Present Irish Questions

by William O'Connor Morris

The sharp and, as I think, the unfair distinction drawn by the present law between tenant ‘purchasers’ and tenants still subject to the payment of rent, has created, it cannot be said too often, the demand for the compulsory purchase of the Irish land, and for this Lord Salisbury’s Government is largely responsible. But because an Irish peasant, on one side of a fence, cannot obtain the benefits of land tenure, which his neighbour, on the other side, has obtained, and may even have a right to complain, it does not follow that compulsory purchase is a possible, or aught but a disgraceful policy; other interests and considerations must be taken into account. Let us first see how compulsory purchase would affect the financial position of the Three Kingdoms. Great as the prosperity of the Empire is, the strain on its resources is immense; the expenditure of the State at home is vast, and on the increase; the war in South Africa, and the settlement of that huge region, will cost unknown millions; the reform of our military and even of our naval system, necessary to our safety, will be a weighty burden for years; every Chancellor of the Exchequer has declared that fiscal economy, as far as possible, is his first duty. But what does the compulsory purchase of the Irish land involve, and what, confessedly, are its essential conditions? Mr. Gladstone, I have said, asserted, long ago, that the value of the agricultural area of Ireland was £300,000,000; this estimate, I believe, is too high; but, in the opinion of competent judges, it cannot be deemed less than £150,000,000. But the forcible expropriation of the Irish landed gentry on every principle of civilised law, as, indeed, Sir Michael Hicks Beach has already insisted, would imply giving them a large additional bonus; this probably would not be less than £50,000,000; the sum, therefore, required for compulsory purchase, would, it may be assumed, be not less than £200,000,000. Now, can any one imagine that the general taxpayer, in the financial situation in which we are, and shall be for years, will make himself liable for this colossal charge, equal to the ransom Germany extorted from France, in order to bribe Irish peasants into the ownership of their farms, and to effect an agrarian revolution, in which he has no interest? I should like to see the Minister who would go to the country on such an insane policy, and who would call on the hardly taxed millions of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to burn huge holes in their pockets for such an object, for simply robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that without a pretence of right, or any conceivable good. And what security would the Irish land afford for the payment of this enormous impost? The terminable annuities due from the ‘purchasing’ tenants would, it has pleasantly been said, be a sufficient guarantee; but men of common sense are not to be caught by chaff; the idea is a vain and worthless delusion. The ‘No Rent Manifesto’ and the ‘Plan of Campaign’ were movements of Irish peasants, so to speak, of yesterday; what if another Parnell were to arise and to issue a ukase that ‘a foreign and alien Government had no right to an unjust tribute;’ and how could this be collected by a Department of an absentee State?

The general taxpayer, therefore, who, thirteen years ago, grumbled at a demand of £5,000,000 only, will assuredly not fling £200,000,000, or half that sum, into the Serbonian bog of the Irish land. It is hardly necessary to dwell on so small a fact, ‘that compulsory purchase would reduce the income tax of Ireland about one-half, for nine-tenths of the tenant ‘purchasers’ would be below its level;’ but even this cannot be left out of sight. Conservative statesmen, it should be added, are especially bound to reject this scheme; in 1886 they denounced, in emphatic language, Mr. Gladstone’s far less dangerous plan of making the State liable for £50,000,000, to buy out Irish landlords; flagrant inconsistency in politics should be eschewed. The probably fixed purpose of the general taxpayer not to mulct himself heavily to fling the Irish soil to a mass of peasants, is doubtless, and I say it with regret, the best security against the destruction of the Irish landlords; this despoiled and maltreated body of men just now fill the place in Irish affairs of the ‘Injured Lady’ of Swift’s satire, gravely told by her lover across the Channel that ‘I had cost him ten times more than I was worth to maintain me, and that it had been much better for him if I had been damned, or burnt, or thrown to the bottom of the sea.’[145] Nevertheless, I have faith in right-minded Englishmen, however prejudiced or ill-informed about an unpopular class, if plain facts and figures are set before them; let us see how it would fare with the Irish landlord were he forcibly expropriated under compulsory purchase. I will take the case of an Irish country gentleman, who, in the period between 1868 and 1878, had an income from his estate of £1500 a year, subject to a family charge of £10,000 at 4 per cent., that is, had a net annual income of £1100. Owing to the depression of agriculture since 1879, his rents would have naturally fallen about £300 a year; but let us suppose that, through the operation of the new Irish land code, they have been cut down to ‘fair rents’ of £900 a year only. His annual income, therefore, would be £900 less by £400, that is, he would still have £500 a year he could call his own; how would it be with him were he forcibly sold out? Admit that his estate would fetch eighteen years’ purchase—the present average rate is seventeen—that is, would realise £16,200; deducting, say, £200 for law costs, this would be a net residue of £16,000. But the family charge would absorb £10,000; the surplus would be £6000 only, producing, let us calculate, £4 per cent.; this ruined man, therefore, who, little more than twenty years ago, possessed an income of £1100 a year, would be left £240 at the very utmost. I have taken care to understate the case; I challenge attention to my figures; I ask honest Englishmen would not this be sheer robbery, accomplished, to the disgrace of the State, in its name?

