[84] “It forced properties to a general auction, to be sold for whatever they would bring, at a time when legislation had imposed new and unheard of burdens on landed property. At a time of unprecedented depression in the value of land, it called a general auction of Irish estates. English History records no more violent interference with vested interests than the provision by which this Statute forced the sale of a large portion of the landed property at a time no prudent man would have set up an acre to be sold by public competition.” (Tenant Right in Ireland, Butt, p. 881.)
“Estates that would have been well able to pay twice the encumbrances laid upon them, if property was at all near its ordinary level of value, now failed to realize enough to meet the mortgages, and the proprietors were devoted to ruin.... The tenants complain that they have gained little and lost much in the change from the old masters to the new.” (‘New Ireland,’ A. M. Sullivan, p. 88.)
At the sale of Lord Gort’s property thirteen years’ purchase was the maximum; many lots were sold at five. Some portions of the property since resold have fetched twenty-five and twenty-seven years’ purchase.
Excessive rack-renting has been attributed to sales under this iniquitous Encumbered Estates Act.
“In those sales persons buy small portions of property; of course their interest is to get as large a return as they can, and they think of nothing but an increase of rent.” (Minutes of Evidence, Lords Committee, 1867.)
[85] See Speech of Mr. W. H. Smith, M.P., Nov. 19, 1883, commencing “No country on the face of the earth has been so misunderstood and misgoverned as Ireland, &c.”
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
LITTLE GREATNESS.
M. Merimée writes:—
“That which strikes me most in the English politics of our own times, is its littleness. Everything in England is done with a view to keep place” (conserver les portefeuilles), “and they commit all possible faults in order to keep twenty or thirty doubtful votes. They only disquiet themselves about the present, and think nothing of the future.”