THE TIMES' COMMISSIONER ON IRELAND.
IS the reform of the Land Tenure in Ireland to be effected without an argument in defence of the present system ? 'During the last few weeks, the preoccupation of the public mind on the question has been increasing ; articles and letters multiply in all the papers ; it is the text of the dropping fire of extra-Parliamentary utterances which has now begun ; yet, -so far as we can see, the real discussion is wholly on the side of the assailants. They are free to say what their object is, and what are the principles they believe to be applicable ; but 'their opponents—those who will resist any change of tenure to the last—are deaf and dumb as to the reasons by which they 'ope to maintain their ground. They have not yet got beyond the proposition that the rights of property are in danger of Attack, and that all classes must make common cause with the landlords, whoare only first on the list for confiscation. Mr. New- degate tells his hearers in Warwickshire that the agitation on the Irish land question is not of Irish origin at all, but is got up for English purposes ; and Mr. Davenport Bromley affirms that what is a land question now will be a watch-and- purse question immediately. This is a mere shirking of the debate. Nobody proposes, in so many words, to confiscate the property of Irish or any other landlords. The question is whether certain schemes, advocated as equitable in themselves And conducive to the welfare of Ireland, are or are not inva- alone of the rights of property ; and unless the defenders of the present system condescend to argue in detail, they will find that mere vague clamour about property-rights will avail them iothing. The majority of the people who are not landlords will have been instructed meanwhile by the friends of change in the steps they may safely take. They will be studying the facts and theories of the question at first-hand in such papers as those of the Times' Commissioner—which are in odd contrast, by the way, with the leaders in the same paper reflecting with perfect accuracy the muddled opinion of the landlords—and if the latter are to maintain the present system at all, they must really be at some pains to get posted up in the discussion. The publication of these letters in the Times is itself an event which marks, and partly makes, a grave alteration in the con- ditions of the controversy. It is a sign that the discussion has reached a crisis in which the Times, following the drift of opinion, feels it expedient to make room for arguments which would formerly have been ignored, or suppressed, and regarded with angry contempt. Now that the letters have appeared,
they are a challenge to all concerned to have the battle thoroughly fought out and settled, and no longer shelved, as questions are apt to be when the attack seems absolutely hopeless.
The supporters of important changes in the tenure of Irish land should be thankful for the unexpected ally they have obtained. It is something to have their case stated in a forum where the whole country must attend to it as they would to a debate in Parliament, and this much they have gained. No doubt the Commissioner refrains from committing himself to any proposal, and his inquiries have as yet been confined to three counties ; but the facts he states, and his language about the facts, can leave no doubt as to many points in his conclusion.. To almost every fact which has been insisted on as creating a different set of circumstances in Ireland from those which exist in England, he gives the weight of his confirmation. It has been denied, for instance, that the division of creeds in Ireland corresponding broadly to the division between owners and cultivators is of any great consequence ; but all through—at Tipperary, and Cashel, and Nenagh, and Athlone, and Maryborough—the correspondent asserts that he did find it conducive to the want of kindly feeling between Irish landlords and tenants, this feeling being one of the causes why the system of tenancy-at- will, familiar in England, has answered there indifferently well. The most unidiiad Philistine, we should think, must be im- pressed with the illustration the correspondent supplies from Maryborough of a Mr. Warburton raising his rents in a capricious manner, and accompanying his notice to that effect "with a letter of a very insolent kind, reflecting on his tenant as you Roman Catholic ;' " and with the reference to estates, "on which an Englishman, or an Irish Protestant, obtains as a matter of course a preference over a Roman Catholic in the letting of land, the distinction being made the more galling, because the favoured person obtains a lease, and the discredited class are usually without one." This may help to make it intelligible why, for the sake of social peace, it may be desir- able to change largely the ownership of Irish land, so that the cultivators of one creed shall not be at the mercy of land- lords of another. No doubt, the correspondent points out that the new Catholic landlords, who have come in under the Encumbered Estates' Act, are not well liked ; but this does not prove that there is no change possible which would not be acceptable to Irish tenants.
