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THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 
 Sir Mn (Elnttakcr QUis Bart, ffi.B 
 
 
 
T- i *s 
 

 THE 
 
 IEISH PEOPLE 
 
 AND THE 
 
 IEISH LAND: 
 
 A LETTER TO LORD L IF FORD; 
 
 7 
 
 WITH COMMENTS ON THE PUBLICATIONS OF 
 
 LORD DUFFERIN AND LORD ROSSE. 
 
 BY 
 
 ISAAC BUTT, 
 
 FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN; 
 
 AND SOMETIME 
 
 MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR THE BOROUGH OF HARWICH, IN ENGLAND. 
 
 " Whether an indifferent person who looks into all hands be not a better judge of 
 the game than one who sees only his own?" 
 
 " Whether a single hint.be sufficient to overcome a prejudice? and whether even 
 obvious truths will not sometimes bear repeating ?" — Bishop Berkeley. 
 
 DUBLIN: 
 
 JOHN FALCONER, 53, UPPER SACKVILLE-STREET. 
 
 LONDON: W. RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY. 
 
 18 6 7. 
 
John FALcoNERTprinter « u^ a !T~7~^ " 
 
 , -rnnter, 56, Upper Sackville-street. T)nhU„ 
 
 street, Dublin. 
 
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lot? 
 
 mi 
 
 TO 
 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 
 THE LORD VISCOUNT LIFFORD. 
 
 Q My Lord, 
 
 When your Lordship published the letter which you 
 
 \S have done me the honour to address to me* I am sure that you 
 
 oc wished for a full, a free, and a fair discussion of the important 
 
 ^j subject to which it refers. There is no question of deeper interest 
 
 to every Irishman than that which relates to our system of land 
 
 tenure. I believe that question capable of adjustment by free 
 
 and unreserved interchange of thought between the parties interested 
 
 in its settlement. Whatever, therefore, I may think of the opinions 
 
 upon landlord right that have been put forward, I cannot but feel 
 
 it a matter of satisfaction that persons in the position of yourself, 
 
 Lord Dufferin, and Lord Rosse should come forward and boldly 
 
 submit their views of their proprietary rights to the criticism and 
 
 g discussion of their countrymen. I gladly avail myself of the 
 
 §2 opportunity of discussing this question with one so well entitled to 
 
 to represent our best and most improving landlords as yourself. 
 
 i If this were a question of the practical management of an estate 
 £}i I. would feel myself under great disadvantages in a controversy with 
 ^' ybur Lordship. I might, perhaps, acquiesce in some of the criticisms 
 which have gone so far as to assert that, " upon any question con- 
 nected with the land question the opinion of a resident and 
 improving proprietor, like Lord LifFord," is quite conclusive against 
 anything that can be said by " a Dublin Nisi Prius Advocate." On 
 the question with which we are now concerned I cannot so readily 
 acquiesce in the argument which makes the landowner an absolute 
 judge in his own cause. I am neither a landowner nor a tenant 
 farmer. I may, perhaps, so far claim exemption from the prejudices 
 of either class. I do not, therefore, admit that I am disqualified 
 Zm from forming an opinion on the relations between them — neither 
 22 can I admit that my profession unfits me for doing so, although 
 D it does require me to know something of the laws which regulate 
 these relations ; not even were I also to concede that in my own 
 
 I. 
 
 * A Plea for Irish Landlords. A Letter to Isaac Butt, Esq., Q.C. By Lord Lifford. 
 
 
4 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 case I may have the additional disadvantage of having devoted some 
 little industry to the obscure subject of Ireland's history, and of 
 having given some attention to questions connected with economic 
 science. 
 
 Indeed, my Lord, I am disposed to think that very often in 
 courts of justice, especially in " Nisi Prius " trials, there is a great 
 opportunity for learning something of what is really passing in the 
 every-day life of all classes in the country. This is peculiarly the 
 case in the political and social disputes which so frequently give 
 rise to litigation before our Irish tribunals. Within the last 
 two years I have taken part in inquiring, in courts of justice, into 
 the management, not of one Irish estate, but of many. I have 
 fought the battle on one side or the other, not of one but of many 
 evictions; I have heard more than one evicted tenant depose to 
 his own wrongs ; and more than one landlord, or agent, give his 
 evidence to justify the act. It sometimes happens that the state 
 and condition of the country becomes an element in determining 
 the rights of litigants. The disclosures which are thus incidentally 
 made upon these subjects often afford information of the highest 
 value.* Improperly used it may, of course, lead astray. Like all other 
 
 * In the Summer of 1865 a case was disposed of before the House of Lords on an 
 appeal from the Irish Court of Chancery which involved, simply, the question, whether 
 the representative of a deceased trustee should be charged with rents, on a county 
 Cork estate, which, it was alleged, the trustee had lost by his negligence in the years 
 immediately preceding, and following 1820. The litigation had been pending many 
 years; it was finally disposed of by the Supreme Tribunal in 1865. 
 
 It was from the printed evidence in that case that I first realized to myself the 
 enormous change in the circumstances of all Irish landed property which resulted from 
 the cessation of war prices, and the resumption of cash payments. That evidence con- 
 sisted largely of contemporary documents, and correspondence dealing with the circum- 
 stances of a Cork property about the period of the change. 
 
 I believe that if the parties in that case would consent to the publication of that 
 evidence it would throw more light on the causes which led to the insurrectionary 
 movements which disturbed the South of Ireland in 1822 than is supplied by any 
 one publication to which my memory can refer. 
 
 I venture also to think, that in the report of the case of Clarke a. Knox, tried at the 
 Tullamore Spring Assizes in March, 1865, an enquirer will gain more information as 
 to the mode and acting of the working of the arbitrary power of eviction than he will 
 in many pages of statistics however carefully and accurately prepared. 
 
 A writer in the Saturday Review complacently says, of the result of Lord Dufferin's 
 statistics: — "This fact removes a disagreeable picture from the mind's eye; we need no 
 longer dwell upon the smoking ruins of some Irish Auburn, from which the extirpated 
 peasants are picking their melancholy way, in rags and destitution, with many a 
 melancholy look behind." — Saturday Review, January 15th, 1867. 
 
 These sentences almost seem penned to meet the case of the evictions proved at that 
 trial. I will presently have something to say of Lord Dufferin; but in spite of all his 
 statistics, it is a fact proved in a court of justice, that, in January, 1865, an "Irish 
 Auburn" was levelled by a landlord to the ground. The "smoking ruins'' are wanting. 
 The rags were absent, because the tenantry driven out were industrious— up to that 
 eviction even comfortable; but thirteen houses were levelled, if they were not burned — 
 a large force of military and police attended; and under their protection, as the sheriff 
 turned out the inmates of each house, the landlord's servants proceeded to unroof each 
 house, and pull down a portion of the walls, while the furniture of the tenants was 
 flung out upon the road. 
 
 I heard these things proved by the tenant, and admitted by the landlord ; and the 
 
THE QUESTION STATED. 5 
 
 information it requires some care and some intelligence to estimate 
 its general effect. But I am sure that we will often find in the 
 proceedings of courts of justice revelations of the minute details of 
 social life, while we would look for it elsewhere in vain. Doubtless, 
 it may often be of little things. But little things, in the aggregate, 
 make up the whole of a people's life. 
 
 If it be seriously said, that no one but a landlord or a tenant 
 farmer can take part in this discussion, I answer the objection, 
 exactly as it was answered more than a century ago by Bishop 
 Berkeley in his own case, by asking, in his words : — 
 
 " Whether an indifferent person who looks into all hands may not 
 be a better judge of the game than one who sees only his own ? " 
 
 Perhaps there is no one to whom the expression — that "he looks 
 into all hands" — may be more appropriately applied than to an 
 advocate, whose professional duty may call him one day to uphold 
 the extreme legal rights of property, and the next day to defend 
 the privileges of the tenant against the encroachment of those rights. 
 Perhaps, too, it may be thought that a disinterested man may 
 have learned something of " all hands," if his inclinations and his 
 position have given him the opportunity of unreserved intercourse 
 with Irishmen of all classes and all creeds. 
 
 Without further preface, I come, at once, to the issue, which is 
 raised in your Lordship's letter. 
 
 The question between us stands thus : — In a tract which I pub- 
 lished a few months ago, I ventured to suggest a settlement of the 
 Irish Land Question* I proposed that the tenure of every Irish 
 occupier chould be converted into a certain term of 63 years, at a 
 rent to be fixed at the fair letting value of the land, and with 
 covenants which would be effectual to secure all the just rights of 
 the landlord. 
 
 tenant who proved them was able to produce his receipts for every gale of rent for the 
 last twenty years, punctually paid within a few months after it fell due. He was able 
 to tell of substantial improvements effected on his farm. He was a well dressed, 
 respectable, and intelligent man. His manly nature gave way as he said that which 
 every one in court knew well, that the eviction left him no alternative but beggary or 
 emigration. 
 
 These tenants were evicted solely because the purchaser who bought the landlord's 
 interest insisted on " a clearance," believing that he could more advantageously 
 dispose of his purchase if the estate were " cleared" of human habitations and human 
 beings. — Report of the Trial of Clarke a. Knox, at Tullamore Spring Assizes, 1865. — 
 James Duffy, Dublin. 
 
 If the writer in the Saturday Review will read the details which were proved, with- 
 out controversy, at that trial, the " disagreeable picture" of " the ruins of an Irish 
 Auburn" will never be " removed from his mind's eye." 
 
 These are instances of the lessons which even "an advocate" may learn in the dis- 
 charge of the duties of his profession. 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland ; A Plea for the Celtic Race. Falconer, Sackville-street, 
 Dublin. Page 40. Third Edition. 
 
6 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 That proposal you describe as " communistic," as 
 
 " Intended, or at least adapted, for the purpose of depriving the 
 Protestant proprietors of all influence over the people — all management 
 of their own estates," and of " all advantage of the increasing value of 
 property arising from the development of the latent power of the land, 
 in which the proprietor surely should be at least a partner with the 
 tenant." 
 
 And in contrasting the proposal I have made with a suggestion 
 thrown out by Mr. Bright, you say that — 
 
 " Irish contempt of law, and of the rights of property, are paramount 
 in the proposal of the Irish lawyer, while the principle of fair dealing, 
 and the respect of mutual rights, inherent to every Englishman, supersede 
 the rancour of the Saxon man of business. Consequently, Mr. Bright's 
 scheme is comparatively moderate, and is scouted by a Dublin audience. 
 Mr. Butt's proposals are subversive of the rights of property, and no 
 doubt are highly popular." 
 
 Before I proceed to examine how far my proposal is deserving of 
 this condemnation, let me invite attention to one expression which 
 I read with regret in any letter bearing your Lordship's name. 
 The phrase, " Irish contempt of law," implies that this contempt is 
 peculiarly the characteristic of the Irish people. No imputation 
 could be more unjust. There does not exist upon earth a 
 people whose instinct more quickly or more truly recognizes the 
 great principles of natural equity, which are, or ought to be, the 
 foundation of all law. Edmund Spencer was not their friend — yet 
 he has left on record the testimony that " no people under the sun 
 better loveth impartial justice." If laws are bad it may happen that, 
 exactly as they respect or love that j ustice, they may despise or even 
 hate the law. Once reconcile the law with justice, and there is no 
 people that will more quickly appreciate or more readily obey it. 
 
 Expressions like that upon which I venture to comment are often 
 used but to give point to a sentence. They are not the less 
 eagerly seized on by those who hold everything connected with our 
 country in contempt. They minister to the insolent prejudice 
 which looks down upon your Lordship as an Irish landlord just as 
 much as it does upon me as an " Irish lawyer," or upon one of your 
 tenants as an Irish peasant. 
 
 Passing from this, I meet at once the statements contained in 
 the sentences I have quoted. I deny that the proposal I have made 
 exhibits any " contempt of law, or of the rights of property." 
 
 On the contrary, it scrupulously respects those rights. 
 
 I deny that I have proposed anything inconsistent with fair 
 dealing, or shown any want of respect for mutual rights. 
 
 On the contrary, 1 propose to enforce fair dealing in matters in 
 
PROPOSED ACT OF PARLIAMENT. 7 
 
 which the present law enables every landlord to do wrong, and I 
 propose to make it possible for the Irish tenant to feel "respect 
 for mutual rights" by the indispensable preliminary of securing to 
 him some rights of his own. 
 
 And lastly, I deny that it is either intended or adapted to deprive 
 the Protestant proprietors of all influence over the people. 
 
 On the contrary, it is intended and adapted to strengthen, or 
 rather create, their legitimate influence, by removing the bitter 
 sources of heart-burning, hatred, and discontent. 
 
 I admit that it is intended — it is a total failure if it be not adapted 
 — to deprive a proprietary whom your Lordship correctly designates 
 as Protestant, of a power of dominion and coercion. It is intended 
 to deprive the landlord, whether Protestant or Catholic, of that 
 dominion over his tenant which the odious power of arbitrary 
 eviction enables him to enforce. 
 
 I suspect very much that this subject of " influence" or personal 
 dominion over the people, lies at the very root of the question we 
 are discussing, and that resistance to tenant right is far oftener a 
 struggle to maintain a system of vassalage than an effort to preserve 
 any right of property in land. 
 
