TOPICS OF TIIE DAY
THE LORDS AND THE ARREARS BILL.
-LORD SALISBURY has passed, by his usual great majori- ties, two amendments to the Arrears Bill, either of which is so fatal to the utility of the Bill that we doubt whether the Government would be justified in applying the resources of the State to the objects contemplated by the Bill, under such conditions as either of them would impose. By the first amendment, Lord Salisbury proposes to take away from the Bill altogether its character of a public sacrifice made for the attainment of a great pacification, for though he leaves the public sacrifice undiminished, he takes no pains to provide that the pacification should be ensured, or even rendered pro- bable. The landlords, as a class, will be great gainers by the Bill, and therefore the landlords as a class should accept it, even at the cost of some sacrifices on their side. But Lord Salisbury wants to ensure the landlords their great gain, without even the smallest sacrifice on their side for this great advantage. If his first amendment were carried, no one tenant could be sure that he would get the benefit of the Arrears Bill ; the feeling of the tenant class for the landlord class would be as hostile and severely strained as ever; the public would be asked to make a great sacrifice for a great social good which the public would no longer secure. The landlords who declined to avail themselves of the Bill, and who kept the arrears hanging over the heads of their tenants, would embitter the feeling of the tenants beyond even its present point, while every subsequent step in their use of these arrears would be a new signal for the outbreak of social hatred. It is monstrous even to suggest that the public should make such a sacrifice as the Arrears Bill offers, for a result so grossly inadequate as Lord Salisbury's amendment would leave us. Nor is Lord Salisbury's second amendment much better. It has been quite rightly agreed that the Commissioners may take into account the selling value of the tenant-right, in con- sidering whether the tenant is or is not one of the class who is unable to pay his full arrears if he is to cultivate his holding decently. If the Duke of Abercorn's amendment, which was accepted by the Government in the Lords as a sort of com- promise, be agreed to in the Commons, the Bill will go further than this, and require the Commissioners to take into account the selling value of the tenant-right, in determining the qualification of a poor tenant for the help offered by the Arrears Bill. But Lord Salisbury proposes to go much further still, and to leave the unpaid arrears as a permanent lien charged upon the tenant-right, whenever it shall come to be sold. That means that the new start to the relation between landlord and tenant which the Bill is intended to initiate, shall not be a fair start, after all, but shall leave in the background a cause of heartburning in the mind of the tenant, who will have to remember that his tenant-right is, after all, not his own, and that the arrears of rent which the land- lord was asked to remit as an equivalent for the benefit of State-laelp in relation to the arrears due, shall ultimately go to him all the same, if the tenant has a tenant-right of value sufficient to recoup him. There, again, the landlord whom the State-helps to pay, would sacrifice nothing, or, at least, only the interest of his arrears, for the advantage of that help. Now, since one of the great considerations which have induced the Government to bring in this Bill, is that a large number of these arrears are really nominal,—were never looked for by the landlord at all, but only held over the tenant's head as a sort of scourge, in order to screw out as much rent as could be screwed out of his impecuniosity,—it seems to us wholly in- admissible to let those arrears stand over, to play still the bad part they were intended to play, though in a less effective fashion, The public do not get what they bargain for in this Bill, if they do not secure new hope for the small tenants. With (often nominal) arrears still charged as a mortgage on the tenant- right, the amount of new hope secured to the small tenants would often be extremely small. We say, then, that the Com- mons ought not to adopt either of these amendments ; that the Irish and the English public, who are asked to pay two millions and a half for the purpose of putting an end to the monstrous evil of social war, do not get what they are willing to buy, if either of these amendments is to be incorporated into the., Bill.
The question remains,—What ought the Government to do, if Lord Salisbury persists in his wilful and haughty freak, as it seems that so late as Wednesday he intended to do ?