It has been urged, however—and to those who know the facts, the statement is cruel and shameful mockery—that the Irish landlord would only lose his rented lands, and that ‘he could live happily on the demesne land, which he would still retain.’ This would be simply impossible in the case of nineteen-twentieths of the class; they would not have the means to keep their demesnes up; they would be compelled to part with them at almost any price; and the few, who would have the means, would, all but certainly, with their beggared fellows, leave a country in which they had been foully betrayed. It is notorious, indeed, that Irish Nationalist leaders, knowing what compulsory purchase means, have marked down the demesnes of the Irish landed gentry as their prey; associates of American Fenians and of the Clan na Gael are to revel in the mansions of the Geraldines, the Butlers, the O’Connors, the O’Neills, as Jacobins revelled in the mansions of the La Tremouilles and the De Noailles. But man does not live by bread alone; the material ruin of the Irish landlord would be bad enough; but the moral consequences of his expropriation must not be left out of sight. Few of the purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts care probably much about the lands they have bought; the same remark probably applies to most Irish absentees. But an immense majority of the Irish landed gentry are deeply attached to their hearths and their homes; they are bound to their lands by innumerable ties; they have been brought up with the sentiments which property in land creates; in the pathetic words of an old chronicler, ‘They do not wish to pray in foreign churches, or to lie in foreign graves;’ their hope has been to live and die amidst their ancestral surroundings. The State has, in a special manner, encouraged this belief; it rooted the Irish landlord in the soil to be its supporter; is it to expel him from the position it has made for him, without a thought of the shock to his best feelings this must produce? Would not such an act be dishonourable, nay, infamous? Let us hear what the deepest of our political thinkers, Burke, has written upon a somewhat parallel case: ‘When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation—when they have accommodated all their ideas, and all their habits to it, ... I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character and those customs, which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations, and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotick sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.’[146]