 Your Lordship will be good enough to remember that I did not 
 content myself with gf neral suggestions. I drew up, and embodied 
 in the form of a suggested legislative enactment, the provisions by 
 which my proposal might be practically carried out.* These pro- 
 visions were — 
 
 1st. That every occupier of an agricultural tenement in Ireland 
 
 should hold for a term of 63 years. 
 2nd. That he should pay a rent not exceeding the fair letting 
 
 value of the land. 
 3rd. That his landlord should have the most summary power of 
 
 eviction if the tenant failed in paying his rent. 
 4th. That the tenant should be bound properly to cultivate his 
 
 farm. 
 5th. I gave to the landlord the absolute right of prohibiting 
 
 subdivision. 
 6 th. I reserved to the landlord all royalties and manorial rights, 
 
 even the objectionable one of entering on the lands in 
 
 pursuit of game. 
 7th. And lastly, I conferred on the landlord the power of vary- 
 ing the rent when any accidental circumstances increased 
 
 the value of the land. 
 
 I proposed to compel, by law, every landlord to adopt these rules 
 of letting as binding him in the management of his estate. 
 
 * Fixity of Tenure ; Heads of a Suggested Legislative Enactment ; with Introduction 
 and Notes. Falconer, Sackville-street, Dublin. 
 
8 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 And lastly, I proposed that all these provisions should be merely 
 temporary — continuing in force for a period long enough to admit 
 of the creation of an independent class of tenantry, and then leaving 
 all future dealing in land unfettered by any legislative control. 
 
 In answer to the charge of being revolutionary, let me say, 
 first : that I do not propose by my plan to destroy the class of 
 estated gentlemen, and substitute for them a peasant proprietary. 
 This is the object of the plan which your Lordship eulogizes in 
 contrast with mine. I leave the " Protestant" proprietors in posses- 
 sion of their position and their estates. My plan, if carried out, 
 would not diminish by a single unit the number of existing pro- 
 prietors. Whatever be the merits of the system of peasant pro- 
 prietors, the destruction of the present class of landed gentry, either 
 in England or in Ireland, would be a revolution in our social and 
 political system. 
 
 Secondly, I pray you to observe that I propose to enforce a 
 system of management which surely is not unknown on Irish estates. 
 A lease for 63 years is not a thing utterly novel or unheard of. 
 We know of landlords having tenants holding by such leases, who 
 are very far from regarding themselves as entirely deprived of all 
 power or influence over their estates. Such leases were common 
 in days when Irish landlords had far more influence than they have 
 now. In settlements most strictly entailing property the power to 
 make these or similar leases is constantly reserved. It never occurred 
 to any conveyancer that, in reserving to the first owner the power 
 of leasing the property at a fair rent, he was enabling that owner 
 to deprive all who were to follow him of all right of property over 
 the estate. 
 
 It may be right or wrong to make such leases for every landlord 
 by legislative enactment : but, most certainly, if we do so we would 
 be very far from depriving him of all control over his estate. 
 
 We would place the landlord, in fact, in the position of one 
 whose father had exercised this very power under a marriage settle- 
 ment, and whose estate is therefore held by tenants holding by long 
 leases at a moderate rent. We have a known and not unusual 
 condition of proprietorship, which we can compare with the present 
 position of a proprietor who has let his estate to tenants holding 
 from year to year, and we can see, by the comparison, of what powers 
 the latter would be deprived, by such a measure as I propose. 
 Only of the powers of exacting an exorbitant rent, of seizing on 
 his tenant's improvements, and of evicting that tenant whenever 
 he pleased ! We may, indeed, sum up all in one — we would take 
 from him the power of arbitrary eviction ! 
 
 The circumstances of Ireland are such, that this power of arbitrary 
 eviction in the hands of the landlord gives him, over his tenant, 
 a dominion, compared with which the heaviest yoke of feudal vas- 
 salage was light. To evict a tenant in Ireland is, in nine instances 
 
THE POWER OF EVICTION. 9 
 
 out often, to reduce him to beggary — it is to deprive him of the 
 means of living — to send him to the workhouse — or to drive him 
 from his native land. The farm he holds is the only mode in which 
 he can exercise his industry or work for his own or his 
 children's bread. The man who can deprive him of this at his will 
 and pleasure is and must be his master by a law more absolute and 
 exacting than that which gives the slave owner the mastery over 
 his slave. If there were a man whose capricious order could shut 
 me out from the exercise of my profession without giving any 
 reason or being called to any account, that man would be my master. 
 The power of eviction over the Irish tenant is far more coercive. 
 Shut out from the exercise of his profession, the tilling of the soil, 
 the tenant whom his landlord drives out has nothing else to which 
 he can turn. Emigration, beggary, or the poorhouse, constitute 
 the whole choice of the future to which he is to look. It is by no 
 means unusual for him to make acquaintance with the bitterness of 
 all three. 
 
 I may venture to ask your Lordship whether I have exaggerated 
 the effect of the power of eviction? This is a point upon which the 
 personal testimony of a resident proprietor might give us informa- 
 tion upon a subject upon which he has a peculiar right to be heard. 
 The statistics of emigration and eviction are just as open to me as 
 to Lord Dufferin. Neither he nor your Lordship have the slightest 
 advantage over me in tracing or in estimating the effects of past mis- 
 government and oppression. But if your Lordship were to assure 
 me that I am quite mistaken in my judgment of the effect of an 
 eviction — that it was something which the tenant regarded with no 
 terror, and which left him just as happy and comfortable as before — 
 if you were to tell me, according to the views of those who hold 
 the doctrine of " commercial ownership," that whenever a landlord 
 turned out a tenant, the evicted tenant would find two or three 
 other landlords eagerly running after him, and offering " their wares 
 for sale" in the shape of well furnished farms to let — if you were to 
 bear your testimony that tenants in Donegal could change their 
 farms with as little inconvenience as a visitor to Dublin could 
 migrate from one hotel or one lodging to another ; then, indeed, I 
 would say, that the testimony of a resident proprietor upon matters 
 within his own peculiar knowledge had thrown a wholly new light 
 upon the question, and I for one, upon such testimony, would 
 re-examine — if that testimony were confirmed, I would modify, all 
 the opinions I have formed. 
 
 We know that no resident proprietor ever will give such testi- 
 mony as this. In the case of the great majority of Irish tenants, 
 the man who holds over them the power of eviction holds their 
 very life and existence in his hands. It is absurd to speak of com- 
 mercial dealing, of mutual rights, of the laws of political economy, 
 between men who stand to each other in such a relation as this. 
 
10 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 It is a relation of pure serfdom without any of the mitigations with 
 which old feudalism tempered the condition of the serf. 
 
 Upon this vital point of the question no Irish landlord who has 
 written upon the land question has touched. What is the true 
 position of the Irish tenant who holds his farm subject to be turned 
 out at the will and pleasure of his landlord? Is that power of 
 eviction a mere abstract right, really exercising no influence, because 
 neither landlords or tenants ever think of its being enforced ? or is it 
 a terror constantly hanging over the occupier — ever present, at least 
 in possibility, to his mind, paralyzing his exertions, and reducing 
 him to complete dependence upon the absolute master of his fortune 
 and his life ? This is the great question of fact that lies at the very 
 foundation of all discussion on land tenure, and upon this question 
 every landlord advocate has been silent. 
 
 Is it not too notorious to be denied — is it not tacitly conceded 
 and admitted, that the condition of the Irish tenant is now one of 
 complete dependence upon his landlord ? It is more than admitted 
 by your Lordship. You justify it— and you complain of my proposal 
 as intended to destroy the influence of the Protestant proprietors 
 by depriving them of this personal dominion. 
 
 If the rights of property have been so exercised — if they are so 
 exercised as to bring about between landlord and tenant this state 
 of slavery and dominion — then we must ask of ourselves — is Ireland 
 in such a state that the landed proprietor should possess this 
 control and dominion over the people ? and then it is that it becomes 
 necessary to take into our account all the causes of antagonism 
 which are still living and active principles in our social condition. 
 No one can understand the Irish land question who will not trace 
 the effects of our past history upon the present position of the 
 landed proprietors of the country. It was, therefore, my Lord, 
 that I ventured on that historical review, of which I do not under- 
 stand your Lordship to dispute the substantial truth. I demon- 
 strated, I am bold to say, in that review — I demonstrated, that to 
 place in the hands of the landed proprietors of Ireland a personal 
 dominion over the population is nothing more or less than to 
 enforce against the people the most odious and extreme rights of 
 conquest — " to keep," if I may repeat the expression, " the sword of 
 Oliver Cromwell suspended over every peasant's door." That 
 argument is certainly not answered until some better reply is given 
 to it than to say, with Lord Dufferin, that I " antedate the respon- 
 sibilities of the landlords." I say that no intelligent man can carefully 
 read the history of Irish confiscations — can trace the effect of these 
 confiscations upon all our social relations, and realize to his own 
 mind the light in which proprietary rights are regarded by the mass 
 of the people, and by the landlords, without coming to the conclu- 
 sion that it is little short of insanity to expect peace or contentment 
 in Ireland so long as the occupiers are kept in a position of serfdom 
 
FENIANISM AND EMIGRATION. 11 
 
 to the owners, of the soil. I repeat now that which I have already- 
 written, all references to past history are utterly valueless upon this 
 question, unless as they throw light upon our present condition. 
 But no man can understand that condition unless he has studied 
 and taken into account the causes and the influences which have 
 produced it. 
 
 The fact that the great mass of the people are serfs to proprietors 
 whom they regard as aliens " in blood, in religion, and in race," 
 lies at the very root of all the miseries of Ireland. It is necessary 
 to alter our system of land tenure, because that system has created 
 and is perpetuating that serfdom. 
 
 You have not, I venture to say, done justice to this argument, 
 expanded as it is, in the Plea for the Celtic Race, when you 
 represent me as attributing the necessity of such a change either 
 to emigration or Fenianism. I distinctly disclaimed any such 
 opinion. I regarded both emigration arid Fenianism as proofs 
 of the discontent of the Irish nation with our present land laws. 
 I expressly said that they both " only revealed to us the importance 
 which always belonged to the subject."* Emigration has actually 
 relieved the misery which our land laws have occasioned. Fenianism 
 has only manifested the power and depth of feelings which have 
 always existed in the hearts of the people. The necessity for a 
 change in our land laws lies in the circumstances which prevail in 
 Ireland, and which surround Irish proprietary right. That necessity 
 would be still greater if there were no emigration. The discontent 
 of the people existed long before Fenianism was heard of. It 
 preyed like a canker upon the prosperity of our country. It found 
 its expression in all the secret societies, the real object of which 
 was to control the arbitrary power of landlords by punishing their 
 real or supposed tyranny by the penalties inflicted by agrarian 
 crime. 
 
 Neither, my Lord, is it correct to say, that while I " stated 
 broadly the sympathy of the whole population with those who 
 would down with landlordism," I " omitted to state that there is 
 equal sympathy with those who would down with the British 
 Crown." Unhappily, my Lord, the latter assertion is true. But it 
 is true just because the people identify British power with " land- 
 lordism " — I adopt the expression — which British power forces on 
 the country. I certainly never meant to conceal the fact that the 
 Irish people are disaffected to the British Crown. On the contrary, 
 I used the existence of that disaffection as the strongest argument 
 for the wisdom of conciliating their attachment by some measure 
 that would protect them in the right to live upon their native soil. 
 
 In my view, the argument for the necessity of protection to the 
 Irish tenant may be condensed into two or three short propositions. 
 
 First. — The operation of our present system of land tenure acting 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland. Page 8, Third Edition. 
 
12 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 on the peculiar circumstances of Ireland is to reduce the great mass 
 of the Irish tenantry to a condition of dependence upon the land- 
 lord so complete as to be justly described as a state of serfdom. 
 
 Second. — The circumstances and condition of Ireland, of its 
 landed proprietors and of its people, are such as to make this con- 
 dition of serfdom in a large proportion of the people, one disastrous 
 to the peace, the prosperity, and the improvement of the country. 
 
 Third. — There is no rational prospect of remedying this state of 
 things except by some legislative interference for the protection of 
 the tenant. 
 
 I will not now repeat the arguments by which I endeavoured to 
 illustrate and support these propositions, or propositions to the same 
 effect. I am sure that there is not any one who really knows the 
 state of Ireland who will deny the first; no one who has intelligently 
 studied the past and present history of the country will, I appre- 
 hend, entertain much doubt as to the other two. 
 
 Let me however observe that the argument against the present 
 condition of things assumes a double form. It rests partly on 
 political and social considerations, partly on economic grounds. 
 
 To the first I have already adverted. I believe that, considering 
 the past history and present circumstances of Ireland, we must 
 come to the conclusion that it is fatal to the peace and contentment 
 of the country to permit the landed proprietors to exercise a per- 
 sonal dominion over the occupiers of the soil. 
 
 But I further believe that even were it abstractedly desirable 
 that such dominion should exist, the process by which it is attained 
 is one which is fatal to the improvement and most injurious to the 
 wealth of the country. 
 
 That process is by retaining in the hands of the landlord the 
 power of evicting the tenant whenever he pleases. The existence 
 of this power involves insecurity of tenure on the part of the tenant. 
 Insecurity of tenure makes improvement by the tenant hopeless. 
 He never will expend his money or his toil upon improving his 
 farm unless he has an assurance that he will enjoy the benefit of 
 these improvements. 
 
 This is peculiarly mischievous in a country in which landlords 
 do not let their farms in an improved state, but leave it to their 
 tenants to supply even those permanent appliances which are 
 absolutely necessary for the cultivation of the farm. 
 
 To complete the picture of the dependence of the Irish occupier 
 we must regard him as placed, as not unfrequently happens, upon 
 a farm upon which he has either partly or entirely to erect a dwel- 
 ling-house — to construct some miserable sheds that cannot deserve 
 the name of offices — it may be in addition to this to make some 
 roadway to his house and erect or improve a fence to separate him 
 from the high road or his neighbour, and to do all this almost as 
 the condition of his living — without a tenure of the land which 
 
EFFECTS OF INSECURITY OF TENURE. 13 
 
 gives him the slightest security that the first time he offends his 
 landlord he will not be turned out, or that he will not be compelled, 
 as soon as his landlord thinks he is able to do it, to pay an increased 
 rent. 
 
