The enormous and, as I believe, the unjust benefits secured by recent legislation to the Irish tenant, are not, however, so complete as they appear to be, and are not without disadvantages attendant on them. Tenants of holdings, to which the law does not apply, such as tenants of demesnes and large pastoral lands, if rightly excluded, nevertheless complain; and ‘future tenants,’ and petty occupants, who cannot afford to seek ‘fair rents’ from the Courts, have, from their point of view, solid grounds of complaint. The scope of the new land code is, therefore, to some extent, restricted; and if the law has actually caused a general reduction of rents, it has not secured the ‘Three F’s’ for a considerable body of farmers, not improbably a fourth or fifth part of the class as a whole. And even the occupiers of the Irish soil, who have obtained the advantages of the new mode of tenure, have not obtained these without a certain kind of drawback. Completely separated as they now are from their former landlords, they cannot expect indulgences from a class which considers itself to have been shamefully wronged; the allowances, which, whatever may be said, had been made to them, in thousands of cases, have, as a rule, been altogether withdrawn; they get no help in making improvements; they are usually obliged regularly to pay their ‘fair rents;’ above all, landlords, of a strict or harsh nature, are sometimes on the look-out to see if they do not violate the statutory conditions to which they are subject, in order to convert them into ‘future tenants,’ outside of the protection of the law, and even to reacquire their lands. These circumstances are not without adverse effects; though unquestionably they are far more than countervailed by the change which has been wrought in Irish land tenure, and has given the Irish tenant the benefits already described. Yet, even from this point of view, the law does not operate as unreservedly in his favour as might be supposed. He has his ‘fair rent,’ probably much too low; his ‘fixity of tenure,’ a perpetuity in all but name; his right to ‘free sale,’ sometimes worth thousands of pounds. But, as a rule, he can only gain these advantages at the cost of a lawsuit recurring at short intervals of time, with the vexation and mischief this brings with it, a lawsuit, too, of which the results may be more or less doubtful. If, too, he is a saving and thrifty man he will hardly be able to acquire lands for himself, as, in consequence of the right of ‘free sale,’ the tenant right of these will have become immensely high; he will be confined, in most instances, to the farm he holds. On the other hand, if he be dishonest or imprudent, he will be tempted to run out and even to injure his land, in order to effect a reduction of rent, or to sublet or mortgage it should an opportunity be found.
The new Irish land code has thus had this special feature: it has done infinite harm to the despoiled landlord, but the tenant has not gained the expected benefits. Let us now see what effect it has had on the great industry on which the Irish landed classes depend, the main source of the wealth of their country. Unquestionably, as I have remarked, over and over again, the tenant in Ireland makes, for the most part, the plant of his farm a necessary incident of the small-farm system; but the Irish landed gentry, in the last half century, have done a great deal in the work of improvement. Whatever interested calumny may falsely assert, they have expended millions, as unerring statistics show, in planting, enclosure, and, especially, in arterial drainage, this last beyond the reach of the common peasant; they have, in thousands of instances, made the breeds of stock better; they have made large allowances as regards farm buildings. All this is now a thing of the past; the sometime landowner, in a real sense, has been divorced from his former estate; law has prohibited him from doing anything for it; his only interest is to collect the rent-charge called, in mockery, ‘fair rent.’ On the other hand, tenants in Ireland have, in a great many cases—I have briefly glanced at the conclusive evidence—positively wasted or neglected their holdings, for the express purpose of working rent down; this shameful expedient has been hardly checked; the deterioration of a large area of land has been thus accomplished. And, at the same time, as ‘fair rent’ is much lower than the rent of the market, a considerable minority of this class have sublet or mortgaged their lands, in order to get advances of which they stand in need; this, no doubt, is a violation of the law; but it is a violation difficult to prove, and they run the risk. In this way, as I have shown, in a preceding chapter, the husbandry of Ireland has declined of late years; woodland has been cut down recklessly to a great extent; main drainage has been largely neglected, a ruinous thing in a wet climate; in thousands of cases the farming of tenants at ‘fair rents’ is wretched. The face of the country reveals these facts: Ireland is worse cultivated than it was twenty years ago; indeed, the best farming, in the island, by many degrees, is that conducted by a small number of men of substance, who still hold on the footing of free contract, having settled with their landlords, and taken out leases, a significant commentary on Irish legislation since 1881.
