TENANT RIGHT (IRELAND) BILL. (Hansard, 4 June 1856)

§ MR. G. H. MOORE

, in moving the second reading of the Bill, said that it was a measure representing the claims of a larger class of our fellow-subjects, in reference to interests more material and essential, than, perhaps any other Bill that ever was introduced into the House of Commons. Before hon. Gentlemen undertook to measure the extent and amount of those claims they ought to consider well their subject, object, and character; and in criticising the provisions which the Bill proposed, they should take into account the nature of the evil which they sought to remedy. In the first place he would ask who and what were they who made this demand? Why, they formed a fifth part of the whole population of the United Kingdom; they were a fourth part of the labouring classes of that population; they formed a third of those who held the spade and the plough; they were half of the men who wielded the musket and the sword; they were the hardy and stalwart descendants of an ancient race, who once held all the lands of Ireland from sea to sea—who were deprived of those lands by force and fraud—who had been trampled down into a peasantry by the malice prepense of law—who had been deprived of a middle class by express legislation. Those for whom he was asking the attention of that House were willing to abdicate all recollection of past rights or past wrongs, they abjured all intention to regain with the pike what the cannon and the sword had won, and all that they asked in redress and reparation for the past was that, looking with a large and earnest consideration to the 923 peculiar circumstances of a case which Parliament had itself created, Parliament would assist them by special and apposite legislation that out of the life of toil to which they were born—out of that labour which was the wealth and strength of nations—they might be enabled to create a new property in their country, a new class in the community, and a new rampart round the Throne. Whether that object could be attained without infringing the rights of property—without loosening the bonds of society—without tampering with the principles of the constitution—were all legitimate subjects of discussion, irrespective of which it would be vain as well as unreasonable to expect any question to be dealt with by that House; but that in a country like Ireland, in which land and labour were plentiful, and capital scarce; in a country in which gentlemen and peasants were, perhaps, both too numerous and the middle classes far too few, every encouragement should be given to the investment of labour, every facility should be given to enable industry to raise itself into a position of respect, was a proposition the truth of which every sound thinker would recognise and appreciate, and no Member of that House, he thought, would attempt to deny; therefore, it would be most unjust and ungracious to insinuate that the Legislature had shown itself indifferent to those high and important considerations. He thought that that House and that Parliament had entitled themselves to the respect and gratitude of the Irish people for the good disposition and patient assiduity with which they had applied themselves to the solution of the question; and he considered that they had no reason to doubt the good faith of the Legislature towards a principle and a project which had been recognised in the present Parliament by the solemn acts of successive Ministries, severally representing the opinion, the character, and the honour of both sides of the House of Commons, responsible to their Sovereign if they misled the people, and to public opinion if, for any unworthy object, they paltered with the powers that were confided to them by the Crown. He thought, therefore, that he might not unreasonably hope that the proposition which he now brought forward, to effect objects which were admitted to be wise, beneficent, and expedient, would not be met at the outset by objections of detail, or questions of extent or degree. The question was one which 924 was beset with great difficulties, in which the wisest and the ablest might solicit forbearance, and in which any man, in the peculiar responsibility in which he stood, had a right to ask of others, abler and more experienced than himself, for counsel and assistance rather that hostility and criticism. But if this were true generally in the discussion of a great social question, it was particularly applicable to the circumstances under which he now appeared before them; and, as many hon. Members—it was useless to blink the fact—as a majority of the Members of that House might entertain grave objections to the Bill as it stood for second reading, it was right and necessary to show how it came in this shape before the House of Commons. In connection with the measure to which he wished to direct the attention of the House, there were three parties—the petitioners for rights admitted but not yet conceded, the opponents of those rights, and the Government of the country—not merely the existing administration, but as represented on both sides of the House by those out of whom the Government of the country must be constituted. Now, the Government of the country had solemnly declared on more occasions than one that "it would tend to the improvement and better cultivation of the land in Ireland that provision should be made by the law for securing to tenants the proper benefit of expenditure, either in capital or labour, made by them on the land in their lawful possession; and that it is expedient to provide compensation