Chapter 2

In politics, as in nature, beneficent powers work quietly, while destructive agencies sweep across the world with noise and tumult. The fruit tree grows in silence; the tempest which uproots it shakes the earth to its centre.

The gradual evolution of society in the development of art, the softening of manners, the equalization of justice, the respect for law, the purity of morals, which are its results and correlatives, comes about as silently as the growth of the tree; but the wars which desolate nations, and the revolutions which destroy in a few months the work of many centuries, are as tumultuous as the tempest and as boisterous as the storm.

In Ireland at the present moment this rule holds good with surprising accuracy. Where the tranquilizing effect of Lord Ashbourne's Act attracts but little attention outside its own immediate sphere, the Plan of Campaign has everywhere been accompanied with murder, boycotting, outrage, and the loud cries of those who, playing at bowls, have to put up with rubbers. Where men who have retained their sense of manly honesty and commercial justice, buy their lands in peace, without asking the world to witness the transaction-those tenants who, having for years refused to pay a reduced rent or any portion of arrears, are at last evicted from the land they do not care to hold as honest men should, make the political welkin ring with their complaints, and call on the nation at large to avenge their wrongs. And the analogy holds good all through. The Irish tenant yearns to possess the land he farms. Lord Ashbourne's Act enables him to do this by the benign way of peace, fairness, and self-respect. The Plan of Campaign, on the other hand, teaches him the destructive methods of dishonesty and violence. The one is a legal, quiet, and equitable arrangement, without personal bitterness, without hysterical shrieking, without wrong-doing to any one. The other is an offence against the common interests of society, and a breach of the law accompanied by crimes against humanity. The one is silent and beneficent; the other noisy, uprooting, and malevolent. But as the powers of growth and development are, in the long run, superior to those of destruction-else all would have gone by the board ages ago-the good done by Lord Ashbourne's Act will be a living force in the national history when the evil wrought by the Plan of Campaign is dead and done with.

By Lord Ashbourne's Act the Irish tenant can buy his farm at (an average of) seventeen years' purchase. He borrows the purchase money from the Government, paying it back on easy terms, so that in forty-nine years he becomes the absolute owner of the property-paying meantime in interest and gradual diminution of the principal, less than the present rent. The landlord has about ￡68 for every ￡100 he used to have in rent. This Act is quietly revolutionizing Ireland, redeeming it from agrarian anarchy, and saving the farmer from himself and his friends. Thousands and thousands of acres are being constantly sold in all parts of the country, and good prices are freely given for farms whereof the turbulent and discontented tenants professed themselves unable to pay the most moderate rents. Large holdings and small alike are bought as gladly as they are sold. Those who buy know the capabilities of the land when worked with a will; those who sell prefer a reduced certainty to the greater nominal value, which might vanish altogether under the fiat of the Campaigners and the visits of Captain Moonlight.

The Irish loyal papers, which no English Home Ruler ever sees-facts being so inimical to sentiment-these Irish papers are full of details respecting these sales. On one estate thirty-seven farmers buy their holdings at prices varying from ￡18 to ￡520, the average being ￡80. On another, six farms bring ￡5,603, one fetching ￡2,250. In the west, small farmers are buying where they can. In Sligo the MacDermott, Q.C., has sold farms to forty-two of his tenants for ￡3,096, the prices varying from ￡32 to ￡70 and ￡130; and the O'Connor Don has sold farms in the same county to fifteen tenants for ￡1,934. The number of acres purchased under this Act for the three years ending August, 1888, are a trifle over 293,556.

The Government valuation is ￡171,774,000. The net rent is ￡190,181 12s. 9d. The purchase-money is ￡3,350,933. The average number of years' purchase is 17.6.

Perhaps the most important of all these sales are those on the Egmont estate in the very heart of one of the gravely-disturbed districts. The rent-roll of this estate was ￡16,000 a year; and it was estimated that successive landlords had laid out about ￡250,000 in improvements-which was just the sum expected to be realized by the sales. All this land has passed into the hands of farmers who, from agitators and No Renters have now become proprietors on their own account, with a direct interest in maintaining law and order, and in opposing violence and disorder all round. Other important sales have been effected. A hundred and fifty tenants on the Drapers' estate in county Derry have bought their farms from the London Company at a total of ￡57,980. These, with others (197 in all), reached a sum total of purchase-money of ￡63,305, as set forth in the Dublin Gazette, of November 5th, 1889.

