LAW OF LANDLORD AND TENANT.

HL Deb 01 August 1850 vol 113 cc609-15

LORD MONTEAGLE

said, he would call the attention of their Lordships to the Motion of which he had given notice; but he would endeavour to compress his observations within as small a space as possible. He had nothing to say against the constitution of the Devon Commission, or the competency of the individuals appointed under it to inquire into the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland; but at the same time, looking to the uses to which the report of that Commission had been applied, he must say that never was an inquiry productive of less good or greater evil. The point to which he wished especially to direct their Lordships' attention was, that there were peculiarities affecting the landed property of Ireland which distinguished it not only from the landed property of England, but from the landed property of every other European country. For the historical state of property in Ireland the English Parliament was at least as much responsible as the present holders of land. He would refer their Lordships to the Earl of Clare's speech, which was made in the Irish House of Lords before the Union, for the purpose of showing the difficulties which arose out of the circumstances of the country. He said— 7,800,000 acres of land were set out under the authority of the Act of Settlement to a motley crew of English adventurers, civil and military, nearly to the total exclusion of the old inhabitants of the island, many of whom, who were innocent of the rebellion, lost their inheritance, as well for the difficulties imposed on them by the Court of Claims in the proofs required of their innocence, as from a deficiency in the fund for reprisal to English adventurers. Even so late as the reign of William III., 1,800,000 acres were taken in the same way. What had been the consequence? As Lord Devon's Report said, the confiscations led in many instances to the possession of large tracts by individuals whose more extensive estates in England made them regardless and neglectful of their properties in Ireland. It had led also to the system of great middlemen, because the parties who lived in this country were more anxious to have security of tenure than anything else. By the penal code the Legislature excluded from the possible ownership of the soil, and from the profitable occupation of it, the whole bulk of the people of Ireland, who were reduced to the condition of serfs. Though those laws had been repealed, yet the effects of the penal code might be traced on every farm. The English public did not look back to these circumstances as the causes of the condition of Ireland, but attributed it to the existing race of Irish landed proprietors. It was these things which had led to the disorganised state of society in Ireland, and affected so injuriously the relations of landlord and tenant, which was the most unsound part of that disorganisation. When, however, Lord Devon and his Commission instituted their inquiry, they were enabled to say that all the elements of prosperity in Ireland were rapidly progressing. The Commissioners said in their Report— Our tour and an extensive intercourse with the farming classes enable us to say that in almost every part of Ireland there exist unequivocal symptoms of improvement, in spite of counteracting circumstances. Speaking of the country generally, with some too notorious exceptions, we believe that at no former period did so active a spirit of improvement prevail, nor could well-directed measures for the attainment of that object have been proposed with a better prospect of success than at the present moment. The Irish people were extricating themselves from their difficulties in 1845, but they were visited afterwards by the most grievous calamity that ever befel a nation in modern times. The labouring classes were reduced to pauperism; and grieving, as he did, for the sufferings which they had endured, he grieved for their pauperised condition still more, because when pauperism was produced by law, the experience of England enabled him to say that there was, and could be, no escape from it, and that if, in 1833, their Lordships had not passed the poor-law, the pauperism of England would have sunk the country. Since 1845 there had been no effective legislation on the subject of landlord and tenant, though there had been several abortive attempts at it. He must say that it was most mischievous to hold out expectations of legislation, unless the framers of a measure were prepared to grapple with the difficulties which the subject presented. Probably it had not been dealt with on account of the want of that information which it was the object of his present Motion to supply. The result of his Motion would be to show what had been done both in England and Ireland, and would enable their Lordships to exercise sonic discrimination in their application of remedial measures to the existing state of things. The conduct of England towards Ireland had been described in a forcible manner by Mr. Greville. Speaking of the civil war in Ireland, he said— The surrender of Limerick terminated the civil war; the Irish people and the Catholic religion were laid in the dust—4,000 Irish subjects were outlawed rebels, and 1,100,000 acres were confiscated. The situation of Ireland at the revolution is unparalleled in the history of the world. If the wars of England had been carried on against a foreign enemy, the inhabitants would have retained their possessions, and their country been annexed to England as a province.….But the whole power and property of the country has been conferred by successive monarchs on an English colony, composed of three successive sets of adventurers; confiscation is their common title. The present state of the law had been upon more than one occasion referred to in that House, and it would be sufficient for him to state, that under its operation some of the most valuable properties in Ireland had been destroyed. There were houses wanting tenants, and tenants wanting houses; but such was the state of the law, and such the difficulties in obtaining possession on the part of the landlords, that many of them preferred pulling down their cottages at once, to being put to the trouble and annoyance of getting rid of a bad tenant. Again, the law which compelled the landlords to pay the poor-rates without regard to whether they received rent from their tenants was a serious injustice, as it frequently happened that the tenant paying nothing to the landlord, left him still, by some Irish process, out of that nothing to extract that something wherewith the landlord was expected to pay the rates which ought to have been paid by the tenant. What he wished to obtain by the appointment of this Commission was a short report, not founded upon evidence, but upon such consideration as a few lawyers of eminence might give upon a careful consideration of the existing state of the law. He did not wish a single amendment to be suggested in the report, or any remarks to be made as to what the state of the law ought to be. He wished the report to be simply as a foundation for future legislation upon the subject, and to contain nothing more than a clear statement of the law of landlord and tenant as it at present stood. The noble Lord concluded by moving— That a humble Address be presented to Her Majesty for a Commission to inquire and to report upon the state of the law of Landlord and Tenant in Great Britain and in Ireland; showing the differences which exist in the laws as affecting the two parts of the United Kingdom.