 The political [and social, and the economic evils react upon each 
 other. But speaking solely of the economic argument, I venture 
 to say that there is not a maxim to be found, or a doctrine laid 
 down in the writings of any political economist from Adam 
 Smith to the present day which implies that such a state of things 
 is not most injurious in its effects upon the national wealth of the 
 country. All the established principles of the science lead necessarily 
 to the conclusion that it is so. 
 
 If these things be so, we must then consider what are the effects 
 of an arbitrary power of eviction in the hands of the Irish land- 
 lords — estimating these effects not by any abstract theories, but by 
 the actual circumstances of the country ? 
 
 They are these: — 
 
 The existence of this power reduces the Irish occupiers to a state 
 of serfdom, placing them under the dominion of proprietors, between 
 whom and the mass of the people there exists no sympathy of feeling. 
 
 The exercise of this dominion by such proprietors over such a 
 population is the fruitful source of quarrels, ill feeling, and 
 discontent. 
 
 This power of arbitrary eviction further places the tenant in such 
 a position of insecurity as to take away from him all motive for the 
 improvement of his farm. 
 
 The farms in Ireland are generally let in such a state that all 
 improvement must be effected by the industry of the tenant. 
 
 The want of security that he will enjoy the fruits of his industry 
 is calculated to take away from the occupier every incentive to 
 prudence and to thrift — to deprive him of the opportunity of exercis- 
 ing the habit of devoting his energies to the production of remote 
 results instead of present enjoyment — a habit which one of the 
 most sagacious of political economists has well described as one of 
 the great instruments in the creation of national wealth.* These are 
 
 * The common language of political economy describes the three instruments of 
 production as land, capital, and labour. For capital Mr. Senior proposed to sub- 
 stitute the word "abstinence," using it as denoting that exercise of will and power 
 by which each person performs the operation of devoting his command over resources 
 to the purpose of remote results instead of immediate enjoyment. 
 
 Any one who has really considered all the fallacies and the confusion which have 
 followed from propositions supposed to state truths or arguments of political economy, 
 by the use of this most uncertain and deceitful word "capital," must feel that in 
 this proposal Mr. Senior does a service to the cause of science which has never been 
 sufficiently appreciated or perhaps understood. 
 
 I have read a very philosophic argument, in which it is said " There are three great 
 instruments of the production of wealth — land, labour, and capital. Ireland has but 
 two. The importation of English capital is therefore the only remedy for her present 
 state." 
 
 I venture to say that the writer of this argument could not assign to the word 
 
14 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 evils which follow from tho very existence of the power. In its 
 practical exercise it creates more. 
 
 It has enabled — it is constantly enabling — wicked or tyrannical, 
 or even careless landlords, by driving out the people from their 
 homes, to cause an amount of human misery and suffering — the 
 extent of which in all its consequences it is not easy to estimate. 
 
 And it is every day enabling sordid or unprincipled landlords 
 to seize on the property which the industry of his tenant has created — 
 to do so, always in violation of natural justice, sometimes under 
 circumstances of treachery and fraud. 
 
 If this be a correct representation of the state of things which 
 actually exists, is it too much to say that our system of land tenure 
 is largely responsible for the disaffection of the people? for the 
 hostility between classes ? for the neglected state of our resources ? 
 for our national misery, poverty, and discontent ? 
 
 To adduce all the instances by which these things can be proved 
 would be to fill many volumes. It would need to photograph every 
 Irish peasant's home. In the tract on land tenure I have cited some 
 few instances chiefly because they were within my own personal 
 knowledge. Even from that source I could add to them many more. 
 To one who, like your Lordship, is a resident in the county of 
 Donegal, within a morning's drive of the romantic solitudes of Glen- 
 veagh, I want no instance to prove that under our law a landlord 
 has, and sometimes at least exercises, the power of exterminating at 
 his own will and pleasure, a whole community — of levelling a 
 whole hamlet, and leaving a whole country side desolate of all 
 human inhabitants except his game-keepers and the attendants on 
 his sheep. Try and sum up in your own mind the miseries which 
 that one clearance caused — bring before you the naked and starving 
 children that shivered as, in the depths of winter, they were turned 
 out upon the road — the homes that were desolated — the agonies 
 that wrung the hearts of those simple mountaineers as they saw 
 the roof-tree of the dwelling of their fathers tumbled down ! I 
 forbear to pursue the picture or to follow the miserable groups of 
 human beings who wandered out homeless and hopeless from that 
 
 " capital " any clear or distinct meaning, so as to give to his proposition any accuracy 
 of statement, such as to make it a fit subject for really scientific discussion. 
 
 Its fallacy is exposed at once if we adopt Mr. Senior's phraseology — Ireland has 
 abundance of land, or rather, to use Mr. Senior's words, " natural agents" in the un- 
 developed fertility of her soil, and she has abundance of the second instrument of 
 production in the labour of her hardy population. The third instrument of production 
 is an appropriation of the resources at our command to permanent or remote results. 
 This instrument of production is in the hands of every farmer who devotes, or is 
 willing to devote, his industry to draining a piece of wet land upon his farm. It is 
 more than " capital" — it is the creation of capital. Like all our sources of wealth — 
 like our land and our labour, it continues unproductive because our system of land 
 tenure will not permit the staple industry of the country to be exercised with any 
 assurance that "remote results" will be enjoyed by the man whose industry creates 
 them. 
 
"IS IT TO LAST FOR EVER?" 15 
 
 once happy glen. Bring these things to your mind ! multiply these 
 miseries by all the evictions of the last twenty years ! and then 
 with your kind and generous heart defend our present system of 
 land tenure if you can ! 
 
 Believe me, my Lord, that if ever there be written a history of 
 the Irish evictions of the last twenty years — and that history will be 
 written if men will insist on upholding the power which caused 
 them — there will be disclosed to the indignation of mankind scenes 
 of human misery and of the cruelty of man to his fellow, which will 
 kindle up feelings in the excitement of which even proprietors like 
 your Lordship must share the hatred which will be visited on all 
 proprietary rights. 
 
 I know — I feel how unjust this would be ; and it was exactly be- 
 cause I knew and felt how unjust it would be, that in the tract on 
 land tenure I abstained, as far as possible, from writing one line 
 which was calculated to excite popular feeling against Irish pro- 
 prietors as a class. I almost weakened my argument to avoid this. 
 If I had not so tempered and measured my language I might have 
 won from the passionate and the unthinking that popularity which 
 your Lordship supposes I have gained. I wrote not to excite or 
 exasperate popular feeling, but to win over the judgment of rational 
 and moderate men. 
 
 It was enough for me then — it is enough for me now — to say, 
 that the power of arbitrary eviction has been exercised, and is 
 exercised under circumstances of cruelty or injustice, frequently 
 enough to make that power the source of misery and discontent ; 
 frequently enough to make every Irish tenant feel and know that 
 he has no reliable security that it will not, one day or other, be 
 employed against himself. 
 
 If this be the condition of the relations connected with our land 
 tenure, the next question is — Is that condition to be perma- 
 nent? When this question is answered I will ask again — has 
 any man ever pointed out, can any man point out, a hope of its 
 being altered in the present course of things, unless by a process 
 which numbers as one of its essential conditions the extermination 
 of the greater portion of the present occupiers of the soil ? 
 
 I am not bringing a charge against any man — I am calmly 
 examining, as a matter of fact, the prospects of improvement which 
 are held out to us. So far as I have read the publications which 
 present to us these prospects, they, one and all, contemplate a large 
 additional emigration of the people. This is the question between 
 those who oppose legislation by presenting to us such prospects, 
 and those who argue that by legislation we may find the means of 
 keeping the people at home. The question, no doubt, is a large 
 one — it involves many that come home to the heart and the conscience 
 of every man. Foremost among them is one of justice. Is our 
 duty fulfilled to the people that have been reared upon our soil 
 
16 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 when we drive them from their native land ? The law of England 
 claims these people wherever they go as the subjects of the 
 Queen. It would visit with the penalties of treason any one of 
 them who engaged in the service of the country that protects 
 him if that country were at war with England. Are we, the 
 educated classes of this country, prepared to tell the Irish people 
 that Ireland is no place for them to live in? Are you, the 
 landlords of Ireland, ready to make to the people this avowal? Is 
 the English Government ready to venture on this declaration, one 
 without precedent in the history of governments ? Another question 
 still remains — is it to be expected that the Irish people, " the 
 Celtic race," * will tamely submit to a law which dooms them to 
 extermination from their native land ? Will impartial history 
 hereafter say that they ought? 
 
 I do not believe that the proposal will be seriously maintained 
 that we are to wait for the prosperity of Ireland until the Irish 
 nation is driven out. I may, at least, presume that men like 
 your Lordship — men of kind heart and liberal views — will desire to 
 see the rights of property reconciled with the right of the people 
 to live in their native land. 
 
 Then, my Lord, I ask you — if it be intolerable to think that our 
 present condition should continue perpetually unchanged — if we 
 shrink from the statement which tells us that it will be remedied 
 when it has driven out the present occupiers of the soil; what 
 remains but some legislative interference which may arrest our 
 present course, and turn us, if I may use the expression, into a 
 different groove ? 
 
 I have no difficulty in discovering the historic causes which 
 make this interference absolutely necessary. I give no weight to 
 theoretic arguments which tell me that all things are best regulated 
 by the operation of natural laws. The truth is, that the condition 
 of land tenure in Ireland has not, for the last two centuries, been in 
 a " natural" state. It is not so now. A country, of which the 
 landed property was tossed as a prey to be scrambled for by 
 " adventurers" and " soldiers who claimed arrears of pay," had its 
 whole system of land tenure violently disturbed from its natural 
 course. That disturbance has never yet settled down. There 
 has not been the opportunity. The provisions of " the settle- 
 ment" intended to prevent the very state of things which has 
 arisen, were wholly neglected and set at nought. Other causes 
 have perpetuated to the present day the disturbing influences of 
 confiscation and conquest. Want of means on the part of the new 
 possessors prevented them from putting their estates into order. 
 
 * I have been taken to task for speaking of the occupiers as constituting the Celtic 
 race. They do so — mingled as they are in blood with the Saxon — the great mass of 
 the Irish population still represent in religion, in feeling, in habits, and in race, the 
 old inhabitants of the land. 
 
ADMITTED NECESSITY OE LEGISLATION. 17 
 
 The degradation of the old population enabled them to use that popu- 
 lation as slaves. Their successors were all brought up to disregard 
 the obligations on the faith of which they held their estates. Seven 
 generations of these proprietors have passed away without effecting 
 any improvement on their estates. All that has been done in the 
 way of improvement has been done by the industry and labour of 
 the occupiers of the soil. The instances in which this is not the 
 case have been so few as to constitute no appreciable exception to 
 the rule. The worst of all is, that the evils of the state following 
 on conquest and confiscation, have become chronic. A serfdom has 
 grown up which, if we do not interfere with it, will for ever per- 
 petuate itself. To get rid of it we must go back to the beginning 
 and undo, if necessary with a strong hand, the neglects and the 
 errors which attended the original settlement of a new proprietary 
 in the country. I will show you presently that it is only necessary 
 to enforce against the representatives of these proprietors a bona 
 fide observance of the conditions of their grants. 
 
 But this review of our history is not necessary for the particular 
 argument upon which I am now engaged. I cannot too often 
 repeat that the transactions of past days would have nothing to do 
 with this question if they did not enter as living, and moving, and 
 actually present elements into our existing social state. I return 
 to the statement that, except when the people are exterminated, 
 there is no prospect that without some legislative interference the 
 present miserable condition of our land tenure can come to an end. 
 
 This much at least almost all men now concur in admitting, that 
 there must be some legislation on the Irish land question. Your 
 Lordship proposes a change in the law which would give the 
 tenant compensation for improvements when made with the land- 
 lord's consent. Lord Rosse would extend to Ireland the Scotch 
 statute known as "The Montgomery Act." The late ministers had 
 a measure of tenant right, not going so far as Lord Derby's measure 
 of 1852, to which even Lord Dufferin, under certain terms, is willing 
 to assent. The present ministers are about to legislate on the 
 subject.* Suggestions innumerable have been offered in letters, 
 in articles, and the press. One Irish landlord, objecting strongly to 
 fixity of tenure, is willing to concede, as a substitute, that no tenant 
 should be evicted except after a six years' notice to quit.f Con- 
 viction has been forced upon the minds of all men that there must 
 be some legislative interference with the system of land tenure in 
 Ireland 4 
 
 * These sentences had been printed before Lord Naas introduced the promised 
 measure of the Cabinet of Lord Derby. In the closing pages of this letter will be 
 found a few observations both on this measure and on that proposed by Mr. Fortescue 
 last year. 
 
 t Letter of "An Irish Landlord" in the Irish Times of January 21st. 
 
 X Among the measures already submitted to Parliament is a bill brought in during 
 
 B 
 
18 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 I had been perfectly convinced of this long before I ventured to 
 offer a definite proposal to the public. In considering the ques- 
 tion I came to three conclusions, in which I may hope your Lordship 
 will agree with me. 
 
 First. — A measure should be passed which would finally settle 
 the question by effectually remedying the evils which now exist. 
 
 Second. — That it should interfere as little as possible with our 
 existing system of landed property. 
 
