural experts: it should have representatives of Irish landlords and tenants. It should examine the Irish land system as this existed before 1870; should review the whole series of Irish Land Acts, from 1870 to the present time, and inquire into their results and tendencies; should carefully consider the operation of the tribunals selected to carry out the new Irish land code, especially as regards the fixing of ‘fair rents,’ and that not with respect to their procedure only, an unjust limit imposed on the Fry Commission, but with respect to the principles that have been adopted and the methods pursued; it should deal exhaustively with the subject of so-called ‘land purchase,’ and see whether it has not directly led to the demand for compulsory purchase; it should take evidence as to ‘peasant proprietary’ and its creation; and it should make a complete and searching report, with a view to the legislation it might recommend. And if I am not altogether mistaken, such a Commission would state, in emphatic language, that the present Irish land code was ill designed, even if it cannot be now much changed; that its administration has been attended with grave errors; that cruel wrong has been done to Irish landlords, while Irish tenants have not obtained what was hoped for; that the economic and social results have been deplorable; that if ‘land purchase’ cannot be stopped, it is a bad expedient on its present lines, and that the cry for compulsory purchase has been its evident effect; and that extensive, still more universal peasant ownership, is an impossible and would be a pernicious policy. Finally, if I am not much mistaken again, such a Commission would report that a reform of the Irish land system, if very difficult, should be attempted; and that, in its main scope and operation at least, it should be carried out on the side of land tenure, that is, in the relations of landlord and tenant, as has been the opinion of every thinker from Burke onwards, who has not been swayed by the exigencies of agitation, or of party politics.
I proceed briefly to put my scheme forward, assuming that I have made a reasonably correct forecast. I may say it has been a subject of reflection during many years, indeed, since the legislation of 1881; Mr. Gladstone, in his place in the House of Commons, pointedly approved of a tract in which I set forth my views; and so, curiously enough, did Parnell. It is impossible, I have said, to transform the existing system of Irish land tenure; a wide departure from it cannot be made; but improvement is really feasible within certain limits. My object would be to get rid of palpable evils, inseparable from the present state of things; to make the positions of both Irish landlords and tenants in some degree better than they now are; to place the Irish land system on a somewhat less precarious basis. In the first place, the law as to the exemption of tenants’ improvements from rent, an excrescence on the Land Act of 1881, and made extravagant by the Land Act of 1896, should be restricted in its application to some extent; as it stands, it is a fruitful cause of injustice, of demoralisation, and of hard swearing, producing endless litigation to very little purpose; claims in respect of improvements ought to be more limited, in point of time, than they are; a check should be placed on obsolete and illusory claims; this would be advantageous, I think, to all interests involved. Again, it would be impracticable to exclude from the operation of the present land code lands that have been already brought within its scope; but a more precise definition should be made of the lands that are intended to be now excluded—demesnes, town parks, residential holdings, and large pastoral farms; the decisions of the Courts, in this province, are very perplexing; a good definition would make litigation very considerably less. These changes, I am convinced, would do much appreciable good; but I would go a long way farther in attempting to make the status of both landlord and tenant in Ireland less insecure and vexatious than it now is. In the first place, leaving lands now excluded out, I would make all agricultural and pastoral Irish tenants entitled to the tenure of the ‘Three F’s,’ removing the prohibition as to ‘future tenants,’ a distinction that never ought to have been made, and, as far as possible, securing this mode of tenure to the poorest tenants, by means to which I shall advert afterwards. In the next place, I would make an earnest effort to lessen the ruinous litigation and the instability caused by the statutory leases renewable at short intervals of time. The tenant should have ‘fixity of tenure’ in a real sense; the estate created in his favour against the landlord ought not to be one of fifteen years only, however indefinitely it may be extended; I would prefer to see it an estate for ever; but, as in the present state of agriculture, there would be objections to this, on account of the uncertainty of the rate of rent, it might be an estate for a limited term. But the term ought not to be less than thirty years at least, renewable, of course, like the shorter term of fifteen; this would quiet possession and get rid of lawsuits for the period of a generation of men. The tenant should retain his right of ‘free sale;’ but I would make the conditions less stringent than they are under the existing law.