The correspondent is equally happy on other points, the connection between Irish history and the discontent of the peasantry ; the non-recognition by the latter of the old confis- cations to which the title of the landlords goes back ; and the fact that the improvement of late years in the condition of the Irish tenantry, instead of making them more contented with their circumstances, is only likely to make them more energetic in demanding their rights. It is the statement, however, of the customs of cultivation, and the strength of the irregular agencies by which the Irish tenants obtain a security for their " property " which the law does not give, that will, no doubt, be most instructive. The differences of religion and old traditions and other facts may aggravate the evils of a defective economic arrangement ; but the great mischief must be in the arrangement itself, to pro- duce the disaffection which exists in Ireland, and it is this fact which, above all, the correspondent amply confirms. In his explorations of the counties he has visited, he has very rarely found it the practice for the landlord to make improvements. The men who do so, who have given to large districts all the wealth they have, who have reclaimed the flats of the Shannon, or carried tillage up the " barren wild " of the slopes leading to the Commeraghs, and who have built decent dwellings on these properties, are mere tenants, so-called occu- piers in the eye of the law, and in no way partners in the property they have created. As the correspondent insists again and again, this difference from the English practice as to the custom of improving makes a different set of circumstances to which the English common-law notion of owners and occupiers, pronounced a convenient mode of evading difficult questions, is totally inapplicable. There would be less injustice in applying that notion to Ireland, if another assumption of the English law—the equality of the contracting parties— were true ; but the reverse is the case, the tenants being under natural and artificial disabilities which condemn them to the task of producing what is legally for the benefit of another. More than this, the usage is so strong that the good-will of the tenant becomes saleable, the landlord's right to evict, except for non-payment of a fair rent, being unree3g- nized. In this way the correspondent has made it clear what has long enough been familiar to politicians, except those who are also landlords, that there is a conflict in Ireland between the legal rules and the actual facts of property, the law nominally assigning to one man what is morally another's, and becoming thus the instrument of organized and whole- sale robbery. To stamp this firmly on the English mind may be difficult, but if the correspondent fail, it will not be from want of repetition in the clearest terms. The following is only one summing-up out of many :-
"When moral divisions, broad and deep, keep the owners and occupiers of the soil apart ; when large tracts are deprived of the presence of those whose duty it is to mako the relations of landlord and tenint gracious ; when the delicate but all-powerful chord of sympathy is want- ing to knit a community together ; when it is in the power of a dominant class to appropriate the fruits of the industry of others and to enforce a law of ' sic vos non voids when ex- amples of this wrong may be cited ; when those with whom more than any others the prosperity of a district rests are legally in a state of mere dependence, and hold the land by a precarious tenure ; and when it is possible to confiscate rights gained morally by purchase, it is easy to see that the elements of content and of general welfare are extremely deficient. Nor is it necessary, to effect this result, that oppression or wrong should be generally exercised ; the mere existence of this state of society, the apprehensions it inevitably diffuses among those who may suffer from it, the certain check it imposes on industry, are quite sufficient to retard progress and to create a sentiment of angry irritation."
