LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE LIBERALS AND THE IRISH BILL.
[TO Tea EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.")
regret very much the attitude assumed by a section of the Liberal party towards the Compensation for Disturbances The difficulty of carrying out the law in the distressed dis- tricts of Ireland during the coming autumn and winter, under any circumstances, must be great. It is doubled by the fact that the Home-rule agitation makes it difficult to discriminate between a refusal to pay rent and a real inability to pay it. It has been still further increased, I fear, by the way in which the -opponents of the Bill have magnified and distorted its meaning. That injustice would be done by carrying out, in all cases, the law as it stands, is manifest. For ejection without adequate -compensation, whether it means turning the tenant out of -doors or putting him back as a caretaker, means, undoubtedly, an extinction of the tenant-right which the Act of 1870 ac- kuowledgedto exist. And wherever the value of this tenant-right may exceed the arrears of rent-ejection without adequate com- pensation obviously means the confiscation of the remainder. 'To carry out the law, as it stands, to the letter in every case, and in this exceptional time of distress, would, therefore, clearly be contrary to its spirit and unjust in itself. Does any one in sober judgment believe that it is the duty of a Government to allow the law to work injustice under exceptional circumstances like the present, without trying to prevent it? Does any one believe that it is true policy to en- force provisions which work injustice in Ireland at the present moment ? It may be a difficult thing to do, but the attempt surely is laudable, to search out by judicial authority the cases of real inability, and in these cases to acknowledge the just value of the tenant's interest in his holding, to make the arrears of rent the first set-off against it, and if there be a residue, to secure the tenant from its needless confiscation. This, I take it, is exactly what the Bill tries to do. But the hue-and-cry is raised that it is done at the expense of the landlord. Is it so ? The landlord uses the law to eject his tenant. In a real case of inability, whatever else the landlord can do, he cannot imme- diately get his money. Ejectment does not bring him his rent. He ejects in order to get his money's worth by cancelling, or rather by appropriating to himself, the tenant's tenant- right. Is it unjust to the landlord that the tenant- right should be valued by a Court, and any excess of value over and above the arrears of rent left to the tenant ? If the landlord does not like to face this payment, he need not eject. Under the English Agricultural Improvements Act, in a similar case, if the value of the tenant's improvements should exceed the arrears of rent, would not the laudlord have to pay over the difference ? And is not this fact a wholesome and just check upon the too free use by the landlord of the " notice to quit?" I venture to submit that what real Conservatives, as well as all loyal Liberals, should have united in doing was, not to play into the hands of the Home-rulers by magnifying the difficul- ties, but to strengthen the hands of the Government, first in making the law reasonable and just in these exceptional cases, and then in carrying out the law with a good conscience and a strong hand against that wilful refusal to pay rent for which the Home-rulers are in part responsible. Mr. Forster's task is hard enough, in any case. I regret that any section of the Liberal party should have joined with the Conservative opposition and the Home-rulers in making it harder than it need have been.—I am, Sir, &e., F. SEEBOIIM.
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