This subject, however, must be considered from a broader point of view, and with reference to the community of Ireland, as a whole. A great confiscation, I have said, has been wrought in the Irish land; the immense fall in the value of the landlord’s estate, and the immense rise in the value of the tenant right, prove that property belonging to one class has been transferred, wholesale, by law, to another, a result never contemplated by responsible statesmen. And confiscation has produced its inevitable effects; free dealing in land has been prevented; except to his former tenants an Irish country gentleman cannot sell what remains to him of his former estate, and that through the system of ‘land purchase;’ capital shuns the Irish soil as if it were a quicksand; trustees and mortgagees will not invest in it; in a word, as respects the class which had been its owners, the Irish land has been bound in a kind of pernicious mortmain. It is unnecessary to dwell on the resulting evils; one of the sources of the wealth of Ireland has been made barren; a paralysis has fallen on a member of Irish industry; what is, perhaps, even worse, a sense of insecurity, of instability, of fear of unknown change, so widely prevails in Irish landed relations, that they have become completely unsettled, and are a mere chaos. And as vicious legislation has cut the old landlord off from his estate, has assimilated him to the chief lord of the eighteenth century, and is evolving, by degrees, the middleman, so the effects of confiscation, by keeping land out of commerce, have unnaturally limited and restricted its nominal ownership; in fact, many of the features of the detestable penal laws of Ireland are reappearing in the Irish land system, and are being reproduced by the modern Irish land code. Another mischievous effect of this code, in another direction, requires attention. The value of tenant right, we have seen, has enormously increased; the sums paid by incoming to outgoing tenants, on the transfer of farms, have, accordingly, become enormous; these purchasers, therefore, are being subjected to heavy outlays, practically in the nature of rack-rents, which hamper their industry, starve their capital, and most injuriously affect good husbandry. One class of the community is thus wronged for the behoof of another; and agriculture must, more or less, suffer.
Not the least, however, of the manifold evils caused by this legislation have to be yet noticed. The ancient divisions of race and faith in the Irish land system still continue; what was most harsh and oppressive in them has been effaced; but they have become wider and more marked in the last twenty years; and this is largely to be ascribed to the present land code. A mode of land tenure, which produces harassing litigation at short intervals of time, and makes landed relations cockpits for legal conflicts, necessarily sets the landed classes against each other; it has aggravated the old differences deep-rooted in the Irish soil. The Protestant gentleman and the Catholic peasant are more estranged from each other, in the southern provinces, than they have been, I believe, within living memory; the same remark, too, applies to Presbyterian Ulster, where the gentry belong, for the most part, to the late Established Church, and the tenant classes are of the faith of John Knox; the lines of distinction between these orders of men have deepened; and this alienation, concurring with another cause, has contributed to the cry for the confiscation of the Irish land, which is now being very generally raised, and to which I shall refer afterwards. Another mischief of this legislation, at which I have already glanced, is the widespread demoralisation it has caused, from the nature of the case. The litigation in the Courts where ‘fair rents’ are being fixed, is often a miserable spectacle of hard and mendacious swearing productive of the worst effects on the human character. Peasants, as a rule, do not scruple to pledge their oaths that their rents ought to be at most a fourth of the rents they had paid for perhaps half a century; the witnesses they call as valuers usually repeat these statements. The claims, too, for exemption from rent, on account of improvements, are often ridiculous, often shameful; I have seen sums paid for manures twenty years old, gravely put forward as creating a claim for exemption; and the subject of the deterioration of farms is another fruitful source of falsehood. It is hardly necessary to comment on the results, as regards self-respect and the moral sense of men, which must follow proceedings of this kind, carried on, over whole counties, in thousands of cases; they are, inevitably, in a very high degree, unfortunate; but, when law encourages dishonesty, they were to be only expected.
