LAND LAW (IRELAND) BILL.— [BILL 135.]

HC Deb 09 May 1881 vol 261 cc58-123

(Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Forster, Mr. Bright, Mr. Attorney General for Ireland, Mr. Solicitor General for Ireland.)

SECOND READING. ADJOURNED DEBATE. [FIFTH NIGHT.]

Order read, for resuming Adjourned Debate on Amendment proposed to Question [25th April], "That the Bill be now read a second time."

And which Amendment was, To leave out from the word "That" to the end of the Question, in order to add the words "this House, while willing to consider any just measure, founded upon sound principles, that will benefit tenants of land in Ireland, is of opinion that the leading provisions of the Land Law (Ireland) Bill are in the main economically unsound, unjust, and impolitic,"—(Lord Elcho,)

—instead thereof.

Question again proposed, "That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question."

Debate resumed.

MR. ERRINGTON

said, it was obvious that the stage of second reading was not the most convenient for discussing the full details of such a complicated measure as this. There were, however, principles underlying the measure which were novel in their application, and it was of the utmost consequence that they should be threshed out on the present occasion, that they should be defined, and their scope and limit carefully discussed and made clear to the mind of the public. It was no exaggeration to say that no measure had ever been laid before that House which had been fraught with more anxious and more momentous consequences both for the present and the future than that which was now under discussion. They had to consider, in the first place, the very grave and serious state of things which now existed in Ireland; and, secondly, how that state of things was to be dealt with. He did not think it too much to say that by this measure they were about to combat a revolution by means of a revolutionary measure; and he was perfectly convinced that if they were justified on the present occasion in accepting the homeopathic maxim of endeavouring to cure like by like, they must not lose sight of that other maxim as to the employment of those dangerous remedies, and take care that if not given in infinitesimal doses, yet it was given in a manner carefully weighed and perfectly understood. In the remarkable speech made by the Prime Minister when he introduced the Bill, he told them the greatest difficulty the Government had to contend against had arisen from wild discussions from Communistic schemes and appeals to public passion. They all knew to what he alluded, and they would agree with him that those dangers and difficulties were by no means over now that the Bill was introduced, and would not be over when it was actually passed. It was impossible for anyone who realized the position not to look with grave apprehension to what would happen when the Bill was passed. How was the Bill received as far as Ireland was concerned? In some cases with what he could only call hypocritical approval, and in others with the open and avowed declaration that it was not to be used as a measure of peace and tranquillity, but for the purposes of inciting in the future to more dangerous agitation than in the past. Everything was done to turn the good into evil, and the most dangerous way that could be done was by exciting in the minds of the credulous but honest population hopes and expectations which were quite impossible to be realized. It appeared to him that nothing was more cruel than exciting such hopes. It was necessary for them all to combine in order to defeat such tactics, and to make people understand that the measure was what he believed it would be—namely, a fair and honest measure, and that it would do all law could do to redress honest and fair grievances, but that it never could gratify the wild expectations so unfairly raised. Nothing could be further from his mind than the wish to minimize the effect of the Bill; but he thought it better that people should be disappointed before rather than after the Bill had become law. In this respect the speech of the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) deserved commendation, inasmuch as it placed clearly before the country the real scope and character of the measure. He preferred to accept the right hon. and learned Gentleman as the exponent of what was a wise and statesmanlike measure than certain more recent speakers. One of the most important points he had raised was the definition of fair rent; and he was glad that he had elicited from the Government in no doubtful terms that they admitted the same definition, and he was glad to hear that because it showed him that, after all, there was common ground on which they could all approach the subject—that common ground being the necessity, which was frankly admitted to exist in Ireland as well as in England and among landlords as well as among tenants, that some law must be passed in regard to land. He thought they ought all to combine to make that Bill what he trusted it would be, not a triumph for any Party nor for any class, but a Bill of fairness and justice to all classes of persons. There was one point in the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin to which he took exception, and that was in regard to the drafting of the Bill. He had said that the Bill was obscure; but it appeared to him (Mr. Errington) that the obscurity was not duo so much to the Bill as it was to the subject; and if hon. Gentlemen found a difficulty in understanding the subject, how could they expect to very readily understand the Bill? The question of free sale had been discussed again and again; but it was of such importance, that he should like to repeat to the House two strong reasons in its favour which could not be repeated too often. Hitherto, one of the greatest misfortunes was the ignorance of English people with regard to Irish ideas. Complicated and illogical as "free sale" appeared to English minds, and as applied to English ideas, it was in thorough accordance with the whole spirit and genius of Irish institutions and conditions. Hitherto, English legislation for Ireland had neglected all consideration of Irish ideas; the result had been uniform failure and disappointment. He hailed with pleasure this new departure and this attempt to legislate for Ireland according to the spirit of Irish institutions. The second great argument in favour of free sale was that it was the only way of effectually stimulating the energy and industry of the tenant. It did this by securing him an interest the value of which varied to a great extent according to his own industry. Self-interest was the only motive they could rely on; but hitherto the self-interest of the Irish tenant had been enlisted on the wrong side; it was his interest not to improve, for improvements only suggested to him a rise of rent. Now, the benefit of every hour's extra energy and labour would be secured to him; but in order that this should be so it was necessary that "free sale" should be really and completely free, and this brought him to a very grave defect in the Bill. The Bill provided that in almost every case the landlord should have the right of preemption, necessarily accompanied by the provision that the price of the tenant right should be fixed by the Court. This, he ventured to say, would seriously cripple the advantage of "free sale," for no Court could measure, nor could be believed to measure, accurately the results of tenants' general improvements, It must be remembered that the larger and more important improvements, such as building and draining, would be quite the exception. What he was desirous to stimulate were those general, impalpable, but very real improvements in the general condition of the farm arising from good management and manual industry. No Court could test these in the way a public sale would. He was aware that there were strong reasons for securing the right of pre-emption to the landlord. The Prime Minister told them that Ireland was not in a fit state for absolute freedom of contract, and, therefore, he proposed to interpose a period of change. He probably wished to leave open certain doors, of which this right of pre-emption was one, by which the country must some day return; but he earnestly begged the Prime Minister to weigh very carefully whether he was not paying too dear a price for it in so seriously interfering with the most beneficial effects of free sale. He hoped the landlords would not blindly defend that point. Let them consider—what he believed very few had—what real advantage it conferred on them. He ventured to say few landlords would avail themselves of it, and yet the effect would be just as injurious as if all did so. In its evil effects it would be very like the present right of capricious eviction; few landlords used it, but, as all might use it, its evil effects were nearly as great as if all did. Now, there was one very serious argument brought against free sale which he did not wish to pass over without a word. It was said that, owing to the competition for land, excessive prices would be paid for the tenant right, thus placing the incoming tenant under an extreme rack rent, so that we were in reality undoing with one hand what we were doing with the other. He admitted that in theory this argument was unanswerable; but he contended that when applied in practice the consequences would be totally different, as was often the case with theoretical arguments. In the first place, the Irish tenant did not, and never would, regard the interest of the money spent in purchasing tenant right in the same light as rent; he might be, and was, wrong economically, but this was the fact. He knew that the capital in the one case belonged to him, and would return to him when he pleased, and though this, as we knew, made no real difference, it did so in his mind. Then, again, it was contended that because tenants in Ireland would often promise impossible rents in order to enter on possession of a farm, therefore they would pay an exhorbitant sum of ready money for the same purpose. But the difference was immense between the two cases. There was great difference between promising and paying down ready money; and in the long run a man wino had money might be trusted to take care of it. But he fully admitted that it was most important not needlessly to stimulate an appetite for land, which the general tendency of this Bill would certainly not diminish; and this brought him to what he considered another grave flaw in the Bill, for there was nothing in the Bill to prevent a tenant raising money by mortgage on the tenant right. That, he feared, would be a great temptation to the incoming tenant to pay an exhorbitant price and throw himself entirely into the hands of the usurer. The consequences would be disastrous, for the tenant from the first moment of entering his farm would have no interest in the tenant right, consequently, no inducement to improve. The other great advantage of tenant right would also be lost, for if the tenant failed, or left the farm from any cause, instead of going away with a good sum of money in his pocket to help him to set up elsewhere, the money would go to the usurer, and the tenant would leave, as at present, with misery and vengeance in his heart. He, therefore, hoped some provision would be introduced, making it illegal to recover any mortgage on the tenant right. He would make one exception, and allow a mortgage by testamentary disposition for the benefit of a widow or younger children. No doubt, the economical arguments against usury laws in general would be cited against him; but here, again, he appealed from theory to practice. He had a precedent in India, where, in conditions as nearly as possible identical with those of Ireland, these provisions were found necessary to protect the "ryot" from the money-lender. This might appear at first sight an unwelcome restriction to the Irish tenant, and people would, no doubt, be found to misrepresent and abuse him for speaking thus. But he felt he was acting for the true interest of the tenant farmer in endeavouring to save him from the clutches of the usurer, and if his advice was not taken the day would come when many a poor farmer would bitterly regret it. It was, however, objected that all that fine scheme of "free sale" and "fair rents" was built on robbery, or, as the fashionable expression was, "that they were carving an interest for the tenant out of the landlord's property." That was another instance of rash statement based on theory and without knowledge or consideration of practical matters. He contended that no tangible or material interest was transferred from the landlord. What the Bill did was to liberate a capital at present locked up and unavailable, and which was in abeyance between landlord and tenant. The landlord had the legal right; but in most cases he neither could nor would exercise it, and most landlords thought they ought not to do so. On the other hand, almost all authorities in Ireland, as well as in England, admitted that the equitable right vested in the tenant; but he, of course could not use it except on sufferance. It was, therefore, in its present condition useless to everyone, and it was certain that so long as things remained as they were the landlord. would never use it. What they proposed in the Bill was to call that right out of abeyance in favour of the tenant, in whom vested the equitable right. If that was to be called confiscation, the whole thing was a childish argument about words. As the Bill was founded on "free sale," and as "free sale" depended on "fair rents," so "fair rents" depended on the "Court," and thus, in reality, on the Court, its character and efficiency, really turned in the last resort the operation of the measure. He quite agreed with the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), that there ought to be equal access to the Court for the landlord and the tenant. They had heard a great deal lately about prestige. Whatever hon. Members might think of prestige in the East, they would not deny that on the prestige of the Court in Ireland its success would greatly depend. As at present proposed, he feared. its prospects of obtaining or deserving prestige were small. Almost all authorities agreed in condemning the employment of the County Courts as courts of first instance under the Bill. In the first place, uniformity of judgment was essential, and it would be impossible to obtain this from over 20 Judges, all of whom were already pledged to various views and opinions on most of the questions which would now come before them; and besides, it was notorious that, rightly or wrongly, these Courts would not coinmand the confidence of the people. It, therefore, did appear to him that those who were to administer that new mea1 sure should come to its consideration with minds absolutely fresh and unbiassed by previous judgments. He ventured to submit the following scheme as worthy of consideration:—The Court to consist, as at present proposed, of three or four Commissioners, but with salaries higher than £2,000 a-year; he did not think £5,000 a-year too much to command men of the necessary standing and ability for these most arduous duties; they should besides be independent like other Judges, and be appointed during good behaviour, and not during pleasure. Instead of employing the County Courts, he would suggest to name in the Bill eight Assistant Commissioners—four to be experts in land matters and four to be barristers. They should be appointed for five years, because, whatever the amount of work thrown on the Court might be, it would be heaviest during the first years after the passing of the Act. Care should be taken, especially in the case of the four experts, to secure the very best men. As a practical illustration of what he meant by an expert in land matters, he mentioned the name of Professor Baldwin, a gentleman well known to many Members of the House, as the fittest person he could think of for these important duties. These Assistant Commissioners should go circuit two and two; but he proposed that, instead of deciding cases themselves, they should hear and report each case to the Commissioners at Dublin, and that the actual decision should emanate from there, and it would be without appeal except in cases where points of law were reserved; and in such cases, borrowing a provision from the Irish Church Act, he proposed that the Master of the Rolls or some other Judge should be called in to strengthen the legal element in the Court. The overwhelming importance of that portion of the Bill induced him to make that detailed proposal. They had now a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe what provisions they pleased; but it would be very difficult to make a change hereafter. There was another portion of the Bill which he could not pass over without a word—he meant the proposals for helping emigration, which had been used in some cases most dishonestly to excite unpopularity against the Bill. He yielded to none in his admiration for that love of country which was so noble a trait in the Irish character; but he felt indignant when he saw even these noble and sacred feelings trafficked and traded on for the sake of popularity. He did not wish to see one single Irishman who could live in reasonable comfort at home leave his own country, nor did he think that, taken on an average, the population of Ireland was at all too high; on the contrary, he looked forward to the time when, under conditions of increasing prosperity, a still larger population might be maintained in comfort; but at present it was notorious that in some districts if the people had their land for nothing they could not live. But what cared the agitators for that?—or for the fact that the thousands who now emigrated with the most precarious prospects would, under the provisions of the Bill, do so with every prospect of happiness and success? He would be ashamed, therefore, if fear of unpopularity prevented him from warmly supporting a proposal which promised happiness to thousands of his countrymen. But, after all, it was to the successful creation of a peasant proprietary that they must look for the pacification, and he hoped the ultimate regeneration of Ireland, and in connection with that ho had one last suggestion to make. He had pointed out what difficulties that measure would have to contend against, and how important it was to secure the consent and approval of all honest men—the consensus bonorum omnium—against the combinations of agitators to defeat it. That could only be done by making the Bill a measure of justice to all classes. But it was notorious that a large section deeply interested regarded the measure with distrust. That feeling was not gratuitous nor thoughtless; and though, of course, he thoroughly disagreed with it, it could not be ignored nor summarily dismissed. It was entertained, after all, by many men second to none in their knowledge of the question and in their personal integrity. He appealed to the Prime Minister whether it was not worth while to purchase unanimity by conceding terms of compensation to the landlords, which, without cost to the public Treasury, might remove even the suggestion of bad faith? The Bill provided that sums of money—he hoped very large—were to be devoted to creating peasant proprietors; now, why should not this money kill two birds with one stone, and fulfil the simultaneous purpose of buying out such landlords as considered their interests injuriously affected? The way to effect this would be—first, to remove the restrictions imposed on the Commissioners as to the purchase of estates, especially that relating to the competent number of tenants ready to purchase their farms; and, secondly, to impose a strict limit on the price to be paid for estates by the Commissioners. If hon. Gentlemen would think this out, they would find that the result would be that for the most part the estates purchased would be those of discontented landlords, who would thus, as far as the money went, be got rid of. The limit he proposed as the price would be 20 years' purchase on a fair rent, which money should be paid in Three per Cent Stock at par. The Commissioners could then afford to sell the land to the tenants at the same fair rent to be paid for 31 years, after which time the land would be the property of the tenants. These figures were not new; but they were so remarkable as to deserve consideration. No such liberal terms to the tenant had ever been suggested. Taking a special case to see how the plan would work, they found that for every £100 of fair rent the landlord would receive £60 in Three per Cent Stock. The State borrowing the purchase money at 3 per cent, and charging the tenant fair rent—that was, 5 per cent—would be repaid capital and interest in 31 years; the tenant would then be owner. Or, supposing that, in consequence of bad years, or other exceptional cause, it was necessary to give a reduction of rent, this would only delay for a few years the final enfranchisement of the tenant. This system offered the tenants far better terms than they could get under any other system, and, on the other hand, offered an option to discontented landlords. No doubt, the price offered to the landlord was not a fancy price, but it was a fair price; and the landlord, by investing the price in other securities, might raise the income from £60 to £80 or £90; but even at £60 the offer was not unreasonable. He earnestly trusted his right hon. Friend would consider these suggestions, with a view of securing the co-operation of all classes in the success of this measure. The Prime Minister, no doubt, had brought it forward under circumstances of great advantage—those circumstances were his own great talents, and the overwhelming influence he wielded in the country—but its difficulties were also formidable, and arose not only from the inherent difficulty of the question, but from a most determined combination outside to defeat it. Of the character of that combination they had ample evidence. They had been told in public the Bill must be opposed, because, if carried, it would break up the Land League. All were bound to join in defeating that conspiracy against law and order, which virtually said—Perish honesty, perish honour, perish all the truest and best interests of the Irish tenant, perish religion, in order to keep up the mercenary agitation on which its own base existence depended. He, therefore, came forward to say what he believed was the opinion of the tenants of Ireland, that they welcomed this Bill with gratitude. This he was convinced many would say for themselves were it not for that wretched system of intimidation which made honest men afraid to avow their own honesty. On behalf of the honest men, he wished to say they regarded this Bill as a fair and good measure, worthy of the support of the Irish farmer. He was glad to see there were still persons in Ireland who had the courage to express their approval of the Bill, as had been clone by the Catholic Bishops and the Presbyterian clergy. He hoped there would be a combination, not only to pass, but to make this Bill work successfully when carried; and if the Prime Minister succeeded by this great measure of justice in restoring confidence and tranquillity to his distracted country, it would rank not only among the greatest deeds of his political career, but among the greatest legislative achievements recorded in history.

