THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
have read Mr. Bright's letter in your number of last Saturday, and beg leave to apologize to him for having said that did not think he believed in his own scheme for dealing with the land of Ireland.
I do not, however, think that either Mr. Bright's or Mr. ilutton's plan is what Ireland needs. I do not think the mass of Irish farmers are men of whom it is desirable to make proprietors, in the English sense of the word. They are deplorably ignorant of agriculture, and what is worse, they have an inherited tendency to divide and sublet the land, which at present the power of the landlords is used to counteract. What we need is some plan that will protect the tenant against arbitrary eviction and the con- fiscation of his improvements, and the land against a renewal of that subdivision which was most ruinous in times past, but from. which the country is now recovering. I believe these two desiderata are met by a proposal which you published in a letter of mine last February or March (I have not the file by me to refer to). I propose that if the tenant fails to pay the rent, or wastes, or alienates, or divides the land, the landlord should have power to evict him summarily ; but so long as he does none of those things, the landlord, if he evicts a tenant, should be required to pay him the same damages as an evicting railway company would have to pay. I would give the tenant power to bequeath his interest in his farm, provided that it is bequeathed un- divided.
The effect of this would be to give the tenant that kind of limited interest in the land which is, as I believe, the best suited to his present intelligence. The land would be his to hold and to cultivate so long as he paid his rent, and any improvements that he might make would be his own, but the land would not be his to alienate or to waste.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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