I have referred to an instance, within my knowledge, of the operation of the new Irish land code, in the case of a middleman, his under-tenant, and a despoiled owner of a rent. I now refer to an instance, also within my knowledge, of what compulsory purchase would do in the case of an Irish landlord. This person is a scion of one of the princely Irish-Milesian houses; his forefathers were lords of a tract extending from the Boyne to the Shannon. They belonged to one of the famous ‘five bloods of Ireland,’ acknowledged to be half-royal by Henry of Anjou; they intermarried with the great Norman-Irish noblesse; one of their matronage was half-sister of Surrey’s fair Geraldine; the ruins of the abbeys they founded are still to be seen. Their domains were torn from them in the reign of Mary Tudor; but they fought stubbornly with their tribe in the great Desmond war; they retained, though proscribed, the rank of princes, until the close of the sixteenth century; leaders of the house then carried their swords into foreign armies, and have given a field marshal to Austria and grandees to Spain. The direct line of the chiefs, however, remained in Ireland; it vegetated in obscurity until the Irish rising of 1689-90; one of its members then appeared in the Parliament of James II. in Dublin, and perished, at the head of his regiment, it is said, at Aughrim. The fortunes of his descendants are not without interest; one is believed to have been a companion-in-arms of Villars at Malplaquet and Dénain; two of his remote offspring, the tradition exists, perished in the ranks of Napoleon’s armies. But the heir of the family bowed under the yoke of the Irish penal laws, and became a Protestant, at least in name; his near kindred gave Ireland Anthony Malone, one of the most illustrious Irishmen of the eighteenth century, and gave England the best commentator on her most immortal poet. One of his representatives, the person of whom I write, still possesses a fragment of the immense possessions his fathers ruled; of more than thirty of their castles he has the wreck of one; a scroll on the roof of his house bears the touching legend that he has sprung from the loins of the old Milesian princes. He is not wholly unknown as an Irish landlord of this day; curiously, too, his rental has been hardly reduced by the visitations of the Land and the Sub-Commissions. Is this scion of the best and the most ancient noblesse of Ireland to be banished in his old age from his home, and to be replaced in it by ornaments of the Land, the National, and the United Irish Leagues, for this would be one result of compulsory purchase?

Let us imagine, however, that, owing to the malign influence which, Spenser said, attends England in Irish affairs, the Irish landed gentry were removed from the land, and their former tenants were put in their place as owners. What would be the consequences, economic, social, political, of this sudden agrarian revolution in one of the Three Kingdoms? The distribution of the Irish soil between the classes which would possess it, would be unfavourable, in the highest degree, to the establishment of a ‘peasant proprietary,’ the common name in use on this subject. Of the 486,000 tenant farmers in Ireland, some 132,000 hold patches of from less than one to five acres in extent; are these to be stereotyped as real land owners? More than 90,000 occupy from fifty to five hundred acres and upwards; these include the great graziers of the rich tracts of pasturage; do these supply elements of a ‘peasant proprietary’ in any rational sense? The only class which even on plausible, a priori grounds could be made occupying owners of the land would contain much less than 300,000 families; and probably it occupies less than two-thirds of the island as a whole. Are all these bodies of men to be lumped, so to speak, together, and universally to receive the ownership of the soil; would not compulsory purchase, even on these conditions, be the sheerest folly? Furthermore, the configuration of Ireland and her climate make it next to impossible that a ‘peasant proprietary’ could generally thrive within her borders; Nature herself forbids an attempt to carry out, on a large scale, a settlement of the kind. The central area of the island is a low watershed of wide extent, from which a succession of streams descends through vast tracts of morass and bog; in other parts of the country there are large and deep rivers, curving as they approach the sea, and flowing through mountain spaces; the lands they traverse are swampy, and require main drainage; a large part of Ireland is composed of wild hill ranges only fit for the rearing of young and coarse breeds of cattle; she possesses a fine area of the best pasturage, confined, however, to a few counties; her true agricultural area is comparatively small. Her climate, moreover, is wet to a proverb; torrents of rain from the Atlantic fall on her plains for months; above all, her inland towns are far from each other, and petty; scarcely one is peopled by more than 10,000 souls. Any well-informed and right-judging person who knows the conditions under which a ‘peasant proprietary’ can alone flourish, must know that, from the nature of the case, it would be a failure, in the circumstances in which it would be necessarily placed, were it forcibly established in every part of Ireland. Ireland has little in common with Belgium, with Northern Italy, with France; this settlement of confiscation would go the way of the Englishry of the Middle Ages and the Cromwellian colonists.