 Third. — That it should not, without the clearest necessity, take 
 from the landlord any right which he now possesses. 
 
 There is, indeed, another consideration which must be present to 
 the mind of every person dealing with this question. No measure 
 ought to be proposed unless it places the occupiers in as good a 
 position as that held by the Ulster tenant in districts where the 
 custom of tenant right is observed. In the first place, if you fall 
 short of this you do not do equal justice to all. In the next place 
 you run a great risk of depriving the northern tenant of the 
 custom, and reducing him to the privileges, which you establish by 
 law. Such a law would supply a plausible pretext for the destruction 
 
 last session, and introduced in the present session by Sir Colman O'Loghlen and Mr. 
 Gregory. This bill provided that whenever a tenancy was created without a written 
 agreement it should operate in law as a tenancy for 21 years. 
 
 I am very far from saying that objections might not be urged against the adoption 
 of such a measure. In my view it would be far, very far, from even touching the 
 evils of our present system. But the very proposal of such a measure by the men who 
 have made it shows how deeply the necessity of security of tenure has impressed 
 itself upon thoughtful and intelligent minds. 
 
 I recognize in this attempt the old, and, as I believe, the fruitless effort to steal in 
 the principle of security of tenure without trenching on the landlord's absolute 
 dominion. I am quite sure that all such attempts are vain. I do not, therefore, the 
 less respect those who make them. 
 
 I have not noticed among the measures intended for the settlement of the Irish land 
 question the proposal of Mr. Bright for the purchase of the estates of some Irish 
 absentee proprietors, regranting them in lots to the occupying tenants. 
 
 It would be doing the greatest injustice to that proposal to treat it as one intended 
 for the general settlement of the Irish land question. It is one dealing with a political 
 question as to the advisability of introducing into the country a class of peasant 
 proprietors. If adopted it could only have, of course, a limited operation, aud would 
 leave the great mass of the Irish tenantry exactly in the condition in which they 
 now are. 
 
 That proposal was plainly never meant as a substitute for general legislation between 
 landlord and tenant, but as a partial and cautious attempt to break down the system 
 of great landed estates by trying the experiment of a peasant proprietary upon a small 
 scale. 
 
 Whatever opinion may be formed of that proposal, it is obviously one which leaves 
 the question discussed in this letter and in the tract on Land Tenure perfectly untouched. 
 Its adoption would not in the slightest degree supersede the necessity of a general 
 measure such as I suggest. The passing of such a general measure would not interfere 
 with the carrying into effect of the proposal of Mr. Bright. The two proposals are 
 distinct in their object, and the adoption of either could neither interfere with or 
 supersede the other. 
 
 The same observation may be applied to another proposal, which has fouud many 
 advocates, that of giving the tenant a compulsory power of purchasing the fee-simple 
 of his farm. 
 
FIXITY OF RENT. 19 
 
 of a custom which, in too many instances, is already stealthily 
 undermined. 
 
 It did occur to me that all these conditions would be fulfilled by 
 an enactment compelling every landlord to regard each existing 
 tenant as holding under a lease for 63 years at a fair rent — a tenure 
 perfectly well known in the management of estates — a tenure under 
 which some tenants in Ireland still actually hold — a tenure not 
 exceeding that which tenants-for-life have constantly the power of 
 creating so as to bind their successors. 
 
 Of course I do not mean to say that this is not an interference with 
 the present rights of the owner of property — that is, with the absolute 
 right which he now exercises, of dealing with his land exactly as he 
 pleases, subject only to the engagements into which his predecessors 
 in the proprietorship have entered. The admission of the necessity 
 of any legislation presupposes that there is to be some such inter- 
 ference. The question is no longer one of principle, but one of 
 degree. I believe that the very first requisite of any interference 
 is that it should be effectual. Nothing can be more mischievous 
 than abortive legislation ; the passing of measures which will still 
 leave evils unremedied, and grievances unredressed. It will but 
 inflame the difficulties of the subject to adopt legislation which will 
 excite hopes only to disappoint them. The landlords are deeply 
 interested that if any remedy be applied it should be one that will 
 be effectual and complete. 
 
 I confess, my Lord, I cannot see how we can really redress the evils 
 arising from the serfdom of the occupier, and the insecurity of his 
 tenure, unless we place him in the position of a tenant, holding by a 
 long lease and at a rent which it is not in the landlord's power to 
 fix. To enact that every landlord must let his lands on lease, but to 
 leave it in his power to insert in that lease a rent as exorbitant as 
 he chose, would appear to me to give him the power of making the 
 whole measure absolutely nugatory. If it be once conceded that 
 we ought to compel the landlord to give his tenant a secure tenure, 
 it follows, of necessity, that we must also oblige him to give it at a 
 rent which the tenant can pay. An ejectment for non-payment of 
 rent is just as effectual a disturbance of tenure as an ejectment 
 upon notice to quit. The man is equally a serf who holds his land 
 upon a condition which he cannot perform, as he who holds it 
 directly at his landlord's pleasure. Indeed, the tenant who is bound 
 by lease to an exorbitant rent, is practically in a worse position 
 than a tenant-at-will. 
 
 Now, my Lord, bearing these principles in mind, I will ask of 
 your Lordship to take up the bill which I have sketched, and 
 waiving objections to details which may be, and which probably are 
 imperfect and even faulty, and considering only the purport of its 
 provisions, I ask of you, is it possible effectually to remove the 
 evils of insecurity of tenure with less interference with the landlord's 
 
20 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 rights, or in a manner more consistent with the territorial arrange- 
 ments of our social system ? 
 
 I propose to bind the estate of every landlord by the very 
 engagements by which, under many of the most strict entails, his 
 father, although only owning the estate for life, might have bound 
 that estate if he pleased. 
 
 I take away from the landlord the power of arbitrary eviction. 
 I consequently take away from him the power of extorting an 
 exorbitant rent, and the power of confiscating the improvements 
 effected by the industry of the tenant. 
 
 I admit, also, that I take away from him the " influence," or, as 
 I say, the dominion and coercion, which is or are attendant on a 
 power of eviction in a country in which eviction is in most instances 
 a sentence consigning the evicted to beggary and ruin. 
 
 Throwing aside for a moment the question whether the State 
 ought to tolerate the use of proprietary rights for the purpose of 
 holding the people in a state of personal serfdom, let us deal with 
 the question of property. 
 
 For what honest purpose of property can the power of eviction 
 be used which is not fully provided for in the measure I propose ? 
 
 I am sure your Lordship would indignantly disclaim the inten- 
 tion of ever using it for the purpose of exacting an extortionate 
 rent, or of seizing on the improvements effected by the hard toil of 
 the tenant. 
 
 For what legitimate purpose of property is it then required ? 
 
 Is it to enforce the obligation to pay the rent? I give you 
 remedies more stringent than any you now possess. 
 
 Is it to enforce the due cultivation of the farm ? My measure 
 leaves it with you for this purpose unimpaired. 
 
 Is it to discharge that which your Lordship considers " one of 
 the first duties of property" — " to take care that his farms are not 
 so subdivided as to be unable to support a family ?" 
 
 For this purpose I leave it with you. 
 
 Is it even to secure to the landlord " a partnership with the 
 tenant" in " the advantage by the increasing value of property 
 arising from the development of the latent powers of the land ?" 
 
 I have aimed at securing even this, by providing for a periodical 
 revision of the rent. 
 
 If all objects connected with the rights and legitimate purposes 
 of property be provided for, the struggle must be to keep the 
 power of eviction in order to retain in the landlord that more than 
 feudal dominion which is enforced by the exercise of that power. 
 To this dominion I do not believe the Irish people ever will tamely 
 submit. There never will be peace in Ireland while it exists. The 
 old feud neyer will be forgotten while the people are made to feel 
 that their right to live in their own country is held at the mercy of 
 those who represent the rights of confiscation and conquest. There 
 
LORD LIFFORD ON HIS OWN ESTATE. 21 
 
 never will be improvement or prosperity in Ireland so long as the 
 occupiers of the soil are serfs. 
 
 I feel how difficult it is to reason with a person in your Lord- 
 ship's position upon such a question as this. I assume that you 
 now have over the tenantry on your estate the dominion which 
 the power of eviction gives. I ask you to lay it down. 
 
 It is difficult so to reason exactly in proportion to the merit which 
 belongs to your Lordship for " having made the improvement of 
 your tenantry the laborious object of your life." If I could charge 
 your Lordship with having used your dominion for purposes of 
 oppression or wrong; if I could accuse you of ever having seized 
 on the property of your tenant's industry ; or if I could even say 
 that you have contented yourself with exacting your rents heedless 
 of the duties which those who have station, and property, and 
 education, owe to their dependents — then I would have compara- 
 tively little difficulty in proving to you that you ought not to have 
 this power. 
 
 In your case assertions like these would be not only untrue, but 
 the direct contrary of the truth. Many years have separated me from 
 the district in which you have become a resident, but I have sufficient 
 interest in it to learn something of what is passing, and I know that 
 your presence has been a great good. You have yourself reclaimed 
 and cultivated the mountain wilds, and you have taught — I do not 
 believe you ever had occasion to coerce — your tenantry to do the 
 same. Honestly and laboriously you have devoted yourself to the 
 improvement of the people among whom you live. Nay, more, my 
 Lord, I may admit that the very dominion I assail has been in your 
 hands the instrument of good, which possibly, in some rare instances, 
 you could not have effected without it, or at least effected only at 
 the cost of great additional labour and trouble. The more honestly 
 and successfully you use your power over your tenants the stronger 
 is the temptation to persuade yourself that it ought to be left with 
 your class. 
 
 Believing as I do that free government is the greatest boon that 
 can be conferred upon a nation, I have sometimes speculated why 
 there is no instance in history of an absolute sovereign voluntarily 
 conferring it upon his people. The very best and wisest of such 
 sovereigns has too easily persuaded himself that to part with his 
 absolute dominion would only be to deprive himself of the power of 
 carrying out wise and enlightened legislation. Perhaps there is 
 no man among us who has really wished to benefit his country, who 
 has not some time or other wished he were a dictator. I can well 
 understand that your Lordship desires to retain the power which 
 you are conscious you use only in the effort to do good. 
 
 And yet, even if the question were one wholly between land- 
 lords like your Lordship and their tenants, I still would desire 
 to see the tenants independent. Believe me if they were so we 
 
22 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 would lose nothing of all that can be effected by your influence for 
 good. I have confidence in the power of intelligence, in the influence 
 of example, in the authority of station. There is no people so easily 
 swayed by such influences as the Irish. Ancient lineage and high 
 position have over them a power which to those who are not for- 
 tunate enough to possess these advantages appears to be undue. 
 When combined with high character and benevolence and kindliness 
 of disposition, the power of these things is immeasurably increased. 
 Were all your tenantry independent your real influence would not 
 be less, even though you advised where you can now direct, and 
 persuaded where now you command. 
 
 And even in such instances may I not suggest that after all the 
 personal character of his landlord is but a poor security for the 
 tenant. The best of men are not exempt from the influences of 
 passion, of caprice, and of mistake. It is not certain that the good 
 landlord may not part with his estate. It is certain that, one day 
 or other, he must die. Who is to answer for the character of the 
 purchaser or successor? The cruellest cases of evictions which I 
 have known were upon estates on which the tenantry had lived 
 happily under the old proprietor, but a purchaser ruthlessly 
 expelled them from their homes. I have known instances of 
 oppression where " the good old Irish gentleman" was gathered to 
 his fathers, and a distant relative succeeded to the estate. The 
 best of landlords, who leaves his tenants in a state of serfdom, 
 has no security that the homesteads which have risen under his 
 fostering care may not one day be desolated by the exterminator. 
 Of one thing, too, I am sure, that while a landlord keeps his 
 tenantry in subservience and subjection, whatever else he may 
 teach them, he cannot teach them the great lesson of independence, 
 he cannot train them in the qualities of manliness, and self-reliance, 
 which are the springs of industry and enterprise He cannot teach 
 them the best lesson of all, that of being able to do without his 
 aid. 
 
 Let me add to what I have said that many, very many, of the 
 instances in which the property created by the industry or capital 
 of the tenant has been seized, have occurred where tenants have 
 made these improvements upon the faith of their landlord's 
 character ; but on the death of that landlord the next successor to 
 the estate has considered himself at liberty to disregard all the 
 engagements, implied or expressed, of his predecessor. 
 
 But, my Lord, unhappily the question is not between landlords 
 like your Lordship, and their tenants. It is a question generally 
 between the Irish proprietors and the Irish occupiers of the soil. 
 I am not, as your Lordship has done me the justice to observe, 
 the assailant of the Irish landlords. There are among them many, 
 very many, high-minded and humane men. I am also sure that 
 there are among them many who are sordid, or cruel, or tyrannical, 
 
ESTRANGEMENT BETWEEN GENTRY AND PEOPLE. 23 
 
 or unjust. There are many, perhaps the most numerous class, 
 who do not deserve any of these characters, but who yield them- 
 selves almost as involuntary agents to the influences by which their 
 position surrounds them. I regard the Irish landlords as neither 
 better nor w^orse than other people. I take them just as all our 
 knowledge of human nature might lead us to expect to find them. 
 
 But, my Lord, our experience of human nature tells us that in 
 all the relations of life the characters and the conduct of men are 
 moulded and formed by the circumstances in which they are placed. 
 There is in the Irish gentry an hereditary distrust of the Irish 
 people. They are taught from their youth up to believe in u Irish 
 contempt of law, and of the rights of property." The people 
 reciprocate the hostile feelings of the gentry. I have already 
 described, and traced to its cause, this miserable estrangement of 
 classes. I have no wish to dwell upon the picture. It is enough 
 to say that this mutual estrangement and distrust exist. They exist 
 with a universality and intensity which it requires a close observa- 
 tion of what is passing in Irish society to understand.* Judging 
 by the feelings with which they regard each other, I believe the 
 Irish proprietors to be altogether unfitted — if, indeed, any men 
 could be fit — to exercise the dominion of vassalage over the Irish 
 people. 
 
