The House of Peers, as we apprehended last week, has
got "out of hand," and prepared for itself a humiliation. The majority of the Lords, despite the warnings of the Duke of Richmond, their nominal leader, have carried a series of amendments which take most of the value and all the grace out of the Land Bill, and which the Commons must reject. Lord Salisbury on Friday carried an amendment of which, as we have shown elsewhere, he clearly does not understand the effect, under which no tenant paying more than £50 a year is entitled to compensation for eviction ; and other Tory lords have done even meaner things. On Friday, for instance, the Duke of Richmond carried one amendment deny- ing compensation to an assignee not approved by the land- lord, a direct though trifling increase to the landlord's power ; and another, forbidding tenants to let gardens to their labourers under penalty of losing the protection of the Act ; and a third, reducing the lease which is to exempt landlords from the Act from 31 to 21 years. On Monday, led by Lord Clanricarde, the Peers re-estab- lished the presumption of law in favour of improvements having been made by the landlord,—a presumption entirely contrary to fact ; on Tuesday they abolished the authority of juries as to matters of fact [Government assents to this] ; and finally, they reduced the needful notice to quit from twelve months to six,— perhaps of all the amendments the one which most clearly explains their drift.
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