TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NEW IRISH RELTFIF BILL.
PROBABLY the gravest step yet taken by the new Govern- ment, is the resolve to apply to the existing distress in Ireland the principle involved in the new Bill of which Mr. Forster has given notice. It was very wise to withdraw the new clause from the Bill now passing, and to embody it in a separate Bill, for it is quite certain that it ought not to be discussed as a mere detail of any other measure. We, for our parts, are quite ready to admit that, as a matter of principle, the new measure can be defended, if only it could be vindicated from the very serious abuses to which, we fear, it will be liable. It is worth while to quote the proposal in full, as there is a general impression that it is even more trenchant and more wide in its application than it really is. The old "clause" which is now to be embodied in a separate Bill ran as follows :— " (Temporary Provision regarding Ejectment for Non-payment of Rent.)—Whereas, having regard to the distress now existing in certain parts of Ireland, arising from failure of crops, it is expedient to make temporary provision with respect to eject- ment for non-payment of rent in certain cases. Therefore an ejectment for non-payment of rent for the recovery of the possession of a holding situate wholly or partially in any of districts mentioned in the Schedule hereto, and which shall be commenced after the passing of this Act, and before Decem- ber 31st, 1881, or which shall have been commenced before the passing of this Act, and in which any judgment or decree for possession shall be executed after the passing of this Act, and before December 31st, 1881, shall be deemed and declared by the Court having jurisdiction to hear and deter- mine land claims in and for the county in which such holding is situate, to be a disturbance of the tenant by the act of the landlord within the meaning of the third section of The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870;' and the tenant shall be entitled to compensation for such disturbance accord- ingly, notwithstanding anything in the said Act contained, if it shall appear to the Court that such non-payment of rent by the tenant is owing to his inability to pay caused by such dis- tress as aforesaid, and that the tenant is willing to continue in the occupation of his holding upon just and reasonable terms as to rent, arrears of rent, and otherwise, and that such terms are unreasonably refused by the landlord. This section shall be construed with The Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870." It is, of course, to be noted that the clause only applies to the scheduled districts, that it is to have force only till the effects of the recent failure of the crops are passed, and that it is a &Anse the application of which is discretionary on the opinion of the Judge who deals with the case that the non- payment of rent is really due to the failure of the crops, and that the ejectment determined on by the landlord is unreason- able. But it is obvious what will be said, and has indeed been said, against it. It will be urged that when in 1870 even the Irish tenant-at-will was given a certain valuable interest in his holding by the law which awarded him a certain compen- sation for disturbance, the strict condition on which that compensation was awarded him was the full and regular pay- ment of rent ; and that now it is proposed, in certain cases, to break faith with the landlord, and give the tenant this same interest, in spite of his not fulfilling the condition on which alone the compensation for disturbance was given. It will be said, and has been said, that there is no more reason why the landlord should suffer for the bad times than why the shopkeeper or other creditor of the peasant should suffer for them ; and yet that while the latter can avail himself of the law to get the whole of his debt, the landlord will only be able to obtain by legal means the difference between the arrears due to him and the sum awarded for "disturbance," and this though the disturbance was caused not by any arbi- trary action of the landlord's, but by the very natural and reasonable desire to secure the equivalent for which he had fairly contracted when he let the peasant his land. All this has been said, and will be said often again, with various forcible illustrations of the injustice of treating the holders of this par- ticular kind of security in a manner different from the holders of every other kind of security. Indeed, it is certain to be urged that because, on historic grounds, the landowners were fined a heavy fine for evicting their tenants by the legislation of 1870, —.though on the special condition that they might evict them -without any such fine, in case they did not receive punctu- ally the rent agreed upon,—they are to be made to bear an additional burden when they evict in 1880, even under the very conditions under which they were exempted from all fine by the Act of the earlier year. Is it just, the landlords will ask, that we who were promised that we might always evict without compensation, if we did not receive regularly the in- come for which we had contracted with our tenants, should now be saddled with compensation, even in these reserved cases,—and this, too, at a time when we, like the peasants are. suffering severely from the failure of our own crops, as well as. from the failure of our tenants to pay the reduced rents we. are demanding?
