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Other circumstances, moreover, of great importance, ought to have been taken into account, with respect to this subject. The rental of Ireland was not as high as it had been before the Great Famine; where rents, therefore, had not been increased, and had been regularly paid for a long series of years, there was the strongest possible presumption that these would be 'fair.' Again, the material progress of Ireland had been great during the forty preceding years: the wages of labour had, indeed, risen; but owing to the introduction of good farm machinery, the cost of production, in agriculture, had diminished; the extension of the railway system had opened new markets, and had brought even Connaught within a few hours of Great Britain; steam navigation had multiplied and improved; the modes of husbandry and the breeds of stock of all kinds had become infinitely better than they had been; and prices of late had been very high. These were all elements to be regarded in the determination of 'fair rent;' they ought to have been examined with care; and inquiries on these matters should have extended over a long space of time. Moreover, as the Land Act of 1881 discharged improvements made by tenants from rent, as these were defined and limited by the Act of 1870, the greatest pains ought to have been taken that claims for exemption should be strictly dealt with, and not permitted to run riot, especially as it was notorious that demands of this kind, made under the law already in force, were usually excessive, supported by untrue statements, and by no means easy to resist and disprove. Another fact, also, of the gravest moment, ought to have been thoroughly considered, as regards this question. As improvements made by tenants were not to be charged with rent, it was but equitable that the lands they might hold should be valued as if in their normal state; that if these had been deteriorated, either through wilful misconduct, or gross neglect, their occupiers were not to make profit of their own wrong; that deterioration, in a word, was not to be allowed to work rent down, and was to be taken into account, in adjudicating upon 'fair rent.' This was the more necessary because it was well known that numbers of farms in Ireland had been more or less run out; and especially because, as in the case of the ryot of Bengal, under the Permanent Settlement of Lord Cornwallis, an Irish tenant would be strongly tempted to injure his lands, if he believed that, when 'a fair rent' should be fixed on them, he would be permitted to take advantage of his own default. It should be added that, in the fixing of 'fair rents,' the large sums which, in many instances, Irish landlords had laid out in improving their estates, notably since the years that succeeded the Famine, ought, as a matter of course, to have been kept in mind.

The Land Commissioners, but from a different point of view, might have learned something from Parnell in this matter. They were, no doubt, harassed by the prospect of the task before them; but had they taken a certain number of 'test cases,' and investigated them as a Court of first instance, they would have laid down principles to be followed in the fixing of 'fair rent;' have explained these in well-considered judgments, going over the whole field of inquiry; and, so far as in them lay, have tried to do justice. Even if they had not adopted this course, one of their members, as the Act of 1881 provided, might have taken part for some time with their subordinates in the adjustment of rent; this would have been in accord with Mr. Gladstone's assertions that the Land Commission was to be the real arbiter of rent. Unfortunately the Commissioners acted quite otherwise; their conduct, palliate as you may, was an abdication of a plain duty, on the plea that they were overwhelmed by the work before them. Not one of them ever sat in a Court of first instance to fix 'fair rents;' they delegated this the most important of all their functions to their Sub-Commissions, to which they thus committed the charge of adjusting rent throughout the whole of Ireland. These Sub-Commissions formed Courts, each composed of three members, one a legal Commissioner and two laymen; the Sub-Commissioners were nominees of the Government, whether appointed on the recommendation of the Land Commission or not is not certain; the only qualifications for the legal Commissioners were that they should be barristers or solicitors of six years' standing, and for the lay Commissioners that they should have some knowledge of land. These were strange tribunals to deal with property worth hundreds of millions; but this was only a part of what must be called a scandal most discreditable to those responsible for it. The Sub-Commissioners, one and all, were much underpaid; their salaries were inadequate to secure fitting men; and, one and all, they were at the sufferance of the men at the Castle, liable to be dismissed at a moment's notice, and without the independence which is the best guarantee of justice. Some of the Sub-Commissioners, indeed, were only paid for the job, by the day; they had, therefore, a direct personal interest to reduce rents, in order to make work for themselves and to retain their places. Even in Ireland such tribunals were never set on foot, since Cromwell assembled his Courts of Claims to give their sanction to his huge forfeitures; that they were ever thought of is one of the many proofs of the disregard shown to property in land in Ireland. No wonder that it was significantly remarked: 'The whole spirit of our judicial institutions suggests that officers with such extensive powers should be selected with the greatest care and with reference to their possession of high qualifications, and that they should be placed in a position of independence, and should, so far as possible, be lifted above the suspicions that surround them.'

Sixty or seventy officials of this type--the number was afterwards largely increased--were thus, in the significant words of one, 'let loose over Ireland' to deal with estates; it is very remarkable that they have never received instructions from the Land Commission how to perform their duties. The procedure of the Courts of the Sub-Commissions was, under existing conditions, as well devised as could be fairly expected. The three Commissioners, who formed a Court, nearly always sate together, and heard the evidence brought before them as to what were 'fair rents;' the legal Commissioner decided questions of law; and, this evidence having been taken, the two lay Commissioners inspected the farms, the subjects of the previous inquiries, and having conferred with their legal colleague, determined with him what should be their 'fair rents.' This was the ordinary if not the universal practice; if some deviations have been made from it, these cannot be deemed of very great importance. Grave complaints have been made, in not a few instances, of the lay Commissioners, when engaged in examining lands; it has been said that they often neglected and 'scamped' their work; but these charges have been hardly, if at all, sustained; my own experience--and it is tolerably large--is that the Commissioners performed their functions with diligence and care, and sometimes gave proof of real knowledge of husbandry. But it was utterly impossible that tribunals of this kind, not composed of experts of a high order, dependent upon the breath of the Castle, without regulations to direct their conduct, and acting, without concert, in many districts, could adjust rent in a satisfactory way, and in conformity with true methods, especially as the work they had to do was excessive; indeed, they sometimes fixed 'fair rents' by dozens in a day. It was equally impossible that the Sub-Commissions--and to do their members justice they never made the attempt--could take into account all the manifold and far-reaching elements which enter into the question of 'fair rent,' and could set forth, in exhaustive judgments, the principles applicable to a most intricate problem. On the contrary, as a rule, and no doubt wisely, they avoided topics which might have tasked the highest judicial powers; they decided the cases before them summarily, and with little reflection, certainly without the protracted examination required to establish settled rules and doctrines. And the result has been that they disregarded, and even set at nought, a whole series of considerations, of supreme importance, with reference to the fixing of 'fair rent;' and, however unconsciously and innocently, they have been the authors, in the first instance at least, of the gravest injustice, and of wrong, done wholesale, to the landed gentry of Ireland.