Lord Spencer, whose political volte face is one of the wonders of the hour, does not hesitate to say that this Act has not been a success. Can he give counter figures to those quoted above? And Mr. Michael Davitt does not approve of the sales in general and of those on the Egmont estates in especial, "He hates the Ashbourne Act worse than he hates the idea of an endowed Roman Catholic University, which is saying a great deal. He hates it because it renders impossible his visionary scheme of land nationalization, but more because it wrests from his hands the weapons of Separatist rebellion. And what he openly says, all the more cautious members of his party think. Every purchaser under the Ashbourne Act is a soldier lost to the cause of sedition. More than one of the ringleaders have indeed said this formerly, but of late they have grown more reticent. The Parnellite, it has been said, is essentially an Opportunist. Mr. Davitt is hardly a Parnellite, but the real Parnellite items have discovered that their seats in Parliament and their future hopes would be endangered, if they openly fell foul of the Act under which so many Irish tenants are becoming freeholders. They do not bless the Act, but they leave it alone."

There is another misstatement that had better be frankly met. The objectors to the Land Courts say that the applicants are so many and the process is so slow, it is almost useless and worse than heartbreaking to apply for relief. One thing, however, must be remembered-during the interim of application and hearing, a tenant cannot be disturbed in his holding, and if he refuses to pay his rent the landlord cannot evict him. The following correspondence is instructive:-

"Braintree, Nov. 14.

"Sir,-Will you be good enough to inform me whether the statement I give below is correct? It was made by an Irish lecturer (going about with magic-lantern views) for the purpose of showing how unjustly the Irish tenants are treated. The lecturer was Mr. J. O'Brady, and he was delivering the lecture at Braintree on Saturday, November 9:-'There are now 90,000 cases awaiting the decision of the Land Courts to fix a "fair rent" on their holdings, and as only 15,000 cases can be heard in one year, do you wonder at the tenants refusing to pay their present rent?'

"Your faithful servant,

"G. THORPE BARTRAM."

"The Right Hon. A.J. Balfour, M.P."

"Irish Office, Great Queen Street, Nov. 22.

"Dear Sir,-I have made special inquiry into the subject of your letter of the 14th inst., and find that on the 31st of the last month the number of outstanding applications to have fair rents fixed was 44,295, and that the number of cases disposed of in the months of July and August (the latest month for which the figures are made up) was 5,380. You will see, therefore, that the arrear is less than one-half of the amount stated by the Separatist lecturer to whom you refer, and the rate of progression in disposing of it is considerably higher than that alleged by him. It may reasonably be hoped also (though the statistics are not yet available) that this rate has since been increased, as several additional Sub-Commissioners have been appointed to hear the cases. I would observe also that under the provisions of the Land Act, passed by the present Government in 1887, the tenant gets the benefit of the judicial rent from the date of his application, an advantage which he did not possess under Mr. Gladstone's Act. Such unavoidable delay as may occur, therefore, does not, under the existing law, involve the serious injury to the tenant implied by the lecturer. I enclose a printed paper, which will give you further information on this subject. In conclusion, I would point out that the suggestion that the agrarian trouble in Ireland arises from the difficulty experienced by the tenants in getting judicial rents fixed is not warranted by the facts. Take as illustrations the cases of two estates which have lately been prominently before the public-namely, the Ponsonby and the Olphert. In the former case the landlord is anxious, I believe, to get the tenants to go into Court, and offers to give retrospective effect to the decisions, though not bound by law to do so, but under the influence of the agitators the tenants refuse to go into Court. In the latter instance judicial rents have long since been fixed in the great majority of cases.

"Yours faithfully,

"ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR."

Together with this easy mode of purchase by which the quiet and industrious are profiting, rents are reduced all over the country, though still the Home Rulers reiterate the old charge of "rack-renting," as if such a thing were the rule. These unscrupulous misstatements, indeed, make half the difficulties of the Irish question; for lies stick fast, where disclaimers, proofs, facts, and figures, pass by like dry leaves on the wind. But for all the fact of past extortion the present reductions are not always a proof of over-renting. What Mr. Buxton says has common sense on the face of it:-

"Very serious reductions of rents are being made all through Ireland by the Land Sub-Commissioners, who are supposed to be in some extent guided by the appearance of the farms. Now it should be remembered that at the interview that took place in London on July 3rd, between Mr. Smith-Barry and some of his tenants, in reference to that gentleman's support of the evictions on the Ponsonby estate, one of the arguments for forgiveness of arrears was that when eviction was threatened 'the tenants gave up their industry,' and 'how could they get the rents out of the land when they were absolutely idle?' To admit such a plea for granting a reduction of rent is most dangerous. Tenants have but to neglect their land, get into arrears of rent, and claim large reductions because their farms do not pay. An ignorant, or slovenly, or idle farmer, under such circumstances, is likely to have a lower rent fixed by the Sub-Commissioners than his more industrious neighbour, and thus a great injustice may be done to both the good farmer and the landlord, the-perhaps cunningly-idle farmer receiving a premium for neglecting his farm. A comparison of the judicial rents with the former rents and the Poor Law valuation is truly startling, and must lead one to imagine that the system by which so much valuable property is dealt with is most unjust."