for improvement in certain cases for outgoing tenants." These were momentous admissions. It should at the same time be observed that they did not relate to a question of political privilege or adjustment of machinery, which depended upon time and circumstance, and which might with justice and propriety be withheld on one day and conceded on another. It was a question of material justice, of property, of the rights of deserving men, arising out of expenditure in capital and labour, the proper benefit of which the Legislature declared ought to be secured to those who made it, but which the Legislature admitted was not so secured, but was appropriated by those to whom it did not of right belong. Surely, then, it was the part of the Government of the country—not on one side of the House exclusively, but of both—to limit, to define, to decide without delay a question so cruelly affecting the vital interests of classes who 925 so needed and merited their assistance. But the noble Lord at the head of the present Administration declined to have anything to say to a question which he himself admitted to be of the gravest interest, or to assist in the attainment of objects which he declared to be wise, salutary, and expedient. He would not say, that in adopting this Resolution, the noble Lord was abdicating the functions of Government, nor did he allege that the Opposition in declining to assume his responsibility were failing in the duties of Opposition. But he did assert, in the name of those whom he represented, that, coming forward as he did, in the admitted default of those who were responsible for the settlement of the question'—appearing on behalf of the claimants in an admitted claim, it was not open for any professing to be favourable to the demand generally to say, that he was claiming too much or going too far. What would be said of a debtor who refused to go into the account of a just demand, on the allegation that he did not owe as much as the account claimed? If the noble Lord at the head of the Government were prepared to take what the law would regard as the proper course in such a case, if he were prepared to lodge in Court the amount that he thought due—if he were prepared to meet his (Mr. G. Moore's) Bill with a Bill of his own for the same ostensible purpose, then, indeed, the noble Lord would be in a position to ask the House to reject his (Mr. G. Moore's) claim as exaggerated and unreasonable; but, failing that, he thought he was justified in asking the noble Lord, and every well-wisher of the general principle, to enter into the account with him and give him an honest audit. It might be argued that to go into Committee upon a Bill of which so large a portion was not likely to meet the views of a majority of that House would be inconsistent with the dignity or practice of the House of Commons. He would, however, remind the House of the course which it took on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, upon which it went into Committee on the avowed understanding that the whole measure was to be abandoned in that stage, with the exception of one clause, and that one subjected to amendment and modification. Surely the course which the House did not think it beneath its dignity to resort to in the conduct of a Bill of pains and penalties, it might, without any compromise of its dignity, again adopt in respect of a measure, the object of which was to confer a 926 boon and a blessing upon large and deserving classes, who from one cause or another, have been hitherto deprived of their full share in the general prosperity. The Bill that he now asked a second reading for, contained four principal propositions, two of which were primary and general, and two ancillary and incidental. They were as follows:—1.That provision should be made by law for securing to tenants the proper benefit of expenditure either in labour or capital made by them on the land in their lawful possession, and to provide compensation for improvements to outgoing tenants. 2. That rights arising out of prescriptive custom, in certain parts of Ireland should no longer depend upon the caprice or the necessities of particular classes, but should be defined and fixed, as far as they rest upon justice, by the law. 3. That restraints should be placed upon the powers exercised by landlords of evicting, according to the markets, vast masses of men without any regard to the dictates of humanity, the well-being of the community, or the exigencies of the empire. 4. That the law should interpose to regulate certain anomalies which have arisen out of the disturbing elements of violent legislative changes, and out of the famine of 1846 and succeeding years. Now it must be admitted that these were very large questions to be disposed of in a single Bill; but, on the other hand, it would scarcely be denied that the social anomalies which existed in Ireland, and which did not arise out of nothing—as Englishmen were too apt to infer with regard to anything that did not exist in England,— should be dealt with in a large and comprehensive spirit, and with a just and temperate but unsparing will. The first of the propositions which he had just recited was of such universal application that, if it had been always in operation, it would have rendered any further provision unnecessary; and, although it might better suit his argument to assume it as granted—which, from the proceedings of the present Parliament, he should be quite justified in doing—he could not let the subject pass without calling attention to the large, special, and urgent interests, to the considerations