Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

than non-payment of rent. This Bill was thrown out by a large majority.¹⁷

It is probable that the Act of 1870 would have been more successful if it had been less ambitious, and had aimed at a smaller number of objects. The difficulty, however, of the task was extremely great, and much allowance must be made for the statesmen who framed it. The two features of the old Irish land system which made the position of the Irish tenant most precarious were the general absence of leases, and the custom of the tenant, not the landlord, making most improvements. Neither of these points was, in most cases, a matter of much dispute between landlord and tenant. Those who are best acquainted with the conditions of Irish land before the recent legislation will I believe, agree with me that the majority of smaller tenants preferred a yearly tenancy, which was rarely changed, to a definite lease, which usually involved stricter covenants, and was likely when it expired to be followed by a revaluation and rise of rents; and that they preferred making their improvements in their own economical, and generally slovenly, way, rather than have them made in the English fashion by the landlord, who compensates himself by adding a percentage to the rent. If the rent is sufficiently low, and the tenure sufficiently long to compensate the tenant for his outlay, there is nothing in this system that is unjust; nor is it unjust that, after the tenant has been so compensated, the land should be rented according to its improved value. But it is easy to understand how this custom strengthened that notion of the joint ownership of the soil which had such a deep root among Irish ideas. In many of the poorest parts of Ireland the cabin built by the peasant, the clearing of stones, and the erecting of fences, constituted much the greater part of the value of the farm. These little farms of barren land were, indeed, essentially unsupporting. They furnished the small tenant with shelter and with potatoes for his subsistence. His rent, which was usually not more than about 4l. a year, and very irregularly paid, was earned sometimes by fishing, more frequently as a migratory labourer, and often by harvest-work in England or Scotland.

In the fertile districts the conditions were different and very various. Probably the greater number of the original improvements had been made under the old system of very long leases at very low rents. In many cases the erection of certain buildings was expressly stipulated in the lease, and was one of the elements in regulating the price. A great part of the cost of drainage which has been made under Government loans has been paid by the landlords, and in very many cases they have contributed a proportion to the cost of buildings; but, as a general rule, the improvements were made by the tenant, under the belief that he would enjoy his tenancy for a sufficient time and at a sufficiently low rent to compensate him for them. The immense deterioration of Irish land through bad and wasteful farming forms, however, a considerable offset against these improvements.

      That rents in Ireland before 1870 were not in general extortionate, and were, indeed, much below the competition value, is abundantly proved.¹⁸ It is proved by the fact that wherever tenant right was permitted this right of occupation sold for a large sum; by the fact that wherever subletting was permitted the tenant almost invariably let the whole, or portions of his tenancy, at much higher rents than he paid. It is proved by the evidence of men of the greatest authority on Irish land, such as Judge Longfield and Master Fitzgibbon, and by the direct testimony of the Bessborough Commission in 1881, which, after a long and careful investigation, arrived at the conclusion that in Ireland it was unusual to exact what in England would have been considered as a full and fair commercial rent.’¹⁹ It is proved by comparison with English and with foreign rents, and by the slow increase of Irish rents, as compared both with the prices of the chief articles of agricultural produce and with the increase of rents in other parts of the kingdom. Arthur Young, in his day, considered the rents paid in Ireland to the owner of land unduly, and often absurdly, low; and in bringing in the Land Bill of 1870, Mr. Gladstone stated that, in the ninety years that had elapsed since Arthur Young wrote, the rents of Ireland had just doubled, and, if Ulster were excluded, had much less than doubled, while in ninety-eight years the rental of England had trebled, and in ninety-nine years the rental of Scotland had sextupled.²⁰ If we take a shorter period, and a period of great prosperity, we shall come to much the same conclusion. Mr. Caird, who is one of the best modern authorities on agriculture, computed that in the seven years before 1869 ‘the land rental of England has risen 7 per cent., that of Scotland 8 per cent., while that of Ireland appears in the same time to have advanced, from its lowest point, not more than 51/2 per cent.’²¹ Taking Ireland, indeed, as a whole, it is probably the portion of the United Kingdom in which the benefit of the great rise in the price of agricultural produce in the third quarter of the nineteenth century has fallen most largely to the labourers and tenants, and in the smallest degree to the landlords.²²

But although it is not true that Irish rents were in general unduly high, it is true that the position of the great body of the Irish tenants was utterly precarious; that in three provinces of Ireland many causes had conspired to break down the good feeling between landlord and tenant which was essential to a sound agrarian state; and that cases of gross oppression and extortion, though they were a small minority, did exist, and were not infrequent. Subletting, it is true, had much diminished, and with it the chief cause of extravagant rents. No fact is more clearly stamped upon every page of Irish agrarian history than that men of the farmer class have always been far harsher masters than men of the gentleman class; and in these latter days there have been instances of tenants holding at very moderate rents under the landlord, and actually having their rents reduced by the Land Court, at the very time when they were themselves extorting for portions of the same land extreme rack rents from their labourers. To no spot of the globe, indeed, is the parable of the servant who, having been forgiven his debt by his own master, exacted the last penny from his fellow-servant, more applicable than to Ireland.

But among rents paid to the actual owner of the soil two classes were often extortionate. There were small properties in the hands of men of narrow means, either of the trading or farming classes, and there were tracts—often extensive tracts—which had been bought by speculators under the Incumbered Estates Act, usually with borrowed money. There were cases in which the purchasers at once sought, by extensive clearances and greatly raised rents, to recoup themselves for their outlay. In the sale of these estates the tenants had usually been unprotected by lease. The law under which the estates had been sold recognised in them no right in their improvements, and rents were sometimes raised, in estates which had derived most of their value from recent tenants’ improvements, in a manner that was positively fraudulent. The purchaser thought only of his legal rights. He knew nothing and he cared nothing about the history of his property.²³ Sometimes, too, on older estates, particular farms might be found rented at a strangely higher rate than those around them. The explanation is, usually, that these rents had formerly been paid to a middleman, and had not been revised when the middleman was removed.

      The Act of 1870 had many merits, but it admitted, as I believe, a dangerous and dishonest principle. The Act of 1881 appears to me one of the most unquestionable, and indeed extreme, violations of the rights of property in the whole history of English legislation. In order to realise its character it is only necessary to remember that before the legislation of Mr. Gladstone the ownership of land in Ireland was, like that in France and in America, as absolute and undisputed as the ownership of a house, or a horse, or a yacht. The Incumbered Estates Act, and all the proceedings connected with it, brought this fact into the clearest relief. It had been the policy of the Whig Government, supported in its day by the loud applause of the Liberal party, to place landed property in Ireland on the strictest commercial basis. The measure was carried in 1849, at a time when Ireland was reduced to the lowest depths of misery by the great Famine, and when the newly imposed poor law in many cases equalled, in some cases even exceeded, the whole valuation income of an estate, and it was pressed on by the Liberal party with extreme harshness, to the ruin of countless landlords and creditors.

      By this Act, at a time when Irish land had sunk to a mere fraction of its normal value, the first incumbrancer of an estate, or any other creditor who believed that the estate would fetch a price large enough to meet the payment of his own demand, might force the estate by a summary proceeding, and before a newly constituted court, into the market, utterly regardless of the interests of the other creditors and of the owner. Every creditor except the petitioner who was forcing the sale was at liberty to bid; and even the petitioner,