'Compulsory valuation and fixity of tenure would bring about total demoralisation and a Saturnalia of crime.'
Exactly.
Mr. Laing, formerly M.P. for Orkney, in a magazine article defended the 'Plan of Campaign' as an innocent attempt to defend the weak against the strong, and as having been adopted only on estates where rents were too high, in fact, as the result of high rents. As a matter of fact, in Orkney the rents advanced 194 per cent., and during the same period in Kerry they dwindled. He also asserted that the Irish tenants' improvements had been confiscated by the landlords as the tenant improved.
Certainly the law did not prevent them increasing the rent; but, unfortunately for the reasoning of Mr. Laing, and his taking for granted imaginary 'confiscations,' figures most decidedly prove that the landlords did not use any such power. The rentals have steadily decreased while the landlords were borrowing and expending nearly half a million in my own county.
This fact is conclusively demonstrated by the Government returns.
As to the National League—with all its paraphernalia of boycotting, shooting from behind a hedge, merciless beating, shooting in the legs, and other similar variations of Irish Home Rule, on which I shall dwell in a later chapter—being only a protector of the weak tenant against the hard landlord, I think one fact will prove more forcibly than any argument the fallacy of such an assertion.
There were two estates in Kerry let at a much lower rate than any others in the county—those of Lord Cork and Colonel Oliver.
Colonel Oliver's agent was the only one fired at in Kerry in 1886, and Lord Cork's agent was the only one obliged to employ over two hundred police to protect him in endeavouring to recover in 1887 rent which was due in 1884. This rent was due on land let at considerably under the Poor Law valuation, and the rents were only half what was paid in 1860.
These cases afford a decided proof that the Land or National League carries on its government irrespective of high or low rents, and the 'Plan of Campaign' is worked according as the local branches of the League have disciplined or terrorised the inhabitants of a district, the orders from 'headquarters' depending on the probability of success.
I should like to retort on Mr. Laing that, while the evidence before the Land Commissioner proved the rental of Ireland was diminishing, that of the country where his own property lay increased to an unusual degree. I do not say the landlords confiscated the tenants' improvements, possibly they made none. But figures are hard facts, and they prove three things:—