To make this plain, let us glance back at the principles which assuredly ought to have been kept in view, in coming to sound conclusions on the subject of 'fair rent.' It will be seen that the Sub-Commissioners either gave little or no attention to these, or directly violated them in, perhaps, tens of thousands of cases. They have never attempted to establish some kind of standard, which would form a general measure of 'fair rent;' they have completely ignored the definition of Mr. Law, precise and most valuable as it was; they have treated 'Griffith's valuation' as though it did not exist; they have regarded the Report of Mr. Gladstone's Commission, declaring that Ireland was not excessively rented, as mere waste paper; they have apparently taken hardly any account of the well-known distinction between the low rentals of the great and old landlords, and the rack-rents too often exacted by purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts. So, too, it would seem, they have refused to consider the strong presumption that rents would be 'fair' if not raised during a long series of years, and if reasonably well paid, within that period; and they certainly have given no real weight, as an element in adjusting rent, to the agricultural progress made by Ireland since the Great Famine. Innumerable complaints have been made against their decisions as to the exemption of tenants' improvements from rent; but my belief is that they gave great attention to this subject; the wrong that has been done was owing to the difficulty of the law, and of its application to given cases; and the law, besides, was not, I think, just. On the correlative and most important question of the deterioration of farms through the default of tenants, they have hardly ever inquired into this; they have repeatedly done the landlords wrong; they have made grave and palpable mistakes; and in many instances they have made no allowances for the expenditure of landlords upon their estates. Having thus refused to follow the principles which ought to have been their guide, they have widely deviated in the actual fixing of 'fair rents' from rules and methods they should have observed and made effective. They have given too much weight to the class of evidence that was least important and most open to question; they have attached little and sometimes no value to the class of evidence by far the most trustworthy, and that ought to possess the greatest influence. This has especially been the case, as we shall see, with respect to the sums paid on the transfer of farms, the strongest possible indication that their rents must be 'fair,' on the ordinary principles of human nature, and giving the purchasers credit for the simplest common sense.

These are grave charges against quasi-judicial bodies; let us see if they are not completely justified. The Sub-Commissioners, I have said, have taken no heed of Mr. Law's definition of 'fair rent;' but they have acted as though they set it at defiance; they have ignored the principle of competition in fixing 'fair' rents. Unquestionably, as Mr. Law pointed out, a deduction should be made from a competition rent, regard being had to 'the tenant's interest,' that is, to his rights in respect of improvements, and perhaps to his rights on account of his tenure, a lease renewable every fifteen years, when a 'fair rent' is being fixed on his farm; but why the very idea of competition, that is, of market value, was to be excluded as an element in estimating 'fair rent,' is what men of common sense have never understood. This, in fact, was a portentous mistake, with consequences of a far-reaching kind; you might as well argue that because two partners had an interest in a fee simple estate, or two peasants had each a share in a cow, the price of the land or the cow was not to depend on what would be given for it at an auction mart or a county fair. Yet this was a position the Sub-Commissions have always taken; they have always insisted that competition had nothing to do with 'fair rent.' The evidence on this subject is conclusive; I can only take a few samples from the statements of a cloud of witnesses, who really seem to make a boast of their faith. Colonel Bayley, a Sub-Commissioner of large experience, has laid it down that the 'difference between a competition rent and the fair rent would be more than 20 per cent.; it would, I think, be more than that; there would be between 30 and 75 per cent. difference between the fair rent and the competition rent.' Mr. Roberts, another Sub-Commissioner, has deposed to much the same effect: 'Decidedly, I believe that if the land was put in the market it would bring 25 per cent. more than the rent I put on.' So, too, Mr. Bailey, a legal Sub-Commissioner, very much respected, has alleged: 'It would be most misleading to take the evidence of letting value in the neighbourhood, thus bringing in competition value, which we rigorously exclude in fair-rent cases.' Mr. Bomford, a well-known Sub-Commissioner, has said, in much the same sense: 'We do not take the competition rent, and cannot take it into consideration, when fixing what the fair rent should be. Then you utterly exclude, when you come to the fixing of the fair rent, the element of competition?--Yes, except in one matter, when we have town parks.'