MR. DAWSON

hoped to have been able to place before the House the opinions of his constituents without being obliged to enter into matters beneath the dignity or importance of this momentous question, but really could not overlook the remarks of the hon. Member who had just sat down. The hon. Member might believe that by the course he had taken he had won popularity in the House, and had obtained from the Prime Minister some assent to the extraordinary accusation he had made against that Party to whom must be ascribed the introduction of this Bill. He (Mr. Dawson) did not wish to shut out the merits due to the Prime Minister or to his Government for introducing a measure such as this, and he cordially allowed that it constituted a revolution with regard to the tenure of land in Ireland. He should therefore support, and should not oppose, the principles of the Bill. But while he went so far, he must entirely deny the allegation of the hon. Member who had just spoken that the agitation to which ho referred encouraged wild schemes, and proceeded by trafficking on the credulity of the people. What were the objects of the Bill which was brought in, not by agitators nor by conspirators, but by the responsible Government of Her Majesty? Its first object was to render more fair and more just the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland; and, having done so much to promote the creation of an occupying proprietary, what were the objects of the National Land League? He had become a member of that organization lately; but, before doing so, and before taking the position of president of one of its most important branches in the City of Dublin, he asked what were the provisions to which he was asked to subscribe. In answer to his request, he received the card of the Land League, which he held in his hand, and in which were enumerated two distinct objects. The first was to put an end to rack-renting, eviction, and landlord oppression, which was the object of the Bill before the House. It was to put an end to rack-renting by means of a State tribunal; to put an end to eviction, which the Prime Minister called a sentence of death; and to put an end to the oppression which was the whole raison d' être of the measure. Would the hon. Member for Longford tell his constituents that two propositions so perfectly analogous, the one introduced by the Government and the other distinctly put forward by the Land League, were trafficking on the credulity of the people, and encouraging them to wild and impossible schemes? The second object of the Land League was to effect such a radical change in the land system of Ireland as would put it in the power of every Irish farmer to become the owner, on fair terms, of the land he tilled. What was the fifth part of the Bill? Why, it proposed to afford facilities to effect the very object of the Land League. If, therefore, the hon. Member for Long- ford reflected upon that fact, must he not confess that the whole of his oration, though it might win a certain popularity in that House, bristled with unfounded accusations against the very people who sent him there. Coming to the Bill itself, lie must say, as he said already at Carlow, that he thanked the Government for the principles enunciated in it, which appeared to him to be a revolution in the right direction on this momentous question. However, on account of the details in which it abounded, ho was not in a position to give it, in the present shape, that unlimited support which he hoped to be able to give it in its final passage through the House. One of the gravest charges against the Land League, and against an hon. Member of that House, who was now unable to occupy that place which he would adorn if he were present, was that they were accused of propounding extreme doctrines when they said that tenants in Ireland ought not to pay more than Griffith's valuation. In The Times newspaper of the previous day, he read an editorial article in which it was stated that the Bill would probably leave the rental of estates, which were about Griffith's valuation, unaltered; but it would reduce all other rents to that point. That was the pronouncement of The Times; but if anyone in Ireland attempted to propound such a doctrine he would at once be called a Communistic agitator. With regard to leases, he certainly understood, from the speech of the Prime Minister, that the Bill would have a retrospective effect. The right hon. Gentleman, in speaking of the harshness inflicted on those who were obliged to contract under pressure, said the Bill would establish a Court that could take cognizance of any lease whose provisions were not in accordance with the judicial lease. If the right hon. Gentleman did not mean to include existing leases, he certainly should have done so; because the whole reason of this great revolution and the burning interest which the question assumed was due to the loud and prolonged complaints of those who were suffering from injuries inflicted by leases with conditions such as he had described. With respect to arrears of rent which had accumulated because of the impossible conditions which the unfortunate tenants were forced to assume, he did not propose that they should be wiped out; but if they were to be met, he certainly thought it should be on the same basis as the new rents fixed by the Courts. There was a clause in the Bill which appeared to him to bear a strong resemblance to the clause in the Act of 1870 which encouraged consolidation. The Bill declared that tenants with a valuation of £150 and upwards should have the power of contracting themselves out of the benefit of the Act. He entirely disapproved of any such provision, because it would be putting the landlord in a position in which he could say that a number of small tenants could cause him any amount of trouble and annoyance. But if he had large tenants whose valuations were over £150, he would be enabled to make arrangements with them which would render the provisions of the Act nugatory. He was afraid that the retention of the words "free sale" was calculated to create a wrong impression in certain cases where the right of pre-emption enabled certain farms to be sold without being put up to public competition. With respect to the local Courts, he did not think the provision of the Bill satisfactory. The judgments of the County Court Judges were marked by such diversity of opinion, and their demeanour in many cases was of such a character, as to deprive them of the confidence of the people. He did not approve of local assessors, because he was entirely against the importation of anything like local prejudice into the decision of cases of such importance. Witnesses would be examined, and a Judge previously unacquainted with the circumstances would be more likely to come to a just conclusion than any local person. He did not think the present County Court Judges possessed the confidence of the country. He had known cases where the Judge had said to applicants in the Courts—"You had better go to Mr. Gladstone or to the Land League." There certainly had been many instances in which the Courts had shown a strong animus in favour of the landlords. Such flippancy, when treating of a serious subject, betrayed a contempt, and the judgments themselves revealed an animus, which unfitted such men for holding the fate of the Irish tenant in their hands. Turning to the scheme for the reclamation of waste lands, he expressed sympathy with the object of the Government; but entirely dissented from the proposal to hand over the work of reclamation to Joint Stock Companies, whether English or Irish. The people of Ireland did not want English money or English patronage, but they did require justice. If they obtained that they would and could cultivate the land, firmly believing that there were ample resources for the sustenance of a much larger population than they had at present. He had been greatly startled by the devolution clauses of the Bill, because they tied down the people to one heir, and really perpetuated the Law of Primogeniture, to which it was understood such men as the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and other prominent Members of the Government were strongly opposed. It was an entirely retrograde policy. The Government having made two such mistakes as these, they proposed emigration, which, in reality, was the necessary outcome of their legislation. The waste land clauses would not allow the people of Ireland to become proprietors, to become happy and independent in their own country; and the devolution clauses would not allow them to have a chance of getting the land into their own hands. He had no sentimental objection to emigration; but held that the resources of the country ought to be developed to the utmost before recourse was had to it, and that it should not be thought necessary to promote it until there should exist an absolutely surplus population for whom sustenance at home would be a matter of impossibility. He had always endeavoured to promote the proper accommodation of the labouring classes; and he thought a clause might easily be inserted in the Bill stipulating that the agricultural tenant holdings should comply with all the sanitary conditions which made life comfortable and tolerable. He would also wish to introduce a provision that the rents of those tenements should be of such a nature that they should include in their weekly charge the purchase money of the cottages and plots of ground. The condition that tenants should pay one fourth of the purchase money he could not approve. The Prime Minister allowed the Government securities which the tenant right gave the tenant to raise the other fourth; but, if so, why not the Government supply it, instead of forcing the tenant in many cases to raise it at high interest? He acknowledged willingly and frankly that the Bill contained good and sound principles. While, however, he said that, he could not help adding that if it passed in its present condition, it would not be a measure which would effect the object Her Majesty's Government had in view in promoting it. For his part, ho would be happy to assist in any changes which would add to the usefulness of the Bill; and he believed that if the Government would consider favourably and support the Amendments which would be submitted by those with whom he acted, the Bill would become an effective measure, such as the Prime Minister promised to make it—one which would tend to promote the peace and prosperity of Ireland.

