MR. TREVELYAN'S LAND BILL.
AGREAT advance has been made towards the pacification of Ireland. We do not mean in Mr. Trevelyan's new Bill, which is only a machine, though a most ably planned machine, for carrying out an idea, but in the adoption of the idea itself. Both the great parties in the State, under the slow teaching of facts, have at last become convinced that the only hope for Ireland is to substitute there a territorial demo- cracy for the English form of social organisation. The Irish people as a body form one of those communities which, the moment they rise above a semi-savage state, insist upon the possession of property, and consequently of the only property they know, which is land. All the people of Southern Asia, all Russians, all Frenchmen, all North Germans, all Scandi- navians, and, indeed, all Europeans except the English, the Spaniards, and the Italians, display the same feeling, in a greater or less degree,—some of them, like the French, in an even greater measure than Irishmen. It has its origin, as we believe, in fear, in a morbid imagination, which sees in the future all manner of suffering from pennilessness, which quite dominates the mind, and from which only the un- imaginative and stolid Englishman is entirely free. "I'm braver than you," boasted the English labourer to the English gentleman ; "I dare spend my last shilling, and you daren't." So powerful is this passion, that it has been the ultimate cause of every Continental revolution ; and its compression in Ireland by the English rule has been at least the first, if not the single, cause of that enduring hate which so perplexes our simple- minded people. There will be no peace till that apprehension is removed and the Irish tiller owns the soil he ploughs, and is bound by the fact of that ownership to support and approve the supremacy of law. We have fought for that doctrine steadily for fifteen years,—contending even against Mr. Glad- stone, in 1869, that in fixity of tenure lay the only hope. And now the truth is acknowledged by both sides. Land in large blocks—as Mr. Trevelyan, in his most lucid speech of Tuesday, conclusively proved—has in Ireland become unsale- able, even when a Parliamentary title is given ; and the land- lords, hopeless of a brighter future, are at last as ready to propose a sale as the peasantry to acquire fixity. It is not from "the garrison" that resistance will come to Mr. Trevelyan's Bill, but from the peasantry if at all ; and we think we can show that, one condition granted, they, although they are now pausing to hear what the rest of them have to say, and to study the Bill with the self-interested, distrustful greediness which in all countries, from Bengal to Belgium, marks the peasant proprietor, will gradually accept its provisions. There is a possible prize in them for the peasant which English journalists not accustomed to his close calculations, have not yet detected.
To the peasant who will or can pay one-fourth of the price down, the Government makes an offer which is really splendid : so great, indeed, that if Irish landlords and farmers were all honest, and small mortgages therefore possible, the whole of Ireland might in a few years belong to its peasantry. These Ministers to whom Irish farmers feel no gratitude, and whose very lives are not safe from their insane hatred, bestow on them the whole benefit of the difference between a peasant's credit and the credit of the State. They offer them three- fourths of the purchase-money at a rate of interest (3-1 per cent.) so low, that when they have paid it, the difference between that and their present rental will provide for their rates, and for the accumulation of a sum which in forty years will extinguish their debt, and leave them unmortgaged freeholders. Stating the principle broadly, and avoiding fractions, the tenant now pays 5 per cent. on his valuation price as rent. The Government takes less than two-thirds of that, for its loan of three- fourths the price. The remaining 2f per cent, suffices to pay rates, and to give to the State a pittance which, by gradual accumulation, will in forty years extinguish the debt. The rent which now only hires the farm will in future not only hire, but buy it. The peasant obtains, if he pays his rent, immoveable fixity now—fixity as of the best copyholder —and the freehold by-and-bye. The dream of every farmer is realised ; the payment which now seems to go on for ever uselessly, and to be a tax for permission to toil, buys the land itself for the toiler. The idea is magnificent ; and in the Highlands, in Wales, in Cumberland, and those districts of the South which are filled with little dairy farms, would, if Parliament ever offered boons to Englishmen, be snatched at with an eagerness that would revolutionise society. Nor will the Irishman, for reasons stated below, hesitate very long.