It is also to be added that the correspondent shows no
little art in selecting his illustrative cases. While nar- rating the history of agrarian crimes, he does not dwell on them, but states quietly, from district after district, how the landlords dare not provoke the agrarian spirit, which palpably affects the management of property ; and preferably adduces illustrations of the lamentable insecurity of tenure from good estates. For instance, one of the stories on which he comments is that of a tenant on the estate of Mr. Stafford O'Brien, one of the most popular Tipperary landlords, whose wife's marriage portion had been used to substitute a slate house for a mud cabin on the property, at a cost of £150, and to effect other improvements :- "I asked why he bad been so unwise as to lay out his mosey on another man's land without a particle of real security. She replied, pointing to a ruined cabin, That was all the accommodation when I came here, and a deeent couple could not live in it.' I the.' asked why he had not applied for a lease, and with what tenure he would be satisfied, regard being had to his outlay. She answered that Mr. Statiord O'Brien preferred his people to trust to his word ; that they did not like to trouble his honour ; that, perhaps, his agent and he would not be pleased; that the land would possibly be revalued if an appli- cation for a lease were made ; and, of course, that a mere 21 years' lease would, is such circumstances, be of no advantage. Things might as well remain as they were, trusting to a gentleman who was good to the tenant and kept faith, unless they could get a term of 50 or 60 years ; that would be of real use to them.' "
This is the condition of dependence in which Irish tenants are as to the fruits of their labour. Even with the best landlords the tenants do not like their case, and " if this is done in the green tree, what may not be done in the dry." As to what changes should be made, the Cominissioner, as we have said, is not yet explicit, but he stands committed to a great deal. Some time ago, as we noticed at the time, he repeated a significant conversation with Mr. Bianconi, of Irish car celebrity, who had raised the rents of a property he pur- chased 10 per cent., giving the tenants thirty-one years' leases, and found it to answer ; and to judge by the conversations he reports, he is still leaning to this idea of long leases. In many cases he finds a cry for fixity of tenure which he styles extravagant, but he is glad to record the reasonableness of tenants who ask only a long term to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Again, he lets fall a phrase according with the suggestion we made some weeks ago about securing the tenants compensation in the shape of a long lease. He would even have no difficulty, he tells us, in approving the cry for fixity of tenure, were Irish tenants all tenants-at-will, were there no cases in which the English system of the landlord making improvements and contracting with tenants on terms of equality did not exist ; but these cases, he seems to think, interpose a difficulty in the way of a general law. Whether the difficulty is so great as he makes out may be doubtful, but in any case the admission is enormous from one who is evidently a friend to the landlord class, and every way re- verent of the rights of "property." It cannot be very reassuring to Irish landlords, clinging to the shadow of right which law gives them, to be told that but for the small inter- mixture of a system in which the English notion happens to correspond with the fact, the moral partnership of the Irish I tenant in the property of the soil should be legally recognized. Quite as effective is the correspondent's assimilation of the' case of the Irish tenant, whose good-will has become saleable, to that of the old English copyholder, whose right had gradually encroached on the freehold of the lord of the- manor, and had at length to be legally recognized. The mere citation of an English precedent for legally recognizing moral rights should help to show that " revolutionary " measures may not be inconsistent with the rights of property..
We recommend these letters with confidence, therefore, to- the average landlord-politician, that he may know what he has- to discuss. The assertion of his assailants is that the " rights " of Irish landlords with which it is proposed to interfere are not the ordinary rights of property at all,—that the present law is itself confiscation, and must be purified of injustice. If he tries to show cause to the contrary, he will be heard, but the assumption that in Ireland the name of owner in land: includes everything that is meant in England is a manifest begging of the question. By law it is so now, but the- law is fruitful only of misery, has never been, and we-
venture to say never will be, enforced. It may be a. question how far the State, having conferred rights which are, in fact, illusory, should, in giving back their due- to those whose claims are infringed by these " rights," compensate the class whom it has vainly favoured. It may- be expedient on many grounds—to obviate, among other things, any danger of even appearing to invade the principle of " property "—to treat the landlord's legal right as real, to- give him the option of compensation such as is usually given to those whose property is expropriated, if he will not be a. landlord under new conditions in the tenant's favour ; but the- case is at least stronger and not weaker than the ordinary cases in which, for public purposes, expropriation is allowed.. If the State ought not to expropriate in order to remedy a. great wrong it has done, and remove a just cause of social war- from an entire nation, wherein then lies the superiority of those- objects of public policy which are now deemed a sufficient justification of the process ? We confess we do not see how landlords can have a syllable to say on this ground, and per- baps that is the reason why they never get beyond a purpose- less maundering about " property."
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