IRISH LAND TENURE. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE "EPBOTATOR-1 SIR,—Mr.
Bence Jones, in his letter published in the Spectator of March 31, has most successfully maintained that Ireland needs its landlords ; that it would be destroying a valuable element of society if they were changed into mere powerless rent-chargers, as the extreme advocates of the tenants' claims would do. But it does not follow that the tenants have no case for an amendment of the Land. Act of 1871. I believe the right solution would be that which I formerly advocated in the Spectator, namely, to give to a tenant evicted by his landlord the same action for damages as if he were evicted by a railway company. An Act embodying this single principle would be in effect the same as the Act of 1871, relieved of its complications and carrying its intentions more completely into effect.
The worst feature in the Land Act of 1871 is that it fixes a limit to the amount of compensation that can be received for mere "disturbance," and fixes it relatively lower the larger the farm. This is giving landlords, artificially, a pecuniary induce- ment to consolidate farms as opportunity offers. Consolidation of farms may be desirable, but it cannot be right for Parliament to set a bonus on the process.
Permit me to point out a strange irrelevancy in Mr. Bence
Jones's letter. He argues that the Irish farmers must be short of capital, because they have only about fifteen millions sterling deposited in the banks, being scarcely a pound an acre. They ought to have no money in the banks at all. All this money ought to be employed in the cultivation of the land, and the former system—not the present system, but that which was ended for ever by the Act of 1871—is condemned by the fact that with the land undrained, impoverished, and foul with weeds, the- tenants have preferred to keep this money in the banks at little- more than a nominal rate of interest, instead of employing it in• the improvement of the land. It is needless to debate whether this is due to insecurity of tenure, as maintained by the advocates of the tenants, or to ignorance and apathy, as maintained by the advocates of the landlords. Apathy and ignorance are naturally the effects of insecurity. And if the tardy and imperfect justice of the Act of 1871 has not at once made Irish farmers skilful and energetic, this is only like emancipated slaves not knowing what to do with their freedom at first.
Mr. Bence Jones, and hundreds of others, speak of the defi- ciency of capital in Ireland. This is true, but scarcely relevant.
Abundance or scarcity of capital is not a fact of the same class with fertility or barrenness of the soil. France must have been well drained of wealth in 1815, and less than sixty years later the world was astonished by the facility with which France paid an indemnity that would have strained the means of any other country in the world. Whence did this wealth come, if not from the industry and frugality of the French people ?—I am, Sir, &c.,.
JOSEPH JOHN MURPHY..
Old Forge, Dunmurry, County Antrim, April 9.
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