MR. BRODRICK

said, there were few who would not regret that speeches similar to those made in the House that night had been addressed to their constituents by some Irish Members, for much of the difficulty which had arisen might have been avoided if responsible persons had not excited anticipations which could not be fulfilled, and led tenants to expect something which the Government could not give. One thing which struck him in listening to Irish Members was that they discussed the question without recognizing the truth that their facts and arguments were less applicable to the whole of Ireland than to the particular portions with which they happened to be connected. The fault of the present Bill was that it attempted similarly to apply an universal rule to the whole of Ireland. The difficulty thus involved in criticizing the measure was increased by the fact that there were certain parts of the Bill that were still shrouded in obscurity, because criticisms and questions had not been answered by the Government. That was particularly the case with regard to Clause 7, and the House had a right to expect that direct answers should be given to the questions that had been put. The Members of the Government seemed to differ in some respects as to the interpretation which they put upon the clause. The Attorney General for Ireland said the rent was to be found by taking away the price of the tenant right from the competition rent. If that were so, it was much to be regretted that it was not stated in the Bill. The Chief Secretary diverged very quickly from the question how the fair rent was to be found. Not the least important consideration was whether it was desirable that the fair rent should be based on a competition rent, which the Commission had decided was not generally exacted by landlords. The right hon. Gentleman quoted the opinion of the O'Conor Don, that rents must be less than the fair commercial letting value of the land; but he did not state that the O'Conor Don added that it would be contrary to justice and sound policy for the State to take away private rights without giving compensation. It was, therefore, unfair to represent the O'Conor Don as favouring a diminished rent without adding his proviso with regard to that compensation which the Bill did not give. He believed the Government preferred that a term so controversial as competition rent should not find a place in the Bill; but he should be much mistaken if, when the Bill came to be interpreted in a Court of Law, the present indefinite expressions were not superseded by that of competition rent, which alone would satisfy hon. Members on that side of the House. He hoped the next Member of the Government who spoke would clear up these difficulties, so that the remaining speeches might be addressed, not merely to the intentions of the Government, but to the actual facts of the case as they would appear when interpreted by legal authorities. The Amendment of the noble Lord the Member for Haddingtonshire (Lord Elcho) dwelt more with the theoretical mistakes that would be made by the Bill than with the practical effect it would have on the people of Ireland. No invasion of the rights of property could, it must be admitted, be greater in theory than that which was involved in making freedom of contract almost a matter of the past. But still it would have been possible for a much shorter Bill to have taken a great deal more from the landlords, and to have given a great deal more to the tenants of that practical independence at which they were striving. And such a Bill would not, in practice, he hoped, be so terrible in its operation as the noble Lord anticipated. He had been much struck by the references made during the debate to the speech of the noble Lord, the Member for Barnstaple (Viscount Lymington) in consequence of his connection with an estate in Wexford where the benefits of free sale were supposed to be such as to justify its extension to the whole of the country. Now, ho had some acquaintance with that property, and he confessed he did not think the reference would commend the experiment which had been attempted on that property to the House. The great object they should have in view was to establish some permanent system by which the soil of Ireland would be improved both by the landlord and the tenant. Now, what were the facts of that case? The Nobleman in question had a property in Wexford from which he was reputed to draw £18,000 a-year; but he had never laid out on that property ls.; he never resided on it, or in Ireland; to all intents and purposes he was an instance of an unmitigated absentee landlord, who drew a large profit from Ids estate, and did nothing for its improvement. Was that a system to be applauded or followed? He thought that the adoption of such a principle of estate management would be in direct opposition to the Land Act of 1870, and most injurious to the real interests of the soil. And yet this was the system which they were invited by the Government to establish in the parts of Ireland which were now free from it. Nor must it be forgotten that there were many tenants in Ireland, especially in the South, who would care wondrously little for legislative securities if in them were involved the loss of those traditional securities which existed in the confidence and good feeling of their landlord. It was all very well to say that the Bill conferred security of tenure for 15 years; but this, in the minds of many yearly tenants, meant, not the lengthening of a yearly tenancy, but the shortening of that perpetual tenure which had been enjoyed under good landlords. But it would be said that they could not ignore the proprietary right of the tenant, which had grown up under the Act of 1870. But this did not necessarily involve a system of dual ownership. The First Commissioner of Works had stated that in all parts of the Continent the tendency had been to establish the proprietary right of the tenant. There was one exception. In a part of Germany 100 years ago exactly the same difficulty now felt in Ireland had occurred. Heavy charges were laid on the tenant; there was great disaffection, poverty, and misery among the people; and the landlords had great difficulty in obtaining their rights. The Government of Germany addressed themselves to the difficulty in a manner not dissimilar to that adopted by right hon. Gentlemen opposite. They found there was undoubtedly some proprietary right in the tenant, which made his being placed absolutely at the mercy of the landlord a great cruelty and a hardship. The State therefore gave to the tenant a portion of the land, which was commensurate with his proprietary rights to enjoy it in fee simple. The other portion of the estate was given to the landlord, compensation being granted from the National Exchequer for the amount to which his property had been depreciated by what had been transferred to the tenant. He hoped the English Government would act on a like principle of justice when they proposed to curtail the rights of the landlords. It was the misfortune of this Bill that it placed all classes of estates in Ireland on the same footing. It opened to every landlord in Ireland the possibility, if not probability, that every dissatisfied tenant would come upon him at the same moment on the passing of the Bill to demand the adjustment of his rent. For what inducements did they offer to the tenant not to take his landlord into Court? They enabled him to sell his tenant right, and when the new tenant came in the landlord was not one step nearer getting his rent than before. A new source of litigation was thus to be opened up. The hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) said if the Bill passed into law they would use the resources of the Land League for the purpose of enabling the tenant to make the most of it to bring the landlord to reason, and settle the whole land of Ireland on the basis of this Bill. But, apart from litigation, did the Bill effect its object? Under this Bill the position of the tenant was to be improved; but what effect would be produced where the present tenant had not paid for tenant right? A sum would be received for which nothing had been paid, and the present tenant would, undoubtedly, receive a substantial benefit; but, seeing that any reduction of rent would be more than counterbalanced by the payment for tenant right under the Bill, the incoming tenant would be out of pocket by the transaction. Side by side with the apparent prosperity of Ulster had grown up a system of indebtedness the extent and importance of which it was difficult to exaggerate. A gentleman managing 70,000 acres had said that the indebtedness of tenants in Ulster was so great that they paid more to the usurers than to the landlords. He had himself seen an advertisement of a wholesale stationer in Ulster, who said that at present he made up five times as many bill books for the entry of accounts as he had done before the Act of 1870 had passed. It might be concluded from that fact that since the number of the Ulster tenants had not increased, their indebtedness was now five times as great as before the Act of 1870. It had been argued by the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk (Mr. Charles Russell), and echoed by the hon. Member for Carlow (Mr. Dawson), that the arrears of rent should be dealt with by the Bill. But the hon. and learned Member for Dundalk ought in logical sequence to have argued that it was not merely arrears due to the landlords, but also debts duo to shopkeepers and others that should be dealt with. That would have been a measure of equality and justice which they should have expected from the Benches opposite. The hon. and learned Member for Dundalk adduced the instance of the small farmers in France, whose arrears, he said, were forgiven by the landlords in bad years. Now, it seemed to him somewhat unjust that in Ireland, where tenant right was to be recognized and compensation given for improvements, landlords should be required to make allowances to tenants for arrears. When the hon. and learned. Member spoke of the custom in France he spoke of it as a matter of statute law, whereas, in fact, it was a matter of free contract between the tenant and the landlord, and a French writer had recently stated that four-fifths of the tenancies in France had been contracted out of these conditions. It was obvious that in those contracts, which made the tenant a sort of partner with the landlord, both shared in the gains and the losses. But in the case of the land- lord and tenant in Ireland, they were asked to recognize this in addition to the tenant right, which would be a gross injustice. The class of estates on which improvements had been made by the landlords was not sufficiently protected by the Bill, and ought to be separated from the class on which the tenants were the improvers. He felt very strongly that where a tenant had taken a piece of bog, for example, and reclaimed it by his own labour a great deal was due to him. But, on the other hand, he would ask the House to deal equally fairly with the landlords who had made improvements on their estates. The right hon. Gentleman opposite said that the Government had put in a most important provision to protect the landlord, for they allowed him to take something from the value of the tenant right to compensate him for his improvements; but could that compensate him for being saddled with a tenant who from land hunger paid far more for the tenant right than it was worth, who had no capital left to work the farm, and who impoverished the land, while the landlord was not able to do anything to prevent it? They were told the landlord could object to an incoming tenant on the ground of the insufficiency of his means. Now, he would ask the Attorney General for Ireland, who knew the country well, how was it possible for a landlord to know anything about the sufficiency of means of the tenant coming on his property? How could he know that a tenant in the South of Ireland had not borrowed the money from a bank in the North? Let it be required that the incoming tenant should prove the sufficiency of his means, not that the landlord should prove the insufficiency of the tenant's means, and that would be much fairer. Then, as to going into Court to prove that the character of the tenant was bad, that would only expose the landlord to an action at law. It must not be forgotten that a great number of landlords in the South of Ireland had spent large sums in order to keep out of their estates this custom of free sale, which the noble Lord the Member for Barnstaple (Viscount Lymington) said was so good a thing. But this was not all. They were going to subject a good landlord who had not asked for a rise of rent to a penalty to which a bad landlord was not exposed. If a landlord attempted to evade the rules and raised his rent, he might have an opportunity of buying back his land by exercising the right of pre-emption and paying the tenant a certain sum. But the good landlord, whose tenant had chosen to fortify himself by getting a judicial rent fixed, could not regain a single acre of his land for 15 years; he would have no power of touching it during that time, whether he wanted to turn a portion of his property into villas, town parks, or anything else. Let him point out to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who made on Friday night such a speech as he could wish the right hon. Gentleman would make on this Bill, that the landlord of property near a town could not improve it by the erection of factories or the creation of manufacturing agencies of any kind. The estate with which he was connected was some part of it town park; but it was quite possible that some portions of it not coming under this denomination might be improved in the way to which he had just alluded, and yet they were tying it up for 15 years. All the lawyers were agreed that it was impossible under the Bill for the landlord to resume possession of any part of his land that might be necessary for the development of the estate or for the encouragement of agriculture. In fact, he objected to the Bill on the broad ground that it deprived the landlord of the power of managing his own property. No doubt, the State had a right to destroy any class whose existence was generally detrimental; but if everything was to be taken away from the Irish landowners that made them a beneficial factor in Irish life, it was only fair to accompany that deprivation with a provision in the Bill which would emancipate them from a condition which would become intolerable, and give them an opportunity of utilizing their capital elsewhere. Then came the question of the estates on which the tenants had made their own improvements, and to whom the Bill was specially acceptable. Such improvements had, perhaps, been sufficiently dealt with by the Act of 1870; but, at any rate, the tenantry in many parts of Ireland had not yet expressed an opinion on the subject. The most cautious tenants were not represented in the House; they formed part of no caucus, and were not members of any branch of the Land League; they were men who desired not to sell, but to increase their holdings, and who would be compelled, at each small addition to their farms, to pay a considerable sum of money to the outgoing tenant. These men would certainly not receive any of the justice that would be meted out to the inferior class of tenants, and furnished one instance of the various interests for which a Procrustean rule was to be adopted by the Bill. One word as to the County Courts. An attack had been made on them by the hon. Member for Carlow (Mr. Dawson), and he could not regard them as wholly satisfactory tribunals in land questions; but the Judges were honest and reliable men, who might be trusted unless they were called upon to deal with matters of which they had no knowledge. Under the Bill they would be intrusted with many complicated and difficult questions, with which they were neither by previous training, nor by the aid they could call on, competent to deal. Another great objection to them was founded on the fact that their judgments naturally varied very much in different parts of the country, so that the suitors ceased to have much confidence in them. That had been pointed out by the hon. Member for the City of Cork (Mr. Parnell) in reference to the Act of 1870. The hon. Member had said— One of the chief reasons for the failure of the Act of 1870 is the want of confidence in the County Courts. Many decisions are given adverse to the people, and when a favourable decision is given the amount due is eaten up by costs. To make these Courts the tribunal for fixing fair rents is one of the vital defects of the Bill. In his opinion, the Courts ought to be strengthened by the addition of professional valuators from Dublin, so that the work might be done efficiently, and the public might have confidence in the Courts. The landlords of Ireland, as a rule, were anxious to have the Land Question fairly dealt with; but he would put it to the Government whether the state of things which existed now was so different from that which existed in 1870, as to render necessary a complete remodelling of the law. It would be difficult to find anything in the history of the last ten years to justify a completely new departure in the system of land tenure. Rents had not generally been raised, evictions had been less numerous, prosperity had been, until the last two famine years, more general than before. And in the face of these facts they were asked to override the existing order of things by a Bill which was denounced by the landlords, unacceptable to the tenants, and which would prove to be subversive of all the social relations of the country.

MR. SUMMERS

said, that in the few observations with which he should venture to trouble the House, he should endeavour to confine himself as strictly as possible to a consideration of one or two of the more important principles that were embodied in the earlier portion of the Bill. It was that part of the Bill that had been most vigorously, not to say vehemently, assailed, and against which, he presumed, at a later stage a determined opposition would be raised. Nor did it in any way surprise him that the principles of free sale and fair rents, to say nothing of fixity or security of tenure, should be an offence and a stumbling block to many hon. Gentlemen opposite. So far as he was aware, those principles, though not entirely, were yet, to a very considerable extent, new to English law. Not that that, however, was in his view any objection to them. Indeed, so far from its being an objection to those principles that they were, to a large extent, new to English law, it appeared to him to be a positive recommendation in their favour, when it was recollected that it was not with England, but with Ireland, that they were at the present moment concerned. If they were to approach the question of the reform of the Land Laws of Ireland with any hope or prospect of arriving at a satisfactory solution of it, they must endeavour to approach it from an Irish point of view, and look at it in the light of Irish history in regard to those usages and customs which had gradually grown up and established themselves in the Sister Island. So far from seeking to maim and to cripple, to deface, and to deform those usages and those customs, it ought to be the first object of their legislation to give them new life, and force, and strength. Let them look, for example, at fair rents. Hon. Gentlemen opposite said why should it be necessary to have a Court to fix fair rents in Ireland when we were able to dispense with altogether the existence of such a Court in this country? The answer was not far to seek, and it was to be found in the different agricultural systems which prevailed in the two countries. The most characteristic and fundamental distinction between those systems was to be found in the simple but all important fact that, whereas in Ireland it was the tenant and not the landlord who for the most part made the improvements, the condition of things which generally prevailed in this country was precisely the reverse. That was a fact to which all the Commissions, from the Devon Commission down to the Bess-borough Commission, bore undisputed testimony. It would not be necessary, therefore, for him to make more than a single quotation upon that head. It was taken from the Report of the Bess-borough Commissioners, who wrote as follows:— As a fact, the removal of masses of rock and stone, which in some parts of Ireland incumber the soil, the drainage of the land, and the erection of buildings, including their own dwellings, have generally been effected by tenants' labour, unassisted, or only in some instances assisted, by advances from the landlord. No doubt, there were exceptions to that general rule; but the framers of the Bill now before the House had made ample provision for those exceptional cases, so that no fear need be entertained lest improving landlords should suffer any injustice when this Bill passed into law, as he trusted would shortly be the case. Springing from this all-important fact, that it was the tenant who for the most part made the improvements, they found there a widespread and well-recognized system of tenant right. They had the Ulster Custom, and customs analogous to it; and, where these did not exist, they had compensation for disturbance, recoverable in cases of capricious eviction under the disturbance clauses of the Land Act of 1870. In a word, they had a system of partnership, or quasi-partnership, in the land, and the tenant had an interest or property in his holding just as much as the landlord had. The tenant and the landlord were, in fact, joint proprietors of the soil. ["No, no!" and laughter.] Hon. Gentlemen opposite might laugh; but that was the actual fact, whether they recognized it in law or not. Landlord and tenant were, he repeated, joint proprietors of the soil, and cases were by no means unknown or infrequent where the value of the tenant right exceeded the value of the fee-simple itself. The question, therefore, which came up for consideration was this—was it to be tolerated that the interest of the tenant should be at the mercy, at the mere will or caprice of the landlord? Was the landlord to be permitted, by the constant raising of rent or in any other way, to nibble at and gradually to eat away the value of the tenant right, or should not the object of their legislation rather be, as they endeavoured to secure the landlord in the enjoyment of his property, to secure the tenant also, who was the weaker partner of the two, in the enjoyment of his? Such, then, being the relations that subsisted in Ireland between landlords and tenants, and such being the uncertainty and insecurity attaching to the tenant's interest in his holding, it became, as he held, an absolute and imperative necessity that they should have some Court of Arbitration to make an award in case of dispute between the two contending parties, or, in other words, to determine and to decide what under all the circumstances of the case a fair rent would be, which a tenant might justly be called upon to pay to his landlord; or, to put the matter in a slightly altered form, where there were two persons, each of whom had an interest or property in the same thing, and those two persons were unable to agree between themselves as to the exact amount of interest which belonged to each, it followed as a natural and inevitable consequence, if the social machinery was to work without friction, if law and order was to prevail, that there should be some external and impartial authority to step in between the two disputants, and decide the issue in dispute. In a word, they must have a Court clothed with authority to decide upon and to fix what, under all the circumstances of the case, a fair rent would be. There was only one other question upon which, with the kind indulgence of the House, he should like to say a word or two. How, it might be asked, was the Court to decide so difficult and complicated a question as what a fair rent really was? The answer of the Government was to be found in the much-debated 3rd sub-section of Clause 7 of the Bill. The words of this sub-section were as follows:— A fair rent means such a rent as in the opinion of the Court, after hearing the parties and considering all the circumstances of the case, holding, and district, a solvent tenant would undertake to pay, one year with another: Provided that the Court, in fixing such rent, shall have regard to the tenant's interest; and the tenant's interest, they were farther told, was to be estimated with reference, first of all, to the Ulster tenant right custom, and, where no such custom existed, to the scale of compensation for disturbance provided by the Act. Now, the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), in the course of the eloquent and ingenious speech with which he opened this debate, found very great fault with this portion of the Bill; and he appeared to him (Mr. Summers) to argue that the Court, in fixing what was a fair rent, ought to pay no regard whatever to the tenant's interest in his holding. If lie had rightly apprehended the argument of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, he must say that the proposition which he sought to lay down was, in his humble judgment, monstrously unjust to the tenant. An in-coming tenant bought from an outgoing tenant his tenant right. He paid for it, and it was his. Why was he to be called upon to pay for it a second time, in the shape of an addition to his rent to the landlord. He paid rent not for the tenant right, which was his property, but for the use of the fee-simple, which was the landlord's property; and it followed, therefore, as a natural consequence, and, he would say, as a matter of course and common sense, that in fixing a fair rent the Court ought to take into special consideration the extent to which the tenant had an interest in the land. He had now said what little he desired to say with regard to the principle of fair rents. The principles of fixity of tenure and free sale followed as a logical consequence from the principle of fair rents, as was very ably shown by the right hon. and learned Gentleman the Attorney General for Ireland (Mr. Law). He (Mr. Summers) did not intend to repeat the masterly argument of the right hon. and learned Gentleman, nor should he touch upon the remaining parts of the Bill, such as that which had for its object the establishment of a peasant proprietary in Ireland, except to say that, broadly and generally speaking, they had his hearty approval and support. In conclusion, he should simply content himself with saying that he trusted the Bill would speedily pass into law, and that it would accomplish the purposes—the beneficent purposes—which it was intended by its authors to serve. Might it give security to Irish industry, might it remove the well-founded grievances of the Irish tenantry, might it atone in some degree for our past misgovernment of Ireland, and help to make her a source of strength instead of weakness to the Empire.

