PAST AND PRESENT IN IRELAND.* LORD EVERSLRY has achieved a
very rare success. For the most part narratives dealing with politics that have ceased to be contemporary and have not yet become history are but dull reading. In Gladstone and Ireland we have an example of the opposite kind. The Irish laud question, which is the main subject of the book, lives again in Lord Eversley's pages. The story is told in a way that seizes the reader's attention, and the speeches, both in and out of Parliament, which neces- sarily play so large a part in it are handled by a master in the art of making telling summaries. This result is obtained in spite of—we should rather say because of— the frank partisanship of the writer. He suppresses nothing, least of all his personal judgment on the events he chronicles. Nor does he pretend to even a momentary doubt on which side the right lay. He shares to the full Mr. Gladstone's main error in dealing with the land question in Ireland, and he seeks the explanation of his ill success in every direction but the right one. But, as he keeps back none of the facts, ho furnishes his readers with the means of correcting his rendering of them for themselves, and so does more to bring out the truth than if he had written a book of greater impartiality but of less interest.
The failure of the Land Act of 1870 should have convinced Mr. Gladstone that the relation of landlord and tenant was not suited to Ireland. It had long been assumed that what worked well in England must work equally well in Ireland. But the one thing required to make this a sound conclusion was wanting. The circumstances of the two countries, far from being the same, were altogether different. In England landlords and tenants were of the same race and of the same religion, and there had never been any want of good feeling between them. In Ireland the majority of the landlords were of English descent and professed the English religion, and though they had in most cases become more Irish than the Irish themselves the identity had not created any sense of a common interest in each other's well-doing. The landlord looked only to the rent which the tenant had agreed to pay him. Nothing in the way of improvements concerned him. They were made, if made at all, by the tenant. "If," said Mr. Bright, "all that the tenants have done were swept off the soil, and all that the landlords have done were left upon it, the land would be as bare of houses and farms, fences and cultivation, as it was in prehistoric times. It would be as bare as an American prairie." Under the law as it stood before 1870 all that the tenants had done was from time to time swept not indeed off the soil, but into the landlord's pocket. He had an unre- stricted right to raise the rents at his pleasure, and if the tenant was unable to pay he could be and was evicted, and the land, with the increased value derived from the improve- ments made by the tenant, was let to another applicant. Morally and economically the system was bad. The landlord seized the fruit of another man's labour; the tenant was dis- couraged from making improvements which he could not call his own.
In one province of Ireland, though the law was the same as in the other three, a custom strong enough to make the law of none effect had gradually grown up. In Ulster an outgoing tenant could by this custom claim either from the incoming tenant or from the landlord the value of any improvements he had made as well as something for the goodwill of the farm. The Land Act of 1870 practically turned this custom into law and extended it to the whole of Ireland. But there were other features in the custom which were not extended beyond Ulster. The Act did not interfere with the landlord's power to raise rents at his pleasure, and compensation for disturbance was not to be paid if the ground of eviction was non-payment of rent, except in the case of holdings under £25 a year. Still the Act " had the effect of putting an end to the arbitrary and wholesale evictions of tenants in ordinary times. . . . It was not till the bad seasons of 1878.79 that the defects of the Act became apparent." These defects were that the landlord retained the power of asking what rent he chose for the land he let, and that he could evict a tenant at the end of his term upon paying him compensation for improvements made by him or his predecessors. The remedy most in favour.in • Gladstone and Ireland. By Lord Everoley. London : Main= and Co. 104, ad. net.]