The most conclusive argument against compulsory purchase has, nevertheless, to be yet put forward. The state of things ‘voluntary purchase’ is evolving would assuredly be aggravated a hundred-fold were every tenant in Ireland made the owner of his farm by a revolutionary act on the part of the State. It is significant, in the highest degree, that from the time of the ‘New Departure’ to this hour, the conspiracy against our rule in Ireland has clamoured for the expropriation of the Irish landed gentry by force, and for the conversion of their tenants into possessors of these estates; far better informed than British statesmen, it has rightly calculated that this violent change would increase the ‘Nationalist’ sympathies of the Irish peasant; and this opinion is being confirmed, to a great extent, by the results of ‘voluntary purchase’ being now developed. The coarse materialist view that bribery will make a class law-abiding and loyal, is opposed to human nature and fact; bribery will not efface ideas, feelings, and tendencies, deep-rooted in history and ancient tradition; above all, if it is a concession to agitation and a rebellious movement, it will only quicken the animosity to the State and the greed of the favoured class. Parnell, I have said, had his mind made up on this subject; he always insisted that the Irish tenant, wherever his holding had been made his own, would be ‘more true to the cause than ever;’ it is curious that the confident prediction of a most able man appears to have been persistently ignored. For the rest, the mischief ‘voluntary purchase’ is already doing would be enormously aggravated by the effects of compulsory purchase. The Irish tenant farmers, made owners of the land everywhere, would, like the present ‘purchasers,’ cut down woodland wholesale; the country would be disafforested over an immense area; the consequences to agriculture would be as bad as possible. Arterial and main drainage too would, as a rule, be neglected; but these would, comparatively, be trifling results; the compulsory purchaser would deal with the land as their ‘voluntary’ fellows are now largely dealing, but, in all probability, more generally, and in much a greater proportion. Holding as they would nine-tenths of the Irish soil at terminable annuities much lower than any rent, they would inevitably subdivide, sublet, and mortgage their farms in tens of thousands of cases; they would become middlemen, over whole counties, the harsh oppressors of a multitude ground down by rack-rents; the worst kind of ‘landlordism’ would be reproduced in the worst aspect. The tendency of events is even now confirming what I wrote a long time ago on this subject: ‘Freehold ownership, therefore, would disappear more or less quickly over extensive tracts, the “yeomen” would become a diminishing quantity, and these would be replaced by a new class of landlords with tenants at competition rents, that is, determined by the land hunger of the Celt. The transformation would inevitably go on, for its causes would operate with intense force; and before many years probably two-thirds of Ireland would have become a land of mere peasant landlords placed over a mass of rack-rented tenants.’[147] The creation of a universal ‘peasant proprietary,’ by force, would, in fact, bring the Irish land system back by degrees into the state in which it was before the Great Famine, when millions of serfdom squatted on the soil, disorganising agriculture and preventing social progress.

These considerations, however, by no means exhaust the case against the compulsory purchase of the rented land of Ireland. Irish landlords have been decried, for an evil purpose, during many years; their position is difficult and open to attack; but if they are an unpopular class, they have been a civilising influence in Ireland of real value, the most civilising influence, perhaps, in her three southern provinces. Their annihilation, despoiled and impoverished as they are, would still withdraw a large fund from Irish rural labour; and it would be most injurious to agriculture in many ways, especially as regards main and arterial drainage, an absolute necessity for the Irish soil, and scarcely possible except under a system of large estates. Their extinction, too, Englishmen ought not to forget, would deprive the State of one of its mainstays in Ireland; the idea to the contrary growing up is a mere delusion; it was not for nothing that Parnell and Davitt described this order of men as ‘the British garrison’ and insisted that were it once out of the fortress the power of England in Ireland would certainly perish. The conversion of Irish farmers universally into landowners would also have a ruinous effect on many Irish industries. It would do infinite harm to many branches of commerce, especially to trades of the higher type; it would be disastrous to such towns as Dublin and Belfast, already beginning to protest against it; and, whatever may be said, the prospect of it is dreaded by agricultural Irish labourers as a class, which has always been ill-treated by their masters, the farmers, though, owing to the influence of priests and demagogues, they are unwilling to express the sentiments they really feel. Compulsory purchase, in fact, is by no means so generally asked for in Ireland as is supposed; her representation demands it by a great majority of votes; but this representation, as I have pointed out before, is not a true index of Irish opinion. Another consideration, too, should be taken into account in coming to a reasonable conclusion on this subject. The land system of England and Scotland, from a variety of causes sufficiently known, is essentially different from that of Ireland; politically, socially, economically, it has little in common with it. But were Parliament to declare that the whole tenant class of Ireland were to be transformed into fee simple owners, subject only to renders, much less than true rents, and payable for a short space of time, I much doubt if English and Scottish tenants would acquiesce, and would not agitate for legislation of a similar kind, especially as British agriculture is still heavily depressed. Leaseholders of large houses in towns, for long terms of years, at ground rents, and a whole class of builders, assuredly would join in such a demand; the contagion of revolution and socialism is always perilous. English and Scottish landlords have usually played the part of the Jew to the Samaritan as regards their Irish fellows; but ‘proximus ardet Ucalegon’ might be borne in mind.[148]

