MR. GLADSTONE ON THE LAND BILL.
The first question Mr. Gladstone approached was that of con- fiscation and compensation. Where there was confiscation, he admitted and maintained that compensation ought to follow ; but he absolutely denied the one, and therefore refused the other. And he showed that the House itself, and oven the Opposition side of the House, were by no means so ready to admit con- fiscation when -it did not suit their immediate case, as they were to assert it when it did. In 1874, they confiscated the Scotch Church advowsons, without compensation. At a much earlier date, when Sir Robert Peel abolished the Corn Laws, the Irish landowners received a very considerable compensation for a fancied loss which was a real gain. More important still, when the Encumbered Estates Act de- stroyed the tenants' very considerable virtual interest in all the land sold under it,—nay, actually sold that interest for the benefit of the landlords,—not a shilling of compensation was thought of or voted to those who suffered a very real and great calamity. But now that the House of Commons is try- lug to restore the tenants of Ireland to their ancient position, a very tumultuous cry of confiscation is raised, and all the machinery of the Tory Party is put in motion to exact substantial compensation. Against this, however, Mr. Gladstone entirely sets his face. By all the precedents of the past, there clearly ought to be no fanciful squeamish- ness in such a case. There ought to be clear evidence of real confiscation, before compensation could be admitted. Is that evidence forthcoming ? Mr. Gladstone says No. The Bill now proposed only extends considerably the principle of the Land Act of 1870, and does not even extend that without the most anxious precautions against injustice to either party. Did the Land Act of 1870 lower the value of land in
Ireland On the contrary, it raised that value, and after it was passed the rent of land rose rather than fell in magni- tude. What is now proposed, is not to carve new interests for the tenants out of the landlords' property, as Mr. Gibson and others have so positively represented, but to instruct the Land Court which will have to fix the rent, to take strictly into account what the tenant's interest really is, whether that has arisen out of an ad- mitted tenant-right as in Ulster, or out of a virtual tenant-right such as the Act of 1870 has created in many other parts of Ireland, where the incoming tenant is required to pay to the evicted tenant the compensation for disturbance and improvements awarded to him by that Act ; or whether, finally,it has arisen from the fancy price, the pretiunz affeetionis, which one tenant is willing to pay to another simply to get a farm at all, in a country where there are so few alternative occu- pations as Ireland. The landlord is to be protected by the Court from excessive valuations of the tenant's interest, no less than from the tenant's demand for unfairly lowered rents. If the landlord thinks his rent too low, he can himself raise it ; and if the tenant appeals against this raising of the rent, the Court is required to sustain the landlord In every case where the raising of rent seems just. Thus, as Mr. Gladstone shows, there is no real pretence for the cry of con- fiscation ; and when you consider how, in former times, the land- lords have been compensated for what turned out an advantage to them, instead of a loss, and how the tenants have not been com- pensated at all for what turned out a pure and absolute lose, the cry for compensation to the landlords cannot for a moment be sustained. Such was Mr. Gladstone's masterly exposition of the inadmissibility of ' the cry of compensation for the landlords.
The other parts of his speech were even more powerful. He pointed out how Mr. Disraeli had himself suggested in 1870 the very solution of this question against which some of Mr. Disraeli 's followers are now so vehemently protesting. In 1870, Mr. Disraeli said that if a man without a lease had paid his rent, and were evicted, his case should come before a tribunal, and the Judge should investigate the case, and come to a decision which, on one side, would guard the tenant from coercion, and, on the other, preserve the landlord from fraud. Except that this Bill goes beyond the case of eviction, that is precisely, of course, the principle of this Bill. Further, Mr. Gladstone showed that even Mr. Chaplin had signed a recommendation that .there should be "legislative interfererence to protect the tenant from an arbitrary increase of rent," without any limitation of that pro- tection to the value added by the tenant's own improvements, and that to allow a Court to grant such protection one day and let the landlord abolish it the next, would be clearly too absurd a mockery of the word "protection." Mr. Chaplin's own recom- mendation, then—passionately as he now tries to disclaim this interpretation of the report of the Land Commission which he signed—covers the establishment of a Court to give the tenant a real security of tenure ; and what the Court has thus given the tenant, it is clear that the tenant, if he wishes to leave, should be at liberty to dispose of ; otherwise, the interest is not really his. This was the second stage in Mr. Gladstone's argument, which showed how clearly the most eminent of the Tories themselves had conceded the principle of the Government Bill.
The third and last portion of the speech dealt with the fate of the Bill, and especially with the intention of the Tories to vote for Lord Elcho's amendment, which asserts that the leading principles of the Bill are in the main economically unsound, unjust, and impolitic. Here Mr. Glad- stone discerned the first result of the death of Lord Beacons- field. He it was who had kept the Tories from obstruct- ing the passage of the Irish Church and Irish Land Bills, as he easily might have obstructed them for years by the use of his majority in the House of Lords; and had he still been living, the Tory Party would not now be advised to vote for a sweeping condemnation like Lord Elcho's, but would be so led as to enable them to yield prudently, so soon ap it ap- peared certain that the principle of the Bill must triumph in the end. What would be the result, asked Mr. Glad- stone, of a Tory success in throwing out the Bill, and with the Bill, the Government ? The result would be the accession of a Tory Government to office, which, under pressure from opponents, would carry a much more revolu- lutionary Bill than this. " The words fraud, force, and folly,' as applied to the three F's, would gradually dwindle and grow pale, and the honourable Member for Cork would wave his flag of triumph over a measure passed by a Conservative Government, of which, perhaps, some Conservatives would themselves be heard to say, How much more Liberal a measure it is, after all, than that which was brought forward by the Liberal Party.' " No speech was ever more con- vincing. It showed that the great leader, as well as some of the most bigoted followers of the Tory Party, had them- selves been constrained by the urgency of the case to concede the general principle of the Bill. It showed that that principle is embodied in the Bill in an elaborately cautious form, which provides for its cessation, so soon as it has accomplished the great work needed ; and it reminded the Tories how, in times past, the only result of their offering obstruction to popular measures, was that they had themselves to incur the ignominy of doing, against their principles, all and more than all, that the Liberals had previously proposed to do in accordance with their principles. No wonder that when Mr. Gladstone sat down the House of Commons felt that the Bill was in a totally different position from that which it occupied when he rose. Each Party knew what its acceptance meant, and what its rejection would involve.
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