Such have been the fruits of the new Irish land code, on the side of the occupation of the Irish land. Legislation, essentially faulty and unwise, in conflict with economic science and the facts of the case, has taken from the Irish landlords their chief proprietary rights, and forcibly transferred these to their tenants; it has not conferred the benefits it intended on an unfairly favoured class; it has wrought a revolution in the Irish land system, in contravention to plain justice, and given it an unnatural and evil aspect; it has caused iniquitous confiscation on a vast scale and demoralisation profound and widespread, with the far-reaching inherent mischiefs; and bad administration has made bad laws worse. Political economy, spite of Mr. Gladstone, has not fled from this world at his bidding; she looks on, so to speak, at the ruins in Ireland produced by the violation of her most certain principles; I will add, she affirms the claim to compensation of the Irish landlord, if the simplest equity is not to be set at nought. As to the general situation evolved by the present Irish land code, I may refer to these pregnant words of Mr. Lecky: ‘It cannot be denied that this legislation has redressed some hard cases and benefited a large number of tenants; and as few men look beyond immediate consequences, or rightly estimate those which are indirect and remote, this fact is accepted by many as its justification. For my own part, I believe that it will one day be found that the evils resulting from this policy have greatly outweighed its benefits, and that they will fall far more heavily on another class than on the small class which was directly injured. In a poor country, where increased capital, improved credit, and secure industry are the greatest needs, it has shaken to the very basis the idea of the sanctity and obligation of contract; made it almost impossible to borrow any considerable sum on Irish land; effectually stopped the influx of English gold; paralysed or prevented nearly all industrial undertakings stretching into a distant future. It has reacted powerfully upon trade, and thus contributed to impoverish the Irish towns, while it has withdrawn the whole rental of Ireland from the improvement of the soil, as the landlord can have no further inducement or obligation to spend money on his estate. In combination, also, with the Home Rule movement, it has driven much capital out of the land.’[143]
I pass on to the legislation of late years, with respect to the Irish land, on the side of ownership. I have briefly described what that legislation is: a Conservative Ministry, impressed with the wrong idea that Mr. Gladstone had ‘created dual ownership,’ by the ill-conceived measure of 1881, resolved to abolish this evil thing if they could, though it is the natural mould of Irish land tenure; and Parliament has allotted £40,000,000 to attain this object, through the operation of what is falsely called ‘land purchase.’ The mode of proceeding has been explained: an Irish landlord, who desires to sell his estate to his tenants, can obtain an advance for this purpose from the State, through the agency of the Land Commission; the tenants are then made owners of their farms, without contributing any moneys of their own, and hold at terminable annuities much lower than even ‘fair rents.’ The transaction, therefore, we have seen, is, in no sense, a purchase; it is a gift, in the nature of a bribe; it is completely different from the policy of John Bright and the sales of land made to tenants before 1885, in which these men paid part of the price at least, the only real security for thrift and honesty. Of the £40,000,000, nearly half, I have said, has been spent; and out of the 486,000 agricultural Irish tenants, some 50,000 have acquired their holdings, in fee, under these conditions. The law thus applies to a mere fraction of the class; it is idle to assert that this can do much to extinguish ‘dual ownership’ in all Ireland; the sum required would be many times more than that which alone has been made available; and the process, at the present rate of ‘purchases,’ would not be accomplished within a century. We may, therefore, pass away from this part of the subject; but let us see how ‘land purchase,’ effected in this way, bears on the position of the Irish landed gentry. The immense majority of this order of men still cling to their native country and their homes; they hate the idea of parting with the rights they retain in the land, trampled down and injured as they have been; this is especially the case with the best and most solvent landlords. But as the terminable annuities payable on ‘land purchase’ are not nearly so high as even very low rents, not to speak of the other conditions of this mode of tenure, it follows that tenants who have thus been made owners are infinitely better off than tenants still subject to rent; one class has great advantages, of which the other is deprived; as a necessary consequence an artificial standard is set up against rent, which does wrong to the landlord, from the nature of the case; gives every tenant on his estate a grievance; and not improbably may expose him to a determined refusal to pay any rent whatever.