Thus, the famous reductions in County Clare, where the abatements granted averaged over 30 per cent., and in some cases exceeded 50 per cent., were not perhaps all a sign of the landlord's iniquity, but also may be taken to show something of the tenant's indifference. Poverty is pitiable, truly, and it claims relief from all who believe in the interdependence of a community; but poverty which comes from idleness, unthrift, neglect, and which then falls on others to relieve-these others having to suffer for sins not their own-how about that as a righteous obligation? Must I and my children go foodless because my tenants will neither till the land they hold from me, so as to make it yield their own livelihood and that profit over which is my inheritance, nor suffer others to do what they will not? If we are prepared to endorse the famous saying: "La propriété c'est le vol," well and good. Meanwhile to spend all our sympathy on men who reduce themselves and others to poverty by idleness and unthrift, seems rather a bad investment of emotion. The old-fashioned saying about workers and eaters had a different ring; and once on a time birds who could sing, and would not, were somehow made.

Co-incident with these conditions of no rent at all-reduction of rent all round-and the free purchase of land by those who yesterday professed pauperism, is the startling fact that the increase in Bank deposits for the half-year of 1889 was ￡89,000-in Post Office Savings Bank deposits ￡244,000-in Trustee Savings Banks, ￡16,000.

Mr. Mitchell Henry, writing to the Times, says:-"If any one will tell the exact truth as to Irish matters at this moment, he must confess that landlords are utterly powerless to coerce their tenants; that the pockets of the tenants themselves are full of money formerly paid in rent; that the price of all kinds of cattle has risen largely; that the last harvest was an excellent one; and that the banks-savings banks, Post Office banks, and ordinary banks-are richer than they have ever been, whilst the consumption of whisky-that sure barometer of Irish prosperity-is increasing beyond all former experience. In addition to this, I venture to say that, with certain local exceptions, the Irish peasant is better clothed than any other peasants in the world. The people are sick of agitation and long to be let alone; but they are a people of extraordinary clannishness, and take an intellectual delight in intrigue, especially where the Saxon is concerned. British simplicity is wonderful, and the very people who have put on this cupboard love for Mr. Gladstone and his lieutenants, whom they formerly abused beyond all decent license of abuse, laugh at them as soon as their backs are turned."

These savings do not come from the landlords, so many of whom are hopelessly ruined by the combined action of our own legislature and the Plan of Campaign. Of this ruin Colonel Lloyd has given a very graphic account. Alluding to Mr. Balfour's answer in the House on the 21st of June, to the question put by Mr. Macartney on Colonel Lloyd's letter to the Times (10th of June), the Colonel repeats his assertions, or rather his accusations against the Court. These are:-"First, that the percentage of reductions now being given is the very highest yet made, notwithstanding that prices of agricultural produce and cattle have considerably increased; secondly, that the Sub-Commissioners have no fixed rule to guide them save one-viz., that existing rents, be they high or low, must be cut down, although they may not have been altered for half a century; thirdly that it was reported the Commissioners had instructions to give all-round reductions of 33 per cent.; fourthly, that in the Land Court the most skilled evidence of value is disregarded, as also the Poor Law valuation; fifthly, that the Sub-Commissioners assign no reasons for their decisions; and, sixthly, that the machinery of the Court is faulty and unfair in the following instances:-(a) If a landlord appeals and fails, he must pay costs, but if he appeals and succeeds he will not get costs; (b) tenants' costs are taxed by the Court behind the landlord's back; (c) their rules are constantly changing without any proper notice to the public; and (d) appeals are accumulating with no prospect of their being disposed of in any reasonable time."

Colonel Lloyd disposes of Mr. Balfour's denials to these statements, but at too great length to copy. It may be taken for granted here that they are disposed of, and that he proves up to the hilt his case of crying injustice to the landlords-as indeed every fair-minded person who looks honestly into the question, must acknowledge. As one slight corroboration of what he says he adduces the following instances:-

"The following judicial rents were fixed by the Assistant-Commissioners in the West of Ireland:-

Poor Law Judicial

Tenants' Names. Old Rent. Valuation. Rent

￡ s. d. ￡ s. d. ￡ s. d.

Tom Regan 9 9 10 12 0 0 5 15 0

J. Manlon 9 2 6 11 10 0 5 15 0