TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EVICTED TENANTS' COMMISSION.
IRELAND is seldom fortunate either in her Revolu- tionary or in her Constitutional party. She has been specially unfortunate in the opening of Mr. Morley's Commission. Sir James Mathew, the President of the Commission, commenced its proceedings in the spirit of a partisan, anticipating judgment on one of the Irish land- lords which was quite improper before any evidence had been taken or sifted, even though the judgment should ulti- mately have been justified, and he certainly misstated, and misstated greatly, both the drift and meaning of the clause in the Land Act of 1891, the alleged failure of which is the excuse for the appointment of this Commission. On the other hand, the Irish landlords were very unfortunate in their representatives. Mr. Car- son, Mr. Kenny, and Mr. Moore, who appeared on their behalf, were not in the least justified in assuming that they ought to be allowed to cross-examine the witnesses of the tenants, as if that Commission had been a Judicial Court proceeding on the same principles as the Parnell Commis- sion. That has not been usual in Commissions of investiga- tion of this kind, even when much graver questions of misconduct were at issue than any which are even alleged in the present case. In the Birmingham Gaol inquiry (that on which the late Mr. Charles Reade founded one of his novels), the method pursued was that directed by Sir James Mathew in this case, that all questions suggested by Counsel should, in the first instance at least, be put through the President of the Commission, if, in his opinion, the questions were properly framed, and of a kind to aid in eliciting the truth. For Mr. Carson and Mr. Kenny to fly into a passion and shake off the dust from their feet as they did, because they were not allowed to cross-examine the tenants' witnesses, was a very im- proper proceeding. It would be highly inconvenient if every Commission of Inquiry were to be bound by a strictly judicial code of procedure. It would lengthen out inquiries of this sort to an intolerable degree, and involve a great accumulation of thoroughly irrelevant interrogatories and evidence. The only objection which we feel to Sir James Mathew's statement of his intended procedure, is his admission of reporters to publish all the un- answered and unsifted evidence brought forward by the friends of the tenants for days, and, perhaps, even weeks, before any answer can be given to it by the landlords. Surely the Commission should have sat with closed doors, instead of allowing all the heavy charges which might be brought against the landlords to go forth to the world days before their defence could be heard. Considering the very angry feelings which all these ex pane statements excite, care should, we think, have been taken not to circulate the charge without the answer to it. Nor should Sir James Mathew, after his very strong condemnation of Mr. Carson and Mr. Kenny, have allowed Mr. William O'Brien, without rebuke, to interrupt the proceedings of the Commission with the remark to Mr. Carson : "You are not in a Coercion Court now." The whole tenor of the first day's proceedings was very ominous for the Com- mission. It appears to us to show that the President allows himself to speak like a partisan, that the repre- sentatives of the landlords are acting like partisans, and that the representatives of the tenants are acting like partisans too. Peace is certainly not likely to be the issue of such scenes as that of Monday in Dublin.
Sir James Mathew showed his bias plainly enough by speaking of the "Plan of Campaign" as if it were a mere "combination to lower rents." A combination to lower future rents has always been perfectly lawful in Ireland, and is perfectly lawful now. The "Plan of Campaign" was a combination not to pay a rent already contracted for, and, indeed, to pay it when it was ready into a campaign fund, instead of to the landlord to whom it was due, in order that the landlord might be compelled to lower his rents all round alike to those who can afford to pay them and to those who cannot. Chief Baron Panes has twice declared the "Plan of Campaign" to be an illegal con- spiracy, and for Sir James Mathew to speak of it as a mere union intended to affect the rents of the future, at once marks out his speech as the speech of a partisan. Further, he declared that the 13th Section of the Land Act - of 1891 was intended to express the mind of Parliament that there was nothing in the tenant's having given in his adhesion to the 'Plan of Campaign" which should strike that tenant out of the category of persons who, though they had lost their tenancy by lawful eviction, are quite fit to be reinstated as tenants. Now there was, as Mr. Balfour has. pointed out, no intention at all in that section to reinstate the evicted tenant as a tenant. It permitted the land- lord, if he were willing to do so, to sell him his holding on the same terms on which he might have sold it to him had he still been his tenant. But that was not to reinstate him, and it was a purely permissive provision. Of course there are plenty of mere dupes in Ireland who have been the victims of the agitators, and who did not at all appreciate bow great a wrong they were doing. It was perfectly right that a landlord who knew them to belong to this class. should be enabled, as this section enabled him, to close his relations with the evicted tenant by selling his holding to him under the security afforded by the rates of his neigh- bours. There was nothing to compel a landlord who did not think his tenant a dupe, the victim of others, but who thought him a willing and open-eyed conspirator pledged to break a lawful contract which he was quite able to per- form, to sell his holding to such a man. In fact, the moral character of the criminal conspiracy entered into was left open to investigation, and there was nothing in the world to show that Parliament intended to give any absolution at all to any individual tenant for the conspiracy into- which he had been induced to enter. All that was per- mitted was that the landlord, on his own discretion, might sell him his holding if he thought it right, wise, and prudent to do so.
It was most unfortunate that the head of a Commission which was, as it was supposed, appointed expressly to examine the circumstances which had prevented this clause from being effectively worked except in a few cases, should have begun by assuming that there was nothing in> adherence to the "Plan of Campaign" which unfitted the- evicted tenant at all for reinstatement,—a course never even contemplated. It is quite one thing to say that a man may be allowed to agree to pay his landlord for his holding on the security of his neighbours' credit, if there is nothing to render that arrangement undesirable in the landlord's eyes, and quite another to promote his reinstate- ment in a relation of which he had deliberately broken the covenants. The power actually given by the Act did not in any way reflect on the landlord for evicting him. If Parliament had absolved him, or rehabilitated him as a tenant, it would have reflected more or less on his evic- tion by his landlord for a criminal conspiracy ; and this was not in the least degree the purport or intention of the Act. Sir James Mathew has, in our opinion, given. the landlords as a class reasonable ground of offence by the erroneous assumptions which he made, both as to the intention of Parliament and as to the true character of the "Plan of Campaign," and also by his hasty attack on• Lord Clanricarde, before any evidence had been taken on his case.
On the other hand, as we have already said, the attitude of the landlords' advocates towards the procedure of the Commission cannot, in our opinion, be in the least justified. Commissions have sat before this which were not em- powered to take evidence on oath, which were not intended to follow the rules of a court of law, and which, neverthe- less, did very seriously concern the character of several persons of standing and repute ; nor has there been any denunciation of them, such as Mr. Carson and his colleague launched at the head of the Commission, for turning the investigation into "a farce and a sham." If the questions Mr. Carson had suggested, by way of cross-examination of the witnesses, had been relevant, and reasonable questions, and if the head of the Commission had repeatedly refused to put them, then, no doubt, there would have been some excuse for such language. As it was, there was none. The bitterness of party feeling has again vitiated in Ire- land, as it so often does, an investigation which might, if candidly conducted, have had some good results. Neither party can put off the fierceness of its partisanship. Neither party can see any unreasonableness or fault in its own assumptions and proceedings. And investigations conducted in such a spirit can hardly end in any right and peaceful issue. Investigation in Ireland is only too apt to end in new and more serious quarrels.
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