BOOKS.
MR. CHARLES RUSSELL ON IRELAND.* Ma. Russrm, has republished the letters addressed by him to the _Daily Telegraph on the condition of Ireland, in a small, clearly-printed. volume, They will not take two hours to read, and they should. be studied by every one who desires to understand the existing crisis in Ireland. An Irishman by birth and a Liberal in political principle ; a trained and experienced lawyer, who has made a specialty of laud claims, and that in the North of Ireland; a solicitor who built up a great business, and then a barrister who has been named for the English Solicitor- Generalship, Mr, Russell employed some recent leisure in a close examination of the condition of Kerry, where for long years it has been notorious that, while the people are poor, outrages have been infrequent ; and the result is an utter condemnation of the existing system of land- tenure. It is impossible to read Mr. Russell's account, and the rejoinders on behalf of Lord Lansdowne, which are with great fairness included in the volume, without seeing that in Kerry, at least, all confidence between landlord and tenant has disappeared, that the two classes hate and dread one another ; that the landlords and their agents take advantage of every opportunity to raise rents, while doing com- paratively little, as judged by the English standard, for their estates ; and that the tenantry who make up the body of the people live lives of terror and suspicion fatal to social security, to comfort, and even to industry. So great is the landlords' power, and so abject the submission of the people, that Mr. Russell declares it to be the custom on the Lansdowne estate to make the tenant acknowledge a year's rent which he does not owe. The statement is so extraordinary that we give it as we find it :—
"One extraordinary institution prevails on this estate, not only on the Kenrnare, but also on the Calirciveen portion of it,—namely, what is called the hanging two gales, or hanging year's rent. At first, I supposed that this merely meant that instead of the hanging gale, or half-year, which is common on Irish estates, carelessness or liberality had suffered this to be increased to two hanging half-years. But I found this was not so. I found it dated back to the pro-famine years, and that, while treated as non-existing so long as the tenant continued to pay the accruing gales, the hanging year was used as an engine of terrific power in the hands of the agent where the tenant fell in arrear. It is difficult to understand this, and I was slow to believe it ; but over and over again, and in all directions upon the estate, I was informed that this outlying year counted for nothing, and dated back to a time older than many of the inhabitants. They added that, although it counted for nothing so long as the accruing rent was punctually paid, it did count for much if the rent was half a year in arrear, for that then, and then only, was the dormant year brought forward as the basis on which an ejectment was founded, and by which (it is not too harsh a word to use) the screw was applied to the tardy-paying tenant. More than one instance was cited to us of cases where an ejected tenant, whom the agent did not desire to continue on the estate, was not allowed to redeem, except upon pay- ment of this stale demand; whilst if the tenant were not obnoxious to the agent, no such demand was made. I confess I was incredulous for n long time, until I was informed by the Rev. Mr. M'Cutcheon, Protestant Rector of Kenmore (himself a sturdy Northern), that when he succeeded to the incumbency of Kenmare, upon paying his first gale of rent, he looked at hie receipt, and to his surprise found that it was dated a year back. Ho was thus made to appear not only to be owing a year's rent, but to be paying for a period when, in fact, ho was not in occupation. He complained of this, and received for his comfort the assurance of Mr. Trench that it was a mere matter of form,—that it was the custom of the office."
The object is, of course, facility of eviction. The Kerry landlord can and does raise rent, whenever he can, often most oppres- sively, till there is nothing left for the cultivators except a bare subsistence, of which from year to year they never feel secure. The tenants, feeling that improvements would tend to a rise of rents, fail to make them, till in many places the population con- sists of half-fed, half-clothed cottiers, living in houses which in England would be huts,—an existence scarcely above, if it is above, that of the uncivilised races of the East, and embittered by a sense that the misery comes from unjust treatment. This state of affairs, in an island where the laud is almost the only means of living, constitutes a social danger of which agitators have taken advantage to produce a social war such as we now see raging over half the kingdom. For each assertion Mr. Russell pro- duces page upon page of evidence,—instances of suffering which he saw with his own eyes ; and, though he may be considered too favourable to the debtor—too much inclined to believe that a creditor is morally bound to be "lenient," whereas he is only
* New Vince on Ireland. By Charles Russell, QC., M.P. London Macmillan.
morally bound to be just—the general accuracy of the impres- sion he leaves cannot be denied. It is on the face of the facts, and is one of the most painful kind. The tenant is too powerless. to be " free " in making his contract, and, consequently, makes one too severe to allow of his raising himself above virtual serfage, This contract is not enforced usually to its full ex- tent, but the menace of enforcing it is employed so as to extract from the tenants the very utmost they can be made to pay, often more than, on an average of good y ears and bad years, the land will bear.