SIR JOHN HOLDER

said, that as he considered the questions involved in this measure were of overwhelming importance, he was reluctant to content himself with giving a silent vote. He did not rise in the expectation of being able to convince any hon. Gentleman opposite, because he feared that the conclusions at which they had arrived were foregone conclusions. He rose for the purpose of explaining to his constituents, and to others who might be interested in the course he adopted in Parliament, the views he entertained on this question and his reasons for the vote he was about to give. In dealing with the question presented for the consideration of the House, it was all important at the very outset to have an accurate appreciation of the designs which the Government intended to accomplish by the passing of this Bill. He presumed that, in the first place, it was the object of the Government to ameliorate the condition of the very poor among the population in Ireland, and to drive from their doors the distress and misery which very often threatened and frequently overwhelmed them. He presumed, in the second place, it was the object of the Government to diminish if they could, and, indeed, altogether to allay and remove the irritation and discontent which had for some time, unhappily, existed throughout a very great part of Ireland. No doubt, great evils arose from the excessive poverty of the tenants in some districts in Ireland. We might, he thought, without much trouble ascertain the causes of the great poverty which undoubtedly prevailed. The Irish peasant was a man of intelligence, and, according to many, he was thrifty and industrious. Whether, as a rule, he deserved that description he (Sir John Holker) would not pause to consider; but certainly the Irish peasant Was capable of enduring an appalling amount of privation. The poor Irish peasant would endure cheerfully a state of things which the inhabitants of more favoured countries would consider intolerable. But there was a limit to the powers of flesh and blood, and, unfortunately, he was in such a position that he was liable almost at any time to be deprived of the necessaries of life; for in many parts of Ireland, especially in the West and the South, the population was greater than the industries of those districts could maintain. The result was that the people were often unable to obtain any employment at all. In bad seasons the occupiers of a few acres of land found it impossible to make both ends meet, a problem which at the best of times he found very difficult. In two or three such seasons these people were driven almost to desperation. Then, in consequence of the competition which had been created by the system of Free Trade, the Irish farmer, like his English brother, had been forced out of the grain market by foreign competition, a great quantity of arable land had been converted into pasture, and the result had been that the demand for labour had greatly decreased. On the other hand, as was always the case in a poor country, the population increased by gigantic strides. Thus, year by year, the demand for labour decreased and the population increased. Thus a state of things was in process of being realized—he thought, in fact, it had been realized—with which any Government would be bound to deal. We found ourselves face to face with an enormous difficulty, which must be dealt with in some way or other, no matter what sacrifices had to be made. So far as the provisions of the Bill tended to diminish these evils, he, for one, heartily approved it. It might be—it had been argued—that some of the provisions of the Bill which tried to cope with the evils to which he had referred did not altogether square with economic laws. He cared very little for that. He thought these difficulties had been forced upon the country by a stern and cruel necessity—by an overwhelming necessity. If such a necessity existed economic laws must give way. He did not altogether agree with the argument; but he would look into the provisions of the Bill. He had no doubt that much might be done by encouraging emigration, but it must be free and voluntary; and facilities should be given for emigration. Much, too, might be done by immigration and migration to other parts of the country and of the United Kingdom. There were no provisions of that kind in the Bill; but it would be easy to introduce them. The expenses ought to be borne by the National Exchequer. Then, too, there was the reclamation of tracts of land and the execution of public works, which would create a demand for remunerative labour, which would be a great advantage to the people and lead to ultimate prosperity. He thought a better time would come, especially if the Government by wise and politic laws secured life and property, and thus reestablished confidence in the country. No Bill would do that which ignored or disregarded the rights of life or property. In addition to those portions of the Bill to which he had alluded, it was possible that something might be done for the benefit of the poor by creating a peasant proprietary. He confessed ho had no great confidence in the possibility of permanently establishing a peasant proprietary, for the simple reason that, owing to the character of the Irish peasant—to his virtues, which were many, and to his vices, which were few—in the course of a few years 90 per cent of the owners of such holdings would have disposed of them altogether. ["No!"] He did not expect hon. Members opposite to agree with him; but that was his view. He thought such a scheme would be a failure. He freely owned that in many countries of Europe such a system had been apparently successful. At all events, he thought the plan ought to be tried slowly and tentatively. But if the Government attempted such a scheme in order to get rid of poverty, it ought to be carried out at the expense of the National Exchequer, and not at that of any particular class of the community. On what principle, he would ask, was it sought to carry out such an experiment at the expense of the landlord? He should have thought that if the Government really wanted to benefit the very poor classes in Ireland, they would, instead of endeavouring to create a peasant proprietary at the expense of the landlord, have tried to establish what he might call a State tenantry. The great difficulty in the way of establishing a peasant proprietary was that it was impossible to get the peasants who were vested with portions of land to continue to hold it. But what grave objections, he would like to know, would there be to the State acquiring from the landlord by fair purchase tracts of land, dividing them into small holdings, and letting those holdings on lease to tenants who might desire to take them? Then the tenant could not get rid of his holding. The State might let the holding for 20 or 30 years, or any other term that might be thought advisable, giving the tenant that fixity of tenure which was thought right and proper; and when he had obtained that fixity which would make it worth his while to improve his holding, he might be made subject to any stipulations which the State might think it proper to impose. It might provide for the assignment of his interest; he might get the value of any improvements which he might make; and the State, or an authority constituted by the State, might enable landlords and tenants to enter into reasonable agreements, and to do that which a reasonable and prudent landlord would do when dealing with a reasonable and prudent tenant. If some such provision as that were inserted in the Bill, it might be made so far, in his opinion, a very useful measure, and have the effect of mitigating, if not entirely removing, the great evil existing in Ireland—the excessive poverty of the peasant population. But while, after the most careful and candid consideration, and with no partizan feeling in his mind, he regarded the provisions contained in Part 5 of the Bill as good, useful, and politic, he could not, he regretted to say, make the same observation with regard to the other provisions of the measure. He now came to that part of the Bill which proposed to introduce into the law of landlord and tenant in Ireland a most complete, sweeping, and extraordinary change. That portion of the Bill was complicated and perplexing in the extreme. It was complicated and perplexing owing to the very nature of the subject with which the framers of the measure had to deal; but it had been made still more complicated and perplexing by the system of drafting which had been adopted, and which seemed as if the designed introduction of obscurity had been contemplated. He did not wish to enter into any minute criticism of the clauses of the Bill, because it was obvious that if they were not framed as lucidly as they might be, the defects might be remedied in Committee. He would therefore deal with the principles of the Bill, and allow for the moment all criticism on the phraseology of the clauses to pass. It would not, he thought, be very difficult, notwithstanding the obscurity of some of the provisions of the Bill, to state in a few sentences what were the alterations in the law of landlord and tenant which the Government proposed to accomplish. There were a good many points on which he might dwell; but he would content himself with dealing with two or three of those which appeared to him to be the most prominent. The first object of the framers of the Bill to which he would refer was that which was sought to be carried by the 1st clause, and that object was to alter the law at present in existence in all parts of Ireland not subject to the Ulster Custom, and to give every holder of land to whose tenancy the Bill applied the absolute right of free sale. He hoped hon. Members who had read the clause to which he was referring had endeavoured to understand it, though he must confess he had some doubts as to the success of any such attempt. ["Hear, hear!"] He was aware that the Prime Minister, who had done him the honour to cheer that observation—he was not sure whether ironically or not—had a great affection for that part of the Bill, which, however, appeared to him to introduce into the law a most alarming provision; for in what did the interest which the tenant was to sell consist? Did the clause give the slightest information on that point? Not at all; all was left in darkness. The tenant might be a tenant at will, and the clause would apply to him unless there was something to show that it was intended it should not apply. He might be a holder of land for a year certain, and he might be a tenant from year to year, and the clause would apply; and the Bill said, or rather the Court to be constituted under it might come to the conclusion, that not only had he a tenancy from year to year, but something more which he got from tradition or sentiment. Was it wise, he would ask, to deal with the subject in that way? If tradition and sentiment gave him more than a tenancy from year to year, how much was to be due to tradition and how much to sentiment? Was the question of sentiment to be decided by the County Court Judge? If so, one County Court Judge might respect sentiment, while another would decline to do so. The fact was that, so far as the clause was concerned, all was vague, uncertain, and so much involved in doubt, that it was impossible for the lucidity, even of the Prime Minister, to give any adequate explanation. But the clause applied to every tenant to whom the Bill related, no matter under what circumstances he might have acquired his holding, be it 50, or 60, or 100 years ago, although his rent might never have been raised, and even although he might have only so recently as two years ago been let into the holding on the distinct understanding that he was not to sell it or his interest in it, in consideration of his having to pay only a very moderate rent. Notwithstanding any such agreement, a man so situated might, after the Bill passed, break through his bargain and get what money he could for his farm. It was obvious that such a provision gave a great bonus to a man to live under a reasonable and moderate landlord, and put at a disadvantage the man who had not that good fortune—that was to say, a man who held his land under a grasping landlord would get nothing for his tenancy, whereas if he lived under a good landlord he would be able to sell his tenancy advantageously. Was that state of things, he would ask, either reasonable or just? Perhaps, however, they were not to look for any elements of justice in the Bill. As he read the Bill, every tenant for a year certain, or every tenant from year to year, not to say every tenant at will, would have it in his power, in spite of the landlord, to turn his tenancy into a 15 years' lease, and, at the same time, retain the privilege of selling his interest and determining his tenancy whenever he chose. He could give notice to quit at any time—there was no provision against it—his rent was to be fixed not by agreement with the landlord, but by a tribunal, and if turned out he was to be compensated heavily. If he had given a true description of anything like the alterations which were intended to be effected by this Bill, he would ask every man of fair and reasonable mind whether it was not a measure of the grossest confiscation and spoliation, seeing that there was not the slightest equivalent or compensation offered to the landlord for the enormous sacrifices he was called upon to make. The Bill, it seemed to him, would work an alarming, nay, an appalling, infringement of the rights of property. He would be reminded, perhaps, that it referred to Ireland. Whenever they dealt legislatively with Ireland they became involved in a haze, or a fog, or a bog, or something which obscured their vision entirely. Ireland had this peculiarity about it, that no reason or common Sense applied to it at all. What would be said if such a Bill next year were applied to Scotland or England? They would be astonished, indignant, and alarmed. Unfortunately, they would be also powerless, because they might depend upon it, if these provisions were granted to Ireland in response to popular clamour, they would have to be granted to Scotland and England too, if the people clamoured for them, as clamour they soon would. And if these provisions were to be sanctioned in respect to land, why not in respect to other species of property? Why not in respect to houses, manufactures, merchandize, or wages in Ireland? Once they got rid of the silly idea of freedom of contract, where were they to stop? The hon. Member for Longford (Mr. Errington) said they were using a revolution to stop a revolution; but he (Sir John Holker) entirely objected to a revolution of this sort. It was freely admitted by responsible journals and speakers that the carrying out of the intentions of the Government would involve a flagrant violation of economic laws. Now, economic laws might require to yield in the face of an overwhelming and overmastering necessity; but no such necessity, it seemed to him, existed in Ireland. Turning to the clause relating to the fixing of fair rent, he felt bound to say that it seemed to justify his remark that the Bill was not only obscurely drawn, but that it was drawn with designed and contemplated obscurity. The clause, if put forth in its naked deformity, would appal the people of this country; but the ingenious drafter of it had so framed it that no one reading it could understand what it meant. The right hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Dublin University (Mr. Gibson) did not know what it meant, and apparently the Attorney General for Ireland, who answered him, did not know what it meant; and when the Chief Secretary for Ireland attempted to explain it nobody in the world could tell what he meant. It was by no means certain that the construction intended by the Government was the right one. A County Court Judge reading the clause would naturally assume that a tenant who received so many advantages would give so much the more for them; but that was not the view of the Government. He supposed the clause meant this—that in fixing a rent they were not to take into consideration anything the tenant had already—they were not to make the tenant pay for what was his own property already. They were to consider what rent a solvent tenant would pay, &c., at the same time having regard—there was no phrase so vague as "having regard"—to the tenant's interest in the holding. The tenant's interest was to be estimated with reference to various considerations. First, with reference to Ulster tenant right, where that existed. That was not unreasonable. It would certainly be unjust to make the tenant pay for his own property. But what followed? In sub-section B regard was to be had, in cases where Ulster tenant right did not exist, to the scale of compensation for disturbance provided—except so far as any circumstances shown in evidence might justify a departure therefrom—and to the right, if any, to compensation for improvements effected by the tenant or his predecessor in title. Now, he had no objection to taking into account, in the fixing of the rent, the improvements the tenant had made—a tenant, indeed, ought not to be charged rent for the improvements lie had made; but why in the world should they make a deduction from the rent for the compensation for disturbance which the tenant might receive? What was the compensation for disturbance? It was defined in Clause 5 to be where the rent was under £30, a sum not exceeding seven years' rent; where the rent was under £50, a sum not exceeding five years' rent; where the rent was under £100, a sum not exceeding four years' rent; and where the rent was £100 or upwards, a sum not exceeding three years' rent. What was the unhappy County Court Judge to do in this? Could he avoid bringing into his calculation the maximum compensation for disturbance? If he fixed the maximum compensation for disturbance, what justice was there in allowing a tenant the maximum compensation for disturbance in cases where he was never disturbed at all, where he himself had resorted to the tribunal? He repeated, not only was the section obscure, but it was designedly obscure; and if they got rid of its obscurity they would find that it was monstrously and flagrantly unjust. He asked, how could they justify this interference with the rights of property, this total destruction of the freedom of contract between landlord and tenant? Nothing could justify it but an overwhelming over-mastering necessity. And where was this necessity—where were the benefits this Bill would confer? Was this Bill likely to increase the livelihood of the poorest of the people in Ireland? Of course, to a certain extent, by diminishing the rent where it was unfair there would be remissions; but would these remissions be likely to any great extent to increase the livelihood of the very poor in Ireland? He should say not. It was perfectly obvious they might decrease the rent; but when a bad time came it was not a question of rent, but of living with the tenant. In a bad time he could not live if he had the land for nothing. The provisions of the Bill, if carried into law, would, it was said, prevent the imposition of exorbitant rents. Instead of that, he contended the effect would be perfectly contrary, for this reason—the hunger and greed for land, which was one of the curses or misfortunes of Ireland, would not be diminished. There would be as many competitors for a bit of land as before, and the landlord would say, if he let that bit of land, what would be the result? He could never raise the rent unless he ran the risk of creating a statutory tenancy of 15 years to recoup himself. Would this relieve the labourer? Very little was said about the labourer in this Bill. Had he been omitted because he had no vote? He hoped not. The labourer depended greatly upon the prosperity of the landowner. But if they crippled the resources of the landowner and prevented him improving his land, how could the labourer prosper? This Bill would obviously and seriously dis- courage the expenditure of capital in Ireland. What remained? Could any man show any advantage from these alterations in the law of landlord and tenant in Ireland? Was it not obvious that the alterations of the law proposed were solely and simply for the purpose of satisfying the clamour of the Land Leaguers and that portion of the population of Ireland which the Land Leaguers had contrived to render discontented and disloyal? Would the House approve of these violent alterations in the law of landlord and tenant for the purpose of satisfying a small portion of the population of Ireland which was at present discontented? It was an endeavour which, if they made it, would never be successful, for they would never satisfy the discontented portion of the population by this measure or any other. And for the purpose of trying to do that which they could not do, were they to inflict a grievous wrong, an irreparable injury, upon the landlords of Irelands, who had always shown themselves, he thought, the most intelligent, certainly the most loyal and useful subjects of Her Majesty in that country? And were they, for the sake of doing this, to put a stop practically to the prosperity of Ireland? He hoped not, and he, for one, would certainly vote against the Bill unless those portions of it which related to alterations of the law of landlord and tenant were omitted. He would vote for it if those alterations were omitted. [A laugh.] The hon. Gentleman laughed. He thought his proposal was a reasonable one. He would vote against the Bill if the alterations which he suggested were not made, because he thought it was a bad, unwise, and impolitic measure, a measure which was totally unnecessary. He should vote against it because he was a Conservative. The principles of the Party to which he belonged demanded that he should vote against any measure that introduced an unnecessary infringement of the law of the rights of property, and especially which introduced an unnecessary infringement of the law of property for the purpose of truckling to a discontented portion of the people of Ireland.

