MR. GLA_DSTONE AND EVICTIONS.
WE have always held that Mr. Gladstone and his followers were only half-sincere, though doubtless unconscious that they were only half-sincere, in their advocacy of the Parnellite principles in regard to the ownership of land. That this is the truth, and that the necessary conclusions drawn from those principles are only accepted in so far as they are calculated to produce a political result and to further a party purpose, and that they are in no sense intended for home consumption, has been made manifest in a somewhat humorous fashion by the controversy over the exercise of the rights of property which has lately taken place at Hawarden. It is impossible to suppress a smile over Mr. Gladstone's letter to the Times, so evidently unfeigned is his indignation that any one should have ventured to comment upon the management of the estate. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Gladstone, when he defends his son's treatment of the tenantry, misses the whole point in dispute, and entirely fails to answer his assailants.
No one has accused Mr. Gladstone and his son of being harsh landlords, or of having acted ungenerously towards the occupiers of their land. Indeed, it has been admitted on all hands that the Hawarden estate is particularly well managed, and that the farmers have met with every con- sideration and generosity from the owners of the property. No one wants to prove Mr. W. H. Gladstone a bad landlord, even if this were possible, which it manifestly is not ; for to do so would be to destroy the whole value of the argument based upon what has taken place at Hawarden. Unionists— when defending those Irish landlords who, to protect them- selves from the "Plan of Campaign" and other attempts at spoliation, are in the habit of exercising what remain to them of their rights over their land—are wont to declare that the power to dispossess a tenant who refuses to pay rent and gets into arrears for a long period of time is absolutely necessary. Accordingly, they uphold the practice of re- suming possession of the holding in case of persistent breach of contract. For doing so, however, they are denounced as the aiders and abettors of tyrants and exterminators who drive men from their homes and inflict upon them sentences of death and starvation. To bear out the Unionist contention in regard to the necessity that exists for preserving the power of eviction, the Hawarden case is therefore most apposite. Here is an English estate admittedly managed on the soundest, the most liberal, and the most kindly principles, an estate where there is no sort or kind of ill-feeling between landlord and tenant, and where no temptation to induce the occupier to act unreasonably can be said to exist. Yet even on this ideally managed property, the landlord finds it necessary to have recourse to so violent an exercise of the rights of property as a distraint coupled with a notice of eviction.
Let us look at the circumstances. Certain tenants fail to fulfil their contracts and get so greatly into arrears, that at last they have to be dispossessed of their tenancies, the owner sending in bailiffs, who forcibly seize the goods on the farms and sell them then and there by public auction ;—the occupier meantime forfeiting, in addition to his tenancy, any improvements that have been made by him in past years. Of course such action sounds harsh, and of course the ruined and dispossessed tenant feels aggrieved ; but can it be argued that there was any other way out of the difficulty for the landlord, unless he were willing to be de- prived of his property through the ill-luck or bad manage- ment of the man who contracted to pay him rent for the use of his land ? To blame Mr. W. H. Gladstone because he determined to take action which, if not taken—nothing spreads so rapidly as inability to pay rent—might ulti- mately have resulted in the ruin of himself as ow,uer, and of his father as rent-charger, would surely be not only ridiculous, but utterly unjust and unreasonable. If any persons have attempted to make their action in regard to the Hawarden tenants a ground for a personal attack upon either the leader of the Opposition or his son as harsh and cruel landowners, such persons deserve the severest condemnation of all honest and all honourable men. To point out, however, that if we justify the action . taken at Hawarden, we must a fortiori justify that taken at Luggacurran, on the estate of the O'Grady, on the estate of Lord Kenmare, and on a hundred other Irish properties, is in no sort of way an insult or injury to Mr. Gladstone. Since the passing of the Irish Land Acts of 1881 and 1887, an eviction in Ireland is prima' facie far more likely to be justifiable than in England. In England, a landlord may, if he chooses, resume possession of a tenant's holding in an arbitrary, oppressive, and capricious manner, either by exacting an impossible rent, or by simply informing the occupier that he must give up possession on a particular day. In Ireland, no such action is pos- sible. The landlord there can only ask such a rent as the Land Courts will allow him, while arbitrary eviction is impossible, and compensation for improvements is secured by provisions far more favourable to the tenant than exist in England. Lastly, the Irish tenant, if dispossessed for mm-payment of rent, can sell his interest to the highest bidder, and even after actual eviction, is allowed a period of six months in which to redeem his holding. It is, in fact, absolutely impossible to defend the management of the Hawarden estate without also upholding the action of such landlords as the O'Grady, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Brooke, Lord Kenmare, or Captain Vandeleur. In Lord Lansdowne's case, the tenants made no pretence of poverty, but simply demanded to sit at ridiculously low rents, relying upon their ability to force their landlord into compliance by putting pressure upon him in his public capacity. They failed, how- ever, and were evicted. How can we condemn the course pur- sued by Lord Lansdowne without denouncing that adopted by Mr. W. H. Gladstone ? If instead of the Lugga,curran estate we take that of Lord Kenmare or the O'Grady, we shall find numerous individual cases—plenty are minutely described by Mr. T. W. Russell in his remarkable series of letters to the Times—which exactly correspond to those of the men who have been dispossessed of their tenancies at Hawarden,—men in arrears for five or six years who have continued to occupy without making any attempt to pay rent. With such instances before them, the Gladstonian leaders must contend either that things may rightly be done in England which are wrong in Ireland, or else must declare generally that a landlord must never make use of distraint or eviction to collect his rent, and that the tenants themselves must be the judges of whether they ought or ought not to fulfil their contracts. No doubt the Gladstonians will prefer to adopt the former alterna- tive, and we shall be told that the doctrines of the Land League, though applicable enough to Ireland, ought never to be allowed to cross St. George's Channel. If tenants were legally worse off in Kerry or Clare than they are in Bedfordshire or Wales, there might be some reason for taking up such a position. Since, however, as we have pointed out above, the Irish tenant has an infinitely better position before the law than his brother-occupier in England, the whole basis on which the distinction is founded falls to the ground. If there was no injustice in the action taken at Hawarden, then most emphatically there has been none on various estates ruined by the "Plan of Campaign," where the Gladstonians have, nevertheless, not scrupled to denounce the landlord. Again, if those who originally brought the facts to light really used Mr. W. H. Gladstone's troubles with his tenants to discredit the leader of the Opposition, they were doubtless acting basely and unworthily ; but not more basely or more unworthily than those who have employed Lord Lansdowne's or Lord Kenmare's difficulties to further a political end.
We must not leave the subject of the Hawarden estate and Mr. Glad,stone's letter without mentioning the curious fact that Mr. Gladstone appears to have entirely forgotten that he ever referred to evictions as sentences of death. The actual words used by him in the debate on the Compen- sation for Disturbance Bill appear to have been as follows : —" It is no exaggeration to say, in a country where the agricultural pursuit is the only pursuit, and where the means of the payment of rent are entirely destroyed for the time by the visitation of Providence, that the poor occupier may, in these circumstances, regard the sentence of eviction as coming for him very near to a sentence of starvation." It may be, however, that Mr. Gladstone has not forgotten the passage, but draws a characteristic distinction between the words reported in " Hansard " and those which are cur- rently quoted as representing his meaning. After all, the matter is not one of very great moment. What is important, however, is to remember that the farmer who has failed in England and has to be dispossessed is not nearly so well off as if he lived in Ireland, and that it is mere misrepresentation to talk of eviction as wicked and cruel in Ireland, but as a perfectly legitimate process in. England.
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