of common probity and to the suggestions of public exigency that it involved. It was scarcely necessary for him to intimate to any English Member that the state of Ireland was peculiar, but there was nothing in it more peculiar than this—that, whereas in England all the more 927 permanent operations on the soil were performed by the landlord, in Ireland, on the other hand, the tenant originally received nothing from the proprietor, but the soil as nature made it, and no allowance was made to him either in money or in rent for the expenditure of capital and labour necessary to make it fit for habitation or cultivation. If, therefore, the tenant, by the expenditure of his capital, or his labour—which indisputably was his capital — supplied that which the proprietor neglected or was unable to perform, the claim of that proprietor to appropriate, by right of his own default, the results of labour in which he did not share, and the benefit of expenditure for which he had given no equivalent, appeared, primâ facie, so unjust and unrighteous that it required very recondite reasoning, and very subtle morality—a hard head and a still harder heart—to plead its justification. Reason and morality, however, were to be found equal to every occasion, and plain men like himself, who, in advocating tenant right, imagined they were only protesting against the infraction of a commandment, had received solemn warning that they were in reality assailing the palladium of property, in the form of freedom of contract. In the first place, it seemed somewhat strange that the very classes who appeared so painfully and properly solicitous about freedom of contract in this matter were the very same who insisted npon maintaining the usury laws, which, in another species of property, presented a tolerably exact equivalent to compulsory valuation of rent. He would admit, however, that it was no impeachment of the value of the principle to allege that freedom of contract was not exactly the horse that the landed interest was accustomed to ride in battle. But, in point of fact, the question of contract did not arise in a proposition for giving compensation for that which a tenant did over and above his contract. It was no part of a tenant's contract that he should make certain permanent improvements, and whenever it was so, no legal enactment could interfere in special agreements made between man and man. But he thought it must be conceded by every one disposed to deal fairly with this question—that in matters of contract the law ought to do one of two things; either to leave contracts perfectly free, and confine its adjudications between the parties to the terms of the contract as they stood; or, if it 928 interposed at all, to do so in a spirit of equal justice for the purpose of protecting both parties in their several equities, and of advancing the general wellbeing of society. If contracts were left free and final by the law, there could be no reason, in the absence of any stipulation to the contrary, why a tenant should not consume, during the term of his tenure, the improvements he himself had made. There being no contract that he should erect a house or farm steading, why should he not pull down these erections and sell the materials for his own benefit before the determination of his occupancy, leaving the premises exactly as he recived them? But, irrespective of any contract between the parties, the law interposed, and declared that to be waste, and therefore in itself illegal. He for one thought that the law was right as far as it went; but so inevitable was the conclusion that, in thus interfering in contracts, it was bound to interpose justly, and with a regard to the whole equity of the case, that a Committee in another place had gravely recommended that the tenant should have leave to wreck and destroy his own improvements, no matter what might be the loss of property that might result from such a proceeding. Such a recommendation appeared to him more worthy of a conclave of barons in the middle ages than of English statesmen in the nineteenth century. But if there were an absence of wisdom there was assuredly an intuitive sense of justice and honour in this conclusion, at once English and noble. The House of Lords would go back, to avoid palpable injustice to either party. He would go forward for the purpose of doing complete and equal justice to both. The law had already interfered in contracts to prevent property from being wasted; let it also interpose to protect it from spoliation. But then they were told that the tenant was compensated for his improvements during the term of his occupancy, and that such improvements were tacitly a part of the contract for which allowance was virtually made in the rent. To much such allegations—he would not say tenable, but debateable—they must assume that the improvements by the tenant were a fixed and invariable operation on the soil, and a necessary incident of the process of cultivation; whereas the questions that would arise out of a law for compensation would not be general but differential. Take the case of two tenants, to whom the proprietor 929 lets thirty acres each on a mountain side, worth, at the time of letting, say 10s. an acre, and which both hold under lease for twenty-one years. One of these tenants—it was no uncommon case under the present system—just tilled the land sufficiently to pay the rent and maintain existence; and whatever improvements he might find necessary in the commencement to render the land capable of fulfilling even those wretched conditions he utterly exhausted