THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

Grey River Argus, Volume IX, Issue 639, 22 February 1870, Page 3

THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

The Dublin correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette says :— The discussion of the land question is. daily increasing in earnestness in Ireland. Its peculiar feature is the adoption to a certain extent of what have been considered tenant right views by certain Conservative journals. The Irish Times has commenced the publication of essays by a special Land Commission, which it has organised. The Evening Mail calls for a defensive property league to meet the danger to landlords which it sees in these movements. The Freeman's Journal, in giving an account of the Stirn and Harden berg reforms in Prussia, says that it will be the destiny of Mr Gladstone and Mr Bright to earn an immortality analogous to that of the great land reformers in Europe, and to win a niche in the homestead of every Irish peasant. The inscription it would indelibly engrave on every peasant's lintel would be of tenure, and no capricious increase of rent." The same journal asks — Do the landlords of Ireland prefer the Prussian plan of settling the laad question to the simple process of giving fixity of tenure at a rent based upon a just and fail' standard, and secur- [ ing an increment or decrement bearing the same proportion to the standard rent that the present average of prices of produce may bear to any future average of prices ? This is the alternative suggested to the Prussian Land Reform, which, applied to Ireland or to England, would as a rule give every third acre to the landlord, and the remaining two to the tenant rent free for ever — a far more sweeping reform than has ever been dreamed by the wildest land reformer we know of. At the Tralee Agricultural Banquet The O'Donoghue, M.P., spoke. He thought the life of a farmer had more of the elements of true happiness than any other. It was the bounden duty of every man to guard with jealouseyethe in dividual rights of the farmer. It would be vain, he said, to conceal the fact the Agricultural Society had been looked on with disfavor, as raising ' the issue of cattle against men— that as cattle multiplied men disappeared. The society, however, was not responsible for the circumstances which gave rise to those adverse opinions.. The Lord Chancellor, in his speech, avoided all political allusions, but referred to Earl Spencer's evident mastery of agricultural subjects, and possession of the knowledge that best may oase sotmd measures for* the future of the land of Ireland. (FoV hotitiriualion of news see Fourth Page.)