13 FEBRUARY 1886, Page 12

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

THE CREATION OF AN IRISH PEASANT- PROPRIETARY.

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Six,—Will you allow an Irish land agent of long experience, and holding upwards of twenty Land Agencies, some in the Protestant and more in the Roman Catholic districts of Ulster, to state his conviction that while there is nothing more desirable for Ireland than the creation of a large body of bona fide solvent peasant-proprietors, the real reason why there has been hitherto so few applications under the Land Purchase Act of 1885 is not to be found in any defect or shortcoming in that Act, but in the prevalence amongst the Irish tenants of wild hopes and beliefs in revolutionary political changes in the government of Ireland, or in further extraordinary concessions to be made at the risk of the British taxpayer ; and that until it is unmistakably shown, first, that England will never concede an independent Irish Parliament free to confiscate and proscribe as it pleases, and, second, that there is a limit to the extent to which England will pledge her national credit on the good faith and honesty of Irish tenants, there will never under any acheme be any substantial increase in the number of peasant-proprietors P

In support of my argument, I shall submit three proposi- tions, viz. :—(1), that the Land Purchase Act of 1885 offers extraordinary advantages to tenants wishing to buy out their landlords ; (2), that a very large number of landlords are willing and anxious to sell to their tenants, at prices and on terms which would confer on the tenants greater advantages than they could possibly secure by legal and legitimate meaus if they declined to purchase, and elect to hold on as tenants ; and (3), that the great majority of tenants do not hold back

from buying on such terms through bond -fide doubt of the advantages of the change, but through hopes of revolution or of " public plunder," or perhaps restrained by intimidation from giving any higher price than that sanctioned by the National League.

(1.) The advantages of the Act of 1883. Under the Land Act of 1870, a tenant buying his farm was obliged to pay down in cash one-third of the purchase-money, when the Government would advance him the remaining two-thirds at 5 per cent., repaying principal and interest in thirty-five years; and under the Act of 1881, the proportion of the purchase-money which the Government might advance was increased to three-fourths ; but under the Act of 1885, the Government may advance the whole of the purchase-money, repayable in forty-nine years, principal and interest, by instalments at the rate of 4 per cent., so that a tenant buying at twenty years' purchase would, without paying down a single penny of cash, obtain an immediate reduction in his judicial rent of 20 per cent., and -exchange his inextinguishable rent for a terminable rent-charge. Surely these are advantages which the most extreme of Irish agitators themselves never dreamt of asking for the tenants even five years ago !

(2.) There are, as a matter of fact, very many landlords willing to sell at twenty years' purchase, and leave the required fifth of the purchase-money as a guarantee deposit in the hands of the Land Commission, and there are not a few landlords willing to sell at eighteen or nineteen years' purchase; but yet, -except in a few instances, the tenants show no inclination to buy.

(3.) The objection to buy cannot be a purely financial and honest one, even taking the very gloomiest views of the future of agriculture. Take the case of two tenants, A B and C D, who have each had their old rents reduced from £125 to £100 as from November, 1881, under the Land Act of 1881, and to whom their landlord, E F, offers to sell at twenty years' purchase of the judicial rents of £100. There are only four years -expired of their statutory terms of fifteen years, and, therefore, if they decline to buy, they must pay the £100 rents for another eleven years, and their hopes must rest upon the further reduc- tion which they may obtain in the Land Commission Court at the end of the statutory term. But if A B buys, and C D refuses to do so, compare their position at the end of twenty years.

A B's yearly payment is at once reduced to £80, and at the end of the twenty years he will only have paid £1,600, and will be nearly half-way towards absolute ownership ; but C D will at the end of his statutory term have paid £1,100, and to enable him to save the amount of one year's rent in the twenty years as compared with A B, he mast obtain a further reduction in his judicial rent of no less than 55 per cent., or to 245. Does any honest, intelligent farmer really believe that the depression in agriculture will increase so enormously and continue so persistently, as to load any Court of Justice to further reduce judicial rents by more than half within eleven years from the present time ? Few ordinary Irish farmers would look beyond twenty years, but even looking forward thirty years, it would require C D to secure a further reduction of 37 per cent., or to £63, to save him one year's rent as compared with A B, who would at the end of the thirty years be within nineteen years of absolute ownership, while C D would be as far from it as ever.

I submit, then, that the grounds on which tenants in general are refusing to buy at twenty years' purchase are not bond fide; and as I have already trespassed at too great length upon your valuable space, I shall conclude for the present by asking leave to quote in your next issue a few instances out of the many which have come within my own experience of the extent to which the Act is rendered a dead-letter by the unsettled political and social state of the country, and also by the direct intimida- tion of the National League. I have not overlooked the fact that upon a tenant buying his farm he would become liable for the proportion of taxes now paid by the landlord ; but that would

not, as a rule, average more than 5 per ceut. on his rent, and may, therefore, be fairly enough placed as a set-off against the counter-advantage of exchanging a perpetual rent for a termin- able rent-charge, even if the latter was of equal amount with the