No doubt the case is a very hard one. But we do think that, if only we could rely thoroughly on the Judges who will have to try these eviction cases, the principle which. Mr. Forster lays down is sound. We assume, of course, that the legislation of 1870 is the basis from which all parties start. That legislation undoubtedly did give the tenant-at- will a lien on his holding to the amount of the compensation, to which, in case of disturbance he would be entitled, though this lien was subject to the condition of prompt payment of rent. Every such tenant had, as it were, something on which his family could rely in case of eviction, so long as the rent was promptly paid. On the other hand, the landlord knew that this fine which he would have to pay in case of evicting his tenant, was a deduction of so much from his land- lord's interest in the land ; and in counting up what he- possessed, he would never have reckoned his property as entirely at his own disposal, except after making allowance for the fines he would have to pay before he could sell his land or transfer it without conditions to another. Now, this. being so, can it be said that a tenant who has really been a. good tenant, who has paid rent punctually in ordinary times, who has been rendered unable to pay solely by a calamity as. independent of his industry and will as an earthquake or a flood, ought to be evicted without any allowance being made for the sum which he would have received for such evictiorr in ordinary times If so, this would follow —that a really- inhumane landlord might avail himself of such a time as this to clear his land of tenants he did not like, at less cost to himself than he would have had in clearing it of these. tenants in more prosperous times. Suppose the case of a landlord wishing to take a much larger acreage of land into his own cultivation. He could not do this in ordinary years without giving his tenants so much an acre for evicting them. But now comes a time of wide-spread failure of crops, and he seizes the opportunity of a quarter's- rent being unpaid by most of them to get lie of them without any such payment at all. Is this fair to the tenant ? Is it not really visiting upon him the bad times, in the sense of con- fiscating wholly the lien which he really had upon the land subject to a condition which the calamity of the famine, and not any indolence of his own, had alone prevented him from fulfilling?
The real objection to the new measure we take to be of a different kind, but it is serious, and requires very grave consideration. Can we or can we not depend on those Judges who will have to decide this matter, to enforce evictions without compensation in all cases where the tenant really had the means to pay the rent, but was con- cealing this from his landlord, in the hope of living for a time partially or wholly rent-free? Can we really trust the Judges- to have the knowledge requisite, and if they have it, to use it when there is a great popular cry against hard Judges and hard landlords, and plenty of excuse at least for lenient—that is, unjust—decisions? This is really the grave question at issue, and it is a very grave one. The Government may fairly say, as we trust they will say, that they are about to put the law in force with some stringency on the side of the landlords, in all cases where there is no reason to believe that the tenant has any valid excuse for not fulfilling his side of the contract ; that the recent relief measure has bene- fited landlords, as well as tenants and labourers, by the very low rate of interest asked for the loans offered to improving landlords ; and that this being so, it is only fair to correct the stringency of evictions carried out against really respectable and hard-working tenants, by allow- ing the Judge to take into account, and to set off against the arrears of rent, such a sum as the peasant would certainly have received for eviction in ordinary times. The value of the holding was really diminished to the landlord by the liability to pay that sum, and there is no good reason why he should be practically a gainer—especially when he is offered the benefit, of loans for improving his property on very easy terms—by the prevalent distress. On the other hand, if the Government cannot strictly rely on the judicial agents who are to work such an Act as this ; if they cannot be sure that these judicial agents will not be very easily imposed upon by the shrewd Irish peasant ; if they cannot be sure that even when they are not so imposed upon they will have courage to enforce just evictions without compensation against a vehement popular cry, then they are taking a very great responsibility indeed in passing such a Bill as is proposed. We believe that under certain circumstances this Bill may be justified. But we are not absolutely sure that these circumstances exist. It is essential that we should not seem to be playing fast and loose with the Irish landlord. It is only to a Government of whose purpose, and of whose power, to enforce justice rigidly even on the side of the landlord,—to enforce rigidly the contracts which the tenant is shirking, though quite able to fulfil them,—and to eject Irish tenants sternly without compensation for either voluntary or involuntary non-payment of rent due to any cause but the famine, that we should be willing to entrust the powers of the proposed Bill. We hope Mr. Forster may be able to make statements of a nature to convince the country that the present government of Ireland is a government of this kind.
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