LORD LANDSDOWNE’S ESTATE.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2140, 4 January 1881, Page 4

LORD LANDSDOWNE’S ESTATE.

The Marquis of Lansdowne has addressed tho following letter to the editor of the American newspaper, the “ Chicago Tribune” :

Sir, —My attention has been directed to a paragraph in the “ Chicago Tribune” of the 2nd of September, in which reference is made to the condition of the tenants on my Kerry estate, as described by Mr Bedpath. That description is summarised in the following terms : Tho rules of the estate cause the special hardships. They prohibit marriages among the tenants, except with the permission of the agents, or the sheltering of any person, whether relative or not, in any cabin on the estate. Tenants or laborers’ children who do marry without permission are ejected at once. The common punishment of sheltering strangers or visitors is a fine of a gale’s rent. A gale is half a year’s rent. Several deaths have been caused by tho operation of these rules. Tenants have been fined for sheltering their own children. Women abont to bo confined have been turned out to suffer the inclemencies of winter. Those who read Mr Badpath’s letters in this country are able to judge for themselves of the probability of his statements, and can, if necessary, endeavor to verify them on the spot. The readers of your widely-circulated journal have no such opportunities, and for their information I ask your permission to make the following observations : —No rules “ prohibiting marriages ” or the “sheltering ” of the relatives of the tenants or other persons exist or have existed upon this estate. The fine of a gale of rent is not “a common punishment for sheltering visitors or strangers,” nor have “several deaths” been caused by the operation of rules such os the above. The misrepresentations of which I complain appear to have arisen out of the following circumstances: All competent authorities are agreed that no cause has contributed more towards human suffering in

this country than the minute subdivision of the farmers’ holdings. The effects of the famine of 1848 were most fatal in those districts where the progress of subdivision had been unchecked ; and it is in them that the distress which has since visited Ireland has been most severe. There are in three counties alone about 54,000 holdings, valued at or under £4 a year. Such holdings are manifestly too small to support a man and bis family in comfort and respectability. Landlords experience the greatest difficulty in preventing farther subdivision. The poorest tenants will, if permitted, often subdivide their holdings among members of their families. The landlord who has let a farm barely sufficient to maintain one family, to a single tenant, is surely bound to intervene if he finds that farm in course of being broken up into two separate lots, and made liable for the support of two separate families. Such intervention on the part of the landlord has from time to time occurred on this estate, and has usually taken place under some such circumstances as these—A tenant, having designated bis oldest son as his successor, gets him married and establishes him with bis family upon the farm. He afterwards gets a daughter or a younger son married, and endeavors to establish him or her, with a second family, upon a part of the land, either in a cow-house or hovel unfit for a human dwelling, or in the farm-house, already inhabited by the tenant’s family and that of his eldest son. The first person to object to the arrangement is usually the eldest son, who in all probability obtained the hand and fortune of his wife on the express stipulation that he was to succeed to the whole farm, and who sees with dismay the imminent loss of a part of his patrimony, already slender enough. It is clearly undesirable, in the interests of the tenants themselves, that the small holdings should become smaller still, or that human beings dependent in great measure upon a precarious crop should be more closely huddled together than they are at this moment in some parts of Western Ireland. Where such a sub-division as I have described is attempted in the face of repeated warnings, the landlord must either shut his eyes and submit, with the knowledge that the example set will be followed in numberless cases, or he must enforce the so-called estate rule and insist upon the removal of the intruding family.—l have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant, L INSDOWNB. Kenmare, October 2nd, 1880.