Before we state those reasons, however, we must mention two preliminary obstacles which Mr. Trevelyan finds it neces- sary to remove. The first, which is swept away with a decision and completeness often wanting in Irish legislation, is that of securing title. The Land Court may arrange for the settlements which burden the land, and prevent sales, by appointing trustees to keep the money payable to beneficiaries, and as to all other difficulties may, as far as the peasant proprietor is concerned, cut them at once by
granting him without cost a writing of investment, which operates as an indefeasible Parliamentary title. Much machinery will, of course, be employed, but by the seller and the Court, not by the buyer, who is neither to be delayed, nor worried, nor taxed, but to "walk out of court, with his title in his bosom," a freeholder. The second is that question of the remaining fourth to be paid down, which has hitherto de- terred purchasers. In a majority of cases the Irish peasant— who is still highly rented for a country so little favoured by nature, and so exhausted by the over-tillage of rack-rented fields for centuries—who is taxed by his usurer, taxed by his own love of drink, taxed by his fine devotion to his feebler relatives, cannot find the money ; and when he can, he often will not. The saving Irishman is the Irishman who fears the future ; and the Irishman who fears the future keeps his hoard as a protection, jealously as a Bengalee or a Mahratta, and will not part with it to buy Heaven, not to mention an incomplete right to land. Mr. Trevelyan, therefore, offers to lend it him in one of two ways, neither of which, we confess, impress us very deeply with their cleverness. The owner may leave that fourth on mortgage ; and if he does, of course everything is simple. But as the Irish peasant must first of all pay his quit-rent to the State, and is usually poor, and is frequently dishonest, and is always disinclined to pay anything to the day— exactness worrying him as it worries aristocrats, and for the same reason, indifference to time — lam:Horde will hardly avail themselves largely of this privilege. They want to be quit of the nuisance ef asking rent from poor and ill-tempered men, not to be subjected to the bother of dunning them for a fourth of it, and perhaps not getting it after all. That plan will fail ; and though the alternative may not, it is a cumbrous one. The alternative offered by Mr. Trevelyan is that the State should provide the whole purchase-money whenever the Land Commissioners and a Board elected by the Grand Juries and Boards of Guardians together decide that the purchase is expedient and the price fair ; that the tenant should pay 5 per cent, for the money ; and that the difference between this sum and 3+ per cent. should be accumulated, so as to extinguish the debt in thirty three years. In the event of the tenant failing to pay, the Board will recoup the amount by adding it to the usual cess, and levying it on the barony. The State would, therefore, be guaranteed by the district,which, again, would know the circumstances of the farmer, and would com- pel him to pay better than the State could. It is quite pos- sible that this may strike the peasant, as it does Mr. Trevelyan, as "an offer never yet made by any State to any class of its citizens," and that he may accept it eagerly ; but we are doubt- ful if he will. He will not want to be worried with the opinion of the Local Board upon his separate case, infinitely preferring to deal directly with his landlord, whom he can persuade or cajole, or, in extremity, coerce. He will not like paying for the thirty-three years, as he will pay a little more than he pays now, and he will argue that the State, if it could trust him for three-fourths, could trust him for the whole. As to the security, it is, after all, not very good ; for the peasant can resist the Board—which he can see, and shoot—much more easily than the Government ; and we should not wonder if, when the cess grew large, Grand Jurors and Guardians alike refused to elect. Both are quite disposed to make the Treasury pay. We should greatly have preferred, as Sir Rowland Blennerhassett suggests in a recent pamphlet, that the State should lend the whole money, guaranteeing itself,if needful, by some general tax—say, merely for illustration, an Irish duty on sugar—and relying for its security on the scheme itself.
For, as we believe, the scheme is secure. The Irish peasant, though a dreamer, is not a sanguine dreamer, and about money is a dreamer who never quite forgets the facts. If the Republic is to come, he knows quite well that he can seize the land, but he does not quite think it will come ; and if not, will he ever get better terms ? No; for although forty years is a long time, and the rent is still high, that the rent should buy the land is a mighty, and above all a perceptible gain, and, moreover, a divisible one—the point forgotten in most criticisms on the Bill. The peasant is not forced to wait forty years. Every year a part of his freehold accrues to him, and a part which is saleable, assignable, capable of being expressed in money. He has a freehold burdened with a mortgage, but the mortgage grows less every year. In ten years a fourth of his free- hold will be his, in twenty years half, in thirty years such a quantity that the farm will be a property loaded only with " a trifle of mortgage." He will have the proprietors' right from the first ; he will be exempt from eviction while he pays; and he will every year become possessed of a property continually increasing, which in his eyes is by no means small, and with which if he chooses to emigrate—and he never loses sight of that chance—he can obtain the wherewithal. He gains, in fact, with every pay- ment an increasing tenant-right, of the most saleable and valuable kind, purchased, not with his savings, not with borrowed money, but by the simple payment of his accustomed rent. This is the prize, the almost immediate prize, which is offered him in Mr. Trevelyan's Bill, and not only the ultimate freehold ; and it is this which will, as we believe, over- come both his reluctance to buy and his distrust of any scheme which comes from the British Parliament. To reject an offer of a possible freehold forty years hence might be easy; but to reject a fourth of the value of his farm which will be his in ten years,—the Irish farmer will turn that over in his mind many times before he does it, and will be in- fluenced in his final decision by Mr. Parnell no more than by the priest. Neither of them can move him on the agrarian side of his mind, which is set on obtaining his land for him- self for the smallest conceivable price. Is any price ever likely to be fixed less than the payment for a limited time,—one life and a fraction—of his reduced rent ? Of one thing, at all events, he may be sure, that Englishmen will think so ; and if he looks back at history, as he knows it, he will take that into consideration.
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