Let us now see what distinctions, in fixing 'fair rents,' the Sub-Commissioners have drawn between landlords whose rentals were low and landlords whose rentals were really high; and how they have dealt with rents, paid for a long space of time, without having been raised; this is a fair index of the equity of their proceedings. It should be remarked, at the outset, that it soon appeared that rents had only been increased in comparatively few instances, going back over a series of years; yet, as a rule, nearly all rents were indiscriminately reduced. No attempt has been made, by any official of the Land Commission, to answer this damaging charge made, in 1897, at a judicial inquiry held upon the subject: 'The result of that calculation, the accuracy of which cannot be challenged, shows that, as the result of all the cases that were heard, in only 8 per cent. of them was any increase of rent for many years prior to 1881 proved. But whether the Sub-Commissioners are dealing with an estate on which for centuries the rents had remained unchanged, and on which the tenants had been fairly treated, or whether they were dealing with estates that had come into the hands of speculators by purchase in the Landed Estates Court, in all cases the average result was the same. They deducted something between 15 and 20 per cent. from the existing rent, no matter how long it had existed, and no matter upon what estate it was being paid.' This significant evidence, too, points to the same conclusion: 'There is nothing to justify the reductions that have been made in the rents of good landlords, who did not raise their rents in the good years. In fact, the landlords who did raise their rents got off a great deal better, at the hands of the Sub-Commissioners, than the good landlords who did not raise them.' And Mr. Lecky, a calm-minded observer, if there ever was one, has added these striking and pregnant remarks: 'The landlords who have suffered least have probably been those who simplified their properties by the wholesale evictions, the harsh clearances, that too often followed the Famine. Next in the scale come those who exacted extreme rack-rents from their tenants. These rents had been received for many years, and though they were ultimately reduced more than rents which had been always low, they still, in innumerable instances, remained higher than the others. The large class who regarded land simply as a source of revenue, and, without doing anything harsh, or extortionate, or unjust, took no part in its management, have suffered very moderately. It is the improving landlord, who took a real interest in his estate, who sank large sums in draining and other purposes of improvement, who exercised a constant and beneficent influence over his tenants, who has suffered most from the legislation that reduced him to a mere powerless rent-charger, and, in most cases, rendered the sums he had expended an absolute loss.'

The Sub-Commissions dealt with the subject of the exemption of tenants' improvements from rent, on the whole, as fairly, I think, as could be expected; and on the different questions of law that arose, appeals ran from them to the Land Commission, which usually investigated these cases at length. But this part of the law, really an excrescence on the Act of 1881, was unfair to the landlords, in the circumstances in which they were placed; they were confronted by innumerable and often obsolete and worthless claims, which they had only seldom the means of refuting; and if the demoralisation and false swearing under the Act of 1870 was bad, they were infinitely worse under the Act of 1881. A witty Irishman, indeed, once said that he could wish no severer punishment for Mr. Gladstone than to see him in a Sub-Commission Court listening to those wrongful statements; the mischief has, of course, been aggravated since the Act of 1896 has made the basis for the exemption larger and more ill-defined. The Sub-Commissions, I have said, were gravely in error, almost, as a rule, with respect to the deterioration of land, as an element to be considered in fixing rent; in this respect gross injustice has been done to landlords. There is scarcely any proof that, even in a single instance, the Sub-Commissioners valued land 'for fair rent,' as in its normal state; and yet, assuredly, this was what ought to have been done, if a premium was not to be put on misconduct, and because farms had been injured and exhausted in hundreds, throughout Ireland. The deterioration was usually of two kinds--wilful waste committed in order to work down rent, and passive waste caused by negligence and bad farming. Out of many instances, under the first head, I shall refer to one; the Sub-Commissioners usually gave little or no attention to wrongs of this kind; in this instance they enabled the tenant to make money by his own misdeeds; they reduced the rent nearly 30 per cent.: 'The dykes were full of stuff and choked, and the sluice-gate, which we had repaired at our own expense, was all choked up, and the water had been left on the land as long as it could stay on it. I complained and remonstrated with the tenant. I sent for Madden, and in Mr. Lyle's presence I stated this to him. His answer to me was that he was not such a damned fool as to have his land looking well when the Commissioners came to look at it.

'SIR E. FRY: Did that case come before the Sub-commissioner Court?--It did.

'Did you give evidence of what the tenant said?--Yes, sir....

'MR. CAMPBELL: I will tell you, sir, what they did.

As for passive waste, that is, the bad cultivation of farms, the proof is conclusive that it has been seldom, if ever, considered by the Sub-Commissions in fixing 'fair rents.' If we bear in mind that many thousands of acres in Ireland have been well-nigh destroyed by the burning done by tenants, and that hundreds of thousands have been run out by slovenly farming, the injury thus done to landlords has been enormous, especially as tenants' improvements have been exempted from rent against them; the 'candle,' it has been justly said, 'has been melted down at both ends.' I cite two instances, out of hundreds, of the injustice thus done; it has been proved over and over again that, in the case of two adjoining farms, in all respects of the same natural quality, the rent on that which was deteriorated was fixed at a much lower rate than the rent on that which was in good heart; in other words, the landlord was despoiled of the difference, and the tenant had the benefit of his bad husbandry. I take, almost at random, a case in Ulster: 'The Commissioners always value the land as they see it. I have two cases on my property in one townland. One tenant was an industrious, hard-working man, who had his farm in very good order. The second tenant, his wife had died, he was in poverty, with a lot of young children, and he himself was not quite "all there." These two holdings came at the same time before the Sub-Commissioners, and the rents were cut down in each case. When the thing was over, I said to Quinn, who was one of the tenants, "Are you satisfied with your reduction?" "How can I be satisfied," he said, "when my rent is at the same rate as Hurson's rent?" I looked at the return and saw he was quite right.... The deteriorated farm was cut down considerably more than the cultivated farm.' Another remarkable case occurred in the west: 'I had a case, I think decided this year; a farm that was divided between two sons fifteen or twenty years ago; the father divided the land before I came into the management of the property.

'Did they get an equal portion? was it divided into halves?--Into halves, and paid an equal rent.

'Before the Act of 1881?--Before the Act of 1881.

