The following is a list of Irish landlords who owned more than 30,000 acres each, and the average annual rentals collected from their tenants prior to the passage of the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, which authorizes the purchase with government funds of their estates, and the division into small farms for the tenants who occupied them:
The owners of other large tracts and the persons who own between 10,000 and 30,000 acres are also nearly all noblemen. It would seem that titles of nobility and large estates go together over here. That is the rule in other countries, and is perfectly natural, because a poor man has no use for a title of nobility and a rich man is usually anxious to get one.
A peer has just as much right to own land as anybody, and the complaints heard in Ireland are not on account of the rank or the station of the landlords, but because of their neglect of their interests and their tenants, especially because most of them do not spend the incomes from their estates in making improvements or for the benefit of their own people; they do not spend it in Ireland, but reside in London most of the time and spend the money there, where the people who earn it receive no benefit from it directly or indirectly. It is unnecessary to discuss the evils of large estates. They are too numerous to mention, especially when they are owned by people who live outside of the country. That is the great obstacle to the development of Mexico, where millions of acres in large tracts, granted to Spanish grandees before independence, still remain in the ownership of their descendants, who live in Spain or Paris, and spend the revenues there. It is true, also, of Russia, Poland, Austria, and of many other countries, and to a certain extent of Cuba, where a number of the valuable and productive plantations belong to families who are living in Spain, Paris, or New York, and never even visit them.
A few years ago, by order of Parliament, an investigation was made to ascertain the habits of the large Irish landowners in connection with their estates, and the following table shows the result:
| Landlords | Acres owned | Rents collected | |
| Resident on or near the property | 5,589 | 8,880,549 | £4,718,497 |
| Residing elsewhere in Ireland, occasionally on property | 377 | 852,818 | 371,123 |
| Residing elsewhere in Ireland | 4,465 | 4,362,446 | 2,128,220 |
| Residing out of Ireland but occasionally on property | 180 | 1,368,347 | 601,072 |
| Never resident in Ireland | 1,443 | 3,145,514 | 1,538,071 |
| Owned by charitable institutions or corporations, | 161 | 584,327 | 234,678 |
| Not ascertained | 1,350 | 615,308 | 331,633 |
No country ever suffered so much from absentee landlordism as Ireland, and many great estates here have been entirely neglected, or practically abandoned and allowed to go to ruin by the owners who intrusted them to dishonest or incompetent managers and took no interest in their own property. No one can blame the tenants upon such estates for their enmity and resentment toward the proprietors, or condemn them for their refusal to pay rent when they received very little or nothing in return. But the system in Ireland has been very much improved of late years by various acts of parliament, and many people think that the tenants now have the advantage in every respect. Fifty years ago the landlord was the owner and autocrat of the soil and everything that stood upon it. The tenant had no legal rights beyond what was written down in his lease, and when that expired the landlord could raise or lower his rent or drive him off the land at pleasure.
Nearly every one of the peers who has sold his estates in Ireland under the land act has taken the cash and has gone to London to live, and if home rule is ever granted to the Irish people there will be little room left for those who remain. Most of the Irish peers spend the greater part of their time in London. Some of them never come to Ireland at all except for the shooting season or horse show. Several prominent English peers have estates in Ireland inherited from ancestors who have intermarried with the Irish nobility. The Duke of Devonshire, for example, owns one of the largest and finest estates in the kingdom at Lismore, a few miles north of Cork. The late duke, who died in 1907, took a great interest in the property and spent a great deal of time there.
Forcible evictions are things of the past. Several years ago the demands for “The Three Fs”—free sale, fair rent, and fixed tenure—were complied with, and to-day the farms in Ireland are subject to what is called “a dual ownership,” peculiar to this country. No landlord can rob a tenant any longer. Disputes concerning rent are now settled by a tribunal which takes all the circumstances into consideration and decides upon the equities rather than the technicalities of the case. This has revolutionized the land system of Ireland, and by a succession of acts of parliament during the past few years the government has gone a great way toward equalizing ownership and creating a nation of peasant proprietors, which, according to their ideas over here, is the ideal condition.
During the last quarter of a century from six thousand to eight thousand farmers have been evicted from farms in Ireland because they refused or were unable or neglected to pay their rent. Some of them have remained in the neighborhood and have squatted where they could, and waited their chance to recover their holdings; others have emigrated to America; others have gone into different parts of Ireland; others have engaged in business of various sorts. Between five thousand and six thousand have already applied for restoration under the Act of 1907, most of them through the agency of the United Irish League. Of these, 1,595 families had been restored up to July, 1908, most of them to the actual farms from which they were expelled, not as tenants, however, for they will never be asked to pay any more rent, but as the owners of the property and improvements, purchased for them by the government, with money to be repaid, not by them unless they choose to do so, but by their posterity in the year 1975, or thereabouts. The only financial obligation imposed upon them is to pay an interest of 3½ per cent upon the purchase money, which has been borrowed by the government upon bonds running for sixty-eight years, at 3 per cent interest. The additional one-half per cent goes into a sinking fund to pay the bonds at maturity.