The position of the Irish tenant would thus be greatly improved; the sphere of the ‘Three F’s’ would be largely extended; he would have ‘fixity of tenure,’ for a long time, at least, without the hazard and loss of litigation every fifteen years; his right of ‘free sale’ would be less restricted; and he would have distinct advantages, as respects ‘fair rent,’ under the part of my plan I am about to explain. I turn to the position of the Irish ‘landlord’—I still use this expression and that of ‘tenant,’ though both words are hardly applicable to existing facts; this, too, in my judgment, would be made much better. The estate that is now created against him would still be preserved; I wish it were a perpetual estate, but it would be one for thirty years at least; he would, therefore, remain assimilated to a rent-charger, as he is at present. But like his tenant he would be comparatively free from lawsuits; he would be less harassed by claims in respect of improvements; he would have, in many particulars, a more stable tenure. He should, of course, retain the ‘royalties’ still reserved to him—mines, minerals, timber, and such things; and he should have the title to the statutory conditions he now has; but as his reversionary rights would be somewhat lessened, he should be compensated for these by a small money payment. With one great exception he should have the legal remedies to enforce the rights he now possesses; and that exception would be of great importance. I have always thought the law of ejectment for non-payment of rent harsh; it is an innovation on the ancient Common Law; it sometimes causes forfeitures far from just; it is not properly applicable to tenancies of long duration. I would certainly abolish this mode of procedure; I would instead of it give the landlord a power to sell the tenant’s lands, by a procedure analogous to that of bankruptcy, should default be made in the payment of the rent, or rather the rent-charge that might be due. The advantage to both landlord and tenant would be great: the first would have a remedy more expeditious and just than he has; the second, should the land be sold and lost to him, would, as a rule, have a surplus over and above his debts; unlike what is sometimes the case in evictions, he would realise for himself his whole legitimate interest in the land. This single reform would do much to make ‘fair rent’ a less onerous charge than it now is.
By these means the status of the Irish landlord would be made by many degrees more secure; the Irish tenant would acquire an interest in the land much more durable and stable than he has now, in fact, nearly equivalent to full ownership, subject to a rent-charge; and if his interest were made a perpetuity, as I hope would be the case at last, he would be assimilated to an owner subject to a perpetual rent, or to an English copyholder subject to a similar render. This is the position Burke proposed he should have, considerably more than a century ago;[149] it is that which has been advocated by John Stuart Mill, and, I am happy to add, by Mr. John Morley; it is the only position, compatible with common sense and justice, which the new Irish land code has left possible, for I put the quackery of compulsory purchase out of sight, and voluntary purchase is a bad half-measure. The great subject of fixing rent by the State would remain; for, unjustifiable as this expedient is, it is impossible, after what has happened, to dispense with it. Without imputing personal motives or moral blame to any one, the Land Commission and its Sub-Commissions ought, I am convinced, to cease to be the agency to fix ‘fair rents;’ however unconsciously, in my judgment, they have often proceeded on false principles, and have done immense, if not wilful wrong; they are decried by landlords and tenants alike in Ireland. Besides, there is a constitutional objection to their adjusting rent; the Land Commission is entrusted with the task of carrying out ‘land purchase;’ it has a direct inducement to whittle rents away, in order to facilitate the sale of land; its interest and its duty are thus placed in conflict. Be this as it may, my plan for fixing ‘fair rents’ in Ireland by the State would be altogether different. In the first place, a definition of ‘fair rent’ should be made by statute, and should dominate, so to speak, the subject; the omission of this criterion has caused grave injustice. This having been made, I would adjust Irish rents by a method much better, I believe, than that now in existence. A body of competent and well-paid valuers of land should be formed—there would be no difficulty about this in Ireland; these men should visit, when required, estates; and having heard what landlords and tenants had to say on the spot, should declare what they consider the ‘fair rents’ of farms, making a deduction for improvements as arranged by a reformed law, and taking waste and deterioration into account. The reports made by the valuers should be complete and explicit; they would probably satisfy landlords and tenants in most instances; but dissatisfied persons should have a right to an appeal, which should be a full rehearing of all the facts in issue; but the appeal should be at the peril of costs against unsuccessful suitors. The tribunals to decide the appeals should, I suggest, be composed of two eminent judges, for each of the four provinces, assisted by trained agricultural experts; but the authority of the judges should prevail on all questions. From these Courts a further appeal should run to the Court of Appeal in Ireland, on all matters of law and fact, and ultimately should run to the House of Lords; the present restricted appeal to the Land Commission has been little better than a sorry mockery of right.
The scheme I propose has obvious defects; it sanctions the vicious principle of State-settled rents, a thing unknown in lands outside of Ireland, a defiance of the simplest axioms of economic science. But it endeavours at least to improve a bad system of tenure dealing with accomplished facts now beyond recall; I certainly think it would make the relations of Irish landlords and tenants better than they are, and would tend to place both classes in the positions which, as affairs now stand, they will probably, in the long run, occupy. As regards ‘alternative policies,’ as they have been called, I have set forth the reasons that the compulsory purchase of the Irish land would be, I believe, impossible, and, were it possible, would be a confiscation of the foullest kind, ruinous to Great Britain and Ireland alike. I have also shown how the present system of so-styled ‘voluntary purchase’ is, in my judgment, essentially immoral, and pregnant with dangers; and I have indicated the results being already produced. That system, however, must go on; for the present it cannot be arrested; a Conservative Government still pins its faith on it, as a Whig Government, half a century ago, pinned its faith on the Encumbered Estates Act; but a ‘peasant proprietary’ rooted in corruption will hardly succeed, and ‘voluntary purchase’ draws the worst kind of distinctions in Irish land tenure. The acceleration, indeed, of this ‘remedy’ has been deemed advisable; and as long as the sum voted by Parliament is not expended, the system evidently must continue in force. Some of its evils, however, would be lessened were the State to reserve to itself the woodland, which tenant ‘purchasers,’ as a rule, cut down and sell; and if tenants proved to be solvent were compelled to advance part of the money required to transfer their lands to themselves. It is revolting to my mind to see a wealthy Irish farmer bribed into the ownership of his farm by an Act of the State, without having paid a shilling of the price. I commend this spectacle to the hard-pressed general taxpayer.
