TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. BALFOUR'S LAND-PURCHASE SCHEME.
WE have just three objections to raise to Mr. Balfour's Land-Purchase Bill; and though two of them at least are, in our judgment, of the most serious kind, we regret to believe that in the present state of opinion none of the three will have any practical weight. In the first place, the scope of the Bill is not nearly large enough. The curse of Ireland is a tenure which, although an excellent tenure in Great Britain, where men are optimist, not pessimist, in imagination, is nearly unknown in the remainder of the world, and which is utterly unsuited to the temperament of the Irish people. They are plaintive and self-pitying in their very hearts ; they always expect misfortune ; and they think, therefore, that if tenants they will be evicted, that if evicted they will be homeless, and that if homeless they will be degraded, and may the of starvation. As the majority of adult Irishmen are tenant- farmers, there will in Ireland be neither peace nor contentment until the tenants are freeholders paying a quit-rent ; and the ideal Land-Purchase Bill ought, there- fore, to cover the whole island, of which this Bill may possibly cover one-fifth. There is no objection whatever that we know of to that extension except the timidity of politicians ; but then, we quite admit that timidity may be a final reason. Stein, when he carried out a similar reform, had, fortunately for Prussia, no Parlia- ment to convince ; but an English Ministry must consult opinion, even upon subjects about which it is profoundly ignorant. It is useless, therefore, to press the first objection. The second objection is that the Bill is too elaborate, too full of precautions to prevent any penny of liability ever falling upon the British taxpayer. There is no reason whatever why he should so shirk all liability. If the Union between the Kingdoms is a good thing, and if a change of tenure is essential to the Union—and these two propositions underlie every Purchase Bill as yet pro- posed—then the taxpayer of the United Kingdom ought to incur some liability, which he might make as small as he pleased by simply enforcing regular payment of the instalments. For ourselves, indeed, we go much farther, and insist that the Kingdom which originally forced an unsuitable tenure upon the Irish people, at first by conquest, and afterwards by a consistent course of legislation, ought to make compensation for its well-meaning blunder by a heavy grant in aid of the new tenure. It will have to give one in the end, whether the grant is in credit or money; but we admit that for the moment it is politically useless to make such a proposal, which could be carried only by a hopeless conjunction of both Front Benches such as carried the last Reform Bill. It is vain, therefore, to press the second objection, and not of much use, we fear, to press the third. This is, that the English electors will never understand the Bill. The Irish electors will, as their representatives will speedily discover, and the Scotch electors may, firstly because they love arithmetical puzzles for their own sakes, and secondly because they have, at the back of their heads, a wish for a Land Bill of their own ; but the English electors will simply refuse to be burdened with all those details. Those who confide in Mr. Balfour will believe his assurance that the Treasury can never have to pay, and those who trust Mr. Gladstone will accept his dictum that the Bill " imposes a very large liability on the taxpayers of this country ;" but neither class will derive from the Bill itself any consolation. Granted. the conditions, that is probably an unavoidable misfortune ; but still it is a misfortune, for were the Bill but simple, it might greatly help to educate the people in the course which, if Ireland. is ever to be reconciled, is ultimately inevitable. The secret of the Irish agrarian war is an unsuitable tenure, and until it is altered for a suitable one—that is, in practice, for an occupying freehold tenure—there will be no peace.
