The debate on 'the Land Bill has hitherto been rather
unreal. Mr. Gibson, indeed, opened it on Monday, in •a vigorous speech of detail, intended to denounce its legal com- plexity and its great injustice to the landlords ; but his speech had two great blots,—one, that it was a series of committee speeches rather than a speech for the second reading; and next, that it led up to no definite motion. Of course, he made much of the argument that the rules laid down for guiding the Land Court in assessing a fair rent would be at least construable as a direction to carve the value of the tenant-right, or, where there is no tenant-right, of the compensation for disturbance, out of the rent ; complained bitterly of the provisions for free sale and the unreal pre-emption given to the landlord, attacked the one- sidedness of the clauses which give the tenant an appeal to the Court, and do not give it to the landlord; and asserted generally that the Bill was one for the encouragement of litigation by tenants, and would give rise to litigation of which the duration would be something like a hundred years, and the cost five or six millions.
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