IRISH RENTS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
Stre,—I have to thank you for publishing my letter on the new Land Act, in the Spectator of the 24th. In your note appended to it, which I did not see for a few days after publication, you say,—" There never was the slightest idea that the Courts would take the usual rents of the district as a standard. That would have been to perpetuate the grand evil of Ireland, the sectional misery of the people."
This argument of yours appears to show that you believe the constantly repeated assertion that Irish misery is caused by excessive rents. This is doubly wrong. There is a population -ion the west coast living on farms too small to support a family in anything like comfort, even if the land were rent-free, and it is obvious that no reduction of rent will confer prosperity in such cases as these. But, as a rule, the small farmers are not miserable. They are poor, because they have not acquired those habits of steady industry which can grow up only under security of tenure ; and it will take a lifetime of security of tenure before Ireland will rival Switzerland and Belgium in industry and intelligence, and in the wealth which these --create. But the really miserable class in Ireland is the class which can not be directly benefited by any reduc- tion of agricultural rent, because it does not pay the rent, I mean the class of landless day-labourers ; and their misery will be, and is already, deepened by the ruin or expulsion of the gentry. No doubt, the labourers will ultimately benefit by the general prosperity which must be the ultimate result of the new security of tenure, when the present social war is at an end; but this result will take at least a generation to produce, and it is not helped on, but delayed, by the mutual exasperation of classes, and the boundless flood of litigation which the action of the new Courts is promoting.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Old Forge, Dunmurry, County Antrim, December 31st, 1881.
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