'And was the land of uniform quality?--Yes.

'Had one of these men, before he went into Court, greatly deteriorated the land?--Yes.

'Had the other attended to it?--He had attended to it; he looked after the land very well indeed.

'What reduction did the man who had deteriorated his half get?--The man who had deteriorated his half got 17-1/2 per cent, reduction.

'What did the other get?--The other got 7-1/2 per cent.

'The industrious tenant got 7-1/2?--He got 7-1/2.'

This was obviously gross and crying injustice; but two apologies have been made for acts of this kind. It is said that were a deteriorated farm rented as if it were in a normal state, the tenant could not afford to pay the 'fair rent,' in other words, the landlord is to be despoiled for the tenant's neglect. It is said again that the Sub-Commissioners are bound to value the land as they find it, and cannot estimate it at its intrinsic worth, that is, they are under no obligation to ascertain the truth, and do their duty. Yet this sophistry has been gravely put forward as a justification for palpable wrong, through which the property of landlords has been filched away wholesale: 'The land to this day has suffered a very serious deterioration in value; but we did not deal with that as against the present tenant ...' 'Have you frequently asked the Sub-Commissioners why they do not attach sufficient importance to deterioration?--No, but I heard them saying one reason was that if they put the rent of the farm as if it had been fairly treated, the tenant would not be able to pay that rent now in the deteriorated state.' The general result of these proceedings as regards exhausted farms has been thus described: 'My view with reference to deterioration is this. Bad tenants, who had ill-treated and worn out their land, undoubtedly, in my opinion, have obtained larger reductions than they would have got had they farmed well. Probably the reason is that were the Land Commissioners to put a rent on the land according to its natural capacity, before a deterioration, it would be an impossible rent for a broken-down bad tenant to pay. This stereotypes the rent in such cases at a figure unfairly low to the landlord; tends to lower the standard of fair rent generally; is a premium on bad farming; and places tenants under a serious temptation to ill-treat their land, so as to secure a larger reduction from the Land Court than otherwise could be obtainable.'

The Sub-Commissions appear to have disregarded the just rights of landlords in another important respect. Unquestionably, in the great mass of instances, as is inevitable when the land is held in small farms, the Irish tenant had made the improvements on his holding; but the landed gentry, as I have pointed out, had done a good deal since the Great Famine. There is nevertheless cogent evidence that, in 'fixing fair rents,' the Sub-Commissions took hardly any account of the expenditure of landlords under this head. In the case of the estate of the late Mr. Talbot Crosbie, one of the best breeders of prize stock in the Three Kingdoms, and a country gentleman of parts and intelligence, these significant facts were conclusively proved: 'Table E gives the cases of eight holdings upon which there was an expenditure by the landlord of ?1936?--Yes.

'The old rent was ?688?--Yes.

'That was reduced by the Sub-Commissioners to ?493?--Yes. A reduction of about 30 per cent.

'Notwithstanding the outlay by the landlord in the interval of nearly ?2000?--Yes, that is it.

'Table F is a list of eleven farms, on which there was practically no expenditure by the landlord?--Quite so, no recent expenditure. That is, between 1863 and 1887?--There was a good deal done in the famine time, but I did not take account of that.

'You had no evidence in these eleven cases of expenditure for many years prior to the fixing of the rent?--No. In these cases the old rents tot up to ?361?--Yes. And the reductions only brought them to ?280?--A reduction of 18 per cent.

'In other words, on the unimproved farms the reductions only average 18, while on the improved farms they went as high as 30 per cent.?--Quite so.

'SIR E. FRY: Were these two sets of farms different classes of farms?--They were practically of the same class.' In the same way, in the case of the estate of Lord Leconfield, a great and excellent landlord in the County Clare, the Sub-Commission made no real allowance for a sum of ?20,500 expended on twenty-seven farms. 'Am I right in saying that from 1852 to 1881 there was spent by Lord Leconfield ?20,500 in these twenty-seven cases?--The return speaks for itself. That is the result of it.' 'No. 4: As an example of the reductions of the Sub-Commissioners were the rents put back to what they had been in 1852?--Very nearly. There is a difference, I think, of about 1/2 per cent.?--About 1/2 per cent. The rent in 1852 was ?2524, and the judicial rents on these farms was ?2632.'

I pass on to the methods pursued by the Sub-Commissioners in actually fixing 'fair rents.' As I have said, they usually heard the cases at length in Court; they usually devoted attention to them. I do not think they set much store on the reports of valuers, on the part either of landlords or tenants; they formed their decisions, as a general rule, on the inspections made by the lay Commissioners of the lands they visited. This was a much better method, as I shall point out afterwards, than that adopted by their superiors; but obviously inspections of this kind made by officials without local knowledge of the farms, which they examined and valued, could not be a sufficient, or a satisfactory, way to fix 'fair rents.' The great error, however, made, in this matter, by the Sub-Commissions--and in this respect they had the countenance of the higher tribunal--was that they had little or no regard for the evidence which in adjusting rent was assuredly of the greatest importance. They rejected, we have seen, the principle of competition in adjudicating on rent; in fixing the 'fair rents' of holdings before them, they refused to consider the rents of the neighbourhood and of adjoining lands, that is, to consider the price of the market. Yet this was but a trifling compared to their capital mistake, one that, indeed, can hardly be explained: in investigating the subject of 'fair rent,' they would not take into account sums paid on the transfer of farms, that is, their tenant right, in other words, as an indication of what ought to be their 'fair rents.' If we bear in mind, as I have said before, that these sums were given subject to the existing rents, which always formed the first charge on the lands, it is most difficult to understand, as we have seen, how this circumstance did not create a very strong presumption that the rents in question must be 'fair' from the very nature of the case, assuming the Irish tenant to be a rational being. The sums paid for this tenant right were sometimes enormous, not uncommonly equal to one-third or one-half of the value of the fee; I illustrate my meaning from the evidence, taken with reference to the estate of Lord Downshire, one of the largest and best managed in Ulster: 'What would you say the tenants' interest would be worth on the Downshire estate?--Well, judging from the average prices obtained by tenants on transfers, my opinion is that the tenants' interest would be worth ?1,000,000.

