Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky

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СКАЧАТЬ not say ‘whether the action of the court in fixing a judicial rent may not, on the whole, lower the rents rather than raise them in the first operation,’ he was convinced that the increased value of land derived from the greater solidity of the social state which he was bringing about would speedily ‘repay the landlord for any incidental mischief of the Act twofold or threefold.’⁴¹ As was his usual custom on such occasions, he pitched his tone very high, and appealed in noble language to the loftiest motives. ‘Justice, sir, is to be our guide; and as it has been said that love is stronger than death, even so justice is stronger than popular excitement, stronger than the passions of the moment, stronger even than the grudges, the resentments, and the sad traditions of the past. Walking in that light, we cannot err. Guided by that light—the Divine Light—we are safe.’

      Probably no one who was present when, with uplifted eyes, and saintly aspect, and exquisitely modulated intonation, the great speaker poured out these sonorous sentences, predicted that in a few short years he would identify himself with the men whom he had truly described as preaching ‘the doctrine of public plunder;’ demoralising a people by ‘teaching them to make the property of their neighbour the objects of their covetous desire;’ attempting to substitute ‘an anarchical oppression’ for the authority of law; making rapine their first object; seeking ‘to march through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire;’ destroying the peace of life; aiming at ‘the servitude of good men, the impunity and supremacy of bad men.’ Few persons could have imagined that this virtuous statesman would soon be endeavouring to place the government of Ireland in the hands of those who were guilty of such things; that he would be employing all the resources of his matchless dialectic to attenuate their misdeeds; that he would denounce as coercion measures for the enforcement of the criminal law against the most merciless of oppressions, which were largely copied from his own legislation; that he would spend the evening of his long and brilliant public life in inflaming class animosities and reviving the almost extinct embers of provincial jealousies. It is perhaps somewhat less surprising that the Irish landlords continued to be attacked just as if the Acts of 1870 and 1881 had never been carried, and as if capricious evictions and rack-rents had not been rendered impossible.

The Act was, indeed, as far as possible from appeasing Ireland. Probably the worst period of the land agitation followed its enactment, and hopes of plunder were excited to the utmost, while falling prices and ever-deepening agricultural distress vastly aggravated the crisis. The stability which was supposed to have been given by the Act of 1881 had been represented as one of its great merits; but every year the cry for revising it acquired fresh force, and after the utter political demoralisation that followed the apostasy of 1886, when the main section of the Liberal party purchased the votes by adopting the policy of the National League, this cry became probably irresistible. Some of those who had consented to the Act of 1881 now looked with consternation at their work. ‘I would rather have cut off my hand,’ said Lord Selborne, ‘than been a party to the measure of 1881, giving the House the reasons and assurances which I then gave, if I had known that within five years after its passing it would have been thrown over by its authors, and that the course they had now taken would have been entered on.’⁴²

      The Land Act of 1887, however, which reopened the settlement, was carried by a Unionist Government, and it again lowered rents which only four or five years before had been judicially fixed. It was said that the State, having undertaken to regulate rents, could not remain passive when prices had so greatly fallen, and that the political condition of the country imperatively demanded its intervention. It is true that, under the Act of 1881, the State, while reducing the rents of the Irish landlords, had guaranteed those reduced rents for fifteen years.⁴³ It was a distinct, formal promise, resting on the national faith and on the authority of the Imperial Parliament. The promise was broken, but it was asked whether this was in truth a very different thing from what had already been done in 1881, when parliamentary and hereditary titles had been torn into shreds. The existing leaseholders were at the same time brought, for the first time, within the provisions of the clause for reducing rents. Mr. Gladstone had refused to do this in 1881; but it was said that it was intolerable that the flower of the Irish tenantry should alone be excluded from benefits which all other tenants so abundantly enjoyed, and that there was little chance of conciliating the Irish farmers if their leading and most intelligent members were left embittered by an exceptional disability.

The force of this argument is incontestable, but the gravity of the step that was taken is not less so. One great object, as we have seen, of the Act of 1870 had been to induce landlords to grant leases by giving them an assurance that they would in this way place themselves beyond the many entanglements and penal clauses of the new legislation. No one could pretend either that the Irish leaseholders were a helpless class, incapable of making their own bargains, or that their position rested on any other foundation than a distinct written contract. They were the most substantial and intelligent farmers of Ireland. The lease which regulated their tenancies was a fully recognised legal document, bearing the Government stamp, carrying with it all the authority and protection that English law could give. Its first clause was, usually, that at the expiry of the assigned term the tenant should hand back the land to its owner. This provision had been already torn to pieces by the Act of 1881, which provided that in cases of all leases of less than sixty years the tenant, at the expiry of the lease, if resident on his farm, need not hand it back according to his contract, but should remain a ‘present tenant,’ with all the rights of permanent occupancy attaching to that position.⁴⁴ The next clause stipulated in very explicit terms the rent in consideration of which the landlord had, in the exercise of his full legal rights, hired out his farm. This also was broken, and the leaseholder had now the right of bringing his landlord into a court where, as the result of proceedings which always brought with them heavy legal costs to the landlord, the rent was authoritatively and judicially reduced.

      It will be observed that the State did not in this matter annul or dissolve a legal contract, leaving the two parties free to make fresh arrangements. It left one party wholly bound by the terms of the contract; it contented itself with releasing the other; and, it need scarcely be added, it did this without granting the smallest compensation to the defrauded partner. There were other provisions, into which I need not enter, diminishing the few remaining powers of the landlord of recovering rent, and somewhat improving the position of the ordinary tenant. The Act was described by a leading Unionist statesman as ‘the most generous boon’ ever conferred by the Imperial Parliament on the Irish tenant. This ‘generosity’ which impels legislators, without the smallest sacrifice to themselves, to seek to conciliate one class by handing over to them the property of another is likely to be a growing virtue in English politics.

      We can hardly, indeed, have a better example of the manner in which a subversive principle, once admitted into politics, will grow and strengthen till it acquires an irresistible power. When the principle of compensation for disturbance was introduced into the measure of 1870, it was carefully explained that this was not intended to invalidate in any degree the indisputable title of the landlord to the sole ownership of his property; that it was intended to be strictly limited in its application; that it was essentially a measure for the maintenance of public order; that its only object was to make a few bad landlords do what all good landlords were already doing; that it was certain to be as beneficial to the landlord as to the tenant class. Probably, few persons clearly foresaw that it was the first step of a vast transfer of property, and that in a few years it would become customary for ministers of the Crown to base all their legislation on the doctrine that Irish land was not an undivided ownership, but a simple partnership.

As might be expected, the Irish landlords claimed compensation for property that was manifestly confiscated, for vested and reversionary interests and clearly recognised legal rights which, for reasons of public policy, had been taken away. In an eminently moderate and closely reasoned statement they showed how invariably and rigorously the Imperial Parliament, following the general custom of civilised communities, had itself recognised this right, and imposed the obligation of compensation on all public bodies, companies, and individuals to whom it had granted a compulsory power of acquiring or interfering with property or vested interests. They suggested especially two forms of compensation. One of them was the reduction СКАЧАТЬ