For our own parts, we should be disposed to say that this is an emergency in which the Crown might well be advised that a new Session of Parliament should be at once called, and the Bill reintroduced, with an assurance to the Minister that the Crown would use its prerogative to create enough Peers to carry the measure. We are well aware that this is a very strong step to take, nor would we advise it in any emergency less urgent than the present one. Butt without having any regard to the critical condition of foreign affairs, and the serious consequences of a change of Government during the prosecution of the Egyptian campaign, it does seem to us that a half-and-half policy- in Ireland at the present moment would risk all the excel- lent consequences which we are beginning to reap from the new Land Act. The action of the Lords in 1880 was disastrous enough. It stimulated all the confusion and crime of the terrible year and a half which followed. But the conse- quences of renewed confusion of that kind now would be even more serious. As it is, a steady improvement has set in,. following in the most marked manner the track of the Land Commission and its decisions, so that wherever these decisions have gone, outrage has died away upon their track. With the grant of an Arrears Act to save the wretched small tenants im the West, who have never really had a chance of paying the nominal rents which the landlords never even expected to exact, though they held them in tem-arm over the tenant, lest he should regain his independence, there is a reasonable hope that Ireland will soon settle down into peace and industry. But if the match is again to be applied to what we may call the agrarian tinder of the West Coast, all' the efforts of the last two years may have been made almost in vain. It seems to us, then, that the question of the Arrears Bill in Ireland is one quite outside the range of party. Even the strongest Tories might well and reasonably say, We. disapprove the Liberal policy wholly, but if it should be tried at all, it should be tried as a whole ; and this final touch,as the Liberal leaders think it, to the policy of the Land Act ought not to be refused. It will turn out, as we believe, that the whole policy is wrong, but it cannot be right to try neither the Tory policy nor the Liberal policy, but the Liberal policy as it comes out when mutilated by a Tory Peerage.' That seems to us reasonable language, even for the most Tory of Tory legislators, and we doubt not that many of the Conservative landlords of Ireland would hold language of this kind.. They would strongly deprecate the wasting of all the sacrifices which have been made, through the rash and peevish action of the House of Lords. We hold, then, that the Govern- ment would be well warranted in appealing to the Crown for final authority to overawe the House of Peers, in relation to a Bill considered essential to the Liberal policy by all the soundest heads in Ireland, and which, as mutilated by Lord Salisbury, it would not only be folly, but almost madness to. enact.
If, however, this should prove to be too "thorough" a policy for the Government, the next best course seems to be to. avow boldly that, if a second time defeated, it would become necessary to drop the Bill, rather than go further in the direction -of Lord Salisbury than the amendment 'of the Duke of Abercorn—accepted by the Government on Tuesday night—would carry them. The prospect of losing the Arrears Bill altogether would seriously alarm. all the Irish landlords with any head. They know only too well what must be the result of a recurrence of the passions of the last two years, and they know better than any one how likely these passions are to recur, if the hatred with which their class is too often regarded by the Irish peasant is to receive a new access of intensity. As we all know that Lord Salisbury's amendments cannot be accepted without making a farce of the Bill, the only alternatives are either to pass the Bill without them, or to drop the Bill alto- gether. The prospect of the latter course would bring a pres- sure to bear upon Lord Salisbury from his own side such as even he would find it difficult to resist ; and even if lie held out, and threw the Bill out, it would raise a cry in the country against the infatuation and obstinacy of the House of Lords that would be fatal to the Tories at the next election. Deeply as the English people love the Peerage, they love it only on condi- tion that, after all its threats, it shall get out of the way at the right moment, and not bar progress. If the Bill were lost, the state of Ireland would become most critical, a serious calamity of the worst kind, but one which no one could deny that the House of Lords had brought upon us ; and lamentable as that would be, it would at least have the advantage of forcing us to
face the problem how to alter a Constitution in virtue of which the Liberal Party in power can never mature their legislation in the way that seems to them best, while the Conservative Party in power can always carry swiftly through the House of Lords whatever they can persuade the House of Commons to accept. Why should every great Liberal measure be lost or mutilated, though every great Conservative measure passes un- eritised and almost unmodified through the obsequious and unrevising Chamber of Revision,—as, whether during the rule of a Liberal or the rule of a Conservative Government, it is most falsely called ?
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