'On the Downshire estate alone?--Yes.

'Now, could that value in the tenants, or that interest in the tenants, exist, unless the rents at which they were holding were low rents?--No, the prices of tenant right are incompatible with high rents. Does it in your opinion point to their being lower than the commercial rents?--Yes, they are lower.' And will it be believed that on this very estate, in the case of thirteen farms, held at the rents fixed by the landlords, the tenant right realised ?7296, and yet the Sub-Commission reduced the rents more than 20 per cent.? In other words, they declared that the old rents were not fair, though these lands, when transferred, fetched ?7296 paid by their purchasers, subject to the rents in question!

The Downshire was only one of many scores of estates in which the tenant right was exceedingly high, that is, the sums paid, at existing rents, on the transfer of farms, were very great, yet in all these instances this striking fact was not taken into account. It cannot cause surprise that, at a judicial inquiry held afterwards to review the subject, tenants' advocates endeavoured to exclude the evidence which, in the judgment of plain men of sense, affords almost a decisive indication as to whether given rents are 'fair.' It has been argued, however, that the price of tenant right, that is, the sums paid by incoming to outgoing tenants, on the sale of farms, at the current rents, ought to form no element in the fixing of 'fair rent;' it is only just to set forth the reasons. Mr. Bailey, the able legal Sub-Commissioner, referred to before, has explained them in this passage: 'Do you attend to tenant right in considering the fair rent?--No, we do not. The view we take of it is this. The tenant right paid for land is paid for something of an altogether different character from the rent of the land.... When a tenant sells his interest in his holding, he sells two things, first, the improvements on the holding, and secondly, his goodwill or share of the gross product of the holding.... When you put these two items together, viz. improvements and goodwill, it seems to me that the prices paid for tenant right are not at all remarkable. Then your view is that the price paid for tenant right throws no light on what the fair rent ought to be?--No, no light at all.' Mr. Bailey has added these significant words: 'The tenant does not buy at the rent which the tenement at present stands at, but he buys with a possible increase or reduction of the rent?--Quite so. And in latter years with the fall of prices he was buying with the expectation of a very considerable reduction?--Undoubtedly.'

The first of these arguments appears to me to be wholly irrelevant to the real question. Undoubtedly the tenant right of a farm represents the tenant's improvements and his interest in the land, and is completely distinct from the rent; and this is acquired on a sale by an incoming tenant. But the purchaser buys the tenant right, subject to the first charge, the rent; if the rent were excessive, or even high, either he would not buy at all, or he would pay a low price; when, therefore, we find the tenant right commanding very large sums, the conclusion is inevitable, that, taking human nature as it is, the rent must be in the nature of a 'fair rent.' The Sub-Commissions rejected a plain inference they ought to have drawn; that they refused to give weight to an all-important fact cannot be justified in any sense; and the result has been that in hundreds of cases they have done grave wrong to landlords. As for the second argument, it is very probable that in many instances tenants purchased farms in the anticipation of a reduction of rent; they speculated--a significant fact--that the Sub-Commissions would 'bear' the market; but even, on that supposition, this can hardly explain the huge sums paid for tenant right while the existing rents were current. For the rest, I refer to part of my own evidence given on this subject at the same inquiry; readers of ordinary intelligence may judge for themselves: 'The first question I ask the tenant is, "How much will you take for the land, ?100, ?200, ?300; ten, fifteen, twenty, or forty years' rent?" But I never can get an answer. They say, "Oh, your honour, I am here to look after a 'fair rent,' and I am not going to tell your honour what I am going to ask for the land." However, I have a very shrewd notion.... You take into consideration in fixing the fair rent the price paid by the tenants?--Yes, the price which an incoming tenant would give, because I am not one of those who think that the Irish tenant is a fool; and when I find an incoming tenant giving ten, fifteen, twenty, and thirty years' purchase for a farm, I have a very shrewd suspicion that the rent is right.'

It was under these conditions, and by proceedings of this kind, that the Sub-Commissions, bodies of ill-paid men, dependent upon the will of the Government, and constituted to give effect to a policy, were sent throughout Ireland to 'fix fair rents.' They had no assistance, we have seen, from the Land Commission; they often entertained very different views; but their uniform course was in the same direction; they indiscriminately abated rents, as they would abate a nuisance. In fact, they might have joined in the chorus of the doctors of Moli?re: 'Et saignare, et purgare, et clyst?riasaire;' they applied the same remedies to all their victims, and brought them nearly all into the same weak and low condition. But there was a right of appeal from the Sub-Commissions to the Land Commission; and this tribunal, certainly designed to have absolute power in the determination of rent, ought surely to have been expected to redress injustice. I approach a part of the subject on which the plain truth must be told, without making personal imputations of any kind. Appeals from the Sub-Commissions were numbered by many thousands; and, as I have said--an iniquitous provision of the Act of 1881--the decisions of the Land Commission on the subject of 'fair rent' was made final, at least as regards the rate of rent; there was to be no further appeal to a higher tribunal. I quote these significant remarks on this restriction: 'In an ordinary case, I need not tell you, sir, who are conversant with the procedure of Courts of Justice, a litigant, in a civil case, no matter how much the issue may be involved, has the right, if he thinks fit, of taking the case from one Court to another, until he reaches the highest tribunal of the land, the House of Lords. And as you know, there is a well-known case, which the House of Lords had to decide, in which the amount involved was one penny, an alleged overcharge on a railway ticket; but in these land cases, where there may be, and often is, a sum of ?200, ?300, or ?400 a year involved, because in some of the large farms in this country there have been reductions of ?300 and even of ?400 in the rent, under the Act of Parliament they cannot go beyond the Head Land Commission, upon any question of value. That is the Act of Parliament whether it be right or wrong. There it is, and I am not here to discuss the policy of the Act. But when a rehearing is given by the Act of Parliament to the Land Commission, and when the Land Commission are constituted the final judges in such large and important matters, it is obviously of great importance that the final rehearing should be full, and in every respect what the Act of Parliament says it is to be, namely, a rehearing.'

