LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE "PLAN OF CAMPAIGN."
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—You express curiosity how far the English Home-rulers will identify themselves with the action of Mr. Dillon and others. I think the following view will be accepted by many of them. Not by all, as it has been apparently refused admission into a Liberal paper to which I addressed a letter on the subject.
Some of us, at all events, think the present law of landlord and tenant very unsatisfactory. The theory is of a fixed rent legally compulsory under all circumstances. In practice, English landlords are frequently found " remitting " so much of the rent as they presumably judge to be not equitably due. In Ireland, many landlords refuse to reduce rents, or to make adequate reduction. The tenant then offers what he deems a fair rent, and refuses more. Both plans are open to objection. In both, one party or the other makes himself judge in re sna. The landlord is obviously tempted to remit too little, the tenant to reduce too much.
Until the whole law shaping the relations of the two parties is remodelled, I prefer the Irish plan as a temporary expedient,—
(1), Because the occupier and cultivator is a better judge of fair rent than the landlord, especially than an absentee landlord ;
(2), because the cultivator has the first right to be kept out of the profits of the land ; (3), because I think it notorious beyond contradiction that in many cases, full rents, where paid, are paid otherwise than out of the profits of the land,—e.g., by sums furnished from more prosperous relatives in America ; (4), because the practice in England tends to defer the day of reform of first principles, while the Irish plan tends to accelerate it.
I am not questioning the illegality of the Irish plan ; but lawyers and others know that technical illegality has sometimes to be condoned. At all events, it does not lie in the mouths of English Radicals to be very severe on the Irish plan, until it is fully proved to be working substantial injustice.—I am, Sir, &c.,
AN ENGLISH RADICAL AND HOME-RULER.
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