In a country like ours, conflicting interests and opposing currents are ever changing the landmarks of party; and the commissioners feel that with years something will happen to make their labours of little consequence, and that they have only to prolong the period, and all is safe.
At this moment, we have what is called a “Landlord and Tenant Commission” sitting, or sleeping, as it maybe. They have to investigate diverse, knotty, and puzzling points, about people who want too much for their land, and others who prefer paying nothing for it. They are to report, in some fashion, respecting the prospects of estated gentlemen burdened with rent-charges and mortgages, and who won't improve properties they can scarcely live on—and a peasantry, who must nominally pay an exaggerated rent, depending upon the chance of shooting the agent before the gale-day, and thus obtaining easier terms for the future.
They are to investigate the capabilities of waste lands, while cultivated lands lie waste beside them; they must find out why land-owners like money, and tenants hate paying it; and why a people hold life very cheap when they possess little means to sustain it.
Now these, take them how you will, are not so easy of solution as you may think. The landlord, for his own sake, would like a thriving, well-to-do, contented tenantry; the tenants, for their sakes, would like a fair-dealing, reasonable landlord, not over griping and grabbing, but satisfied with a suitable value for his property. They both have no common share of intelligence and acuteness—they have a soil unquestionably fruitful, a climate propitious, little taxation, good roads, abundant markets; and yet the one is half ruined in his house and the other wholly beggared in his hovel—each averring that the cause lies in the tithes, the tariff, the poor-rate, or popery, the agent or the agitation: in fact, it is something or other which one favours and the other opposes—some system or sect, some party or measure, which one advocates and the other denounces; and no matter though its influence should not, in the remotest way, enter into the main question, there is a grievance—that's something; and as Sir Lucius says, “it's a mighty pretty quarrel as it stands”—not the less, that certain partizans on either side assist in the mêlée, and the House of Commons or the Association Hall interfere with their influence.
If, then, the Commissioners can see their way here, they are smart fellows, and no small praise is due to them. There are difficulties enough to puzzle long heads; and I only hope they may be equal to the task. Meanwhile, depopulation goes on briskly—landlords are shot every week in Tipperary; and if the report be but delayed for some few months longer, a new element will appear in the question—for however there may remain some pretenders to perpetuity of tenure, the landlords will not be there to grant the leases. Let the Commissioners, then, keep a look-out a-head—much of the embarrassment of the inquiry will be obviated by only biding their time; and if they but delay their report till next November, there will be but one party to legislate for in the island.
A NUT FOR THE HUMANE SOCIETY.
If my reader will permit me to refer to my own labours, I would wish to remind him of an old “Nut” of mine, in which I endeavoured to demonstrate the defective morality and economy of our penal code—a system, by which the smallest delinquent is made to cost the state several hundreds of pounds, for an offence frequently of some few pennies in value; and a theft of a loaf is, by the geometrical scale of progressive aggrandisement, gradually swelled into a most expensive process, in which policemen, station-houses, inspectors, magistrates, sessions, assizes, judges, crown prosecutors, gaols, turnkeys, and transports, all figure; and the nation is left to pay the cost of this terrible array, for the punishment of a crime the prevention of which might, perhaps, have been effected for two-pence.
I do not now intend to go over the beaten track of this argument; my intention is simply to refer to it, and adduce another instance of this strange and short-sighted policy, which prefers waiting to acting, and despises cheap, though timely interference with evil, and indulges in the somewhat late, but more expensive process of reparation.
And to begin. Imagine—unhappily you need exercise no great stretch of the faculty, the papers teem with too many instances—imagine a poor, woe-begone, miserable creature, destitute and friendless, without a home, without a meal; his tattered clothing displaying through every rent the shrunken form and wasted limbs to which hunger and want have reduced him. See him as night falls, plodding onwards through the crowded thoroughfares of the great city; his lack-lustre eye glazed and filmy; his pale face and blue lip actually corpse-like in their ghast-liness. He gazes at the passers-by with the vacant stare of idiotcy. Starvation has sapped the very intellect, and he is like one in some frightful vision; a vague desire for rest—a dreamy belief that death will release him—lives in the place of hope; and as he leans over the battlements of the tall bridge, the plash of the dark river murmurs softly to his ear. His despair has conjured up a thousand strange and flitting fancies, and voices seem to call to him from the dull stream, and invite him to lie down and be at peace. Meanwhile the crowd passes on. Men in all the worldliness of their hopes and fears, their wishes, their expectations, and their dreads, pour by. None regard him, who at that moment stands on the very brink of an eternity, whither his thoughts have gone before him. As he gazes, his eye is attracted by the star-like spangle of lights in the water. It is the reflection of those in the house of the Humane Society; and he suddenly remembers that there is such an institution; and he bethinks him, as well as his poor brain will let him, that some benevolent people have called this association by this pleasing title, and the very word is a balm to his broken heart.