‘Land purchase,’ therefore—the name is a mere untruth—has been a failure as regards ‘dual ownership;’ and it is establishing against the Irish landlord a false measure of rent, analogous to a base coinage, a strange achievement of a Conservative Government. Let us next consider what has been the working of this economic nostrum, with respect to the class, for the benefit of which it was first prescribed, and which has reaped the advantages it gives. The tenants, who have been made owners of their farms, have, as a rule, discharged their obligations to the State very well, though I could point to not a few exceptions; and there have been strikes against the payment of the terminable annuities in some instances. This may be sufficient for official bureaucrats; it is not sufficient for those who know Ireland, and can impartially watch the course of events. It was fondly expected that ‘land purchase,’ that is, bribing tenants in Ireland to become owners of their farms, would create a powerful body of freeholders loyal to the State; but this has already been seen to be a mere delusion. As Parnell predicted would be the case, these ‘purchasers’ are ‘patriotic’ in the highest degree; they fill the ranks of the United Irish League, that is, of a conspiracy against our rule in Ireland, and are numbered among its most efficient agents; human nature being what it actually is, this is precisely what was to be expected. It was confidently foretold, again, that these ‘purchasers’ would form a thriving class of model farmers; and that their lands would be patterns of admirable and improved peasant husbandry, but this forecast is being, in a great degree, falsified. These men, ‘rocked and dandled into their possessions,’ in the words of Burke, without a single guarantee for common prudence, and especially without an effort of their own, have, in hundreds of instances, turned out sorry failures; and it has been the almost universal practice of the whole class to cut down every tree that grows on their lands, an act of ruinous waste in a rain-drenched climate. Besides, as freehold ownership is not an Irish idea—indeed, is opposed to Irish ideas—these ‘purchasers’ have, in many cases, following the example of tenants ‘at fair rents,’ subdivided, sublet, or mortgaged their holdings; instead of remaining owners in a true sense, they are becoming middlemen lording it over rack-rented serfs. The agriculture, too, of hundreds of these farms is slovenly in the extreme, for bribery does not promote industry; what is ‘easy got, easy goes’ is a true proverb; and, in addition, a number of these men were really insolvent when they were made ‘purchasers.’ That Ireland will blossom like a rose, under these conditions, is seen even now to be a chimera; and there is much reason to believe that many of these ‘purchasers’ have become the prey of the race of local usurers, a consummation that might have been predicted. ‘I shall sell my estate,’ a witty Irishman once remarked, ‘but I will keep two loan offices and four public-houses; and in two generations my “purchasing” tenants will be too happy to resell their lands to my grandsons.’
A singular instance of ‘land purchase,’ and, indeed, of the working of another part of the land code, has come under my notice of late; I can answer for the accuracy of what I write; scores of similar cases could be, probably, found. In 1852, an industrious Scottish tradesman invested the savings of years of his life in buying a chief rent under the Encumbered Estates Act; he gave £5000 for a perpetual rent-charge of £192, that is, not quite 4 per cent. on his capital. The tenant of the lands subject to the rent was a middleman, with an estate of about £3000 a year; he had sublet the lands to a tenant in occupation of them, a slovenly, ill-conditioned, and indolent farmer. The Land Act of 1887 passed; the wealthy middleman, an excellent ‘mark’ for the chief rent, who, therefore, had been obliged to pay the £192 a year, was empowered by the new law to evade his contract, and practically to get rid of his interest; the owner of the chief rent, therefore, had only the tenant in occupation to look to for the discharge of his claim. This person was succeeded by his son, a good-for-nothing and drunken man, who soon became head over ears in debt; but he was declared ‘a purchaser’ by the Land Commission, and, subject to a terminable annuity, was made owner of the lands. But the advance made was not more than £2300; the representative of the hardworking Scotchman, who had bought property, as secure, at the time, as Consols, was a loser of more than half of his capital; he was simply cheated out of £2700, through the operation of an iniquitous law; his indignant protests may well be conceived. The subsequent history of this so-styled ‘purchase’ is significant, and not without interest. The worthless owner took possession of the lands; his first step was to cut down the woodland, until he was stopped by a creditor to whom he owed a mortgage. Since that time he has become insolvent in all but name, and cannot pay the annuity due to the State; the Land Commission has been trying to sell the lands; but the attempt has, hitherto, been a failure; the lands have been ‘boycotted,’ and the market has been closed against a sale. These proceedings do not require a word of comment; they strikingly illustrate how the agrarian code of Ireland makes havoc of capital, annuls contracts, and confiscates property for the behoof of dishonest thriftlessness. Meanwhile the happy middleman enjoys his £3000 a year; I dare say he licks his lips as he thinks of the Land Act of 1887, which scattered a just liability to the winds.