towards the conclusion of his tenure, when he asked for an abatement of the rent, which his mode of treatment had rendered not only advisable but absolutely necessary. The other, who was strong, industrious, and sanguine, set himself to work in another fashion. He drained, he limed, he gravelled, he created a new surface on the barren waste; he built a decent habitation for himself and shelter for his cattle. Instead of gradually consuming towards the termination of his lease the improvements he had made in the beginning, he persevered to the end, and, by the application of his own capital and industry, he made it worth thrice as much as when he first entered on the land. Under the operation of the present law, the landlord proceeded to revalue these two holdings, and, while he compensated the bad tenant by a remission of rent, he made up for it by appropriating the improvements of the industrious one. Now, what was the probable destination of the two men thus dealt with? The industrious man, in bitterness of heart but with unbroken spirit, conveyed himself and his family, with whatever savings his thrift and toil had accumulated, to America, where he became the deadliest foe to the interests of England on the earth's surface. The sluggard emigrated to the poorhouse; and the same law that allowed the landlord to despoil the improving tenant compelled him to pay for the maintenance of the unprofitable hind who had wasted his property. Such were the social relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland; such was the law that professed to regulate those relations. He thought those relations were not happy, or tending to the interests of either party. He thought the law as it stood was partial and unwise in principle, and in its results had been most unfortunate. But although, on the broad principle of compensation to tenants for their improvements, he anticipated, if not a unanimous, at least a general concurrence, 930 he knew there were several grave issues arising in detail. There were the questions of exhausted and unexhausted improvements, of compensating periods, of the nature of the improvements entitled to compensation, and the prospective or retrospective application of measures for that purpose. All those questions were subjects to be discussed in Committee, and he thought he was not unreasonable in expecting that no question of such details would be raised against the second reading of the Bill. The second proposition, which he had cited was that for the adjustment and regulation of the tenant-right custom of Ulster—not necessarily based upon improvements proved to have been made by the tenant, but rather a species of property in the soil, resting on continued prescription, and acquired by purchase made not only with the acquiescence; but with the active concurrence of the owner in fee simple. That was a subject of a very delicate and complicated character, with which he should not, on his own knowledge, have undertaken to deal; but as that part of the Bill rested upon the knowledge and experience of a Gentleman well known in that House, and who had devoted his whole life to the solution of the question, it was, at all events, one on which he considered that he was justified in taking the opinion of the House in Committee. With regard to the two secondary and incidental propositions contained in the Bill, he did not expect that the House of Commons would receive them without distaste, or even discuss them without reluctance. He should not himself have consented to adopt them, if he did not believe that, in point of fact, they were based upon substantial equity; and that in principle they had been recognised by Lord Bacon and Mr. Burke, and the highest constitutional authorities that this country had produced. But although he was prepared to defend them in Committee as just in practice and warrantable in principle, if the majority of the Committee, after fair consideration and discussion, should think fit to reject these clauses, he was not prepared to say that he should, on that account alone, abandon the Bill. Such was a general statement of the case with which they had to deal, and of the measure which he introduced for that purpose. They had to deal with a country in which the relations of society had been perverted and subverted by special legislation, and in which there was an unlimited 931 field for reparation and redress. They had, within a few hours' journey of the metropolis, a large territory half reclaimed from nature and half cultivated by man—in the possession of an aristocracy that was unable to reclaim it or furnish the means for its cultivation, and inhabited by a dense, fertile, and hopeful people, whose instinct and whose passionate desire were to reclaim and cultivate the soil that lay half barren at their feet. He therefore asked the House to apply themselves to the solution of a question of such social, national, and imperial interest. He did not put forward his plan for its solution as a perfect one, nor even as claiming to be entirely impartial. It was a statement of claims of right, made by men who had been long and cruelly wronged, and it was addressed to the consideration and equity of those who were not in their interest, or of their class, and from whom the utmost they could expect was impartial justice. Under such circumstances, whatever incongruities the measure might contain should be considered with lenity and judged with candour. He thought he had given good and sufficient reasons for going into Committee, even if it were to be regarded in the light of a social question only—as