IRISH LAND TENURE.
[To THIS EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:] SIR,—Mr. T. G. MacCarthy is a M.P. and Home Ruler, but his answer to my letter in your paper of March 31 is quite contrary to the facts. The Land Act fully secures compensation for all permanent improvements to tenants from year to year. Whoever turns to the Act will find the protection is absolute, except to large tenants, who are left as in England. The Act has only failed in the sense that tenants very seldom make _permanent im- provements, and so cannot get compensation for improvements they do not make,—just as the great majority of ejectments .having always been for non-payment of rent, they cannot get compensation for capricious eviction, when the non-payment of a moderate rent causes their trouble. No one who has not seen it can imagine the state of exhaustion to which a failing tenant reduces his farm,—often it will not even grow weeds.
Want of industry is the true bane of Ireland. Much land is under leases, and they are increasing fast. Yet all who travel to Ireland must see, besides the armies of docks and thistles and couch, the inferior crops of corn and turnips and the starved grass, the general neglect of land and buildings, and the fences that will not fence, but which it is attempted to make more effec- tual by tying the legs of the sheep, &c. ; the hay in cock at Michaelmas, and most crops sown late and gathered later. Those of us who are farming well are making double the rent such tenants could pay for the same land. The difference is due to want of industry and ignorance, though of course there are a few exceptions.
These are the men to whom, in their present indolence and ignor- ance, it is proposed to give as a bonus, without consideration, the owners' reversion in the land, with the right to sell it for their own profit ; and for whose sake no one of their own class in future is to be suffered to become an occupier without paying these men, or their assignees, £3, or £5, or £10 per acre (the utmost that competition will yield), in addition to the rent, which is practically to be limited, in order that this process may go on. ' And then, as an excuse, it is said the owner would thus be deprived of nothing. He would be robbed of his reversion,— that is all.
The true character of such proposals only needs to be under-
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