The Irish land system, therefore, from every point of view, is simply in a deplorable state; it is an economic and social chaos, pregnant with mischiefs and dangers of many kinds. Confiscation has wrought its work on the Irish landlord; has shaken the structure of Irish society; and has produced its inevitable results in banishing capital from the land, and in dealing a weighty blow to Irish credit. The legislation of 1881, and of subsequent years, has conferred immense advantages on the tenant class in Ireland; but these have fallen short of what might be supposed; this class declares itself to be dissatisfied with its lot; it is clamouring for the wholesale transfer to itself of the rented lands of Ireland, through what is known as compulsory purchase, that is, corruption and spoliation combined in an act of the State. And these efforts of legislation, essentially unwise, in direct conflict with fact and economic science, a mere makeshift to stave off agitation and trouble, are, in all probability, by no means the worst. Demoralisation has spread throughout Irish landed relations, affecting them, unfortunately, in many ways; divisions of class have been made worse, as well as the old divisions of race and faith; respect for contracts and obligations has been destroyed; dishonesty and thriftlessness have been favoured, and industry and honesty not encouraged; an evil spirit of discontent and desire for change is abroad; agriculture is plainly on the decline; there is nothing secure or settled in the land. Vicious as the Irish land system unquestionably was before Mr. Gladstone first took it in hand, I believe that, having regard to the general interests of the State, it is still more vicious at the present time; it has been transformed, but, on the whole, transformed for the worse. As I wrote before, when commenting on the position of affairs in Ireland, before the Land Act of 1870, a revolution only could have removed the deep-rooted ills in all that related to the land; a revolution alone could remove them now. But in the one instance, as in the other, the evil caused by a revolution would be infinitely greater than the good; a new agrarian revolution in Ireland would be a curse to her; it is better, as Burke has remarked, to try to repair even ruins than to blot out every trace of the edifice. Still, taking it as we find it, can nothing be done to amend, in some measure, at least, the existing land system? Much of it, I admit, must be left untouched; the principle of settling rent, through the agency of the State, false as it is, must continue to work; the principle of so-called ‘land purchase’ must, within reasonable limits, be still given free scope. But something in the nature of reform is, I think, possible; the discussion of the subject may be of use; I contribute my mite to it, if with unfeigned diffidence.