one which involved no other interests than the increase of material prosperity and the happiness of classes. But there was another point of view in which it presented itself to the eye of legislation—as a political and national question—and in which light it was still more strongly entitled to the notice of the House of Commons. Within the last ten years the status of the peasantry of Ireland had presented itself to the Legislature in three distinct phases, and on each occasion it had shown a different face. In the years 1845–46 the struggle between the landlord and the land-tiller—for the rights of property on the one hand, and the rights of labour on the other—for the rights that the law protected, and the rights the law refused to protect, had gradually grown and swollen and kindled into a battle for existence. The blunderbuss arose against the crowbar; the guilty omissions in our code led to the adoption of a code of blood, in which a sense of wrong obliterated all sense of right, and in which not only the laws of the land, but the laws of morality and society were completely superseded. He need scarcely recall the memory of those agrarian outrages in Ireland during that terrible year, only less terrible than 932 the outrages that succeeded them. It was to meet such a state of things that the Government of the day appealed to Parliament for the protection of life and property thus imperilled, and introduced what was popularly, or unpopularly, called a Coercion Bill. It was argued by those who opposed this mode of dealing with the matter, that it was a measure for the protection of one class of lives and one species of property only, and those the lives and the properties already the best protected; that the root of the evil was the insecurity of life and labour to those who toiled, and who were daily creating a property in the soil which to them was life, and which the law of the land subjected to daily confiscation. Well, what was the answer to that appeal made with irresistible logic, as it appeared to him, by a great statesman now no more, who, had he lived, might have followed out his own premises to their natural conclusions, and have done that justice to the producers in Ireland which was the complement of the great boon which he conferred upon English consumers? Sir Robert Peel said:— I assent to the justice of the principle which I understand the hon. Member for Rochdale (Mr. S. Crawford) contends for. I think that in Ireland, where the tenant has to bear expenses which the tenant in this country does not bear—I admit that the tenant has a claim for compensation against the owner of the land. …. But I am not sanguine enough to hope that the best devised measure can tell immediately on the present state of Ireland, or relieve us from the duty of taking steps to put a stop to assassination. I will not postpone my consent to this measure to the more permanent measures that may be proposed for Ireland. I will enter into no parley with assassins. Now, he thought he might claim some credit for consistency and sincerity in the course he was now pursuing when he said that, compelled by the irresistible force of that argument, be voted for the measure in question. In doing so he supported a measure of which abstractedly he disapproved; he voted in favour of a Government to which he was opposed, and he acted against the known and strongly expressed opinion of the majority of his constituents. In spite of party feeling, in the face of certain unpopularity, and at the risk of his seat in Parliament, at the sacrifice of every less respectable motive, he did so upon no other ground than that the necessity of the case made it an honourable and conscientious duty. He thought, therefore, that he had a certain personal claim—after waiting for the ten 933 years prescribed by Horace—to ask that House to perform the inverse of the duty then fulfilled by himself, and to extend to the life and property of labour that protection for which it had so nobly toiled and so long waited. But at the very moment when that question came before the House in that terrible moral aspect, there was another and even more fearful view of the subject which was gradually unfolding itself to the eyes of the empire, and in which all statesmen of ordinary prescience might have seen ground for national apprehension. While they were legislating for the protection of the life and property of those who laboured not and left labour to shift for itself through the passive and active resistance of pauperism and crime,—both life and property were being dealt with by another hand, and in a mode that was said to have taxed the resources, as it had endangered the defensive strength of the whole empire. The Irish blight of 1846–7 swept away an amount of property of which he stopped not to take count, because they had since discovered that property was not always the wealth of nations that was the most easily exhausted; but an amount of human life was sacrificed which we had since been taught that gold could never buy. Strong men, men at arms, were driven from the Irish soil, as beggars, for whom we had since gone a-begging ourselves, across the Atlantic: and the fires were quenched in 100,000 cabins round which young men would have grown up with certain passionate instincts, which, however superfluous, and even troublesome sometimes upon Irish soil, would have been honourably welcome that day at the Redan;—a day in which the Nemesis of Kilrush and Skibbereen hovered over our standards, and of which a tale would go down to history which would read but ill by the side of