For the rest, the Bill is a wonderful piece of legislation. The task before Mr. Balfour was to secure that whenever landlord and tenants were willing, the tenants should become occupying owners, paying a moderate quit-rent, and yet that the taxpayer should. pay nothing ; and so far as human ingenuity can provide for two inconsistent requirements, both are provided for. As_ soon as the tenants of Ballymahon estate, yielding a gross rent of £1,000, are agreed with their landlord—which will happen pretty quickly, for the landlord can plague and the tenants: can combine—the State will advance X17,000, in special bonds paying 24 per cent., on British guarantee, and irre- deemable for thirty years, to the Land Department, which, subject to certain conditions, will hold the bonds at the• owner's disposition. The Department will satisfy them- selves that the purchase is bond fide, that there is no. collusion between landlords and tenants, and that the price does not exceed. twenty years' purchase of the " net rent," —that is, of the rent minus landlords' rates—and then will issue " a vesting order." From that moment the tenant is owner, on a Parliamentary title, of his holding; " up to the sky and down to the centre of the earth." He remains heavily mortgaged, it is true ; but he is owner, more completely owner as to title than the majority of English landlords, absolutely beyond the possibility of eviction for any offence except default of payment, and with his mortgage slowly decreasing in. amount of its own will, and without apparent interference from himself. That is to say, the tenant has to pay on the mortgage 4 per cent. for forty-nine years, 2,i per cent. of which will go to the landlord, 4 per cent. to certain good objects—such as building labourers' cottages—and 1 per cent. to extinguish the debt itself, which it will do totally in forty-nine years. The effect of this in the circumstances of Ireland, and under a special clause of the Bill, will be- that the tenant will pay for five years eight-tenths of his present rent, and afterwards seven-tenths, and that every payment will help towards the purchase of the freehold, which, again, being every year nearer emancipation, will every year be worth something more to sell. There are heaps of details, intelligible enough both to landlord and tenant ; but that is, broadly, the scheme, which from the first turns the tenant into a holder in fee subject to a quit-rent less than his present rent, and in the end. makes him free owner of the soil. Now let us look for a moment at the position of the three parties concerned.
(1.) There is "the Taxpayer," who, being a voter, and therefore master of Parliament, is guarded. as if he were- a pawnbroker advancing a shilling on a laundress's flat- irons. First of all, Taxpayer gets the legal right to the flat-irons,—i.e., the farm. If he is never paid, he can sell the farm, which every year, of course, that quit-rent has been paid, has advanced in value. If that is inconvenient or harsh on the tenant, however, he can stop his debt out of the grants which he makes for education and many other local purposes to the defaulting district, and out of some money, a fifth of the price, not handed over to the landlord, the total of these resources together being equal, under all probable circumstances, to the capitalised value of the loan. The security, the reader will perceive, is perfect—at least, if figures which are not questioned are correct—because it is in Taxpayer's own pocket. The tenant may try to cheat anybody he likes, may boycott anybody he pleases, may shoot anybody he can get at, and still there is the security, quiet and comfortable, in Tax- payer's own hands, inextricable thence except by Act of Parliament, that is, by Taxpayer's own consent. The. security, granted that Parliament is firm, is actually better than the pawnbroker's, for somebody might steal those flat-irons, and nobody can steal a sum which the Treasury was going to pay, but is authorised to keep in its own hands. Nothing can be imagined more clever—or more needless. As a matter of fact, the Irish tenant, when conscious that his rent buys his freehold, always does pay it, the total of even momentary default under the different Redemption Acts being less than 2 per cent. Both his qualities and his defects, in truth, impel the tenant to pay. He is the least of a fool in all the world of farmers, and knows quite well that his bargain is a good. one for himself ; and he is, of all farmers, except perhaps Southern Frenchmen, the greediest of property. He hates losing money more than he hates sin —just look at the way he treats a " landgrabber," that is, in practice, an overbidder—and the notion of forfeiting a,. freehold which he has partly enfranchised is utterly- abhorrent to him. He will pay fast enough, except in years of famine ; but if he does not pay, there is the security in Taxpayer's own pocket. He is perfectly safe, a great deal safer than, if he is heart and soul a friend of the Union, he has any right whatever to be ; for he ought, on the Unionist theory, to be willing to use the high credit