 All things of this nature must be judged with reference to the 
 habits, the feelings, and even the passions and prejudices that 
 prevail in any country. You cannot deal with human beings as 
 machines that are to move as you think they ought to move. So 
 long as the Irish peasant feels himself in the absolute power of 
 an alien proprietor he never will think that the oppression of the 
 
 * I may, perhaps, be forgiven for mentioning one of those " little things " which yet 
 make up a very large portion of the daily life of Irish Society. 
 
 Not very long ago a deputation from a tenantry of an estate waited on me for the 
 purpose of being advised whether they could resist certain conditions which their land- 
 lord was enforcing under the penalty of the dreaded notice to quit. 
 
 I was obliged to tell them that they had no alternative but to "go out" or to 
 submit. I well remember the emphatic bitterness with which a fine respectable looking 
 old man among them exclaimed — "And all the time, sir, he will come out and say to 
 us, I know you are all a pack of d — d Fenians, and, smooth as you speak, there is not 
 one of you that would not cut my throat." 
 
 "I never heard," I replied, "that Fenianism made its way into your district." 
 
 "We never heard of it in the whole county," was the answer of the old man. 
 
 I am quite certain that in both respects the old man told the truth. He was corro- 
 borated by all the other tenants who were present. I am equally certain that this 
 incident gives no exaggerated indication of the feeling which too generally prevails. 
 
 It was but the other day that I heard a gentleman of kind heart and even of liberal 
 views, express, before a large party, his opinion of the peasantry of a whole district, by 
 saying that they would be perfectly ready to shoot the gentry, but they were too great 
 cowards — they would run from a gentleman with a pistol in his hand. The district 
 of which he spoke is one in which ? for nearly fifty years, an agrarian or insurrectionary 
 crime was unknown. 
 
 Alas ! alas ! how often does language like this grieve the spirit of every man who 
 really desires, as I do, to see the old feud of classes reconciled, and the Irish gentry 
 and the Irish people live together in peace. 
 
24 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 policy of conquest is past. He feels every day the iron entering 
 into his soul. The feelings which are cherished, ay, and deeply 
 cherished, in the hearts of both the proprietors and occupiers, make 
 it hopeless to expect peace so long as you grant the one dominion 
 over the other. Irish society must always, while this dominion 
 continues, represent, either on a great or on a small scale, the 
 passions and the crimes of a servile war. 
 
 This, I am satisfied, is the true view of this question. Is it 
 right, or just, or expedient, that the representatives of the titles of 
 confiscation and conquest should be absolute masters of the Irish 
 people ? The attempt to make them so lies at the root of all our 
 distraction and discontent. There never will be, there never can be, 
 peace in Ireland until we sever from the right of property in land 
 the right to hold in a state of serfdom the occupiers of that land. 
 
 Do not understand me as saying that the grievance is not a real 
 actual grievance, pressing on the people. In a thousand ways, 
 which it would be vain to recount, the Irish peasant is made every 
 day bitterly to feel that his lord and master regards him as of an 
 inferior race. This is not measured by the number of evictions. 
 The tyranny may be the most oppressive when the penalty never 
 is enforced. I am not one of those who believe that grievances 
 which may be called " sentimental," are therefore no grievances at 
 all. The deepest wrongs to human nature are those which wound 
 the keen susceptibilities of the soul. The Great Being who has 
 implanted in us those susceptibilities intended us for something 
 better than the mere transmission of an animal existence or the 
 enjoyment of material good. Neither in nations or in individuals 
 can you disregard either sentiments or susceptibilities. But I deny 
 that the grievance of subjection to the dominion of a landlord whom 
 he regards as an alien, is to the Irish tenant a mere grievance of 
 sentiment. In every instance it is slavery. There are many cases 
 in which that slavery may be mild. I am not sure that there are 
 any in which it is not galling. Slavery disguised as it may be is 
 slavery still. The peasant who holds his livelihood by the tenure 
 of subservience to the will of his landlord is a slave. The result is 
 that which always must follow. The condition of his servitude is 
 as variable as the character of the lord he serves. Where power is 
 given to a class some bad men must enjoy it. Where bad men 
 possess it it will be badly used. The modes in which it will be so 
 used will be as various as the evil passions of the human heart. 
 There is no conceivable object of ambition, of fanaticism, or of 
 passion, for which the dominion of the landlord has not been used. 
 From the coercion of a vote at an election down to purposes the 
 basest and the most unholy, there is nothing within the range of 
 the follies, the lusts, or the evil passions of power, in respect to 
 which some Irish tenant has not felt the iron hand of tyranny press 
 heavily upon him. 
 
ABSOLUTE DOMINION. 25 
 
 When I speak of the absolute dominion of the landlord — of the 
 complete serfdom of the tenant, no one, I suppose, will imagine 
 that I mean to represent the power of the landlord as altogether 
 uncontrolled. In a country possessing a free press and free judicial 
 institutions it could not be so. What I do mean to assert is that, 
 legally, the landlord has a power which amounts to absolute coercion 
 over his tenants. All the restraining influences which may act 
 upon him are, in many instances, insufficient to control the exercise 
 of that power. In no instance are they sufficient to assure the 
 tenant that it will not be put forth to accomplish his destruction. 
 Very likely there are many cases in which the tenant yields, in 
 which, if he resisted, the landlord would not venture to enforce the 
 penalty; very many in which the landlord hesitates to risk his 
 power by issuing the mandate which might bring matters to a 
 decisive issue. Perhaps this is, of all others, the most unsatisfactory 
 condition in which such relations could be placed. Where serfdom 
 is acknowledged and acquiesced in, there is at least peace. The 
 constant struggle between the claims of vassalage and the principles 
 of freedom involves in Ireland a perpetual state of petty and 
 vexatious war. 
 
 Unhappily, the sword has not always slumbered in its sheath. 
 We have had experience of actual evictions ! I will write more 
 fully of these when I come to the letters of Lord Dufferin, to which 
 you have referred me. But is there a man in Ireland who does not 
 know how they have been used ? Have they been used ruthlessly 
 to sweep away the population which was likely to become a burden 
 by swelling the poor rates on an estate ? Have they been used to 
 drive out the honest and industrious tenant, at the call of his land- 
 lord's interest or caprice ? In how many instances have they been 
 used, and are they used, to rob the widow and orphan of the little 
 property which the husband and the father had created in improve- 
 ments on his farm ? If your Lordship, or any truthful man, will 
 tell me that these things are not done, then I will believe that I 
 have exaggerated the evils of the power of eviction ; but then I 
 will also believe that while imagining I was observing what was 
 passing, I might say before my own eyes, I have really been living 
 in a dream. 
 
 And, let me ask — is it possible for men placed in the position of 
 the Irish farmer to be industrious ? How many tenant farmers in 
 Ireland can walk out this day into their fields and dig the trench that 
 is to drain the morass, or turn up the soil of the uncultivated hill side, 
 and feel that they are toiling for themselves. The result of insecurity of 
 tenure is that our fields are half cultivated, and our lands unimproved. 
 This is no light matter in a country like Ireland, where so much 
 is yet to be done in the way of improvement, and where, as a general 
 rule, the landlord does nothing. In such a country the man who 
 has the occupation of the soil must be the improver ; and therefore, 
 
26 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 if you have improvements at all, you must give to that occupier 
 such a tenure as will enable him to improve. 
 
 Your Lordship, indeed, admits this, for you propose a change in 
 the law by which the tenant is to be " repaid all outlay on perma- 
 nent improvements which had been made with the consent of the 
 landlord." 
 
 " With the consent of the landlord !" How hard is it for the 
 best of men to bring themselves to give up arbitrary power ! 
 
 I do not know that any law is necessary to enable a landlord to 
 make such an agreement with his tenant, unless it may be to confer 
 upon the owner of a " limited estate" the power of binding the in- 
 heritance. If this power be not already conferred upon such an 
 owner our past legislation has been a miserable blunder. But why 
 with the consent of the landlord ? You admit that the things done 
 are improvements, that they have added to the value of the farm, and 
 so increased the wealth of the country, as well as added to the 
 property of the landlord. Why claim for the proprietor the power 
 of preventing this ? What right has any territorial proprietor to 
 prohibit improvement ? It is a dangerous thing to assert for Irish 
 proprietors the odious prerogative of putting a veto upon the 
 increase of national wealth, upon the development of those powers 
 by which the earth giveth her increase — powers surely intended 
 by a beneficent Creator for the common benefit of all. 
 
 In fact, my Lord, the issue is brought to this : Are the landlords 
 of Ireland to have in their hands the power of prohibiting per- 
 manent improvements, of putting a veto upon national progress, 
 and of blighting every indication of prosperity that may appear ? 
 
 But surely a very little reflection will satisfy us that any measure 
 that would require the assent of the landlord to be given as " a 
 precedent condition" to improvements would, in the great majority 
 of cases, be perfectly prohibitory of all improvements. 
 
 There are cases, no doubt, to which such a permission might be 
 applicable. If an Irish tenant farmer were prepared to drain some 
 lake — if he were ready to embank some tidal river — if he were, on 
 an humbler scale, anxious to build a new farm-house, or even to 
 erect substantial offices — if he were prepared to submit the plans of 
 his engineer and his architect — then, indeed, I can understand per- 
 manent improvements effected with his landlord's consent. 
 
 But such arrangements belong to a state of tilings entirely remote 
 from that with which, in Ireland, we have to deal. These are not 
 the improvements which Ireland wants, or which Irish tenant 
 farmers are capable of effecting. The industry of the tenant can 
 gradually carry cultivation to the hill- top — it can, by slow and 
 imperceptible degrees, reduce the watery bottom to the rich and 
 luxuriant meadow — it can, by constant and unflagging attention, 
 turn the waste ground, bit by bit, into a potato ridge, until, in the 
 process of years, the whole becomes a corn field. These changes, 
 
INDUSTRY ON FARMS. 27 
 
 and changes like these, are the improvements by which, gradually 
 and in almost unnoticed steps, the industry of the occupier, might 
 convert all Ireland into a garden. To forbid changes like these 
 unless they are mapped out and planned for the specific and special 
 assent of the landlord beforehand, is simply to prohibit them. 
 
 The man to whose occupation any portion of the Irish soil is 
 entrusted ought, with its occupation, to receive a licence to improve. 
 He ought to be permitted to expend his industry or his 
 " capital" when and where he thinks best; to go out on his fields 
 at every spare hour, and do the best he can to raise the productive 
 powers of the soil; to struggle inch by inch with its natural 
 sterility; to do manful battle, day by day, with the thorns and 
 briars of the primaeval curse ; to watch his opportunities of winning, 
 rood by rood and perch by perch, the waste ground to the purposes 
 of human food. The occupier who cannot do all this, and do it 
 with the certainty that if he does do it, he himself and not another 
 shall reap where he has sowed, is debarred by the wickedness and 
 the folly of human law from making the most of God's earth for 
 the benefit of all the creatures of God. There may be countries — 
 I am not sure that there are — in which agriculture is in such a 
 condition that there is no room for improvements of the character 
 I have just described. Farms may be let in such a high state of 
 cultivation that the industry of the tenant can only be applied in 
 maintaining that cultivation paying himself by its annual proceeds. 
 No one will tell me that this is the condition of the great majority 
 of Irish farms. 
 
 If over the greatest extent of the Irish soil there be room and 
 need for such improvements, then I ask again — Will your Lordship, 
 or any thoughtful person, tell me that insecurity of tenure does not 
 discourage, ay, and prohibit, improvements like these. Upon how 
 many Irish estates would you advise an occupier to make them, 
 and tell him that he had even a reasonable chance of being permitted 
 to enjoy them ? 
 
 Let me pause here, and reiterate that which I have, perhaps, 
 too often repeated, that the whole argument resolves itself, in its 
 most important element, into a question of fact — the question, 
 what is the real position of the occupier of the Irish soil? — a 
 question not to be answered, by any abstract theories of proprietary 
 right, but to be resolved by the actual state of things practically 
 and in real life existing. 
 
 I venture, therefore, to ask of your Lordship — let me ask of Lord 
 DufFerin, or of Lord Rosse, of any fair-minded man who has deluded 
 himself into the belief that there can be either peace or prosperity 
 in the country while the present system of land tenure continues — 
 
 First. — Is it true that, as a general rule, Irish proprietors have 
 retained in their hands the power of arbitrary eviction ? 
 
 Secondly, — Is it true that, as a general rule applicable to the 
 
28 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 great mass of the Irish tenantry, eviction involves the consequences 
 of beggary and ruin ? 
 
 If these two questions be answered, as they must be, in the 
 affirmative, then I ask — 
 
 Thirdly. — Am I right in saying that the Irish proprietors are 
 retaining in their hands a power of coercion which, if pushed to 
 the extreme, amounts to absolute dominion over the tillers of the 
 soil ? And — 
 
 Fourthly. — Does this absolute dominion, depending, as it does, 
 on the power of arbitrary eviction, involve the destruction of all 
 certainty of tenure on the part of the tenant, creating an insecurity 
 for his holding, which, where it is experienced, amounts to an 
 absolute prohibition of the improvement of the soil ? 
 
 If no truthful man can answer these four questions otherwise 
 than affirmatively, is not the whole mystery of Ireland's discontent 
 and wretchedness explained? 
 