the chronicles of Wellesley from the immortal pen of an Irish looker-on. While to add the last point to the terrible epigram, the despatch that on the same day announced the fall of the Malakhoff was written by the hand of a MacMahon. And why was this? Because, while they carefully and properly legislated for the lives and properties of Irish landlords, they delivered over the Irish peasantry, bound hand and foot, to the inexorable mercy of those, whose use of the legal powers confided to their discretion might be chronicled in the simple fact, that within twenty-four months, more 934 than 100,000 homesteads were levelled to the ground, and 1,000,000 human beings were scattered over Irish graveyards or across the waves of the Atlantic as chance directed or Providence disposed; and what were the details of inhuman wantonness and superhuman suffering by which that act of national wrong, that deed of treason to these kingdoms, was accomplished? Within one Union, the enormities of which were recorded for the eternal memory and reprobation of posterity, it was stated, on official authority, that 2,000 homesteads were levelled and 10,000 wretched beings cast upon the world in little more than a twelvemonth. In an official account, which the Chairman of the Committee declared to be by no means exaggerated, it was stated that— These helpless creatures were not only unhoused, but often driven off the land, no remaining tenant or occupier being allowed to give them even a night's shelter. Or perhaps they lingered about the spot and framed some temporary shelter out of the materials of their old homes, against a broken wall, or behind a ditch or fence—places wholly unfit for human habitations. As soon as one horde of houseless and naked paupers were dead or provided for in the workhouse, another wholesale eviction would double the number, who in their turn would pass through the same ordeal of wandering from house to house or burrowing behind ditches, till broken down by privation and exposure to the elements they seek the workhouse or die by the roadside. In many cases wretched hovels were pulled down, where the inmates were left in a helpless state of fever and nakedness, and left by the roadside for days; and in other cases, the temporary huts in which they sought shelter from the cold were fired by the bailiffs and their drivers. He would refer no more to such horrors, but if any hon. Member wished to form an idea of the Legislative wisdom of a lunatic asylum administered by Pandemonium, he would refer him to the "Accounts and Papers, 20, xlix. 1849, Ireland." And these helpless and unresisting sufferers were of the class with whom "no parley was to be held," but were to be legally done to death by those rights of property in favour of which they were suspending the constitution. He assumed he should be told, as he had been told before, that it was bad taste, and tone, and temper, to revive the memory of facts like these, which ought to be buried in oblivion. He thought, on the contrary, that it was bad taste, and exceedingly bad sense, to bury in oblivion any facts that tended to create a right sense of the social position of the poor, or which tended to induce a proper consideration of a great national 935 question. He would hold, as of no account, the mere human agony, the mere social disruption, the mere moral horror of such a desolation—he would consider it only in the practical estimate of its imperial loss. A national outcry, only limited by the national ignorance of the facts and the national pride in the glorious feat of arms that resulted, had been raised at that untoward order which sent 600 gallant soldiers to almost certain destruction. A feeling scarcely less indignant had been still more recently expressed at the supposed case of British horses, through the neglect of officials, being compelled to gnaw each others' tails with hunger. What, then, ought to be said of those ruthless orders which deliberately, and of malice prepense, extirpated from our empire a whole nation of soldiers? What of the legislative administration which, amid the accumulated wealth of the richest empire in the world, suffered such an act of brutality to be accomplished? The noble Lord the Member for London (Lord J. Russell) on no very remote or unforgotten occasion, refused to vindicate the Administration to which he belonged in its conduct of the war, on the ground that "the accounts which we had received were horrible and heartrending;''— that there was "something to him inexplicable in the state of the army," and such as in his opinion no human foresight could have predicted. Now, it appeared to him that the noble Lord, without any great exercise of memory, might have recollected another memorable occasion, not less vast in its extent and full of circumstances not less heartrending, which might have prepared his mind to foresee any amount of distress and disaster—an occasion in which, beneath his own eye, under his own Administration, and without stay or remonstrance on his part—the same Administrative system that was decimating our army had already destroyed the whole material of our soldiers. He might likewise add, that if the public press of this country—to whose earnest energies and thorough English instincts the exposure of this infamous system was certainly due—if at that period, instead of endeavouring to attribute the failure of the system to the faults of those who were its suffering and unresisting victims, it had applied itself to the solution of the terrible mystery with half the zeal and courage it had since displayed, it would not