The LORD CHANCELLOR

considered that it would be perfectly impracticable to obtain in useful form any report upon the subject referred to in the Motion of the noble Lord. It would no doubt be perfectly easy to give an abstract of the various statutes which existed on the subject; but even with such an abstract their Lordships would be exceedingly at a loss to understand what were the rights of either landlord or tenant under those Acts. They could only find out the meaning of those statutes by reference to whole shelves of law books, for their meaning would be best found in the recorded decisions of that House, and in the various courts of law. If their Lordships were to take up a book of the statutes, and suppose that they could understand from it what the law of the land was on the subject of landlord and tenant, it would be the greatest mistake imaginable. The law of landlord and tenant was perhaps the most complicated of all laws; and to arrive at any complete knowledge of the subject, it would be necessary for their Lordships to understand the whole of the bearings of the law of ejectment, the law of replevin, the law of waste, or what a tenant might do without forfeiting his term—which was in itself a most complicated branch of the question—the law of forfeiture as connected with waste and other circumstances, and a variety of other heads, a knowledge of which could only be obtained by a study of the decisions of the courts of law upon them. It might no doubt be possible to obtain a report upon the state of the law with respect to any one particular head; but to attempt any report upon the whole question would only be attended with the most unsatisfactory result; but when to that was to be added, as was proposed in this Motion, a contrast and comparison of the state of the law of landlord and tenant in both countries, it would be perfectly impracticable.

LORD MONTEAGLE

thought that the noble and learned Lord had misapprehend- ed the object of his Motion, as he intended the report of the Commission to be confined exclusively to the actual state of the law, without reference to the decisions of the courts of law upon the subject.

The MARQUESS of LANSDOWNE

objected to the Commission, for he thought any report upon the state of the law of landlord and tenant would be useless unless it were accompanied with the decisions of the courts upon the law itself; but, independently of that objection, he thought also that if the Motion were granted there would be great danger of misapprehension on the subject in Ireland, and that the more circumstance of a new Commission being issued to inquire into the law of landlord and tenant in Ireland, would inevitably he attended with the mischievous effect of creating an opinion there, amongst people whom the arguments of his noble Friend would never reach, that Parliament was about to review the old law on this subject, with a view to amend or alter the system that now existed. He was not prepared to say that some amelioration in the law might not take place; but, whenever it did take place, it must be based on the principle of property itself, which principle he held to be common both to England and Ireland; and whatever peculiar circumstances existed in those countries, or in different parts of them, it would be most dangerous to depart from that principle.

