IRISH LAND AND BRITISH LEGISLATORS.

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FTER years of tinkering at Irish land legislation, a summerfallow is needed to allow time for maturing some scheme which may fairly be regarded as a final settlement of agrarian complications. Of empirical treatment Irish tenants have already had too much; for, although a great deal has been done on their behalf, it has not been based entirely upon just and firm principles, which alone can command respect; and, moreover, what should have been the first step-the redistribution of the land has never been attempted. Apart from the fair claim of England, Wales, and Scotland to the full share of attention from Parliament which has so long been denied them, there would really be no advantage to Ireland in any attempt, during the coming session, to carry another Land Bill, because no measure or plan possessing the elements of finality has yet been brought before the country. Enough has been done, surely, to prove the good-will of Great Britain for Ireland, and to justify the maintenance of law and order, without which the most perfect of agrarian revolutions would inevitably fail in its purpose. Land Act after Land Act has been passed, until tenants in Ireland have been put in possession of legal rights in their holdings superior to those enjoyed by tenants in any other part of the world. They have even had the chance of being set up in business as landed proprietors, not only without a penny of expense to themselves, but also with a bonus in the shape of reduced rent for the period required for completing the purchase of their holdings. The obnoxious English Church Establishment has been very properly abolished, and every vestige of religious disability has been removed. If as much cannot be said of political disabilities, so long as Irishmen, as a rule, are carefully excluded from

the principal official positions in their own country, the reason is that, even if the Irish leaders would accept those positions, they have shown themselves unfit for the responsibility. If yet another

sign of goodwill be asked for, it may be found in the liberal contributions of Englishmen whenever distress has prevailed in Ireland, or when money was needed to help towards emigration from congested districts.

That much yet remains to be done it is the principal object of this article to urge; but short of the dismemberment of the United Kingdom, to which it would be sheer madness to agree, there is nothing in justice that England is not anxious to do for Ireland. Under these circumstances, there is not the slightest excuse for the fiendish dynamite and other murder conspiracies which have been openly concocted in the United States without any attempt at interference by the Government, to the lasting discredit of the Great Republic; and it must further be said that the Irish people, misled by men of petty and malignant dispositions, have shown a degree of ingratitude without parallel in history, by constantly biting the hand which has dispensed to them gift after gift, because it did not give enough. That ingratitude, I am satisfied, is mainly attributable to the machinations of the worst set of leaders with which the ignorant people of any country were ever cursed; and for the sake of those thus misled, it seems to me absolutely necessary, before any further legislation is attempted, to bring the rebels and rowdics of the country into submission. The good results naturally expected from the increased security to tenants' capital and industry conferred by past legislation are scarcely to be seen outside Ulster, and will not so long as the people are induced to suppose that their unscrupulous champions can with impunity defy the Government and the laws of the country. It would be folly to expect the creation of property where property is entirely insecure, and where those who would be industrious, enterprising, and thrifty are under the tyranny of mob law.

Only a superficial critic will accuse me of inconsistency when, after declaring myself in favour of the most stringent measures for the restoration of law and order in Ireland, I immediately proceed to enlarge upon the grievances of the Irish people, by no means yet fully redressed. No one who has not lived in or visited the country can form an adequate conception of the wrongs which the cultivators of the soil have suffered for generations, under a "landlordism" which richly deserved the fate that has overtaken it. Utterly disregarding the truth that property has its duties as well as its rights, the majority of Irish landlords, or agents willing to do dirty work which they themselves would have shrunk from, ruthlessly confiscated the property of their tenants, until the law

stepped in to stop them. As long as the law failed to protect the tenants' property in the soil, the landlords took it in increased rents. There were exceptions, of course; but no agriculturist who sees the miserable patches of land occupied by tenants in various parts of Ireland, and learns what rents have been paid for them, can fail to be convinced that the exceptions were comparatively few. Landlords have done the same everywhere as long as they were able. They have done it in England and Scotland, and they are doing it in the United States; but in the first two countries they have also done a good deal in the way of expending their own capital on the land, and in the third there is plenty of room at present to get away from them.

In most countries, as every one knows, the laws have been made by landowners, and made very much in their own favour. It is the fashion just now to decry dual ownership in the soil, as if it were essentially evil and mischievous. The fact is, however, that the agrarian troubles in Ireland, and a vast amount of wrong and misery in other countries as well, have arisen from the want of a full and frank recognition of dual ownership in a holding which one man lets to another. It seems necessary to repeat what should be axiomatic, so constantly is the truth ignored, that when two men's capitals are mingled in the same piece of land, there must be dual ownership or confiscation. The latter alternative was sanctioned by the law of the United Kingdom until the Irish Land Act of 1870 was passed. It is true that long before that custom in Ulster, and to a limited extent in other parts of Ireland and a few English counties, had recognized the principle of dual ownership; but it was not until 1870 that law took the place of custom in Ulster, and even then it failed to prevent landlords from confiscating, by a rise of rent, the property thus recognized. As to the rest of Ireland, the measure, in effect, recognized the duality of property in the soil, but failed to give adequate security to that of the weaker party. Still, after the Act had been passed, it could no longer be said of Ireland, as a legal authority declared in relation to England before the first Agricultural Holdings Bill was carried in 1875, that the law gave no right to a tenant who spent money on his holding to recover a sixpence on quitting.