The Land Commission sometimes heard these appeals at length, though usually their proceedings were summary in the extreme. The Commissioners occasionally pronounced well-considered judgments, on the difficult questions of law that came before them, especially as regards the exemption of tenants' improvements from rent; in several instances the results were curious. The lay Commissioner now and then dissented from his legal colleagues; his plain common sense rejected theories in tenants' interests; his decisions were more than once confirmed, on these points of law, by the highest Court of Appeal in Ireland, a circumstance of no slight significance. Nineteen-twentieths, however, of these appeals were conversant only with the amount of 'fair rent,' as to which the conclusions of the Land Commission could not be challenged. The Land Commissioners undoubtedly heard these cases, and sometimes had much evidence brought before them; in tolerably many instances they varied the 'fair rents' fixed by the Sub-Commissions, if these variations were seldom important. But the Land Commission practically adopted, with scarcely a single exception, the errors of principle and the faulty methods which had marked the practice and the proceedings of the Sub-Commissions. They excluded the element of competition from the subject of 'fair rent;' they never attempted to define 'fair rent,' or to establish a standard by which to gauge it; they disregarded, to a considerable extent at least, the distinction between the rentals of the old and the new landlords; they paid little or no attention to the fact that rents had been paid for many years without an increase; they hardly ever took deterioration into account, or the expenditure made on their estates by landlords. And in the actual fixing of 'fair rents' they virtually followed in the wake of their inferiors; they rejected, as a rule, the evidence that was most relevant; they refused to consider the rents of adjoining or neighbouring lands, in a word, the price of the market, in determining rent; above all, they gave scarcely any heed to the enormous sums paid for the tenant right of lands, as an indication that their rents were 'fair.' On all these particulars, in a word, supremely important as they were, they almost said ditto to the Sub-Commissions; in these respects the appeals were well-nigh useless. It should be added that the animus of the head of the Land Commission was significantly exhibited on one striking occasion. When opening the proceedings of the Land Commission, Mr. Justice O'Hagan pointedly laid it down, that the object of the Act of 1881 was 'to make tenants live and thrive;' in other words, as Lord Salisbury indignantly remarked, to compel rent to gravitate to the level of the most indolent and worthless Irish peasant, and practically to discourage industry.

These considerations indicate, to some extent at least, the nature and especially the value of these appeals. But this was not all, or nearly all; there was a grave miscarriage of the simplest justice in this important province. Appeals, I have said, came in, in thousands; the work thrown on the Land Commissioners was immense; as one of their present successors remarked, 'If proper consideration' 'given to all the appeals you would' 'wanted ten Appeal Courts to do it;' as was said again substantially, 'Appeals would have crushed the Land Commissioners, had they not been crushed by them.' In this position of affairs, the Land Commissioners, no doubt with no bad or sinister purpose, adopted what must be called a device, to enable them quickly to dispose of appeals, nay, almost in a summary way. They were empowered, under the Act of 1881, to appoint 'independent valuers' to examine lands, and to report on the subject of their 'fair rents;' it was never contemplated that statements of this kind were to dispense with the duty of hearing appeals in detail, and pronouncing solemn judgments upon them; but, practically, the Land Commissioners, in the great mass of instances, when adjudicating on appeals, as regards 'fair rents,' almost wholly relied on the reports of these valuers, who, be it observed, were in no sense witnesses, and were not subject to examination on the part of the suitors before the Court. In a word, the Land Commissioners did not exclude other kinds of evidence; but unquestionably the dicta of the valuers, as a rule, determined the decisions they made on 'fair rent.' This expedient greatly accelerated appeals; but it reduced the right of appeal well-nigh to a sham; and this procedure was by many degrees more repugnant to justice than that of the Sub-Commissions. In an inquiry held before the House of Lords in 1882, an eminent member of the Irish bar remarked, 'It was the most unsatisfactory tribunal that I ever was before. What occurred was this: they took up the figures of the old rent, which we will say was ?100, and the valuation ?70, and the new rent ?80. Then they took up the valuer's report, which was a document concealed from the parties. It was entirely for the information of the Court, and they turned round to me, as the landlord's counsel, the landlord being the appellant, and said, "Can you go on with this appeal in the face of this document?" and they would show me the document.' And in the inquiry I have often referred to before, another distinguished lawyer has said, 'I have been in cases where, in order to overcome the difficulty, I marshalled a perfect phalanx of witnesses, for the landlord, but it was all no use. They listened to them, I admit,--they suggested that I was wasting time, but I am not stating they did not hear them,--but in the end, in the morning, the announcement was made that the judicial rent was confirmed.'