MR. JOHN BRIGHT

Sir, notwithstanding the somewhat strong assault which the hon. and learned Gentleman has made upon this Bill—strong in in- tention—I am willing to admit, and I do it with pleasure, that on the whole, during the debate which has taken place upon it, there had been manifested a feeling which is as satisfactory to me as it is, I think, to be commended by all who judge the House of Commons in regard to it. The right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) made a rather fierce attack at the beginning of the debate, and the noble Lord the Member for Haddington-shire (Lord Elcho) gave us a great deal of impassioned oratory of his sort against the Bill; but notwithstanding these particular speeches I think the debate, on the whole, has shown that the House is sensible of this truth—that we have before us a measure, not extraordinary in the sense of the hon. and learned Gentleman, but a measure such as we rarely have—one on which depends, to a large extent, the social interests of Ireland, and, I believe, also on which depends, to a large extent, the political interests of the United Kingdom. We have heard from many of the speakers, and first of all from the noble Lord the Member for Haddingtonshire, and notably from the hon. and learned Gentleman who has just resumed his seat, a good deal of the question of political economy and English usages with regard to this question of Irish land. But we must bear in mind that even with regard to England there is a very large party in this country, and a large Party in this House, who believe that the English land system is far from perfect, and that before long it will require to be considerably amended. Even a noble Lord who has this day been instrumental in selecting the Leader of the Conservative Party in the other House has himself brought in, last Session and this, Bills making considerable changes with regard to laws affecting land in England. But if we turn to Ireland, where landlords for the most part are very much the same as in England, we find there that the whole system has broken down entirely beyond recovery. The hon. and learned Gentleman talked a great deal about the unnecessary changes we propose; but he has not told us in the least what would happen if nothing were done. He has not told us what his Party would do if they came into power with regard to the present condition of Ireland. In point of fact, it seems to me that the hon, and learned Gentleman knows nothing whatever of the past history of Ireland with regard to this question. He is ignorant, not only of the past history, but of the present condition of Ireland, or else he could not have spoken in so jaunty a manner of the opinions of the people of Ireland, and of the absolute folly—for in his language he went pretty nearly as far as that—if not the dishonesty of the Government in proposing a measure like this to the House of Commons. I may assume that his feeling is most unfavourable to us. He not only said that certain clauses in the Bill were complicated and difficult to interpret, but he went so far as to say that they were so drawn designedly. I must say that is a charge which I think, in my Parliamentary experience, I have never heard before made from one side of this Table against Members on the other side. Now, if I were to give the hon. and learned Gentleman a lecture, I should begin by telling him what a good many Members of the House know—that in Ireland land, from certain causes which are not difficult to discover, is the only thing for the employment of the people with the exception of some portion of the country in the North; that the income for the maintenance of their homes, and whatever comfort they have or prospect of saving money for themselves and their families, comes from the cultivation of the soil, and scarcely at all from these various resources to which the people of Great Britain have recourse in the course of their industrial lives. And I should tell him more than that, something of which he is evidently quite ignorant, that the land in Ireland has for several centuries been the cause of constant discontent and disloyalty and crime. There can be no doubt about that. If the Land Laws of Ireland are perfect—if no change can be made except that little change to which the hon. and learned Gentleman is willing to consent—that gradually, as a tentative measure, a few or some tenant farmers shall be made occupying owners of land—if that be all that is necessary in his opinion, how can it be that for two or three centuries at least within our own accurate historical accounts the condition of Ireland has been one of constant discontent, of constant disloyalty, and of frequently recurring crime, and entirely, as far as we know, in connection with the landed condition of Ireland? Now, the hon. and learned Member ventured on the use of a word which I think was brought into this debate by the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson), and he said—"What a dreadful process of confiscation the Government are entering on under this Bill!" Sir, if he had studied the history of Ireland he would have known that within the last two or three centuries there have been many acts of confiscation of the most undoubted character, and that probably there is not an estate in Ireland, from one end of the country to the other, which has not been subject to that very unpleasant transaction. The vast estates that are held in Ireland are estates that were created mainly at the time and in consequence of the confiscations of which we read in Irish history; and under those confiscations and by those great grants of land there was created that English garrison in Ireland which it was hoped would tie the two countries together so that no power of law, and no insurrection, could possibly tend to separate them in time to come. Another thing the hon. and learned Member might have remembered is that it is said, and I believe it to be true, that six-sevenths—that is, six acres out of every seven acres of land in Ireland—are in the possession of owners who differ entirely in their church connection and in all their religious association from the people. I do not say that that of itself would be a cause of disunion and of evil; but it is one of the causes, acting with others, which have produced so much disturbance in Ireland. Now, if this be so, may I not ask the House whether it is possible, in these circumstances, that there could be union and sympathy between the different classes in that country? Every incident of ownership, of religion, of law—every fact in its history almost—wars against that sympathy and that union which we should like to see between all classes in every part of the Kingdom. And all this has been perpetrated by a law, I undertake to say, ten times more violating all the principles of political economy than any of the clauses of this Bill. For example, if an owner of one of those great estates died intestate during the last two centuries, what has been the result and the consequence? If he left sons, one son absorbed the whole of the property, and the other sons and daughters were driven from their paternal home, disinherited and penniless, unless in those cases where some paternal affection in some degree thwarted and baffled the intended action of the law. Of that there can be no kind of doubt. The hon. and learned Gentleman knows a good deal about law, if he does not know much about Ireland, and I am sure he will admit that I am not over-stating that case. Well, is that consistent with economic law? I will use the hon. and learned Gentleman's own language, and ask is it consistent with justice, or right, or common sense that such laws should exist? But they do exist. And the hon. and learned Gentleman and his Friends on that side, and the Party with which he is proud to act, I undertake to say, if we proposed to remove those laws, would be just as zealous in opposition to us as he is to-night in opposition to this Bill. The House should bear in mind this—that a law, whether it be good or evil, begets its own good or evil. And although the law which we call the Law of Primogeniture acts only in certain cases—namely, in cases of intestacy—yet it begets a custom and a practice which become almost general throughout the whole country where such a law is permitted to exist. ["Question!"] No doubt, that is very near the Question if it is not exactly it. But you have besides all this your system of entails, your practice of settlements, the intricacies of the law, which the hon. and learned Member is thoroughly acquainted with, and the enormous and unnecessary cost of all transactions connected with the transfer of land. Well, all this in Ireland is done by force or permission of law, and it has had the effect of creating practically a huge land monopoly, the influence of which is felt over every part of that Island. A monopoly, I think the hon. and learned Gentleman probably will admit, is the greatest enemy of economical law. I may relate an incident which occurred in 1849, when I was in Ireland, to illustrate how this law acts in that country. I was speaking to a gentleman whose acquaintance I made in Dublin—a man of great information on all matters connected with landed property in Ireland—and I asked him why a mutual friend had not bought the land on which he had re- cently built a new house. He said, "Bought the land? He could not have bought it. It belongs to Lord somebody, who has property in the neighbourhood." He continued—"I have been in Ireland all my life, and I know as much, perhaps, about land there as anybody, and I have known of a great estate being sold in Ireland; but I have not known of the sale of a farm or of a fee. Such a thing is scarcely known in the whole country." He mentioned two baronies in the county of Wexford, and he said that the owner of an estate had died; that he left daughters only. In the case of daughters the Law of Primo geniture does not apply, and the consequence was that it was thought advantageous to the daughters that the estate should be sold, and some sensible person suggested that the farms should be offered to the tenants. The result in that case, the only case he knew of in his experience, was that the estate was divided and offered to the tenants, and many of the tenants purchased their farms. I afterwards went down to the county of Wexford with a friend with whom I was staying in Dublin, and who was also well acquainted with Irish affairs, and we visited those two particular baronies. We enlisted the services of an intelligent priest, who went with us to call on several of the tenants, and we called on one of them—a fine old man named Stafford, who was sitting in a very comfortable arm-chair, in a very comfortable room, in a very solid and well-built house. In conversation we asked Mr. Stafford how he, living on that farm, had so much better a house over his head than we had seen in connection with any farm since we had left Dublin. He said that the estate was sold, the farm was offered to him, and he bought it; he then, not being liable to be disturbed, and not in any danger of having his rent raised, did not like to continue to live in a poor house, and, therefore, he built this good solid stone house. I said—"Mr. Stafford, if the great bulk of the commoners of Ireland were in your condition, would not be disturbed, and could not have their rent raised, and were owners of the farms, what would be the result?" He almost sprang out of his chair. Although an old man, he was struck with a momentary enthusiasm; and, lifting his arm, he said—"Sir, we would take hunger out of Ireland." I think that anecdote contains very much the whole story of Irish poverty and Irish suffering. What we want to do and attempt to do partly by this Bill is to drive famine, and poverty, and suffering, and discontent from Ireland, and I believe that can only be done by measures such as this, which will give to the tenantry of Ireland that which Mr. Stafford possessed—the security of their holdings and security from needless and unjust increases of rent. Now, we have in the past history of Ireland these things—on the one side, repeated confiscations, penal laws, Acts in restraint of the Constitution, Coercion Acts in many and hateful forms; and we have recently had an unhappy acquaintance with them. On the other side, we have suffering, discontent, and crime, and I am sorry to say in some cases crime such as the records of savages, if savages have records, can hardly excel for wickedness and cruelty. All these are things which ought to shock Members of the Legislature and draw them with irresistible impulse to find some mode of changing the condition of the people and changing the history of Ireland, which, during our own time, has not been creditable to the Government of the country. At this moment I think one thing will be admitted—that Great Britain desires and is anxious to be just to Ireland and generous. I believe if the people of Britain were appealed to in any form you like, on any given Bill which they thought or could be persuaded would be likely to change the condition of Ireland—I believe the overwhelming majority of all classes would be in favour of it. If that be so, I venture to say that the Members of the Government sitting on this Bench, and on another Bench in "another place," are as anxious as men can be to deal with Ireland in that spirit, which I have just now said is the spirit and desire of the people of Great Britain. But, notwithstanding all this, it must be admitted, though the hon. and learned Gentleman the Member for Preston (Sir John Holker) does not appear to be conscious of it, for he says there is only a very small number of people in Ireland anxious for change and discontented, and that they are acted upon by a handful of agitators who do a great deal of mis- chief. I am not going to defend the agitators against whom he is disposed to complain; but I am ready to deny that it is a small class of the people of Ireland who are anxious that some change should take place with regard to the law affecting the tenure of land. At this moment Ireland is still disturbed, I am afraid, almost from its centre to its circumference, and it appeals to the Imperial Parliament with a voice as loud and united as it ever has done before, and asks, if possible, that some remedy should be applied to their case. What I have said up to this part of my observations I have said to convince the House of what I am myself deeply convinced, that this is a great and solemn question which is brought before us. It is for the House to rise to it. We cannot rest as we are. We must either go forward, as we proposed to go forward, or we must go backward, as probably the hon. and learned Gentleman would recommend, if, as I understand, he has no sympathy with the legislation to which Parliament agreed in 1870. But I say you cannot go back. If you do not go forward you must govern Ireland with constabulary and a great army quartered in that country; and you will be driven by-and-bye to suspend trial by jury, to put an end to the freedom of the Press, and to suppress public feeling. All these are in the career which the hon. and learned Member for Preston asks the House to follow him in. I am against all that. I believe we must go on in the direction we are now endeavouring to pursue. Therefore, I would ask, is there any Member of this House, except the hon. and learned Member, who thinks there is no necessity for any present legislation? He made an exception which I accept. He thought a certain number of tenants should become owners of their farms. But, except that—I am not sure that he did not wish some emigration—he seemed to be against everything that this Bill proposes. Now, what is it that is asked for and what is needed? The Irish farmers do not ask for a great system of confiscation to balance the confiscation of ancient times. Let us for a moment forget certain violent and unreasoning. and I think very mistaken and evil things, that have been said by some of these agitators, and by some whom we are accustomed to see opposite us in this House. Let us forget that, and I say the Irish tenant farmers up to a recent date have been as punctual in the payment of rent—in the discharge of the duty they had contracted to perform—as the tenants in any country in the world. They have not become at once demoralized and an unfaithful class of men. Therefore, I am at liberty to say, and say it positively, that the Irish tenants do not ask for compensation to balance confiscation of past times. But they ask for a law that will give them adequate security with a fair and adequate rent to the owner. If you had for an audience the tenant farmers from Ireland, as we all see in travelling, at the stations and fairs and so forth, and put it to them—"Are you willing to give an adequate rent to the owner on condition that you shall gain adequate security?" I believe you would get only one answer. They asked for that and no more, and I do not believe they will be content with less. With regard to fair rents—on which the hon. and learned Gentleman has been almost as confusing as the clause he condemns—there is something more to be said. With regard to the question of fair rent, I did not rise at all for the purpose of going into what I may call the legal part of the clauses of the Bill. Any Member of this House who heard the remarkable speech of my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General for Ireland must have felt that whatever there was of difficulty in the proposals of the Bill, with scarcely any exception, he fairly met and explained. I looked at the countenance of the right hon. and learned Member for the University of Dublin (Mr. Gibson) as the speech went on; he will admit that it was a remarkable speech, and a fair and great defence of the clauses of the Bill. I should therefore feel that I was wasting the time of the House if I were to go into the minute details of the clauses. I remember that we are discussing the second reading of the Bill, and we are not in Committee. It is well we have these discussions on second readings, and that these explanatory speeches have been made; for when we go into Committee, and have to deal with the clauses one after another, we shall find ourselves far more competent to discuss the Bill than we otherwise should have been. With regard to the question of fair rent, a good speech was made by the hon. Member opposite (Mr. Brodrick) from his view of the case. It was delivered in a manner and with a temper which will recommend him very much to the House again if he should think it necessary to discuss the question further. He pointed out what would happen; he said that the day after the Bill passed 400,000 or 500,000 tenants would have the power of immediately bringing their landlords before the Court. Well, everybody you meet in the street has the power of bringing you before the magistrate. My view of the operation of that particular clause is that, in reality, the rents in Ireland will, for the most part, in nine eases out of ten, be fixed very much as they are now. It does not follow that there will be no difference in rents; increases which are harsh and unjust will no longer take place. The effect of this law will be to change the position of the contracting parties; it will improve the position of both. The tenant will now have a tribunal to which he can have recourse if necessary. The landlord will know the tenant will not rest satisfied with any unreasonable rent the agent proposes; at any rate, the tenant will have the opportunity, if he chooses, of calling in the judicial arbitrator to decide between them; and the effect of that tribunal being established by law will be that the minds of both landlords and tenants will be affected by it. It will be the interest of neither of them to go to the Court, and I believe they will almost universally, without going to the Court, make agreements with which reasonable landlords and tenants alike will be perfectly contented. That, at all events, is my view of it. The hon. and learned Gentleman (Sir John Holker) was serious about fixity of tenure. I am only surprised he should be so alarmed about these changes, because, for the most part, they are recommended by both the Commissions of Inquiry. I was astonished that the hon. and learned Gentleman spoke so strongly upon questions about which he could not be so well informed as the two Commissions. With regard to security, the purpose of the Bill is to give, not perpetual fixity of tenure, but security of tenure during a considerable term, with an easy, accessible method of renewing it. I believe the operation of those clauses will be generally to give the tenant farmers of Ireland, to a large extent, the security my old and venerable friend Mr. Stafford had; and the tenants would be no longer afraid that they might soon be turned out of their farms, or that they would have their rents raised until they would not have a blade of grass on which to feed