of the United Kingdom to facilitate the execu- tion of an accepted social reform. (2.) There is the Irish Tenant, the person who for the last twenty years has—without any disrespect to Mr. Parnell—been the true " uncrowned King of Ireland." It is he who has made agitation possible, he who is " advised." or coaxed into all conspiracies, he who holds in his hand that Irish representation which has been used to paralyse Parliament ; and what is his position ? In principle, he has nearly won his game. He has not, to be sure, got his holding at its prairie value ; but then he never expected to get it, and never could get it, except by a revolution destructive of his own ultimate interest, which is that a patch of land should be worth much money. But he enjoys advantages such as were never given to a tenant in the world before ; for the Frenchman, when he won in his contest, had to submit to three years of forced labour in each generation, under the name of the conscription, and to take on his neck the burden of at least half the Imperial taxes. If the Irish Tenant accepts the Act, he becomes a freeholder ; has his rent reduced 20 per cent. at once for five years, and afterwards 30 per cent. ; and finds his very rent, that long-hated burden, paying off the only mortgage on his freehold. His old bogey, eviction, is utterly dead, for he can only be turned out by wilful default, default by misfortune being provided against by an assurance fund to be accumulated out of the difference, 10 per cent., between the 20 per cent. he is to save on his rent for the first five years, and the 30 per cent. he is to save for the remainder of his quit-rent term. That quit-rent term is long, it is true ; but half of it will be gone in twenty- four and a half years—little more than the Scotch farm lease —and he can, by paying the balance before it is due, hurry on the time of full emancipation. He is, in fact, the luckiest of mankind, for nobody else kills a debt by merely paying a low interest on it ; so lucky, that if the British farmer were not exempt by some queer perversity or rare merit of temperament from the land-hunger, we should say that the proposal was altogether too dangerous, and would end in a Land question over the whole Kingdom. The only word of complaint the Tenant can say is that the limit of X33,000,000 is too narrow ; and he may rest tranquil about that. All instalments paid are to be re-lent as an increase to the fund ; and if it is not increased whenever he cries for " more," his Parliamentary representatives will have lost their customary cunning.
(3.) Lastly, there is the Landlord ; how does he stand ? Well, we cannot say he is lucky, and can fancy him in many cases exquisitely uncomfortable. He will have to sell, because if a tenant outside his estate is buying his farm with his rent, the tenant inside will think himself swindled unless he gets the same unprecedented advantage, and will either strike or make himself unbearably dis- agreeable. The Landlord, however, may not like to sell. He may want his high rental to pay dower, rent-charge, mortgage interest, and all manner of demands which the Government scheme does not reduce. He may not see his way to employing in business the capital paid him—which is, of course, his best chance—and if he does see it, he only gets four-fifths of it to use, the Government retaining one- fifth at Mr. Goschen's ridiculous rate of interest, which one has to calculate on a slate, and is hardly worth having when it is calculated. He is, it is true, relieved from a great deal of obloquy, from the burden of keeping an agent— the Bill is the death-warrant of that unlucky class, which is at least entitled to the credit of dauntless courage—from a suspense which must have been maddening, and from the feeling, more maddening still, that he has rights, and that nobody will enforce them; but still he is a sufferer, deserving in many cases of profound pity. Sometimes, no doubt, he is paying for the sins of his forefathers, which must be a comforting thought, or half Asia would not have invented it ; but very often he is paying for the sins of our fore- fathers—Henry Cromwell and the rest—in which idea there can be consolation for no man. The truth is, he is impoverished to a certaint extent because the State cannot help itself, being bound to refound social order, and because the British people, for the first time in its whole history, has got a fit of dirty meanness on it. It wants to be comfortable and to pay nothing, and cannot see that when it passes laws for the benefit of a class, it virtually pledges its faith that the benefit shall be forthcoming. If West India planters had a right to a grant in payment for their slaves, the Irish landlords have a right to a grant in payment for their right of eviction,—the thing actually taken away. Argument, however, is thrown away, and all we can hope is that, if the measure succeeds as it should do, the selling value of the demesnes, which are not touched by the Bill, may partly recoup a class expropriated for reasons of State.
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