The first set of Land Commissioners passed away; they were succeeded by a second Land Commission, the president of which was Mr. Justice Bewley, an accomplished, if not a very eminent, lawyer. This Commission, like the other, was composed of honourable men; it is only just to remark that it was bound by the bad precedents made by the tribunal which it had replaced. The procedure of the Sub-Commissions was, in some degree, improved; but the methods of the second Land Commission differed for the worse where they differed from the methods of its predecessor. The Land Commissioners appear to have not at all regarded the general principles in fixing 'fair rent,' which ought to have had effect on their judgments; they gave less weight, than Mr. Justice O'Hagan, and his colleagues did, to the most important evidence, in this province, to which I have adverted before, and laid too much stress on the least important evidence. As has been truly remarked, 'We believe that much more attention was paid in the early days of the Land Commission to the remaining kinds of popular evidence than has been the case of late years; and we are assured by one of the head Commissioners that the Act of 1896 has made a great change in the fixing of fair rents by placing an emphasis on the technical evidence, and throwing the popular evidence into the background.' The Commissioners, too, followed the bad example of the first Land Commission, in the province of appeals; they practically disregarded almost everything but the reports of their valuers, unchecked statements made by men who were not even witnesses, were not sworn, and were not examined--a procedure worthy of the Council of Ten at Venice; as before, the result was that appeals were made all but fruitless, in the Court of which the decisions were, in this respect, final.

What amount of the rental of Ireland was unlawfully cut down owing to the theory of 'occupation right,' it is, of course, impossible to ascertain. Reductions of rent, too, were probably unjustly made through the ignorance of the Land Commission as to agricultural matters. I refer to a grotesque instance of this: 'You have marked a passage there in the judgment, which, according to you, shows that owing to their ignorance as experts they entirely mistook what six-course rotation meant?--Yes. The fact is they took it to be the same crop in the whole seventy acres, that instead of having so many different crops in this portion of the ground, it was to be put into one crop for the year, and that is what they call "rotation" in the Court of Rehearing.... It is plain enough, from the authorised report of the judgment, that they made that mistake?--It is clear as possible, and it was upon that that they threw me out. The tenant himself knew that it was all absurdity and mistake.'

A remarkable incident occurred in 1897 which threw a strong, if not a complete, light on the proceedings of the Land Commission and its Sub-Commissions in the adjustment of rent. In 1896 the time had come for renewing the first statutory leases, under the Act of 1881; the Commissioners suddenly made such enormous reductions of rent that persons who knew Ireland were simply astounded. The Irish landlords naturally were indignant; after some hesitation, and with plain reluctance, the Government gave its consent to a very imperfect inquiry. A Commission, presided over by Sir Edward Fry, a judge of the highest eminence, retired from office, and composed of four additional colleagues, two being well-known agricultural experts, was appointed to investigate the subject on the spot; but the scope of the inquiry was limited in the extreme; it was confined, in this respect, to examining the procedure and practice adopted in fixing 'fair rents;' it did not extend to the conduct generally of the Land Commission and its dependent tribunals. The Commission was engaged nearly three months in its task; it held its sittings in different parts of Ireland; it had before it 183 witnesses; and restricted as it was in this province, it pronounced, in grave and judicial language, a marked censure on the methods that had been followed in fixing 'fair rents' in Ireland. In fact, Sir Edward Fry and his colleagues confirmed, in many respects, the charges which I have made with regard to this whole system. No doubt they reported, in very guarded words, 'that they were unable to conclude that the machinery of the Land Statutes has been uniformly worked with injustice towards landlords;' but as they pointedly refused to rehear a single case, in which the Land Commission and the Sub-Commissions had fixed a 'fair rent,' this statement, ambiguous as it is, is of no real importance. In other particulars the expression of these opinions cannot be mistaken; to impartial minds it will appear decisive. They evidently thought that such wrong had been done to landlords owing to the want of a definition of 'fair rent,' that they actually framed a definition of their own, in order to establish some kind of standard; this did not widely differ from that of Mr. Law, which, I have said, would have made things very different had it been adopted. They pointed out that the Land Commissioners should have assisted the Sub-Commissions in fixing 'fair rents,' and should not have left them 'like ships without a rudder or a compass on a stormy sea;' it is 'a subject of regret,' they reported, 'that in the early days of the system the Land Commissioners were unable to take a part in the tribunals of first instance; and that the whole original business was left to Sub-Commissions.' They strongly condemned the nature of the Sub-Commission Courts, as being composed of members inadequately paid and mere tenants at sufferance; and they put forward an elaborate scheme to make the administration of justice in these tribunals more above suspicion. They evidently believed that the Land Commission and the Sub-Commissions did not give due weight to the class of evidence that was most important, and gave too much weight to that which was the least; and they made significant observations on this subject. On the whole, they arrived at the conclusion that the fixing of 'fair rents' 'gives opportunity for dissatisfaction, and leaves much more for improvement; ... and that the settlement of fair rents has been effected in an unsatisfactory manner, with diversity of opinion and practice, sometimes with carelessness, and sometimes with that bias towards one side or the other which exists in many honest minds.' But their strongest animadversion was found in the system, through which, I have said, the Land Commission really 'strangled' appeals, though in this province its decisions were final: 'An almost universal dissatisfaction is expressed with regard to these appeals, a dissatisfaction felt by some at least of the Commissioners themselves. No witness, with, perhaps, a single exception, spoke in favour of the existing system.'