The most remarkable and the worst effect—with a revolutionary tendency in no doubtful sense—of this mischievous system has, however, to be still noticed. About one out of ten of the agricultural tenants of Ireland have ‘purchased’ their farms in the way described; the fund available for ‘land purchase’ cannot include more than one in five; and the process is and must be slow, owing to the law’s delay. Legislation, therefore, with a singular want of insight, has drawn, and is drawing, an unjust distinction between ‘purchasing’ and rent-paying tenants; it is dividing them into a small favoured class, and a multitude harshly left out in the cold—fat sheep in one fold, lean goats in another; as the inevitable result, the rent-paying tenant resents the benefits obtained by ‘the purchaser;’ and the immense majority of the farmers of Ireland are made discontented with their lot, from their point of view not without reason. It is idle to say to this great body of men that they have already gained advantages from the State, on which they never reckoned thirty years ago, and that they have the ‘Three F’s,’ and all that the phrase implies; those who have secured much are eager to secure more; the unfair distinction arbitrarily made against them is unintelligible and exasperating, man being what he is. The policy of ‘voluntary purchase,’ as it is called, has, accordingly, from the very nature of the case, provoked and called into being the cry for the ‘compulsory purchase’ of the Irish land, now being heard far and wide in Ireland—that is, for the forcible expropriation of all Irish landlords, and for placing all their tenants, in their stead, as owners of their estates. This demand has as yet been rejected by statesmen, and is, I believe, both hopeless and shameful; but it has, nevertheless, some logic on its side; it is a corollary from legislation essentially bad; and, backed as it is by a large force of Irish opinion, it cannot be ignored or treated with contempt. It is simply extraordinary that many Irish landlords have been encouraging, and still encourage, ‘voluntary purchase,’ on its existing lines, and will not perceive that it leads to ‘compulsory purchase;’ either from a desire to dispose of parts of their estates, or from motives not easy to understand, they are promoting a revolution, which, if accomplished, would assure their ruin, as I shall conclusively prove afterwards. But the well-informed and most thoughtful members of their class are not flies lured into a bottle by a bit of sugar; they are alive to all that is involved in what is called ‘land purchase.’ Many years ago, when Parliament was voting funds for ‘voluntary purchase,’ on the present system, I indicated what would be the results; I only claim credit for some share of common sense: ‘Law will have been severing the occupiers of the soil by an arbitrary process into a pampered caste, marked off from a disfavoured multitude; and, as a necessary consequence, the mass of tenants, kept in an inferior position, will be filled with discontent—and from their point of view with perfect justice—when, as the advances from the State run short, their prospects of “land purchase” shall wane and diminish. An “ugly rush” will be made throughout the country to force landlords, as a class, to sell, in order to get a chance of buying; in Ulster the cry for “compulsory purchase,” already heard, will swell high and fierce.’[144]
These, therefore, have been the fruits of the system called ‘land purchase’ with euphemistic falsehood. ‘Compulsory purchase,’ a demand caused by an unwise policy, is a question that must be fairly discussed; it is nothing to the purpose that it has as yet made little way in Parliament. This claim would have been regarded as sheer insanity thirty years ago; it was scouted by John Bright as in the highest degree mischievous, though John Bright was the first statesman who proposed making tenants in Ireland owners of their farms, but through a real, not a sham, mode of purchase. The compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland is a policy that has advocates even in England and Scotland; and it is lamentable to observe how British opinion seems to take little heed how a measure of this kind would affect the position of the Irish landlord, another of the many instances of its habitual disregard of the plainest rights of property in land in Ireland. A set of doctrinaires, ignorant of Irish nature and of the Irish land, imagine that ‘the creation of a peasant proprietary,’ in all parts of Ireland, as the cant phrase is, would, in any case, make the Union secure, and would promote tranquillity, industry, and content. Some politicians still cherish the fond belief, that thrusting Irish tenants, wholesale, into the place of their landlords, by an act of violence without a parallel, would make Irish government and administration more easy; and shut their eyes to the nature of this policy. English and Scottish capitalists, who have made advances on Irish estates, see in compulsory purchase the best probable means of realising securities now in danger; a few great absentee landlords, eager to part with their possessions in Ireland, at almost any price, are possibly not opposed to this scheme; and so maybe a few bankrupt Irish landlords, hoping to get a trifle out of a general shipwreck. The demand, however, for compulsory purchase has its only real strength in Ireland; and unquestionably it is widespread and far-reaching. The conspiracy against British rule in Ireland, which has made the annihilation of Irish ‘landlordism’ one of its main objects, calls for compulsory purchase, as a matter of course; it finds no difficulty in banding together the peasantry of the southern provinces in support of a cry which means for this class an improvement in their lot, and appeals to deep-rooted sentiments of human nature. The Irish Catholic priesthood, too, back the movement to a man, and so do the local Nationalist boards; for obvious reasons, both these orders of men seek to drive the Irish landed gentry from their homes, and to replace them by dependents in sympathy with them. The demand has also extended to Ulster, chiefly on account of the harsh distinction drawn between ‘purchasing’ and ‘non-purchasing’ tenants; it is economic rather than social or political; but the cry for compulsory purchase is perhaps loudest in parts of the northern province. Its principal champion, at present, is an enthusiast, sincere, indeed, if without judgment and insight; but he is sustained by bodies of farmers formidable in numbers at least.