cattle. I come to the last point—the valuation of the holding and of the improvements. The Bill is intended to guarantee to the tenant the value of his improvements; and, more than that, that he should have a certain, at present undefined, value in the holding of which he is in possession. This is what takes place throughout the whole Province of Ulster. It has not destroyed the landlords; it is a curious thing that the Province of Ulster is the only Province in which, at this moment, landlords have any political authority whatever; so that the argument of the hon. Member opposite failed. It does not follow, if adequate security is given to the tenant, that the landlord will be much less a landlord than he is now. Unfortunately, such are the relations of landlords and tenants under the present system that the landlord has lost almost all political influence; I must say he uses it badly when he has it. I cannot say that I very much regret that he has lost it; but I regret very much the circumstances which have caused him to lose it. The landlords, I hope, will obtain as much rent as they are likely to obtain if this Bill does not pass. I should advise the landlord, if he has any regard for his own interest, not to reject propositions which, if not accepted, may not be followed hereafter by anything he may like better. The power of assignment or sale is that which is intended by the clause to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred with a good deal of complaint. Now, it is said, the Bill makes a concession to tenants. Nobody denies that, least of all those who have taken so much pains to frame it. It does make concessions to tenants; but at the same time—and that is one of the causes of the supposed intricacy of some parts of the Bill—there are safeguards introduced, so that, as far as it is desirable or possible, with justice to tenants, the interests of the landlords should be preserved. The idea of the English system is a complete delusion—I speak, of course, of Ireland. I am not speaking of the English system in England. It will remain in England until Parliament, guided by public opinion, thinks it necessary to make a change. But I have no idea or suspicion that such changes as this Bill proposes for Ireland will ever be needed in England. In Ireland you have the questions of race, religion, and of absenteeism; you have the circumstance of the greatest estates being continually under the management of agents, and, in fact, everything in Ireland is at war with the English system. Therefore—there is no escape from it—you are tempted to have recourse to laws which are very different from the laws which we have in England, and which, I trust, will be never necessary in this country. Hon. Members assume that we are giving a great deal to the tenant, and that we are taking all this without any compensation from the landlord. It is astonishing what a universal opinion there is that compensation from a public fund is a blessed thing. It is common in this House to ask if there is any compensation when any measure is proposed which touches any individual interest, but which, at the same time, promises to be of the greatest public benefit. If you complain that the Bill gives too much to the tenants and takes all that it does give from the landlords, I should make this answer—If, at this moment, all that the tenants have done were gone, and all that the landlords have done were left, that is the sort of map I should very much like to see, for its publication would finish this discussion in five minutes. Well, if that were to take place, if all that the tenants have done were swept off the soil, and all that the landlords have done were left upon it, the land would be as bare of house and barn, fences and cultivation, as it was in pre-historic times. It would be as bare as an American prairie where the Indian now roams and where the White man has never trod. [A laugh.] An hon. Member laughs, thinking that an absurd statement. [Mr. TOTTENHAM: Will the right hon. Gentleman give his figures?] The hon. Gentleman asks for figures. We do not often put figures on maps, and I was drawing a map. Surely the hon. Member knows that I am stating little more, if indeed anything more, than was stated in the Reports of the Commission. I may give what was stated 35 years ago by that greatest of all the Commissions—the Commission presided over by Lord Devon. It is not necessary that you should read the thick Blue Book. If you take the digest—it is in two small octavo volumes, which I studied more than 30 years ago, and which I have studied again within the last few years—you will find that the statement I have just made is merely an amplification of the statement made by the Devon Commission. I say I believe, and think I am within the mark, that ninetenths, excluding the towns, of course, of all that is to be seen on the farm land in Ireland, the houses, barns, fences, and whatever you call cultivation, or freeing land from the wilderness, have been placed there by the labour of the tenantry of Ireland, and not at the expense of the landlords; and I believe, too, that in the matter of rent, landlords in hundreds, probably in thousands of cases, have over and over again received the value of that which the tenants have placed upon their farms. Now, the parts of the Bill to which the hon. and learned Gentleman objects so strongly are those which, in my opinion, are necessary as a remedy for the present existing burning ills in Ireland. The other point for which I have a special affection, for reasons which the House will understand, is that which intends to convert, to a very large extent I hope, tenant farmers into farmers who are owners of their own land. In 1870 that principle was adopted by both Houses of Parliament, I believe without any division; it was adopted also in arrangement for the sale of the property that came into the possession of the State when the Irish Church was disestablished. My right hon. Friend the Member for Reading, now First Commissioner of Works, had a Committee of this House to inquire into this question. That Committee reported unanimously in favour of this project, and reported by a majority in favour of the mode of doing it which this Bill has adopted. I think it is the case that the Irish tenant farmers—the future proprietors, I hope, thousands of them will be—that they are greatly indebted to my right hon. Friend for the extraordinary pains which he took and devoted to the examination before the Committee, and the promotion of that great object of the Bill. Thirty years ago I asked Parliament, not in a speech in this House, but in speeches in the country, that this course should be adopted; and I believe now that if it were possible to make so great a change, if it were practicable, it would be of more advantage to Ireland and its population than all other measures that it is possible to conceive of or to attempt if we were to transfer three-fourths of all the tenants of Ireland from tenants into actual owners of their land. Now, if the House will allow me, I should like to give them two or three figures which I extracted the other day from a despatch received at the Foreign Office from Lord Dufferin, our Ambassador at St. Petersburg. Lord Dufferin there describes what has been done in the Russian Empire; and the hon. and learned Gentleman, who used the word "appalled" with regard to this Bill, would be astounded and appalled, no doubt, at the figures which Lord Dufferin gives. I beg the attention of the House particularly to them, for they astonished me so much that I wish everyone else to partake of the same feeling with regard to them. He says that out of 10,137,000 farmer serfs—that is, serf families, which would make I do not know what population—8,584,000, or 85 per cent, are now absolutely owners of the land they occupy—that will be 15 times as many as the whole tenant farmers in Ireland. He says, further, that of these only 644,000 redeemed or purchased their land without some help from the Government. They have redeemed what they have had from the Government, and they are now absolute owners of their land. Then, he says, 1,550,000—which is three times the whole number of tenant occupiers in Ireland—1,550,000 have not yet redeemed their land. Now, that is the process which is going on in Russia. There it is an autocratic Government, and it was not necessary to consult contending Parties in two Houses of Parliament It might have been as well for Russia if that had taken place in other things; but in regard to this matter, there came the hand of Providence, described as a hand stretched out from the clouds—the providence of the late Czar. By a decree of his own, and by the action of his Ministers, that enormous, that stupendous, and that absolutely unequalled change has been made throughout a great portion of that Empire. I think that that is a just appeal to us to do something, although we cannot aim to do so great a thing as that. Now, I should like to make one observation about these proprietors. I have always held that the landed proprietors of Ireland were in a most unsafe position, because they were so few, and the occupying tenants so numerous. There are 500,000 or 600,000 tenants who make public opinion, be it for good or evil, against 10,000 or 14,000 proprietors, who can by no means stand up against it. We find now the crisis is come which so long ago was foretold, and we find what is the truth, that landed proprietors in England and Scotland would do well to take to heart this fact—that the opinion of property is always in favour of property, and that it is property's only great and certain safeguard. Depend upon it, the opinion of people who have no property is not a very great safeguard to people who have property. If land is to be made secure in Ireland, it must be by a system which, by dividing and dispersing land, will furnish it and its rights with a multitude of defenders. That is exactly what one of the principal portions of this Bill is intended to secure to the landed proprietors of Ireland; and the time will come, and is probably not many years removed. when they will admit that this particular part of the measure is quite reconciled to the other parts of it, and when they will certainly attribute to it a great portion of the tranquillity and comfort which they enjoy in the possession of their property in that country. Now, where is land most secure? It is most secure in France, and in those countries in Europe where it is most divided; and I venture to say to the House of Commons, with the most perfect belief in its truth, that there is nothing that Parliament can do, and scarcely anything that it can spend, that will not be amply compensated by a great and widespread liberality with regard to this particular part of the Laud Question. The hon. Member for Cork has found some fault with this Bill in his speeches outside; but I will only refer, for the moment, to one or two points to which he adverted, I think, in a manner hardly reasonable or fair towards the Government. He objected very much to what is said about emigration; and he objected, further, that nothing is said about the labourers. Now, in regard to emigration, no Member of the Government has any idea that any clause of the Bill indicates anything of the kind as that any single Irishman or Irishwoman will be compelled to leave their country and cross the Atlantic. There is no such intention as that. In point of fact, one would say there is hardly any occasion for any inducement of that kind, seeing what is going on at this moment. Last year, 95,000 persons went from Ireland; and, if the reports in the newspapers are correct, emigration is going on now even at a greater rate than it was going on last year. I will put it to the hon. Member for Cork—but it is no credit to England that he should have to answer it, as I think he will have to answer it—I put it to the hon. Member, if all the great mercantile steamers of England—such fleets as the world cannot produce—were to anchor at Cork or at Galway, and to offer a free passage to all the families of the population of Connaught, how many does he think would remain behind? Probably the whole population of Connaught—I have not the least doubt that one-half of them—would find their way to the United States. It is a country which opens its doors to everybody. The Minister of the United States in this country (Mr. Russell Lowell), a man who has put as much wisdom as wit in his description of that country, says— Whose free latch-string never was drawn in Against the poorest child of Adam's kin. And there is room there for the whole population of Connaught. I should be very sorry to see them all go. I should not like it to be said that it was possible in this age, or in our time—that it was necessary to expatriate from Ireland so many scores and thousands of its population. But in every family emigrating, although there is hardship, from the parents to the children, it is a deliverance from a future of poverty and suffering, if they remain where they now are. Therefore, while the Bill does not propose to offer any inducement, except such inducements as the people now have, to any single Irish family to emigrate, yet I am hound to say I believe it would be far better for a great number of those families to be settled in the better parts of Canada and the United States than to remain where they are, or to be removed from where they are to any of those tracts of land which, at a certain expense—I dare not say the exact amount, for it is not easily to be ascertained—might, in Ireland, be made fit for the habitation and cultivation of some of them. So I trust that those families who will go and are going, notwithstanding the violent passion which has been created in America by many statements that are not true, and many that are exaggerated—notwithstanding that, I trust that there are now persons going to the United States who will hear from their own country that much of its misery has departed, that a feeling of justice is entertained, and that the disloyalty and discontent we now so deeply regret have been, for the most part, removed. With regard to the labourer, to whom the hon. Gentleman the Member for Cork refers, there is nothing that can do so much good to him as that which will induce the farmer of Ireland to cultivate his land better than he does. The Bill does nothing for the houses of the labourer. The wages of labour in Ireland are much higher than they were; they have been, in the last 10 years, much higher than they have ever been at any former period; and I believe that the demand for labour has increased. But the houses are, as the hon. Member for Carlow (Mr. Dawson) has stated, miserable; and it is not a very easy thing to put clauses in an Act of Parliament with a view of enforcing the building of many thousands of houses all over Ireland. They must be built by somebody, either with the consent of the landlord or by raising the rent. There are, therefore, other interests to be consulted; and if it be possible to do anything by any more means that would be likely to be practicable, I hope there will be no difficulty in doing it by some other measure, or by adding a clause to this Bill. The hon. and learned Gentleman and others have said that this Bill is an intricate and complicated one. The question is admitted, he has admitted it himself, to be a very difficult one, so difficult that he not only did not understand the clauses of the Bill, but I maintain that he did not in the least understand the question. The Bill, I may say, without any—what may I call it?—without any special praise to the Government, is a child of very much anxiety, of very much consideration, and of very many discussions, and very many amendments. I believe that it would have been difficult to give to any measure a more perfect and fuller consideration than this measure has had on the part of the Government, as far as it was possible to give it. We have endeavoured I to make it worthy of the Government, and of the Parliament to which it was, offered, and we hope that it will do good to the people whose interests it is intended to advance and to secure. As to those people, if I had 10 minutes more, there is one thing I should like to say. [Cries of "Go on!"] We have heard to-night a reference to their virtues and their vices. I shall say nothing of their vices—all people, I think, almost have a sufficient number of critics, and it would not be of any advantage that I should add myself to the number; but with regard to their virtues, there are two things that have struck me very much. The poor people who live in Connaught, and about whom the hon. Gentleman spoke so feelingly at the beginning of his speech, what are they? They may live in hovels scarcely better than wigwams; they may have three or four acres of land, and land so poor that it seems almost impossible for thorn to live on it, and concerning which Mr. Tuke says in his pamphlet, quoting a Yorkshire farmer who visited Connaught, that he saw in one particular district what seemed to be farms that had on them three or four times the original value of the land, put on them entirely by those small tenants. But what are those tenants? They come over to this country during the harvest, travelling there and back at least a thousand miles; they come to Dublin, they cross the Channel, they make their way to some remote farms in England and Scotland, they work with a zeal and energy not surpassed by any English or Scotch labourer. There is one great farmer in Northumberland who last autumn told me—and he was one of your Commissioners—that he believed that these labourers, working as hard as they did for many days, contrived to live on very little. I said that they would live on sixpence a-day, and he told me that he thought that they lived upon less than that. Every shilling, every penny that they earned, they saved. Having in a very good harvest made, perhaps, £10 or £12, they make their way back to Glasgow or Liverpool, cross the Channel again, cross Ireland, and arrive at their own cabins with this little bit of treasure that they have worked so hard for. The men who did that were not men without virtue—I take the ancient meaning of the term virtue. These men who can go so far, can live on so little and save so much, who come back with such devotion and such eagerness to their homes and families, depend upon it, under better and more favourable circumstances, they might become a very admirable portion of the population of any country. And if you will follow the evidence of what takes place in America, you will find what they do there. They have sent back to this country large funds to assist their friends here in Ireland—multitudes of them—in crossing the Atlantic. They have sent back many—I do not know how many, but many millions during the last 30 years, since the Famine—it is impossible to say what, but an enormous and an incredible sum. Shall we think nothing of that people who regard their families with such affection, and their country, too, with so much affection—listening to every wail of sorrow which sometimes comes from Ireland; and listening, perhaps, also, to some of the unfair and exaggerated statements made by certain speakers. But, still, they find their affections are aroused and their sympathies are excited. The Irish domestic servants, the farmers, and the Irishmen who build their railways, have subscribed millions and millions to help their countrymen at home, or to bring them across the Atlantic to the United States. I say, then, of that people, that they are a people we ought to have some regard for; that we ought to feel that of this people something ought to be made better than a discontented, a suffering, and a disloyal people, as, to a great extent, they have been, and now are. And now, what shall we say about this Bill? If that portion of it which deals with that class of cases which the hon. and learned Gentleman thinks is so little, that portion of the Bill which deals with landlords and tenants is worked with fairness—if the purchase clauses and powers are worked with energy—I dare hope and believe that it will be found to be a measure of healing and of blessing to the Irish people. I ask hon. Gentlemen on every side of the House not to imagine that the Bill has not been framed with a great intention and honesty for a great purpose. Let them, as far as they can, support the Bill and the Government who have introduced it to the House. This very night, and every night, the House prays to the Highest—and for what? The language always strikes me as touching and beautiful. We here, representing the whole nation, pray to the Highest for the peace and tranquillity of the Realm. It is for the peace and tranquillity of the Realm that this Bill has been drawn up and introduced to the House; and it is in the hope that if it passes it will tend to the great end that we, not with fear but with confidence, ask for it the acceptance and the sanction of Parliament.