Mr. Justice Bewley has retired from office, and has been replaced by Mr. Justice Meredith, a capable and experienced lawyer. He has done, probably as much as in him lay, to alleviate some of the wrong done to Irish landlords; and for this he has been subjected to violent abuse, especially on the part of an advocate of Ulster farmers, whose tongue is at odds with his trade in temperance. But he is bound by the precedents set by those who have gone before him; and though the work of the Land Commission is now better done than it was before the Report of the Fry Commission appeared, and its general procedure has improved, little change has been effected in the reduction of rent in Ireland. The Government, as I have pointed out in a preceding chapter, has made a few administrative reforms in the composition and the arrangement of the Sub-Commissions; but it has not taken a single step to give effect to the recommendations made by the Fry Commission, so far as these are of real importance; it has refused to legislate on the subject, and to bring in the measure that was required; it has even refused to set a further inquiry on foot. The general results of the labours of the Land Commission and of its subordinate tribunals in fixing 'fair rents' may be summed up in a very few sentences. According to the Report of the Fry Commission, the tenants of rural holdings in Ireland are about 486,000 in number; 328,720 of these have had 'fair rents' fixed, between August, 1881, and the end of March, 1900. The tenants, who have not had 'fair rents' fixed, are probably either tenants of lands not within the Land Acts, or 'future tenants' since 1881-82, or tenants too poor to pay law costs; but these, perhaps in nine cases out of ten, have indirectly had the benefit of the law, and have had their rents reduced like those of the large majority, by voluntary concessions on the part of landlords. The great mass of 'fair rents' has been fixed by the Land Commission and its dependents, and the proceedings of these tribunals have, beyond question, formed a standard for the adjustment of rent; whether 'fair rents' have been fixed by the County Courts, or by agreements between landlord and tenant, they have, in the main, conformed to the measure established by the Courts set up in 1881. The reductions of rent made, in every way, in the first statutory leases, were, on an average, rather more than 20 per cent. on the old rental; but those on the second statutory leases have been 22 per cent. more, that is, the fixing of 'fair rents,' so far as it has gone, has reduced rents rather more than 42 per cent. It may be asserted, with some confidence, that through the operation of the new Irish land code, taking in tenancies of all kinds, Irish rents have been cut down nearly 40 per cent.; little doubt can exist that they are now lower than they were in the day of Wakefield, and in some instances in the day of Arthur Young, when the price of Irish agricultural produce was less than half what it is at the present time.

This great fall in the value of the fee simple in the Irish land, and this great rise in the value of the tenant right, coinciding with the general fixing of 'fair rents,' distinctly point to a plain conclusion: the interest of the Irish landlord has been enormously reduced, a result never contemplated by the author of the Act of 1881. In truth, there has been little or no decline in the market price of land in Ireland; but property that ought to belong to the landlord has been improperly taken from him, and has been transferred to the tenant who had no right to it. Excuses, however, have been made for this wholesale abolition of rent; they are worthless, but may be briefly noticed. Ireland, it is said, is suffering, like England, from the agricultural depression of late years; and rents in Ireland have not been cut down more by the act of the State than they have been reduced in England by the voluntary acts of landlords. But agricultural depression in Ireland, a land of small holdings, and of pasturage, to a considerable extent, is not, by many degrees, as severe as in England, a land of large farms and largely of cereal culture; a signal proof of this is that, while in England, tenants have, in hundreds of instances, thrown up their farms, there has hardly been a case of the kind in Ireland, as appears from the Report of the Fry Commission. Besides, if agricultural prices have fallen in Ireland, compared to what they were, say, twenty-five years ago, they are higher than they were in the years, say, 1850-55, not to take into account the progress made by Ireland, in the last half-century, in crops, farm machinery, and the breeds of farming animals. As to the reduction of rents in England and Ireland, the supposed analogy completely fails. The rental of England rose greatly from 1850 to 1880; there was no corresponding increase in Ireland; there was thus a margin for reduction, in the greater island, which in the lesser did not exist. Again, no comparison can be made between State-settled Irish rents and English rents lowered by the voluntary acts of landlords. 'Fair rents' have practically been reduced for all time; the reduction of English rents is temporary, and can be at once annulled; this difference makes a supposed resemblance a very striking contrast. As to the argument that the Courts which have fixed 'fair rents' have been composed of honourable men, and that it is extremely invidious to make charges against them, mere leather and prunella may be brushed aside. No one disputes the honour of the Land and the Sub-Commissioners, but it does not follow that they have not done injustice; no one has disputed the honour of the Commission which carried out the Encumbered Estates Act, and yet it repeatedly sold estates at less than half their value.

The Irish landlords, I repeat, have been iniquitously despoiled; a huge confiscation has been made of their property. If the simplest right is to be done in this province, their claim to compensation has been rendered complete--apart from the utterances of Mr. Gladstone; should this be disregarded, Parliament will have been chargeable with a grave breach of faith, and a precedent will have been set from trampling on the just rights of property in the Three Kingdoms, which will be dangerous in the extreme. I pass on to consider the Irish land on the side of ownership, and the administration of the system of so-called 'land purchase.' Of the total of ?40,000,000 alone available, some ?20,000,000 appear to have been expended; some 50,000 tenants have been made owners of their farms, without having paid a shilling of their own, that is, rather more than one in ten of the whole tenant class in Ireland. The politicians who declared against 'dual ownership,' that bugbear of self-sufficient ignorance, can find little consolation in these figures; I shall comment afterwards on what this state of things has produced. The Government of Lord Salisbury still proposes to seek to accelerate 'land purchase' of this kind; and loud complaints have been made of the law's delay in not having made the process more speedy. I have had no experience in this matter, and shall, therefore, give no opinion on it; but it appears to me that there has been some want of care in making advances to these so-styled 'purchasers;' not a few were insolvent when they acquired their farms, and many are now on the verge of bankruptcy. This, however, was perhaps inseparable from the system that has been pursued; it is only an additional proof of its essential vices.

THE QUESTION OF THE IRISH LAND --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.'

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.

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