 This is my argument for the measure I have suggested. I have 
 not seen any answer to it even attempted. 
 
 But, though your Lordship does not answer that argument, you 
 meet it by the assertion that my proposal is " communistic" and 
 " subversive of the rights of property," and must therefore be 
 rejected. But if the premises be conceded — if the facts upon which 
 I reason are not denied, the statement amounts simply to this — 
 that it is the right of Irish landlords to keep the Irish people in 
 serfdom, and the Irish nation in a state of wretchedness and dis- 
 content. Beware of this argument, my Lord. It leads rationally 
 to but one conclusion. There are intellects even in Ireland acute 
 enough to follow it out. The rights of property which are destruc- 
 tive of national welfare cannot be maintained. 
 
 I have not said this. I have argued the contrary. I have, I 
 think, shown that it is possible to respect every true right of pro- 
 perty in the Irish landowners — to maintain in the land a class of 
 " Protestant proprietors," exercising every just influence over the 
 people, and yet to reconcile their proprietary rights with the 
 national welfare, and with the prior and higher right of the Irish 
 people to live upon their native soil. 
 
 He is the true Conservative who reconciles these things. He is 
 the revolutionist and the anarchist who insists that they shall clash. 
 
 Let us be clear and explicit upon this point — to what future for 
 Ireland are we to look? I place before you four possible results — 
 
 1st. Is the present state of things to last for ever? Are successive 
 generations of Irishmen to waste and wear away their lives, as we 
 have done the best part of ours, amid the distractions and miseries of 
 an impoverished country — impoverished because its energies are 
 preyed on by the slow fever of a servile war ? Have we no better 
 inheritance to leave to our children ? 
 
 2nd. Are the people to leave the country to the landlords ? 
 
THE FOUR CHOICES. 29 
 
 3rd. Are the landlords to leave it to the people? 
 
 Or, 4th. Are we, by some bold and fearless measure, to reconcile the 
 people to proprietary rights by making proprietary rights consistent 
 with their living in freedom and happiness in their native land? 
 
 Either the second or the third of these results might ultimately 
 make the Irish soil as useful to mankind as it ought to be. Neither 
 of them, not even the last, could be realized without an amount of 
 injustice, and misery, and probably bloodshed from which every 
 right-minded man must shrink. 
 
 The first result, I think, necessarily follows from the proposal 
 of those who, like your Lordship, advise that matters should be let 
 alone. 
 
 The second is really involved in the argument of those who say 
 that emigration is the only remedy for the condition of Ireland. 
 
 The third was the rough and ready remedy of the Fenians. 
 
 The fourth is that which is proposed by myself and others who 
 believe it possible to preserve proprietary rights, and yet prevent 
 the extermination of the people. 
 
 I cannot help saying, my Lord, that if the only choice were be- 
 tween the second and the third — if we were driven to the alternative 
 that either the people should abandon the country to the landlords 
 or the landlords give it up to the people — the " Fenian" view of the 
 question, appears to me of the two the more reasonable and just. 
 
 I may be told that I am omitting another possible contingency. 
 It may be said that Ireland is just beginning to enter on a path 
 of progress and improvement — that if we only wait, discontent and 
 misery will pass away, and the natural progress of events, and (of 
 course) the laws of political economy, will very soon remedy all 
 the evils of which we complain. I have already pointed out that 
 all the arguments of this nature assume that emigration is to drain 
 away a large proportion — I believe about two millions more of our 
 people. This is in truth to propose that the people are to leave 
 the country to the landlords. But, independently of this, is there 
 any man, woman, or child in Ireland who is fool enough to believe 
 in these promises of the advent of Irish prosperity ? 
 
 I have heard and read this as long as I recollect ; I presume that 
 in days before my recollection, this poor island was, as it has always 
 been within it, on the very commencement of an era of prosperity 
 and peace. There is not a country gentleman, for the last thirty 
 years, who has written on any Irish subject without the confident 
 prediction that time was bringing the remedy for all our mis- 
 fortunes. 
 
 " Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille 
 Labitur et labetur." 
 
 I believe that there is no rational hope for Ireland of things 
 righting themselves ; they have been too violently wrenched from 
 
30 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 their natural course ; they are kept in the wrong direction by the 
 force of English power. I agree with your Lordship — in a different 
 sense, perhaps, from that in which you have used the phrase — that 
 " the vicious circle must be cut." Whether it shall be " cut " by 
 peaceful legislation, or one day or other by violence, depends 
 greatly on the Irish landlords themselves. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that in this remarkable passage you admit 
 all that I have urged. You describe the vicious circle as one in 
 which " chronic civil war excludes capital ; want of capital prevents 
 employment." 
 
 "Want of employment places those who do not emigrate entirely 
 
 IN THE POWER OF THE LANDLORD AND LANDOWNERS to make what terms 
 
 the latter pleases as the conditions of a bare subsistence." 
 
 " THE OCCASIONAL MISUSE OF THAT POWER AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF 
 
 the tenant that it exists (coupled with false notions of Irish social 
 history, and continual tamperings in Parliament with the rights of 
 property) perpetuate chronic civil war." * 
 
 What more than this have I said in The Plea for the Celtic 
 Race? 
 
 I have asserted that in Ireland there exists "a chronic state of 
 civil war." 
 
 Your Lordship says the same. 
 
 I have asserted that the peasantry who remain in the country 
 must submit to a state of serfdom. 
 
 That rent is regulated solely by the disposition of the landlord 
 to extort and the ability of the tenant to pay. 
 
 Your Lordship says that the condition of the country places 
 those who do not emigrate entirely in the power of the landowner; 
 that it is " in the power of the landowner to make what terms 
 
 HE PLEASES AS THE CONDITION OF A BARE EXISTENCE." 
 
 Is not this serfdom? 
 
 You say further that there is " occasional misuse of that power." 
 
 That " the knowledge of the tenant that it exists " exercises an 
 injurious influence on his mind. 
 
 And that " notions of Irish history " which you consider " false," 
 with " occasional tampering with the rights of property or Parlia- 
 ment," combine all these causes to " perpetuate the chronic civil 
 war." 
 
 These are exactly the grounds upon which I have urged the 
 absolute necessity of a legal enactment which would give security 
 of tenure to the Irish occupier of the soil. 
 
 Your Lordship agrees with me that this miserable state of things 
 must be met by legislation, but rejecting my proposal for a sixty- 
 three years' lease, you say : — 
 
 * Lord Lifford's letter to Mr. Butt, page 14. 
 
PROPERTY IN LAND. 31 
 
 " I believe it can be met by a measure perfectly legitimate. I would 
 give every man his rights. I would allow the landlord, according to the 
 laws of every civilized country, to do as he would with his own, but the 
 property of the tenant invested in the soil with the knowledge and con- 
 sent of the landowner, I would secure to the tenant by a law which I 
 believe to be so founded on the abstract principle of right, justice, and 
 of political economy, that though it be only imperatively needed in 
 Ireland, it ought to be extended to England and Scotland. I therefore, 
 would support a bill for a law by which the tenant may register the cost 
 of all buildings, drains, fences, &c, made with the knowledge and consent 
 of the landlord, or his agent, to be repaid his outlay, if evicted. Such is 
 my first remedy." 
 
 The fatal words "with the consent of the landlord" would make 
 such a measure nugatory. In the case where a landlord is dis- 
 posed to encourage his tenant's improvements, it is unnecessary; 
 in a case where he is not, it would be ineffectual. 
 
 I have already pointed out that there is nothing utterly de- 
 structive of the rights of property in the granting of a sixty- three 
 years' lease. The many proprietors who have granted it have not 
 denuded themselves of their proprietary rights. Marriage settle- 
 ments are framed with the very object of preserving to the unborn 
 inheritor the estate unimpaired by any act of the tenant for life ; 
 yet in most of such settlements a power is reserved to the tenant for 
 life of creating a tenure equivalent to this. Why ? Because the 
 power of creating such a tenure, so far from being a thing incon- 
 sistent with the transmission of the property, is one essential to the 
 due management of the estate. 
 
 All property, especially all property in land, is the creation of 
 the State. The monopoly of the surface of the earth which confers 
 the power on any proprietor of shutting me out from walking 
 over the mountain or the moor rests upon no natural right. It is 
 an arrangement of society, which is justified because such an appro- 
 priation is necessary to enable the land to be most profitably used 
 for the benefit of all. But there is no proprietary right in land 
 which excludes the right of the whole community to have the land 
 of the country made useful to the national wealth. No wise states- 
 man, indeed, would venture to legislate so as to prevent every 
 possible case of misuse or abuse of proprietary right. I admit that 
 there are limits, within which, in civilized society, every landowner 
 should be permitted to do what he likes with his own, even 
 although he may like to do that which is very wrong. There is, 
 however, a case in which the necessity and the right of legislation 
 are patent — whenever the abuse of proprietary right is such or so 
 general as to become a public mischief and wrong. The very first 
 principles of the social compact teach us that for the purpose of 
 preventing this the State ought to interpose to regulate and control. 
 
 Now this is just what has occurred in the case of Irish land. 
 
32 ANSWER TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 Insecurity of tenure has become nearly universal. The power of 
 arbitrary eviction has become a public mischief and wrong. 
 Therefore the supreme Government ought to interfere and prohibit 
 the proprietors from letting the lands at extortionate rents or on 
 uncertain and insecure tenures. If the necessity be made out, there 
 is nothing plainer than the right of legislation to regulate to this 
 extent the exercise of proprietary rights in land. 
 
 I am within this principle when I propose to enact that no 
 proprietor shall be permitted to let his land at a rent higher than 
 the fair letting value, or for a tenure shorter than sixty-three years. 
 I believe in the perfect right of the State to impose these conditions 
 upon all owners of landed property, if the necessity for imposing 
 them be made out. 
 
 In the case of the Irish proprietors I do not need to resort to 
 these general principles. The very conditions which I think may 
 reasonably be insisted on by legislation are already incorporated 
 with the titles to many, if not most, of their estates. The original 
 grants contain stipulations intended for the express purpose of 
 preventing the state of things which has now arisen — stipulations 
 by which the landowners are bound never to place on their estates 
 a tenantry holding by a short and precarious tenure. 
 
 I have in my former tract endeavoured to show that all Irish 
 proprietors held their estates in such a manner as to create an 
 implied trust to use their proprietary rights in a manner with 
 which their present system is entirely inconsistent.* In this 
 respect the condition of the Irish proprietor differs from that 
 of the proprietors of every country with the history of which 
 I am acquainted. We can positively say of almost all the grants 
 of land which have been made in Ireland since the accession of 
 James I., that they were made for the express purpose, 
 and upon the express condition, of placing on the estate so 
 granted a loyal, and a peaceful, and a contented population. The 
 proprietors have in scarcely any instance carried out the purpose 
 or fulfilled the condition. That, which can be positively shown 
 of the grants of James the First and of Cromwell, may with almost 
 equal certainty be stated of the earlier grants of Elizabeth. But 
 even those which have been made since the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century cover almost the entire of the island. These circum- 
 stances distinguish property in Irish land from similar property in 
 all other countries. In other countries, as was the case in England, 
 wide and fair domains have been granted as the reward of adherence 
 to the partisans of a conquering side. But the lands so granted 
 were settled and reclaimed. In getting the grant of his castle, his 
 manor, or his lordship, the soldier entered into his rest ; the condi- 
 tions upon which he held it were those of settled and civilized life. 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland, &c. Third Edition, p. 73. 
 
PECULIAR^ UN'UF IRISH GRANTS. 33 
 
 In the case of these Irish grants the case was wholly different. 
 
 The grantee received his estates for the purpose of reclaiming hostile 
 
 or unsettled districts to the service of the English sovereign. Even 
 
 in his ownership he was the servant and trustee of that sovereign. 
 
 zLe was expressly told that the lands he was receiving were wild and 
 
 uncivilized wastes, and that no man must take them for the purposes 
 
 only of his private profit, but for the good of the commonwealth. 
 
 He was to civilize and subdue his possessions before he could enjoy 
 
 hem. He was sent there not for the purpose of enjoying a pleasant 
 
 „nd indolent proprietorship, but for the purpose of doing active 
 
 service to the State. Such a condition of proprietorship is wholly 
 
 unlike that of other countries. No one dealing with the land 
 
 question in this country ought to overlook the fact that almost all 
 
 Irish estates have been granted for purposes which are public ones, 
 
 which involve in fact public trusts, trusts which affect the interests, 
 
 the peace, and the well-being of the whole community, both of 
 
 Ireland and England — and that up to this time these trusts have 
 
 not been carried out, and these purposes have not been fulfilled. 
 
 I do not rest even on the general trust which I think attached 
 to all these grants. Unless I am wholly mistaken I believe I can 
 show that Irish estates over at least a great portion of the island 
 were granted upon distinct and specific conditions, very often 
 recited on the face of the patents, which if enforced would remedy 
 many of the evils of which we complain ; and that these conditions 
 are not dead and obsolete stipulations, but are now binding on the 
 present proprietors, while they are systematically and openly violated. 
 Possibly, I will surprise many persons when I say that even my 
 measure, which has been denounced as " revolutionary" and " com- 
 munistic," amounts to nothing more than enforcing conditions 
 binding upon the owners of all Irish estates — conditions, for the 
 violation of which it is not at all clear that the Crown might not, 
 by legal process, have long since resumed possession of many of 
 these estates — conditions which certainly would now justify, in an 
 equitable adjustment, the imposition of terms more stringent than 
 any which I propose. 
 
 The assertion may seem a bold one. The subject is of such 
 importance that I may devote some space to the endeavour to make 
 it clear. 
 
