A MEMORABLE LAND BILL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 14, 2 April 1903, Page 17

A MEMORABLE LAND BILL

S interesting book was written many years ago, bearing the title, * Turning-points of History.' There is at the present moment before the Imperial Parliament a memorable Land Bill which, when it becomes law, should furnish material for a fresh and beautiful chapter in a new edition of that work. Rival parties applaud at least the substance of its provisions ; the King is known to be in strong sympathy with such a measure ; the pleasant temper of discussioa so far points to an easy amendment of any defects that may be in the Bill ; and all the cabled inclination goes to show that within a short period this beneficent piece of legislation will take its place upon the statute-book, ft will make a turning-point in the embittered relations that have ached on and on, without surcease, between the British Government and the Irish people ever since the time — more than seven centuries ago — when Richard Strongbow and his iron-clad Anglo-Norman knights first set their spurred heels upon the soil of Erin.

' Ireland,' says a well-informed writer in the American * Review of Reviews ' for February, •is a conquered country which refuses to be conquered.' She is nominally a member of the triple union of the British Islts. But hereditary wrongs have cradled her people in a spirit that is alien, unfriendly, and marked at times by open or ill -suppressed revolt. Wrong was inflicted on the country's conscience by the long-drawn agony of the penal code ; wrong to her trade by the laws which destroyed her manufacturing industries. These things are past, and gone, and live only in memory and in their remote results. But the evils of her land system have been, like the poor, always with Ire'and ; they have spoiled and poisoned her public and commercial and social and domestic life to this very hour. ' For every wrong,' says Henry George in his ' Social Problems,' ' there must be a remedy. Bat the remedy can be nothing les3 than the abolition of the wrong.' Thus far, the only British political nostrum applied to the admitted and intolerable evils of the Irish land system has been one of blundering quack palliatives, coupled with the exasperating and dangerous policy of 'driving discontent beneath the surface.' True political wisdom has beeu, like Bonnie Prince Charlie, ' long a-comin' ' in the relations of the British Parliament to the Irish people. Thank God it has arrived at lost. The statesmanlike measure now before the House will, when it is embodied in the statute- book, cment the people of the British Isles in a real unity and strengthen the bands of Empire by ministering a radical cure to the most ancient, the most rankling, and the mo?t overshadowing of all Ireland's grievances.

Soon, we hope, the long winter of her discontent will be made glorious summer

' And all the olonds that lour'd upon her house In the deep bosom of the ocean baried.'

Outside the enormous confiscated areas that were handed over to English and Scottish soldiers, settlers, and adventurers, the ancient Irish clan-system of collective ownership in land, with a recognition of individual rights, prevailed till after the close of the Williamite wars. Had the people known that their right of ownership would be taken away, the Limerick Treaty would never have been written, the 20,000 men of the famous Irish Brigade would never have entered the service of France, and, rather than yield, the clansmen would have carried on the war in bog and forest and mountain fastness so long as a regiment remained to make a stand. Contrary to the provisions of the Violated Treaty, the people were deprived of their ancient right of property in the soil, and made by law incapable of holding land. Their old possessions were gradually handed over to members of the dominant creed. The destruction of Irish manufactures by the legislation of the British Parliament, in the interests of English producers, and the lack of mineral resources, flung the population, for the means of subsistence, back upon the land. This naturally brought about fierce competition for farm-lands, and raised rents beyond economic values and the power or hope of tenants to pay. The land-system thus imposed by the conquering nation upon the Irish people was economically false and rotten. Mr. Walter Wellman, who was sent to Ireland a few months ago by the Chicago ' Record-Herald,' with instructions to * learn the truth and print it ' about the land system of the country, says of the new proprietors that ousted the clansmen from their rights : ' Irish landowners, favorites of the conquerors, or heirs or assigns of the favorites, have never been landlords in the proper sense of the world. That is to say, they were never, except in rare instances, the conservators of their estates. It was a tremendous misforture for all concerned that the system which the English imposed upon the country did not require the landowners to nurture, improve and develop th-ir lands. They simply let tracts to tilleis, and the occupiers made all the improvements — built or repaired the huts or houses, dug the drains, reclaimed the bogs, constructed the fences. All that was done upon or for the land, they did. The owner had no improvements to make. He had no responsibility for the land beyond the collection of his rents and the payment of his taxes. He was not required to put anything back upon the land. His only aim was to get as much as possible from it, and do nothing for it in return. Unlike landlords in England, Scotland, and Wales, they were mere rent -chargers, not landlords or lords and managers of the estates which fortune had placed in their keeping.'

Various circumstances combined to aggravate the doleful position of the Irish tenant-farmer. Some of these arose from the character and habits of the landlord class, others from the course of legislation. The Irish landlords were trained to no profession. They were alien to the people in creed and race and caste. They were a hostile foreign garrison in the land. '1 hey boasted of being ' three-bottle men ' — ' very talented drinkers,' as the American humorist says : a whisky swilling, spendthrift, gambling class. A great number of them lived beyond their means. More than half of them were absentees, who spent the money tortured from the half starved peasants on ' the wine-grower, the distiller, the race-track, the gaming-table, the purveyor of luxuries, the vampires of vice, the money-lenders.' Their estates they abandoned to agents. ' Whose delegated cruelty surpassed The worst acts of ote energetic master, However harsh and hard in his own bearing.

