THE EVICTED TENANTS COMMISSION.
MONDAY'S debate on the Evicted Tenants Commission was clearly not a waste of time. Both the attack and the defence were conducted with marked ability, and the country had placed before it in an intelligible form the pros and cons of the whole matter. We cannot help thinking that the net result of the discussion on any reasonable and fair-minded person must be to produce the opinion that the Commission has been a complete fiasco. That is the word that best expresses it. The whole of the transactions connected with the Commission have tended to produce the very opposite effect to that intended. We believe that Mr. Morley was sincerely anxious to get rid of the evicted-tenant difficulty, not only on mere party grounds, but in the interests of the United Kingdom, and to close the open sore caused by the " Plan of Campaign." With this desire, it was not unnatural that he should have had recourse to the instrument usually employed by an English politician faced with an administrative difficulty, —a special Commission charged to look at the facts all round, and to advise the Government how to act. So far all moderate men may agree with Mr. Morley. We come next to the sort of Commission Mr. Morley ought to have appointed. In England, he would, no doubt, have followed the precedent of the Labour Commission, and, just as Mr. Tom Mann sits there side by side with the great capitalists, he would have appointed a mixed body of tenants, or tenants' friends, and landlords. In Ireland, however, party feeling runs too high to allow of such an arrangement, and besides, Mr. Morley did not want an unwieldy body of this kind, but a. body which would be able to act quickly, and to make, not elaborate and comprehensive reports, but plain practical suggestions, suitable to a case of emergency. We hold, then, that Mr. Morley, in determining to name a small body of Irish officials, presided over by an English Judge, committed, in theory at any rate, no error. No doubt it would have been wiser not to have chosen an English Judge so strongly identified, whether rightly or wrongly, by public talk with the Nationalist cause ; but that was a blunder for which Mr. Morley can, perhaps, be excused. It was after this decision as to the character of the Commission that Mr. llorley's really serious mis- takes began. Desiring, as we believe he did, to get to the bottom of the matter, and sincerely anxious to find some means, as he told the House of Commons, to bring landlord and tenant together," and to close the evil book of the "Plan of Campaign," what should he have done ? Assuredly he should have argued : 'My hopes of finding a solution will be entirely frustrated unless I can manage to get the landlords to come to the Commission, and frankly table their case and their views of a proper solution. They are men who believe them- selves to have suffered a terrible series of wrongs at the hands of the tenants and of the State ; who have been half-ruined by the state of things in Ireland; who are dreadfully afraid that they are going to be still further injured by legislation ; and who, in a word, are timid and suspicious almost to the verge of insanity. Though, per- sonally, I may not sympathise with their fears, and may believe them to have been no more injured by the State than the landlords of Wiltshire or Essex, I must be, beyond everything, careful not to alarm them. Accordingly, the first principle of my Commission must be to accord them the fullest ability to state, not only their own case, but to criti- cise, and, if they can, destroy the case put forward by the tenants. No doubt that may, to some extent, cause the production of irrelevant matter, but it will re- assure the landlords, and will make it very difficult for them to go behind the Report when it is produced.' This is how Mr. Morley, essentially a fair-meaning man, might have been expected to argue, and how, for his own sake, he ought to have argued. Instead of that, he first so con- stituted the Commission, and then allowed it to adopt such a plan of procedure as to render the landlords quite hopeless of justice. The course taken, though no doubt very well fitted for an inquiry into some abstract subject, such as the incidence of taxation or the muni- cipalisation of tramways, was sure to cause alarm and indignation in a body like the Irish landlords. It is all very well to say that the Commission was not going to try anybody or to consider anybody's conduct. As a matter of fact, however, every one felt that the landlords on whose estates the "Plan of Campaign" had been in operation, were to be put on their trial. Under such circumstances, can we be surprised that they refused to do anything which might prejudice the ultimate decision of the country in their case ? The landlords in question felt, and no doubt felt rightly, that for them a most serious question of property was at stake. No wonder, then, they were not satisfied with a form of procedure applicable to an investigation into the merits of bimetallism. If they went into the inquiry, and, owing to the arrangements as to how their case was to be stated, they failed to put their position as strongly as it could be put, they felt they might lose ground which could never be regained. Who in England would take any part in an inquiry into the manner in which he had administered a Trust, unless he were allowed to submit the case of his accusers to some sort of cross-examination ? It is asking too much of human nature. Hence, when Mr. Justice Mathew had made his famous opening speech against Lord Clanricarde, and had announced that cross-examination, when allowed, would be conducted by, and at the discretion of a Presi- dent who had thus taken a partisan view, and not by the parties implicated, it was hopeless to expect the land- lords to have anything to do with the Commission. But if the landlords would not have anything to do with the Commission, it was bound to be a fiasco. How could its main object—the bringing-together of landlord and tenant —possibly be effected, if the landlords were frightened away at the very beginning? The resignation of the only two Commissioners in whom the landlords had any sort of con- fidence, and the unguarded character of many of Sir James Mathew's remarks, completed what the original decision as to the method of receiving evidence had begun, and the Report of the Commission becomes an absolutely one-sided document without the slightest force or moral sanction. The most- extreme supporters of the Government do not really expect that the country will attach any weight to recommendations made after hearing only one side, and after the other side was given such an excellent excuse for. stopping away. The Report, then, is so much waste- paper. Mr. Morley might just as well have written out the recommendations himself. Indeed, he would then have had a far better chance of carrying such recommen- dations, for they would not have been prejudiced by the story of the Commission. That the Commission has proved a complete fiasco is, in our opinion, however, by no means a subject of rejoicing. We should have preferred, when once the Commission was appointed, that the matter should have been thoroughly threshed out, and that the case of the landlords, which is absolutely unshakable, should have been put before the country. How very strong that case is, may be gathered from the sworn criticism of the evidence offered at the Commission, which has been collected and printed by the Landlords' Convention. The proof-sheets of this sworn criticism in regard to the Ponsonby, Lansdowne, and Smith-Barry estates—three of the most important "Plan of Campaign" estates—have been placed in our hands, and they show how crushing a reply could have been made by the land- lords to the evidence offered before the Commission by the tenants, had they been allowed to cross-examine. Unfortunately, we cannot bring out the strength of the landlords' case without entering into a mass of details which would be out of place here. We may say generally, however, that this evidence entirely supports the con- tention that cross-examination of the tenants' witnesses was essential to a full statement of the landlords' case.
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