 There are few portions of Irish history upon which we possess 
 information as clear or as accurate as that which throws light upon 
 the plantation of Ulster by the first King James. Papers are in 
 existence said to be drawn up by the King's own hand, containing 
 the project of this plantation. In a paper printed in the year 1608, 
 after a recital, 
 
 " That the greatest part of six counties, in the Province of Ulster, 
 within the realm of Ireland, named Armagh, Coleraine, Donegal, 
 
 C 
 
34 THE PLANTATIu9 Rr) RiLSTER. 
 
 Fermanagh, and Cavan" had " escheated and come to the Crown, and 
 latterly been surveyed, and the survey presented to his Majesty." 
 
 It is declared that " his Majesty" — 
 
 " Not regarding his own profit but the public peace and welfare of 
 this Kingdom by a civil plantation of these unreformed and waste 
 countries, is graciously pleased to distribute the said lands to such of 
 his subjects, as well of Great Britain as of Ireland, as being of merit 
 and ability, shall seek the same with a mind not only to benefit them- 
 selves, but to do service to the Crown and commonwealth." * 
 
 The paper then proceeds to complain of — 
 
 " Importunate suitors for greater portions than they are able to plant, 
 intending their private profit only, and not the advancement of the public 
 service" 
 
 King James would scarcely have recognized in one of his patentees 
 a right "to do what he liked with his own," " intending his own 
 private profit only, and not the advancement of the public service." 
 
 But the matter was not left to any general recital. Very strin- 
 gent terms were imposed upon the grantees. The lands were 
 divided in certain proportions between English and Scotch under- 
 takers, Irish servitors, or servants of the Crown, and Irish natives. 
 
 " The persons of the undertakers shall be of three sorts : — 
 
 " First. — English or Scotch, as well servitors as others, who are to 
 plant their portions with English, or inland Scotch, inhabitants. 
 
 " Second. — Servitors in the kingdom of Ireland, who may take mere 
 Irish, English, or inland Scottish, tenants, at their choice. 
 
 " Third. — Natives of Ireland, who are to be made freeholders." 
 
 It is very singular that from the two first classes these regulations 
 required the taking the oath of supremacy, and " to be conformable 
 in religion." In the case of the Irish natives these conditions were 
 omitted — the only conditions of a political nature imposed upon 
 them being 
 
 " A proviso for the forfeiture of their estates if they entered into actual 
 rebellion." 
 
 But it is to this that I desire to call attention — that in every paper 
 ever published, from the earliest inception of the project, upon every 
 class of grantees one condition was invariably imposed. 
 
 * " Orders and Conditions to be Observed by the Undertakers upon the Distribution 
 and Plantation of the Escheated Lands in Ulster." From a copy printed in the year 
 1608. Harris's Mibernica, page 123. See also the same document in A Concise View of the 
 Origin, Constitution, and Proceedings of the Irish Society, printed by order of the Court. 
 London. 1822. 
 
THE UNDERTAKERS. 35 
 
 Of the English and Scotch undertakers it is declared 
 
 " The said undertakers shall not demise any part of their lands at will 
 only, but shall make certain estates for years, for life, in tail, or in fee- 
 simple." 
 
 Of the Irish servitors — grantees who had been in the service of 
 the Crown — 
 
 " They shall make certain estates to their tenants, and at certain rents, 
 and forbear Irish exactions." 
 
 Of the Irish natives — 
 
 "They shall make certain estates for lives or years to their under- 
 tenant, and shall take no Irish exactions." 
 
 I do not intend to follow out the history of the Ulster plantation. 
 In a work of high authority, the introduction to Carte's Life of 
 Ormonde, the final conditions of the plantation are thus accurately 
 summed up. After describing the several classes of grantees — 
 
 " The King granted estates to all, to be held by them and their heirs ; 
 the undertakers of two thousand acres held of him in capite; those of one 
 thousand five hundred by knight's service as of the Castle of Dublin ; and 
 those of one thousand, in common soccage. The first were, in four years, 
 obliged to build a castle and bawn ; the second in two years, a strong 
 stone or brick house and bawn ; and the last, a bawn ; timber for that 
 purpose, as well as for their tenants' houses, being assigned them out of 
 the King's woods. The first were obliged to plant on their lands, within 
 three years, forty-eight able men, eighteen years old or upwards, born in 
 England or the inland parts of Scotland, to be reduced to twenty families, 
 to keep a demesne of six hundred acres in their hands, to have four fee- 
 farmers on a hundred and twenty acres each, six leaseholders on a hun- 
 dred acres each, and on the rest eight families of husbandmen, artificers, 
 and cottagers : the others were under the like obligations proportionably; 
 and they were all, within five years, to reside in person on some part of the 
 premises, and to have store of arms in their houses. They were not to alienate 
 any of their lands without a royal license, nor set them at uncertain 
 
 RENTS, OR FOR A LESS TERM THAN FOR TWENTY-ONE TEARS, OR THREE 
 
 lives ; and their tenants were to live in houses, not in cabins, and to 
 build their houses together in towns and villages. They had power to 
 erect manors, to hold courts baron, to create tenures, with liberty of 
 exporting and importing timber, and other privileges ; which were likewise 
 extended to the natives, whose estates were granted them in fee-simple 
 and held in soccage, but with no obligation on any to erect castles or 
 build strong houses. These were not thought proper for the residence of 
 persons who might well be deemed willing to arrogate to themselves all 
 the power that had been formerly usurped and exercised by the Irish 
 chiefs : to guard against which, they were restrained from having tenants 
 at will ; they were enjoined to set their lands at rents certain for the like 
 
36 THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. 
 
 terms as the undertakers, and were to take no chief rents, cuttings, and 
 other Irish exactions, from their under-tenants, who were obliged to leave 
 their creating (or running up and down the country with their cattle, 
 from place to place for pasture), and to dwell in towns, and use the English 
 manner of tillage and husbandry. In this manner and under these regu- 
 lations were the escheated lands in Ulster disposed of to a hundred and four 
 English and Scotch undertakers, fifty-six servitors, and two hundred and 
 eighty-six natives, all which gave bond to the government for performance of 
 covenants; for the better assurance whereof the King required a regular account 
 to be sent him from the state, of the progress made by each undertaker in the 
 plantation."* 
 
 Just the same statements are repeated by Leland and by every 
 Irish historian. 
 
 It appears by the printed conditions that every bond expressly 
 secured the fulfilment of the stipulations as to conferring "fixity 
 of tenure" on the tenants. The King, it will be seen, reserved to 
 himself the right of personal supervision over each estate. We 
 shall presently see in what manner, and with what results, he 
 exercised that right. 
 
 For what purpose, or with what object were these restrictions 
 imposed upon the grantees? Why were they prohibited from 
 letting their lands to tenants-at-will ? why were they bound to 
 create independent interests under them, the least of which was to 
 be a term for twenty-one years or three lives ? Exactly to prevent 
 their holding their tenantry in a state of serfdom. The sagacity of 
 King James, or of his councillors, foresaw the danger that pro- 
 prietors who held their estates in a country where conquest had 
 broken the spirit of the natives might fall into the evil habit of 
 placing wretched serfs upon the soil. This mischief was expressly 
 guarded against — and guarded against in the only possible way. 
 Security or fixity of tenure in the tenant was made the express 
 condition of proprietorship in all the grants of King James I. 
 
 Is it " revolutionary," or " communistic," or a violation of the 
 rights of property to insist on the fulfilment of the conditions upon 
 which the estates were granted, and on which they are now held? 
 
 So far as lands are held under these grants there is not a tenant 
 upon one of these estates who has not a right to insist upon fixity 
 of tenure. His ancestor, very probably, came over to this country 
 on the faith of these conditions being observed. The Sovereign 
 and Parliament of England have a right and a duty, by the most 
 peremptory measures, to enforce them. And every Irishman whose 
 lot is cast in a country that will never be a happy country to live 
 in while the occupiers of the soil are serfs — has, in the sight of 
 Heaven and his country, a right to demand of our rulers the 
 
 * Carte's Life of Ormonde, Vol. i., p. 73. 
 
PYNNARS SURVEY AND TENANT RIGHT. 37 
 
 enforcement of these conditions. The descendants of these grantees, 
 or the purchasers of these grants, do not hold their estates " for 
 their own private profit only," but in order, by " the civil plantation 
 of these wild and unreformed and waste countries, to promote the 
 public peace and welfare of the Kingdom of Ireland ;" and they are 
 bound, expressly bound, as the first condition of a " civil plantation," 
 to let their lands upon terms which will give their tenants security 
 of tenure at certain rents. 
 
 The late Mr. Sharman Crawford pointed out that the custom 
 of the Ulster tenant right was originally permitted by the grantees 
 of the Ulster plantation in lieu of the fixed and settled tenures 
 which they were bound by their patents to give to their tenantry, 
 but the granting of which they had evaded. 
 
 This opinion is confirmed by a reference to all the records which 
 describe the dealings of the undertakers with their estates. 
 
 It was scarcely to be expected that all these undertakers, once 
 settled in remote districts of Ireland, would either very scrupulously 
 observe the conditions of the plantation, when they found them 
 inconvenient, or be actuated solely by a desire to " serve the King 
 and Commonwealth," without any regard to their own gain and 
 profit. It was probably impossible for the Government to insist in 
 every case upon a strict compliance with the conditions, even if the 
 Castle of Dublin had been as free from the influences of favouritism 
 as it is now. Difficulties there were, no doubt, in the way of that 
 compliance which supplied an excuse to the indolence of the under- 
 takers for not observing, and to the Irish Government for not 
 enforcing, the conditions of the grant. Even the personal enter- 
 ference of King James was unsuccessful in completely carrying out 
 the conditions of the plantation ; and commissioners whom he sent 
 from time to time, to report to himself the progress he had made, were 
 only able to tell him of the partial accomplishment of his scheme.* 
 Many of the undertakers failed altogether in bringing over the 
 English or Scotch settlers, and retained the native Irish as serfs 
 upon their lands. Even when the settlers were brought over the 
 granting of land to them was, in many instances, evaded or post- 
 poned. Some of them returned to their own country. Others of 
 them remained, constantly appealing to their landlord to fulfil the 
 obligation, and occasionally bringing their complaints before the 
 King's Commissioner when he visited the estate.f It was in such 
 
 * There are, I doubt not, extant, in some of the archives in which the most valuable 
 documents of Irish history are buried, many papers containing the reports from each 
 Irish estate, which King James required to be furnished to himself. 
 
 f In Harris's Hibemica there is preserved a very curious document, known as 
 Pynnar's Survey, in which very considerable light is thrown upon the manner in 
 which the conditions of the plantation were carried out. In November, 1618, a 
 Royal Commission was issued to Nicholas Pynnar, directing him to visit the planta- 
 tion, and report on the progress made on the several estates. This document contains 
 the result of the visitation. 
 
 The general result is that while upon many of the grants the conditions of giving 
 
 
 4 (W l 
 
38 THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. 
 
 a state of things that the Ulster custom of tenant right had its 
 origin. These tenants held under terms which bound the land- 
 lords to give them fixity, in some instances perpetuity, of tenure. 
 The landlord, while he was evading this obligation, could not 
 
 estates to the tenants had been, at least partially, complied with, upon a very large 
 number they had been evaded. The English settlers had, in many instances, been 
 brought over, but were not given the covenanted estates. In many instances they left 
 the land. In several they obtained access to the King's Commissioner, and complained 
 of the violation of the conditions on which they had come to Ireland. The pretexts 
 under which the leases were delayed or refused were various. Some of the short entries 
 in the " Survey " go far to reveal what was passing in the country. I select them almost 
 at random, from the pages of " Harris." Each item is applicable to a different estate : — 
 
 " I find upon this, proportion of British tenants, ten ; but I find no estates except 
 by promise." — P. 158. 
 
 " These hold their land but by promise." — Ibid. 
 
 "Not one freeholder, but many Irish." — P. 159. 
 
 "There are twelve others whose estates I saw not, and therefore can say nothing of 
 them, for many of them do dwell in another country." 
 
 Sir Hugh Worrall "hath no freeholder, nor leaseholder, and but three poor men on 
 the land, which have no estates ; for all the land at this time is inhabited with Irish." — 
 P. 162. 
 
 "The rest of the tenants have no estates, but promises." — P. 177. 
 
 " I find planted on this estate a good number of men, but they have no estates but 
 by promises from one year to another." — P. 172. 
 
 " They who are upon the land have no estates, but mynnets " (minutes). — P. 174. 
 
 " These held their land but by promise. I saw but very few of them, for they dwelt 
 far asunder, and had not time to come to me." 
 
 These are specimens of the entries that meet us at every page. It would seem 
 that in some instances the custom had begun of introducing unreasonable covenants 
 in leases. The tenants of Lord Castlehaven complained that : — 
 
 " They do dwell dispersedly upon their own land, and cannot dwell together in a 
 village, because they are bound every one to dwell upon their own land, which, if 
 they do not, the lease is void." — P. 198. 
 
 On another estate of the same nobleman " the agent for the earl showed me the rent 
 roll of all the tenants that are on these proportions, but their estates are so weak and 
 uncertain that they are leaving the land." — Ibid. 
 
 From many of the entries it is quite plain that Nicholas Pynnar believed that the 
 owners of the estates were evading his inquiries as to the tenures they had granted 
 to their tenants. In some instances, he says, " I came suddenly upon them ; " in 
 others he complains that under one excuse or another he did not see the tenants 
 themselves ; in others he relates, with manifest suspicion, that he had seen the " rent 
 roll" of "estated tenants," but had not been shown any counterparts, or, as he calls 
 them, " counterpaines of leases." 
 