The EARL of GLENGALL

fully concurred in the opinion just expressed by the noble Marquess, that it would he unadvisable to allow it to go forth that any change was contemplated in the law of landlord and tenant by the Motion of the noble Lord. At the present moment there existed in Ireland a considerable amount of ill-feeling on the subject of the relation of landlord and tenant. The feeling was not a new one; it had existed for many ages, and had its origin, he believed, in the unjust mode by which the landlords of Ireland had become originally possessed of their property. A great portion of the land of that country had been confiscated and handed over to persons representing English interests, and the tenants of Ireland could not bring themselves to believe that those parties had become honestly possessed of the property. At the present moment a similar process was going on in Ireland. A number of speculators from Threadneedle-street, had gone over to Ireland, and purchased property there at less than one-half, or one-third, of its value; and it would not be believed there that this was anything but another confiscation of the land; and those who thus possessed themselves of the property of the country need not be surprised if the treatment they receive was in accordance with that opinion. He regretted also to see that although facilities wore given to the public press to report the proceedings of that House, still whenever any Irish question came on, no matter how important—with the single exception of the Dolly Brae's debate—the debates scarcely ever met the public eye, or at best but a few words were given, and then most serious comments appeared the next morning in the public journals, on what was so imperfectly given, or not given at all. So it was when the correspondents of the newspapers went over to Ireland; did they go to the fertile counties in Munster, or to Wicklow, Wexford, Queen's County, Kildare, or Carlow; or did they go to Antrim, Down, or Fermanagh? No. They went to none of those places, where there was as good farming as in any other country. Why did they not go there? Because there was nothing to abuse—it would not sell—it would not pay. They went to four counties in the west, where, from the extreme badness of the land which is farmed, it never would have been cultivated, but that the high prices of corn during the French war had made it profitable. One half the places they went to were only stony mountains or black turf bogs; and were they to expect to see in such places comfortable houses? Did the persons who went from this country to Ireland to make purchases of land go to the western part of it? A person who went to Ireland for that purpose the other day went to the county of Wicklow, where he purchased a beautiful property covered with wood. That was the first adventurer who had gone to Ireland to purchase land. There was another class of persons who went to Ireland, besides the correspondents of newspapers; they were a set of bilious philanthropists, who amused themselves all day in reading blue books and making extracts from them. The bilious gentleman went over with his blue book and his portmanteau, and travelled instantly off to the far west. He went to those four particular counties, where he was sure to find matter for a pithy, spicy pamphlet. He got his information from the person who drove the car, or from an individual between a gamekeeper and a swell-mobsman, who lounged about inn-doors, and lay in wait for Saxon travellers. He gave him information, and referred him to Mister This and Mister That; and besides that, the correspondent had letters of introduction, and each man made him a greater fool than the one he had left. He (the Earl of Glengall) considered that much mischief had been caused by the operation of Pigot's Act, hut admitted that the present Attorney General had done something towards remedying the evils of that and some other objectionable enaactments. Every man in Ireland, who knew what the Attorney General had done during that Session for Ireland, ought to feel the deepest obligation to that officer for the great attention he had paid to Irish legislation, the ability with which he had conducted it, and the sound principles he entertained; and he only hoped that he would long remain Attorney General, and continue to devote his attention to the subject. In conclusion he would say that no country had ever made such strides as Ireland between 1835 and 1845 with respect to agriculture and the improvement of the habitations of the people.

Motion withdrawn.

House adjourned till To-morrow.