The Irish Land Act of 1881 had to do more than secure the tenant's property in the soil, though it failed to do that thoroughly and in all cases. It had also to restore some of the property which had been previously confiscated, or rather to wipe out a portion of the rent charged upon property taken by landlords from existing tenants or their predecessors in title. No doubt in some instances it has gone further, by reducing rents below the amounts at which they were fixed when the land first came into cultivation; but, as a rule,

the reductions up to the present time have not been sufficient to make up for the fall in the prices of agricultural and pastoral produce, People who object to all interference with rents ignore the fact, obvious as it is, that it would be futile to confer upon tenants a right to sell their improvements if landlords were left with the power of putting up rents upon the purchasers to the extent of appropriating what had been bought. At the same time it must be admitted that landlords have been hardly dealt with where the basis on which reductions of rent have been made has been that of the ability of the tenants to pay, rather than that of the fair value to a tenant of average industry and skill. After all, it may be urged, the Land Commissioners who have adopted this course have only followed the landlords' example, the latter, as a rule, having been in the habit of putting a fine upon enterprise by raising rent where they could get an advance from a prosperous tenant, while a lazy or thriftless neighbour's rent remained unaltered. If it be an exaggeration to say, as is commonly said in Ireland, that the wearing of a new suit of clothes by a tenant has frequently been a sufficient provocation for a rise in his rent, it is certain that the building of a new dwelling or the reclamation of a piece of waste land has commonly been followed by such an advance. Nevertheless, the policy in question, whether followed by landlords or by Land Commissioners, must be condemned as unjust and as calculated to discourage enterprise.

The doctrine that all interference with rent is unjustifiable would be a strong one if land were a proper subject for private property, though even then considerations of public interest must be paramount. But under English law all land is the property of the Crown, whatever Lord Bramwell may say to the contrary, landlords holding only an estate" in it. No doubt in recent times land has been bought and sold as if the holders had absolute right of property in it, except that the State has reserved a right to take it for public purposes after paying fair compensation. The time has come, however, when the license too long allowed in dealing with what is as essential to the very existence of the people as air or water is, must be more strictly controlled and regulated. It is obvious, as has been often stated, that the admission of the landlords' claim to do what they like with what they call their own, would involve the admission of their right to expatriate all who are not owners of land; and, as a matter of fact, this result has taken place in parts of Ireland and Scotland. To contend that the population of any country should exist in it only on sufferance of the landlords would be a doctrine too monstrous for public opinion to tolerate, and yet it is the inevitable logical sequence of the claim to absolute property in land. On the other hand, if the landlords and the thousands of other persons who have invested money on the security of landed property under conditions recognized by law and

by public opinion alike claim that, if those conditions are to be essentially altered, the State should take the land after paying them reasonable compensation, I, for one, fully admit the justice of their contention. Such control over rents as is necessary to secure the property of tenants invested in their holdings, and such restitution of what has been confiscated in the past as can be equitably afforded, are entirely justifiable under any circumstances; but if the State goes further than this, and arbitrarily reduces rent on the landlords' share of the property below its market value, the State ought to exercise its benevolence at its own expense. This view of the case is strengthened by the recognition of the fact that, legislate as we may, we cannot do away with competition rent in reality, except for the benefit of the immediate recipient of the advantage of reduction; for if the landlord's rent be set below its market value, the difference is simply added to the value of the tenant-right, the purchaser of which will in reality be charged as much rent as if the reduction had not been made, though he will pay two persons instead of one. Even if all tenants were made owners, there would be competition rent all the same, in the shape of interest on the purchase-money whenever a holding was sold.

If it were right to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, what has just been advanced might be challenged with a good show of argument. Competition rent is ruinously high in Ireland, it might be said, because of the excessive land hunger in the country; and that in turn has been caused, not by the insufficiency of land for the agricultural population, but by the appropriation for farming purposes by landlords, agents, and other large farmers of the greater portion of the soil, except in Ulster, that is worth farming at all. Having recently visited several of the typical agricultural districts of Ireland, I am able to confirm that statement of the case. In traversing eighteen counties, and going about a good deal in a few of them, I noticed nearly everywhere outside Ulster that the wellsituated and naturally fertile tracts of land were in large farms, while the nearly barren mountain-side, the bogs, and the stonecovered tracts bordering upon the bogs, were commonly dotted over with small holdings. In all I had heard or read of Ireland, I had never been led to expect to see such a state of affairs, and it came upon me therefore as a distressing revelation. It was not so in

Ulster, and I saw small holdings on good land in a few districts of other provinces, and in a few only. Some of the many people to whom I appealed for an explanation declared with bitterness that the small tenants had been "hunted off" the good land. Rents were put up on their improvements, and when bad times camenotably during the famine-they were unable to pay, and were turned out of their farms, to emigrate, to take refuge in the poor