In a country like Ireland, where the people desire laud with passion, have no available second resource, except emigration, and hold that the landlords' rights began either in conquest or confiscation, and are therefore unjust, such a system is incon- sistent with social safety ; and Mr. Russell proposes a radical reform, which, like his descriptions, deserves attentive study. It will strike most English readers as too violent, but it has, at least, two merits. It shows how desperately bad a system must be which provokes a hard-headed lawyer of unrivalled experi- euce, who is practising in England, not Ireland, to suggest such a remedy; and it would be, as most suggested reforms would not be, final. Mr. Russell would by a legislative Act turn all Irish tenants into copyholders, or, as he calls them, occupying- proprietors, possessing all the powers of owners, but paying a quit-rent, to be fixed once for all by a Land Commission. And he would permit any tenant who offered the landlord or the Commission twenty-five years' purchase of this quit-rent to become the freeholder, whether the landlord liked, it or not. Any failure to pay the rent would be visited by an order from the Court to sell the holding. He would not allow revaluations, which would keep up the existing insecurity, but would allow the expropriation money to be paid in instalments to the Commis- sion at the tenant's discretion, the Commission giving the owner the whole price in guaranteed bonds. We need not dis- cuss this latter clause, to which Parliament is almost certain not to listen, as it would make the State owner of a vast por- tion of the soil, but Mr. Russell lays great stress on this portion of his plan, which is in itself a variation on Mr. Bright's scheme. We need for our present purpose only point to the fact that Mr. Russell's scheme is really to fix a standard of rent once for all, to grant the "three F's" on that standard, and to compel the landlord on the tenant's demand to sell to the tenant at twenty-five years' purchase, expressed in three per cent, guaranteed bonds. He would extinguish landlordism by purchase, The scheme, though it involves no confiscation, and would be acceptable to many landlords, is too broad for acceptance by a Parliament of landowners living under other conditions, and is open to the obvious objection that if prices fall, the tenant might be unable to pay the awarded rout, when evictions would at once recommence; but Mr. Russell evidently trusts it fully. He believes that the tenants could and would buy, often with help from America ; that the rent, while it lasted, would be paid ; and that subdivision would not be excessive. The pru- dence which conies of property would, he believes, prevent that. Nor does he think the revolution would reduce society to a drill level of small peasant-proprietors. The scheme is applicable to all tenants who have holdings of very different size, and it would increase rather than diminish the temptation of land- lords to live in Ireland, by terminating the social warfare, and the bitter hostility between the poor and the rich, The scheme, indeed, "would have least operation in the case of what are called good and liberal landlords, and most in the ease of what are called bad and harsh landlords. The Act of 1870 operated, in part in just the opposite fashion, for Section 3 gives compensation for disturbance for the loss sustained by the tenant by disturbance, so that where the terms were fairest, the loss was greatest ; and where the terms were hardest, the loss was smallest In other words, the liberal landlord, was liable to pay more more than the illiberal one."
It is not our business to advocate or to repudiate a plan thus suggested. We only desire to call attention to it, as an essential contribution to the literature of the subject. Mr. Russell, though very brief, gives quite sufficient detail, and his book is entirely free from that defect of strong writing which marks so much of
Irish prunphleteering. Its great failure as a book is that it never touches upon the result to follow the acceptance of
such a scheme. Suppose the landlords bought out, and the tenantry, whether mortgaged or not, become freeholders, what is to be the new principle governing landed property P Are
the new proprietors to be absolute owners, capable of making any contract they like ; or are any new tenants of tenant-pro- prietors to be able to appeal to a Court to fix their rents and to expropriate the new owners, or are they liable to eviction ? If the former, as we suppose, is to be the principle adopted, where is the guarantee that the subtenants will not be more miserable than the tenants were ; while if the latter, how is it to be worked ? Is a tenant-proprietor never to be able to part with his interest except by sale of his holding ? Suppose he wauts to go to America, to seek his fortune ? Must he sell P Or if he lets, must he put it out of his power for ever to reclaim hfs home ? The Indian method is to acknowledge no tenaucy that is not perpetual, but the well known effect of that is to load the land. with middlemen, sometimes eight deep, each of whom holds in perpetuity, and each extracts some sort of profit-rent, however small, from the man just below, the .actual cultivator having in the end to support all. If ever this volume is republished, a short, clear chapter should be added upon this point ; but mean- while, all who are discussing schemes for Ireland. should ponder this one, the most radical yet proposed, except that of the Statist, which is the complete purchase of Ireland by the State, with resale to tenants.
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