I need hardly say that, under the scheme I propose, existing interests of tenants should remain intact, and statutory leases should be allowed to come to an end, before a change should be made by law in the position they hold. The question of compensating the Irish landlords would remain; a very few words on this will suffice. I must remind the reader, as I have already shown, that the Land Act of 1881 was passed on the condition that, should experience prove that real injury had been done to this order of men, their right to indemnity would be plain; Mr. Gladstone’s language was unequivocal; the House of Commons approved. Nor can any reasonable doubt exist that the course of legislation from 1881 to 1896 has confiscated the property of the class to an immense extent; the simple fact that the value in Ireland of the fee simple in land has been reduced by a third at least, and that the value of the tenant right has been increased in about the same proportion, points to a conclusion evident to impartial minds. I am satisfied as to what would be the report on this subject of the Commission I should wish to see appointed; it could not avoid drawing an inference that cannot be resisted. The question, therefore, will have to be faced; the good faith of Parliament is virtually at stake; and if a pledge made in the name of the State is not to be broken, the right of the Irish landlords to compensation is complete. Independently, too, of considerations of this kind, it is a recognised principle that should a policy have caused loss to a class, the State is morally bound to make the loss up; a violation of this principle is unjust and dangerous alike. I quote from John Stuart Mill on this very question: ‘The principle of property gives the landowners no right to the land, but only a right to compensation for whatever portion of their interest in the land it may be the policy of the State to deprive them of. To that their claim is indefeasible. It is due to landowners and to owners of any property whatever, recognised as such by the State, that they should not be dispossessed of it without receiving its pecuniary value, or an annual income equal to what they have derived from it. If the land was bought with the produce of the labour of themselves or their ancestors, compensation is due to them on that ground; even if otherwise, it is still due on the ground of prescription. Nor can it ever be necessary for accomplishing an object by which the community altogether will gain, that a particular portion of the community should be immolated. When the property is of a kind to which peculiar affections attach themselves, the compensation ought to exceed a bare pecuniary equivalent.... The legislature, which, if it pleased, might convert the whole body of landlords into fundholders or pensioners, might, À fortiori, commute the average receipts of Irish landowners into a fixed rent-charge, and raise the tenants into proprietors; supposing always that the full market value of the land was tendered to the landlords, in case they preferred that to accepting the conditions proposed.’[150]
Assuming, then, the case for compensating the Irish landlords to have been made out, compensation can be afforded without the loss of a shilling to the State. The bon fide encumbrances on their estates, that is, those which represent advances in cash, are now at an interest of from 4 to 5 per cent.; the State could pay off those which were perfectly secure at an interest of 2¼ per cent., and could make the landlords chargeable with interest at 3 per cent., in order to provide against possible loss. As for encumbrances that were not perfectly secure, the State should only pay off what was well charged; but it should do this on the same conditions; and it should declare hopeless encumbrances extinct. This would be a considerable and just boon to the Irish landlords; the securities taken by the State should be in the form of debentures, which would pass from hand to hand in the market; and many owners of encumbrances would no doubt accept sums less than their full demands, for these, they well know, are at present in danger. I would go, however, farther in relieving the Irish landlords; their estates are subject to a mass of family charges created under a different order of things; if the State has arbitrarily cut down the fund set apart for these, by a wholesale reduction of rents, I cannot understand how it is not the simplest justice to cut the charges down in some fair proportion. At all events, I make these suggestions for what they may be worth; if right is to be done to the Irish landed gentry, and a gross breach of public faith is not to be made, some relief of this kind should be extended to them. Very possibly this will not be afforded; but I venture to remind politicians that even an unpopular class cannot be cruelly wronged and sacrificed, without doing injury to all classes, and shaking to their foundations the clear rights of property. And I openly avow that, in my judgment, it would be in the highest degree against the national interest to annihilate this body of men, as must probably happen, should things in Ireland be left as they are. What if they are the heirs of conquest and confiscation in the past? Is that a reason for destroying them after the lapse of centuries, and when England planted them in the land to be her mainstay? What if, in instances, comparatively few in the extreme, they have abused the social trust imposed on them? Was not this because the opportunity was given by law, and was not the law the work of successive Parliaments? Is it not a fact that British ministers, so to speak, of yesterday, declared that they were secure in their proprietary rights; and that Mr. Gladstone solemnly acquitted them of what had been laid to their charge? On the other hand, have they not been for ages the staunchest friends of England in Irish affairs, especially in troubled and perilous times? Is it for nothing that they have been called the British garrison by her foes, the strongest obstacle to rebellion and treason? And is a class, which has, on the whole, been a civilising influence, for many years, in Ireland, and which has given the State far more than a due proportion of worthies—warriors, orators, statesmen, thinkers, men of eminence in all the arts of life—to be sacrificed at the bidding of a conspiracy bent on subverting British rule in Ireland, or in deference to false and perilous theories?
