By far the beat speech made against it on Thursday
was Lord Derby's. He made a good rhetorical point by asserting that it was absurd to enforce kindness on landlords by law, but his main argument went to prove that the result of the Bill would be the expulsion of small tenants. It exempted all tenancies above 100 acres from its own provisions, thus offering a bonus on clearances, and it so fixed the rates of compensation that the larger the farm the less there was to pay for eviction. He did not, however, con- sider this result an unmixed evil. The answer to that objection is clear. If the landlord wishes to get rid of his tenants he can do it now. The new law only makes eviction a little more difficult. If, therefore, consolidation does not pay him now, when it is legally unpunishable, it will not pay him then, when it is subject to a fine and stands condemned by the Legislature as an unfair act. Another objection, that the Act relieves the evicting landlord of a certain moral coercion enabling him to evict easily if he pays the fine, is much more true, but then it also relieves the tenant of his impulse to vengeance. Lord Derby forgets, as did most of the Peers, that the object of the Bill is not to foster this or that system of cultivation or this or that stratification of society, but to content the people of Ireland.
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