only have preserved a gallant people for the future defence and glory 936 of the empire, but it might have saved, by anticipation, the flower of our army and the honour of our arms from the distress and disaster which a continued licence of unrestricted abuse had since inflicted upon it; and he might say further, that if, instead of dismissing this question with supercilious indifference, as if altogether irrelevant to those military exigencies with which it might one day be found to be intimately connected, the English press were to apply itself to the solution of the Irish exodus, and the social state of the Irish people in its intimate relation with another demand for men-at-arms, they would confer a greater benefit upon their country by urging the necessity of prescient legislation than by afterwards railing at results which they had done nothing to avert. If, as was alleged the other day in that great organ which more than any other represented public opinion in England, if the honour and the defence of the empire in its deadly perils were left to the stubborn virtue of the Highlands and of Connaught, could it be a matter of indifference to the English Legislature how and why it was that that stubborn virtue, upon which the empire hung, had been wasted to a thread? That was the question which he now put to the House of Commons. They had been taught, at the highest price, that nations could pay for experience, that men might be more valuable than money, and that waste of life might be more expensive than waste of gold. They had also found that the soldiery of a free country must be recruited out of its surplus population, and, that, if excess of population might be a national inconvenience, the want of it might be national ruin. They had discovered that it was not to the refuse of cities that the defence of empires was to be entrusted, but to the rude vigour of the fields and the rugged virtue of the mountain side. They had seen that to hand over the masses of a rural people to be dealt with at the unrestricted will of those who were at once their land-dealers and their landlords, was to subject that population to a dispersion and diminution which was not only morally unjustifiable but nationally unsafe. They had proved to our conviction and humiliation that a people cruelly exiled could not at pleasure be recalled; and that they carried with them in their exodus a desperate and contagious hatred of the empire, before whose governing classes they had been compelled to fly. He was stating no 937 more than that which the English press had been saying throughout the last twelvemonth, and which, if ever hostilities were renewed, they would soon hear reiterated by bitterer tongues than his. But he might be told that all these considerations had happily no relation to the present state of affairs; that there was scarcely any agrarian crime in Ireland; that the hostilities that rendered the loss of our martial population alarming had already ceased; that high prices prevailed, and that rents were comparatively moderate; that material prosperity was increasing and political agitation was on the wane; and he might be asked whether the present was a fitting time for legislative changes that were scarcely pressed for out of doors? His answer was this, that it was precisely the time for beneficial legislation. If no agrarian crime existed, it could not be objected that they were holding "parley with assassins;" if agitation on the subject had diminished out of doors, then, out of doors, men would be more easily satisfied; if Irishmen were beginning to be dissatisfied with America, now was the time to give them a status on their own land. But men who spoke in that way forgot that many of the conditions that they cited were incompatible with each other. Prices were still high in consequence of the war, and rents continued moderate in the constant expectation of peace. With peace, prices would fall. With returning prosperity, rents would rise and population would increase; and if a further population returned from America it would not be a population more quiet under injustice. Were we to wait until the miserable cycle of our subterfuges and temporary expedients again returned upon us—until wrong again begot wrong—until agitation again bewildered us at home, and another war assailed us abroad—until Russia, under more favourable circumstances, again returned to the task which she never would abandon, and when it might be our fate to maintain the quarrel, singlehanded, with Russia in the East and with America on the Atlantic? Let no one imagine that such contingencies were improbable or even remote. So sure as the sun that went down that evening would rise to-morrow, so surely the contest with Russia would be renewed on some future occasion. Then let hon. Members look to the present position of America, and to the vindictive elements which we had colonised amid her population. 938 Could there be a more auspicious moment than that in which a party of semi-fanatical and semi-barbarous blockheads in America had alienated the sympathies of her Irish population for us to win back those sympathies by doing justice to them at home? By so doing we should make friends among our enemies, where we had hitherto sent enemies among our friends; we should gather around us at home national defenders, on the stubborn virtue of whose wasted few we so lately had to place reliance; and we should reclaim, from the further shores of the Atlantic, willing soldiers by a process of enlistment for which we should never have to apologise to any nation in the world.