SIR R. ASSHETON CROSS

Sir, at this period of the evening I shall detain the House but a very short time. I join in the last words that fell from the right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down, in which he expressed the hope that the peace and tranquillity of the Realm may endure, and I sincerely trust that no words of mine will tend to disturb it. I cordially agree with him in rendering a just tribute to the generosity, high feeling, and temperament of the people of Ireland, and, for my own part, would not hesitate to adopt any measure for their benefit, provided it was consistent with the laws of justice and right. I also believe that his remarks upon the subject of emigration, with which I concur, will receive the approval of my Colleagues. Further, I go heartily with him in almost every word that has fallen from him with regard to the provisions of the Bill which are directed to making the occupying classes owners, and not tenants, of their farms. I feel, however, that we can hardly call that man an owner who has borrowed three-fourths of the purchase money of his land from the State, and the remaining fourth from the money lender. And, while I believe it would be right to pass that portion of the Bill in an improved form, I think care should be taken that we do not put the occupier in a worse position than he is in already—that is to say, that, having borrowed three-fourths of his money from the State and the remainder at enormous interest from the money lender, the State should not cause him to suffer more than he would have done at the hands of the landlord. I should like to hear, before the debate closes, what would be the position of an owner who had bought under this Bill, and who in bad seasons—recurring bad seasons—was unable to pay the interest on the money borrowed in the manner described—would the State evict him as recklessly and ruthlessly as the landlords are, by some, supposed to have done? Before the end of the discussion, I hope the Prime Minister will inform the House in what way it is intended that the owner who is unable to pay his rent, owing to the interest which he has incurred, is to be protected. I think we ought to approach this part of the question in a manner somewhat different from that of the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The right hon. Gentleman has said a great deal about the landlords; but what we have been told by the Prime Minister, the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, and in the Reports of Committees, is that, so far as inquiries have extended, the landlords as a body stand acquitted. I have no doubt that those who have studied carefully the evidence produced before the Commissioners will see that almost all the cases of hardship that have occurred where the landlords were not the first to apply a remedy were on those estates which were bought under the Encumbered Estates Act, in the way of commercial speculation, by persons who had been forgetful of the good understanding which has existed so long between the Irish landlords and tenants. It seems to me that the Government, in the course of the long and anxious discussions that have taken place upon this Bill, must have tried to frame in their minds a distinction between the estates held in tenure of the old Irish landlords, and those bought recently in the Encumbered Estates Court. It is, I think, too severe upon those landlords who have not been hard upon their tenants to charge them with the shortcomings of a totally different class. The right hon. Gentleman has said that this Bill has received great attention from the Government, and no one can doubt it. It has been a Bill of great discussion. No one will attempt to deny that it has also been a Bill of great disunion amongst the Members of the Government.

MR. GLADSTONE

A Bill of great disunion amongst the Government, has it?