--(S) Vhd Pope's Given Island, By W. P. Ryan. 1.49449n.i James Niabet and Co. [b's, not.] Ireland was the three F's—Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure, and Free Sale of the tenant's interest—and this, though (according both to Lord Eversley and to Lord Morley) disliked by Mr. Gladstone as late as January 1881, was, after all, included in the Land Act of that year. The wonder is that the author of that Act, With his high sense of the responsibilities of a landlord's position, should not have seen that if to concede the three F's was essential to the peace of Ireland it was conclusive evidence that the system of landlord and tenant had hopelessly broken down. That system implies a real division of ownership between the two parties. The landlord makes over a piece of his land to the-tenant for a certain time and on certain conditions. It is taken for granted that the parties to the transaction are free agents, and that when the term comes to an and both will be free to renew,or vary, or end the arrangement. When a landlord cannot get rid of a tenant so long as the rent fixed by a court is duly paid, and the tenant has the power of selling his holding to n third person against whom the landlord can offer no objection except on a few aridly specified grounds, the land is practi- cally the tenant's. If the Land Act had made it hie altogether it would have been the best way out of the difficulty. The landlord might then have disappeared and employed the money he had got for his property in other ways. The tenant would have felt that he had become the owner of the soil and have been open to whatever good influences are implied in the phrase " the magic of property." In Ireland, where almost all that has been done to improve the land has been done by tenants who down to 1870 might have their rent raised as the sole recogni- tion of their contribution to the value of their holding, this magic was likely to be specially powerful. Why, then, did Mr. Gladstone not anticipate Mr. Wyndham's Act in 1881 P Lord Morley gives as a reason that "opinion was not nearly ready either in England or Ireland for general purchase." But in England in 1881 opinion seems only to have been ready for whatever Mr. Gladstone proposed. There was no special love for the three F's. " Northcote," to quote Lord Morley again, " was not far wrong when he said that though the Bill was carried by a majority of two to one there was hardly a man in the House beyond the Irish ranks who cared one straw about it." The general feeling was that something had to be done in Ireland, and that Mr. Gladstone was more likely than any one else to hit upon the right thing to do. If ho had declared for purchase instead of for the three F's he might have anticipated in 1881 the legislation of 1903. Something like the Act actually passed would have had to be introduced, since purchase would have been im- possible at the rents then asked. But this would have been only a provisional arrangement in preparation for purchase, and would have disappeared when the condition necessary to purchase had come into being. The landlord would not have become, as in so many cases he did become, a mere rent- charger on his former estate.
There is one melancholy chapter in Lord Eversley's narrative which recalls the greatest victory that the Nationalist Party has ever won. It was they who committed Mr. Gladstone's Government and all which have followed it to a policy which has well-nigh destroyed the House of Commons, If when the Speaker rose, after forty-one hours of continuous debate on the Coercion Act of 1881, and, after announcing the necessity of vindicating the authority and credit of the House, proceeded to put the question, his action had stood alone, the need for its repetition might possibly not have arisen. Unfortunately Mr. Brand had made it a condition of putting the question at his own instance that Mr. Gladstone should "reconsider the regulation of business either by giving more authority to the House or by conferring authority on the Speaker." In this stipulation lies the germ of all the changes in procedure which have now made the House of Commons little better than a court of registration for Ministerial decrees. The shade of Parnell may well view with satisfaction the change that he was the chief instrument'in effecting. Mr. Ryan gives us a book of a wholly different character. The Pope's Green. Island is a remarkable picture of the Ireland of to-day. As to the accuracy of the presentation it is 'impossible for an English critic to speak. All he can say is that the Ireland of Mr. Ryan is an Ireland which neither the English Government, nor the Roman hierarchy, nor the Pope himself has yet learned to understand. It is an Ireland which speaks Irish, which reads Irish—it has a growing vernacular literature, which is Catholic but • dislikes Vaticanism, and so is in a measure anti-Clerical, which thinks ordinary polities rather unreal, and is more concerned t6 build up an Irish nation than to make changes in the methods or machinery of Irish government. In the eyes of Irishmen of this type the policy of the Nationalist Party in the House of Commons " does not harmonize with a national, intellectUal, and social conception." The whole volume is filled with revelations of this character. Whether they are true or only creations of an enthusiastic and imaginative render- ing of facts which to others bear a more commonplace aspect we cannot pretend to say. In favour of their truth it must be said that the book is full of humour, and that humour seldom dwells in a wholly ideal world. But, whatever opinion we may hold on this point, there is one on which we shall all be agreed. The Pope's Green Island is excellent reading from the first page to the last.
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