The Irish landlords' chief function was that of thumbscrewing out of their tenants the last penny of rack-rent to minister to their tastes or needs. In the process they displayed, as a class, ' a cruel wantonness of power. The falling-in or renewal of the rare leases in the country, a new tenancy, a marriage, ugns of a little comfort in the farmer or his house or family, the pressure of creditors, gambling losses, mere caprice, and too often the death of the peasant bread-earner, led alike to the raising of the rent of a holding. J n the days of restricted franchise and class legis-

lation, the Eritish Parliament practically made the Irish landloid — in the words of the late Mr Gladstone— the arbiter of life and death for his tenantry. It enabled him to capriciously raise rents, capriciously evict, capriciously seize the property created by the tenant, and fnrnished him armed constabulary and military galore to secure his ' legal rights.' Between 1800 and 18-14 Parliament passed no fewer than fifty Acts to strengthen the landlord's hands, and rejected every Bill that was brought in to rc'icve the unfortunate tenant, who was as helpless before his lord and master as the Southern slave before the great American Civil War. And thus the tiller of the soil was at the best times only a little removed from distress and famine.

It was the exactions of the landlords and the woes of the farmer that elicited Swift's fiercest and most deadly satire — his ' Modest Proposal ' for the supply of the meat of fattened Irish babies to the butchers' stalls of Great Britain. Rack-renting, absenteeism, 'duty- work,' &c, were denounced by the Protestant Bishop Woodward in 1791, and by a multitude of Parliamentary Committees at frequent intervals down the course of the nineteenth century, but with little avail. When the repeal of the Corn Laws struck a staggering blow to agriculture in the British Isles, English landlords found it necessary to make reductions in rent averaging forty per cent. Irish landlords pushed the ruined tenant to the wall for the same old rackrents as before. Wholesale evictions and clearances followed. Agrarian discontent and crime came naturally in their train. Then came the famine years, with their million of dead, and further hideous evictions and clearances, and that melancholy exodus which still goes on, and which has reduced the population of the country from over eight millions to a little over four millions. It must ever be a reproach to British statesmanship that even the fearful lesson of the great famine did not rou&e them to a senfe of the urgent necessity of a radical reform of the Irish landsystem. But till twenty years ago, Irish Under-Secrctary Drummond's saying was still, to landed proprietors, an economic heresy: ' Property has its duties as well as its rights ' ; and it was of the Green Isle that Lord Palmerstox spoke when he pronounced his ex-cathedra political dogma, which became, and till the eighties remained, the watchword of the Irish landed gentry : 'Tenant-right is landlord wrong.'

Thus the system dragged its evil way along till the late Mr. Gladstone put it on the disseoting-table. Till his day, the only 'remedial' measures passed to meet the chronic discontent and relieve the recurrent periods of keen distress and want and sheer famine, were acts of stern and exasperating repression. It is a curious and melancholy commentary on British administration in Ireland, that during the course of the nineteenth century alone, nearly eighty Coercion Acts — many of them of almost incredible severity, not to say cruelty — were passed for the ' benefit ' of what is probably the most crimeless country in the world ! A tentative and half-hearted measure of protection was given to the Irish tenant fanner by Mr. Gladstone's Act of 1871. Ten years later, in 1881, the same distinguished statesman made a notable step in advance : he took away from the landlords the right to fix rents at their own sweet caprice. Thenceforth, the work was done by landcourts. ' The next result,' says a recent writer on this subject, ' is that in the last twenty years the total agricultural rents of Ireland have been reduced fioin about £9,000,' 00 a year to about £5,000,000. Here is a declaration of the fui 11 judicial tribunals that, as long as the landlords had everything in their own hands, they were squeezing forty per cent, to t much rent out of their tenants.' '1 hey were no longer the lords of life and death in Ireland. Other Land Acts followed, which transformed 72,000 tenant farmers into proprietors of their holdings at a cost of some £23,00j,000. But the system of dual ownership remains, none the l<ss, intolerable. Neither landlord nor tenant has an interest in developing the productiveness of the soil. Many other grievances — exasperating to both parties — cling to the system still. The recent conference between the representatives of the landlords and the tenants established a modus vivendi which is intended to end for ever the now acknowledged evil of dual ownership and 10 enable the 400,000 tenant farmers of Ireland to become the

proprietors of the soil for which they and their ancestors have paid rack-rents for long centuries. The recommendations of the conference — which are fresh in the minds of our readers — seem to have been followed pretty closely in the Bill now before the House of Commons. The full details of the Bill are not yet to hand, .but it is clearly a great and beneficent measure, and will, we trust, turn into a complete and permanent settlement of this great question, which has been for centuries the nightmare of the Irish people. The true inwardness, the full value, of the forthcoming legislation cannot be understood without those references to the past history of the Irish land-system which appear in the course of this article. * With the land question settled,' says Mr. Wellman, whom we have already quoted, ' most of the objections to Home Rule will disappear ; and that Home Hule — in some form — will logically and naturally follow disposal of the land question, is the belief of English and Irish public men of all parties.'