SIR. R. ASSHETON CROSS

If the right hon. Gentleman is not aware of that fact, he had better ask the Duke of Argyll. It has, moreover, not been framed without some disunion amongst other Members of the Government, although this has not reached the same pitch as in the case of the Duke of Argyll. The right hon. Gentleman who has just sat down has accused the late Attorney General for England of being too mindful of English usages. But I venture to assert, if the right hon. Gentleman will favour me with his attention, that what my hon. and learned Friend said was that he was perfectly ready to adopt all usages, whether in Ireland or in England, provided they were legal usages; but that he was not willing to consent that those things which were matters of sentiment or feeling should be included in the Bill without rhyme or reason, and the landlord deprived of his property for the purpose of handing it over to the tenant. The right hon. Gentleman says that the whole land system in Ireland has broken down, and that some remedy must be applied. But we did not hear any such words from the Prime Minister in all those speeches which he made in Mid Lothian and elsewhere; nor in any of his writings in the reviews is this question referred to as one which rendered an immediate change necessary, except so far as those clauses, commonly known as the "Bright Clauses," of the Act of 1870 are concerned, and to which I should like more attention to be directed than they have yet received. The right hon. Gentleman has delivered a lecture to my hon. and learned Friend, saying that he had forgotten that land was in Ireland the only source of industry and wealth. Why, that was the ground of the argument which the late Attorney General for England pressed at length upon Her Majesty's Government in the course of his speech. I do not think I could have listened to a more unjust accusation, seeing that what the right hon. Gentleman opposite said was forgotten was the very foundation of the argument of my hon. and learned Friend. Then the right hon. Gentleman went on to say that the whole state of Ireland was due to the confiscation which took place years ago. He went into the history of Ireland, stating that about six-sevenths of the owners of the land were of a different religion to that of the occupiers, and touched upon the Law of Primo-geniture, with the object of leading us to the conclusion that in consequence of this confiscation the tenants had suffered a grievous wrong. But the right hon. Gentleman had forgotten the main principle, that two wrongs do not make a right. I should like to refer to one or two clauses of the Bill which seem to me to have practically escaped his attention; but, before I do so, I should like to know what is the main object of the Bill? Is it to transfer the ownership of the land from the owner to the tenant? It is, so far as the fifth part of the Bill is concerned; and if that is what the Government have at heart, I am prepared to go with them a long way provided they mean that the new owner shall be the actual owner of his holding, and not simply a borrower of money. I ask again, is the main object of the Bill really to transfer the ownership of land from the present owners to the occupiers; and are the early portions of the Bill simply modus vivedi to gain time, or are they the substance, the cardinal points of it, the fifth part being only an appendage about which the Government do not very much care whether it be enacted or not? I will undertake to say that the 1st clause, which says— The tenant for the time being of every tenancy to which this Act applies may sell his tenancy for the best price that can be got for the same, is the most dangerous part of the Bill I want to know what this tenancy is? We all understand what it is in those parts of Ireland in which the custom of Ulster prevails; but we have, in the Interpretation Clause at the end of the Bill, an explanation of the word "tenancy" as follows:— Tenancy' means the interest in a holding of a tenant and his successors in title during the continuance of a tenancy. The Government believe it to mean that the tenant has something—they do not say what—that is saleable. Upon this point we have had different interpretations, one coming from the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, and another from an hon. and learned Member below the Gangway. But what is it that the tenant may sell? Leaving that question for a moment, I ask with regard to this right of the tenant to sell this something—this undefined thing said to be created by the Act of 1870, but which, at the time of its passing, that Act was never supposed to create—what will be its effect? In a vast number of instances it will be an increase of the rent which the tenant will have to pay. No one can doubt, I suppose, that if this Bill passes into law as it stands, a great many Irish landlords will not be sorry to leave Ireland? Thus, one of the great evils complained of will be increased. But take, for a moment, the case of land in the landlord's own holding at the time of the passing of this Bill. There is a considerable number of landlords who hold land in this way at the present time; what will be the effect of the Bill in a case of that kind? A landlord, we will say, wants to let his land for the first time, and advertises for tenants. One man comes forward and offers £100 a-year for the land, and another £120. At present the landlord, regarding the man who offered £100 as a better farmer, and one who had probably accumulated capital of his own, would naturally prefer him to the man who was ready to pay £120 a-year. But if the Bill passes in its present form that would no longer be the case. The tenant who had been chosen by the landlord at the smaller rent, £100, because he was the better man, would immediately be able to sell his tenant right to the very man who had been rejected, although he had originally offered the higher rent (£120). And the landlord would think he might just as well put the additional £20 into his pocket. The tendency would undoubtedly be that he would choose a higher bidder than under the present system, and the rent would be raised in consequence. Therefore, in that case, the rent of the tenants will undoubtedly be raised. Next, let us consider how the consequences of this Bill will be to raise the rents in the case of existing tenants, and not that of new tenants. Almost on every page of the Bessborough Commission landlords who have let their estates at very low rents are mentioned. There are other landlords, to whom I have already alluded, who let their estates at very high rents; but their tenants have nothing to sell, for they are rack-rented up to the hilt. The case with the low-rented tenants is different, and their landlord, who will suffer the loss, will have to say to himself—"I have this large estate in Ireland; I have spent a large sum upon it; I have let it at low rents to a large number of tenants; I see under this Bill that my tenants, who are very low rented, have as much right to their interest as the tenants who are high rented; I am not going to allow this state of things to pass—I shall raise my rents." That proves my point, which is that the tendency of this clause will be to raise the rents. I have proved it by the admission of the Prime Minister that where the land is already let at a low rent landlords will be induced to raise that rent. Now, I go a step further—to the incoming tenant, who takes possession when the existing tenant has sold out. That individual will have to pay a higher rent, for he will not only have to pay the original rent, but he will have to pay a premium, for rent does not mean the amount for the land paid by the year, the half-year, or the quarter, but it means money paid into the pocket both of the landlord and of the outgoing tenant for the privilege of holding the tenancy for the time being. He will have to pay for the privilege of coming in over and above the value of manures, and so forth. Undoubtedly, the effect of this clause outside Ulster will be to raise the rents. In the case of an old lease farm, in the case of a new lease farm, or in the case of an incoming tenant where the tenancy has once been sold, in every one of these three cases the inevitable tendency of the clause will be to make future tenants in Ireland pay more for their land than is paid now. And now I want to come to the 7th clause for a moment. I thought, after all the explanations that we had had from divers Members of the Government and others, that the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr. John Bright) would have thrown some additional light on this subject. I am sorry to say that we are just as much in the dark as ever; he has attempted to give us a new definition. Putting aside the first part of the sub-section—namely, that which deals with the Ulster Custom, we come to the second part, and we want to know, practically, what it is under that part that the landlord will have to suffer. Well, the right hon. Gentleman has favoured us with a new definition, and it is rather an extraordinary one. He says that what the tenant will have to sell is this—"a certain, at present undefined, value of his holding." That is certainly a charming explanation of a very complicated subject. [Mr. JOHN BRIGHT: Not defined in Ulster.] We are not talking about Ulster. In the former part of the clause, not only is Ulster mentioned, but also any other part where there is a custom or usage; but we are now coming to the places where there is no custom or usage. Wherever there is a custom or usage, of course the case is clear, and we can understand the matter without asking the right hon. Gentleman for an explanation; but, coming to the place where there is no custom or usage, we ask what is it the tenant will have to sell? And we are told, "a certain, at present undefined, value of his holding." Is that to be the only explanation to the County Court Judge? How is the County Court Judge to interpret it? The right hon. Gentleman thinks this is a difficult part of the Bill, and I agree with him, seeing what a gross injustice will be perpetrated by the clause. I am not speaking of this as a matter of drafting or of Committee, for it is a question of deep principle. What the Government have said in the Bill is that the tenant's interest is to be estimated with reference to "the scale of compensation for disturbance by this Act provided." What do you mean by that? When you put in a scale of compensation for disturbance, what did you do it for? You did it in order to inflict a penalty upon the landlord for unjustly evicting a tenant. First you said a man may be fined, say £100, for unjustly evicting a tenant; and now yon say he is liable to pay the same sum, not as a penalty, not for evicting a tenant, not because he takes any action whatever. but because the tenant chooses to say—"I want the money and will appeal to the Court." Can anything more unjust be conceived? In 1870 it was said—"We want to prevent tenants being unjustly evicted;" and, further, to the landlords it was said—"If you are going to evict these men, you shall pay this penalty for doing so." Well, the landlord does not want to evict a tenant; but the latter may come forward in the Court and say—"I know my landlord does not want to evict me, and would like very well to see me stay; I do not, therefore, claim anything as compensation for disturbance, but I want to leave—but I wish to have the sum I should have been entitled to if he had evicted me." All this, I must say, has very much astonished me. If I had considered the matter now for the first time I should not have been so much surprised; but that is not the case. This question of fair rents has been argued and re-argued over and over again. There is a celebrated anecdote told of a learned advocate who, in the hurry of opening his case, got hold of the wrong story and made a powerful oration in favour of the other side; but, being reminded by a touch on the shoulder by one of his friends of the mistake he had fallen into, with the utmost self-possession said—"Such, gentlemen of the jury, is the case which my learned friend opposite will put before you," and then proceeded to demolish it and put the right case before the jury. That is exactly the case of the right hon. Gentleman the Prime Minister in this matter. The only difference is that during the 11 years which have passed since the introduction of the Land Act of 1870, many things that the right hon. Gentleman said have been forgotten. Many of the arguments used by the Prime Minister in 1870 against the provisions contained in this Bill remain at the present time unanswered. That is something that I am bound to say does astonish me. They were arguments, not of principle, but of positive fact. Why, when we came to this question of the valuation of rents, the right hon. Gentleman declared that it was not only extremely unfair, but that it was impossible and could not be done. When the question came before the House as to whether exorbitant rents could be valued with a view to their being reduced, the right hon. Gentleman said he should like to see the man who would get up and state, in reasonable language, that he could support that proposition. Before the debate closes, no doubt we shall hear this "reasonable language." Now, I want to go one step further. I quite agree that you met the evil of eviction, to some extent, by the Land Bill of 1870, by which a penalty was put on the landlord for unjust eviction. That Bill has, however, in some degree failed, because, as you yourselves say, landlords do not evict but raise the rent. You therefore say—"Let us have this clause for valuing the rent." It seems to me that is rather jumping at a conclusion far beyond the evil it is desired to remedy. What you want I will point out. The right hon. Gentleman says we make no suggestions; but I would venture to offer one. I assume my premisses are right, and that the evil you want to correct is that the Act of 1870, though it practically prevented eviction to a great extent, yet did not prevent the raising of rents. The Chief Secretary put before us some heart-rending cases where tenants had reclaimed land and removed stones and built houses, the result being that the rent had been largely increased; and there is no one on this side of the House who would not say that that is a monstrous iniquity. I do not mean to say, and the Commission very properly states, that you cannot say all the improvements are to be taken from the landlord and handed over to the tenants, otherwise landlords would have nothing but waste land. There must be a statutory limitation. What you mean is that all the recent improvements made by a tenant shall not be put in the landlord's pocket, and you want to prevent the landlord from raising his rent. Well, why do you not say that if the tenant has his rent raised he has a right to say—"Very well, we will have a settlement. If things are allowed to go on as they are I shall be content; but if you choose to raise the rent it is time we had a settlement of accounts. I have done so much, my predecessors did so much—built houses, planted manures that are not exhausted, and so forth. Let us fix the value of the improvements that belong to the tenants—let us know what they are and pay me the money down. If you cannot afford to pay me money down capitalize it and deduct the interest from the rent." Here you would have a remedy for a great evil you want to provide for. You would not infringe any principle of political economy; you would do what is just, and you would not give to the tenant one farthing that he has not a right to receive. If you did this you would do justice between the parties. You are not content with that, however; you want to do something more, and it is just because you want to do something more that we are so entirely opposed to this part of the Bill. I have observed in a great many of the speeches of hon. Members who have spoken on this matter that they have mixed up two things, The hon. Member for Staleybridge (Mr. Summers), for instance, based his speech upon the improvements the tenants had put in the land. He never touched this point that we object to. What we object to is, not payment for improvements, but payment for something else—something that does not belong to the tenant and never did The hon. Member for Staleybridge, therefore, failed to appreciate that part of the case. Do not let the hon. Gentleman run away with the idea suggested by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that all the improvements are done by the tenant. [Mr. JOHN BRIGHT: I did not say all, but ninetenths.] That is nearly all. Do not let the House run away with the idea that all the improvements are, as a rule, done by the tenant. When we read the Report and the Evidence published by the Bessborough Commission, we find that on most of the large estates most of the improvements have been made by the landlords, and that some of them have practically received no rent for the land. ["Oh, oh!"] Well, you find that to be the case in some parts of Ireland, and you know that it is so. Many of the large Irish landlords have spent nearly the whole of their receipts on their estates. All these improvements should be deducted when the tenant makes his claim. We are not willing that you should give the tenant that which he never had and has no right to have. I am far from saying that the Ulster Custom is not a wise one or has not worked beneficially in Ulster, and I do not say that if you introduced that custom to the rest of Ireland it would not work well. It would not suit English habits, and I do not profess to be a judge of what Irish habits are; but I say if you are going to take a serious step, state at once openly and precisely what it is you are going to do. You are going to take away something which has hitherto been considered as always belonging to the landlord, and to hand it over to the tenant, and you are not going to pay the landlord anything for it. It comes to that; and I cannot for one moment imagine that in all these discussions the question of compensation has not entered into the minds of the Government. I quite see all the difficulties they must have had to consider in dealing with the question. They may have asked them- selves—"Where is the compensation to come from? Can we get it from the British taxpayer?" They might have thought of the Church Surplus Fund; but I am afraid there is no Church Surplus. I have no doubt that that was thought of; but there is no surplus—or, at least, there is none available. But that does not alter the question whether compensation ought to be given or not. All I can say is, give the tenant, by all means the full value, if he wants it, of his improvements; let us have a, reckoning up. The landlord raises his rent, and the tenant says—"Very well. then, you shall pay the value of my improvements." But if, beyond that, you are going to take from the landlord what has always been considered to belong to him you must pay him for it. If in the wisdom of the Government they think it right that this should be done, and that the property shall be in the hands of the tenant for the future, let them say so outright, and not by a clause which we cannot understand. Let them say—"In our opinion it is right that the tenant right custom of Ulster should prevail all over Ireland. We shall therefore say to the landlords of Ireland—'For the public good this must be taken out of your estates, and they must be considered as if they were in Ulster. There is no usage or custom to warrant us in doing so; but as we think it is for the public benefit—that it is for the benefit of Ireland that the custom and usage which prevail in Ulster should prevail throughout the length and breadth of the country—we are bound to say we shall impose that obligation upon you which is imposed on the landlords of Ulster. But, as in all other cases when we take away property from one man for the benefit of others, we offer you compensation—full, fair, and ample compensation for the injury we undoubtedly do to your estates.'" Motion made, and Question, "That the Debate be now adjourned,"—(Mr. Shaw,)—put, and agreed to. Debate further adjourned till Thursday.