In order to find out the truth, and thoroughly to clear the ground, a Commission, I suggest, ought to be appointed, as important as the Devon Commission of nearly sixty years ago; it should investigate the Irish Land Question in all its branches. Its President should be a great English nobleman—the nation would have confidence in the Duke of Bedford, a princely and most liberal English landlord; but the judicial element should be strong in it; English and Irish judges should be among its members; it should include trained agricultural experts: it should have representatives of Irish landlords and tenants. It should examine the Irish land system as this existed before 1870; should review the whole series of Irish Land Acts, from 1870 to the present time, and inquire into their results and tendencies; should carefully consider the operation of the tribunals selected to carry out the new Irish land code, especially as regards the fixing of ‘fair rents,’ and that not with respect to their procedure only, an unjust limit imposed on the Fry Commission, but with respect to the principles that have been adopted and the methods pursued; it should deal exhaustively with the subject of so-called ‘land purchase,’ and see whether it has not directly led to the demand for compulsory purchase; it should take evidence as to ‘peasant proprietary’ and its creation; and it should make a complete and searching report, with a view to the legislation it might recommend. And if I am not altogether mistaken, such a Commission would state, in emphatic language, that the present Irish land code was ill designed, even if it cannot be now much changed; that its administration has been attended with grave errors; that cruel wrong has been done to Irish landlords, while Irish tenants have not obtained what was hoped for; that the economic and social results have been deplorable; that if ‘land purchase’ cannot be stopped, it is a bad expedient on its present lines, and that the cry for compulsory purchase has been its evident effect; and that extensive, still more universal peasant ownership, is an impossible and would be a pernicious policy. Finally, if I am not much mistaken again, such a Commission would report that a reform of the Irish land system, if very difficult, should be attempted; and that, in its main scope and operation at least, it should be carried out on the side of land tenure, that is, in the relations of landlord and tenant, as has been the opinion of every thinker from Burke onwards, who has not been swayed by the exigencies of agitation, or of party politics.

I proceed briefly to put my scheme forward, assuming that I have made a reasonably correct forecast. I may say it has been a subject of reflection during many years, indeed, since the legislation of 1881; Mr. Gladstone, in his place in the House of Commons, pointedly approved of a tract in which I set forth my views; and so, curiously enough, did Parnell. It is impossible, I have said, to transform the existing system of Irish land tenure; a wide departure from it cannot be made; but improvement is really feasible within certain limits. My object would be to get rid of palpable evils, inseparable from the present state of things; to make the positions of both Irish landlords and tenants in some degree better than they now are; to place the Irish land system on a somewhat less precarious basis. In the first place, the law as to the exemption of tenants’ improvements from rent, an excrescence on the Land Act of 1881, and made extravagant by the Land Act of 1896, should be restricted in its application to some extent; as it stands, it is a fruitful cause of injustice, of demoralisation, and of hard swearing, producing endless litigation to very little purpose; claims in respect of improvements ought to be more limited, in point of time, than they are; a check should be placed on obsolete and illusory claims; this would be advantageous, I think, to all interests involved. Again, it would be impracticable to exclude from the operation of the present land code lands that have been already brought within its scope; but a more precise definition should be made of the lands that are intended to be now excluded—demesnes, town parks, residential holdings, and large pastoral farms; the decisions of the Courts, in this province, are very perplexing; a good definition would make litigation very considerably less. These changes, I am convinced, would do much appreciable good; but I would go a long way farther in attempting to make the status of both landlord and tenant in Ireland less insecure and vexatious than it now is. In the first place, leaving lands now excluded out, I would make all agricultural and pastoral Irish tenants entitled to the tenure of the ‘Three F’s,’ removing the prohibition as to ‘future tenants,’ a distinction that never ought to have been made, and, as far as possible, securing this mode of tenure to the poorest tenants, by means to which I shall advert afterwards. In the next place, I would make an earnest effort to lessen the ruinous litigation and the instability caused by the statutory leases renewable at short intervals of time. The tenant should have ‘fixity of tenure’ in a real sense; the estate created in his favour against the landlord ought not to be one of fifteen years only, however indefinitely it may be extended; I would prefer to see it an estate for ever; but, as in the present state of agriculture, there would be objections to this, on account of the uncertainty of the rate of rent, it might be an estate for a limited term. But the term ought not to be less than thirty years at least, renewable, of course, like the shorter term of fifteen; this would quiet possession and get rid of lawsuits for the period of a generation of men. The tenant should retain his right of ‘free sale;’ but I would make the conditions less stringent than they are under the existing law.