 Of Sir John Stewart, in the County of Donegal, he writes : — 
 
 " What estates they have I know not, neither would he call the tenants together, 
 but shewed me the counterpaine of one lease and said the rest of the tenants had the 
 like."— P. 188. 
 
 Of Mr. Pringle in Tyrone, who was "dwelling on the land in a poor cabin": — 
 
 " What tenants he hath I know not, for he refused to shew them unto me, but he 
 brought after me a list of just twenty tenants ; but I know not whether they have any 
 estates, for the list doth not make any mention which they held." 
 
 He is even ungallant enough to hint his suspicions of the conduct of a Lady 
 Drummond. " There are many tenants on the land ; insomuch that, knowing I 
 was in the country, they came and complained unto me, and said that for many years 
 they could never get anything from him but promises, and therefore the most part are 
 leaving the land. I desired the lady to show me their counterpaines, but her answer 
 was that her Knight was in Scotland, and she could not come at them." Again, 
 in Armagh, on Mr. Acheson's estate: — "I find a great many tenants on this land, 
 but not that they have any estates but by promise. They petitioned unto me 
 that they might have their leases." These petitions of the tenants for leases are 
 
ORIGIN OF ULSTER TENANT RIGHT. 39 
 
 venture, even if he were disposed, to interfere with their possession. 
 They were somewhat in the condition of persons holding lands 
 under what are termed accepted proposals, without a legal title, 
 but with a claim in equity strong enough to prevent them from 
 being disturbed. Matters continued in this unsettled state for years. 
 In the troubles which soon after agitated Ulster as well as the rest 
 of the kingdom, arising from the war which has been called "the 
 great rebellion " — it was scarcely to be expected that there should 
 be any authoritative adjustment of these claims. During these 
 troubles it was not probable that landlords would interfere with 
 the tenants, upon whose fidelity they relied; and at the end 
 of the great rebellion, the tenants claim for security for their 
 holdings resulted in the establishment, in the case of the Protestant 
 tenantry, with an acquiescence on the part of the landlords, of that 
 virtual fixity of tenure which has puzzled us in modern days under 
 the name of the " Ulster tenant right." 
 
 The obligation of conferring fixity of tenure in the grants of 
 King James extended equally to the mere Irish, or Catholic pro- 
 prietors. They, as well as the English " undertakers," were bound 
 to give fixity of tenure to the tenants whom they were to place 
 on their estates. So were the servitors of the Crown, who were 
 to choose, at their own discretion, the tenants whom they were 
 to select, either from the old inhabitants of the country, or from 
 Englishmen or "inland" Scotchmen. In this scheme of plantation 
 both Catholic landlords and Catholic tenants were permitted 
 upon the largest portion of the escheated land. But in every 
 case, whether both landlord and tenant were to be Irish and 
 Catholic, or whether Protestant landlords were to have Catholic 
 tenants, or Protestant and English landlords were bound to settle 
 on their estates imported tenants of their own religion and 
 race — to each and every case the prohibition against the lettings 
 which are now the universal rule in Ireland strictly applies. 
 In the early part of the 17th century the spirit of religious 
 ascendancy trampled down the native population. The strife of 
 
 frequent. The report of such cases is generally accompanied by the significant addition 
 that for want of leases " the tenants are going away." 
 
 The excuses for not granting leases are very singular. One gentleman refused to 
 give them because he had some reason to suspect that "the land he had been granted 
 was glebe." Another cannot give them for " that the children were still under age." 
 And one of the "Irish gentlemen " assigns the same excuse, which I have read in some of 
 the "letters of Irish landlords," within the last six months : — 
 
 " He hath made no estates, for his tenants will have no longer time but from year 
 to year." 
 
 In this very curious and instructive document, we frequently meet with the expres- 
 sive phrase, "estated" tenants, as applied to the neglect or fulfilment of the condition 
 of the grant. 
 
 Thus early begins the struggle of the new proprietors to evade the obligations on 
 which they hold their estates. 
 
 This survey records probably the first contest between the desire of the landlords to 
 keep in their own hands "the management of their estates," and the interest of "the 
 King and the Commonwealth ;" that they should observe their covenant, to give fixity 
 of tenure to the occupiers of the soil. 
 
40 THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. 
 
 " the great rebellion " completed the subjugation, and the Catholic 
 "estated tenantry" disappeared with the 285 native Irish, who 
 were to fill the place of " estated gentlemen" in the original scheme 
 of the plantation of King James. 
 
 It is impossible to write an incidental treatise on Irish history in 
 a discussion like that upon which I am engaged, yet I think we 
 shall see that in other parts of Ireland there was an equal, if not as 
 explicit an obligation to give " fixity of tenure" to the occupiers of 
 the soil. This is, indeed, the leading principle of every plan for the 
 plantation or settlement of the country. The fulfilment of that 
 obligation has been forced upon the landlords in Ulster, because they 
 had to deal with a tenantry belonging to the dominant class. It 
 was neglected in other parts of Ireland, because the old population 
 were crushed down by civil war and penal laws. Even in Ulster the 
 prevalence of tenant right and of Protestantism will be found to be 
 very nearly identical in the several districts. 
 
 At all events the existence of the Ulster custom of tenant right 
 is in reality a provisional arrangement during the pendency of the 
 claim which every Ulster tenant has to the fixity of tenure provided 
 for him in the conditions of " the plantation" under which his land- 
 lord holds his estate. If this be a true description of the state of 
 things the moment an interference is attempted with the Ulster 
 tenant right the Ulster tenant has a right to demand from Parlia- 
 ment the protection of law. 
 
 But independently of this " perpetual claim," by the assertion 
 of tenant right, it cannot be said that these conditions are obsolete 
 stipulations now only matters of historical and antiquarian interest. 
 Those who hold their properties by a title of a great and general 
 confiscation, cannot ignore the objects for which that confiscation 
 was carried into effect. The objects and conditions of these great 
 settlements of property are a portion of the history of the country, 
 and as such have become a part, as it were, of the common law of 
 the land. In equity and justice, and according to all the higher 
 principles of jurisprudence, a right of visitation over these estates 
 remains in the supreme power as completely as the right exists in 
 the Sovereign to visit a charity which holds estates under grants 
 from the Plantagenets. If it needs the authority of the Queen in 
 Parliament to enforce that visitation, then Parliament ought to 
 give its aid to the Sovereign to interfere. While the great pur- 
 poses of these grants are unfulfilled the conditions never can become 
 obsolete. They are not so regarded in our courts of law. In two 
 instances, in modern times, they have been discussed before judicial 
 tribunals. 
 
 One was that of a suit instituted in the English Court of 
 Chancery by one of the London Companies against the Irish 
 Society, in reference to the distribution of the rents of their 
 estates. The printed copy of the conditions from which I have 
 
THE TRUSTS OF IRISH ESTATES. 41 
 
 quoted was one of the documents principally relied on. This 
 suit was finally disposed of in the House of Lords in the year 
 1843. The decision rested, no doubt, in a great degree, upon 
 the charter of the Irish Society. But Lord Lyndhurst, who then 
 was Lord Chancellor, in a masterly review of the objects of the 
 Ulster plantation, distinctly recognized the " printed conditions" 
 as declaring trusts which were public and permanent, in the fulfil- 
 ment of which the nation has an interest, and which are binding as 
 long as the property to which they are attached is held under the 
 grant.* 
 
 This, no doubt, was the case of a corporation incorporated 
 under a special charter for the purpose of carrying out the objects 
 of the plantation. The conditions of the grants to private indivi- 
 duals became very recently the subject of investigation before the 
 late Master of the Rolls in Ireland. The purchaser of an estate 
 in the county of Donegal actually objected to complete the purchase 
 because some of these very conditions were inserted in the patent 
 under which it had been originally held. The objection was overruled, 
 not because the conditions had become obsolete or ceased to be 
 binding, but because the circumstances were such as, in the opinion 
 of the Court, to show that when he purchased the estate he ought 
 to be held as having notice that it was held on these conditions,! 
 one of the principal foundations of this decision being that these 
 patents were confirmed by a public statute of Charles I. 
 
 So far as these Ulster estates are concerned, it scarcely seems a 
 violation of the rights of property to propose that the tenants 
 should be secured by a lease for sixty-three years. It would be 
 an average between the fee-farm estates and the leases for lives or 
 twenty-one years which the original grants provided. The adoption 
 of such an average would be greatly in favour of the landlord. It 
 would leave him far more " dominion" over his estate than the 
 original grant intended he should have. 
 
 It would be a great mistake to suppose that the grants of King 
 James were confined to the province of Ulster. They were made 
 largely in Longford, in Westmeath, in Kildare, and in Wicklow. 
 In all these counties the conditions corresponded with those of the 
 Ulster plantation. According to the unexceptionable authority of 
 Sir John Davis the estates in Munster are held on the same con- 
 dition of giving fixity of tenure to the tenants. 
 
 I cannot pass from this subject without observing, that, with 
 respect to the plantation of Ulster, a very great injustice has been 
 done to the memory of King James. We must carefully distinguish, 
 in tracing Irish history, between the intentions of the English 
 
 * "The Skinners' Company a. The Irish Society." — Clarke and Finnelly's Mouse of 
 Lords Eeports,Yol. xii., p. 476. 
 
 t Decision in the case of " Stewart against the Marquis of Conyngham." — Irish 
 Chancery Reports, Vol. i., p. 545. 
 
42 THE PLANTATION OF ULSTER. 
 
 Sovereign and the mode in which the orders of the sovereign 
 were carried out by the rapacity or venality of those to whom the 
 execution of the plans was entrusted. The imagination of Curran 
 discerned a great truth, when, in poetic imagery, he described the 
 twilight of viceregal government as offering opportunities for 
 schemes of spoliation which would never have been carried out in 
 the noon-day light of a royal presence — a twilight better for the 
 robber than even the darkness of night. I am now speaking of the 
 original project of King James. It never was a part of his 
 plan to exterminate the native population. Ulster had been 
 thinned of its population by long-continued wars. Independently 
 of this, they were days when certainly over-population was not the 
 crying evil of the country. The scheme of the plantation, was 
 founded on the assumption that the condition of the province left 
 room for a large immigration. Of the forfeited lands in Ulster, a large 
 proportion was expressly reserved for the Irish, to be granted to 
 them on conditions not very dissimilar to these upon which the new 
 settlers obtained theirs. There were, as we have seen, three classes 
 of proprietors. The new settlers, or English undertakers — the Irish 
 servitors, that is, persons who had been previously engaged in the 
 Irish service of the crown, and lastly, native Irish proprietors. 
 The new settlers were bound to bring over Englishmen and 
 Scotchmen, an obligation from which both the Irish servitors and 
 the Irish proprietors were exempt;* and so far was the King from 
 desiring to make the plantation scheme one of compulsory 
 proselytism, that the Irish proprietors were exempt from taking the 
 oath which recognized the royal supremacy. Neither their tenants, 
 nor those of the Irish servitors, were required to be " conformable in 
 religion." f 
 
 I mention this particularly because your Lordship has fallen into 
 the common error of supposing that " the confiscated estates were 
 granted to the ancestors of the present proprietors, on the condition 
 
 * " The persons among whom were distributed the royal grants were distinguished as 
 new undertakers, servitors, and old natives. The first were natives of Britain, and 
 permitted to take only such for their tenants. The second, men who had sometimes 
 served in Ireland, in stations military or civil, were allowed to choose any tenants, 
 with exception only of recusants. The third were under no restrictions as to the 
 religion or birthplace of their tenantry, and were tacitly exempted from the oath of 
 supremacy by which the two former were bound." — Gordon's History of Ireland, 
 Vol. i., p. 321. 
 
 *T Bacon, in recommending the scheme of the Ulster plantation, had strongly urged 
 the necessity of religious toleration. Among many excellent arguments was one 
 intended probably for the prejudices of his royal master. He urged that it would not 
 be for the credit of Protestantism to make that religion responsible for the scandalous 
 lives which were led by the Irish natives. 
 
 In other words, he said: — Let Protestantism be introduced on the vacant lands in 
 Ulster, and let each religion he judged by the Christian influences it exercises on the 
 conduct of its adherents. 
 
 In whatever language it was couched the advice had high authority for its 
 principle. — " By their fruits ye shall know them." 
 
KING JAMES'S PROVISION FOR THE " MEER IRISH." 43 
 
 of the removal of Irish Roman Catholics and the introduction of 
 Protestant tenants." There was no such condition. There was the 
 condition imposed upon one and only one class of the grantees, to 
 bring over a certain number of English and Scotch settlers,* but 
 it was because there was abundance of vacant land in which they 
 had room. Any Irish occupiers who might be displaced were 
 provided for on the portion which was left in the hands of pro- 
 prietors of their own race and creed. Nay more, as Carte, quoting 
 from high and unquestioned authority, tells us, the escheated lands 
 of Ulster were apportioned to 
 
 104 English and Scotch adventurers, 
 56 Servitors, 
 
 286 Natives!! 
 Upon the lands of the first alone was there a condition to plant 
 English and Scotch immigrants. 
 
 Let us be just to the English sovereign. The extermination 
 of the native people was then as now not the act of the English 
 government, but the act of those whom unfortunately and unwisely 
 the English government protected as the instruments and upholders 
 of its power. I quote from the history of Ireland, written by Mr. 
 Gordon.f Upon this point it differs in nothing from the statements 
 of the more partizan Leland. Speaking of the commissioners who 
 carried the plantations into effect, he says : — 
 
 " Abuses were practised, cruelly unjust and oppressive ; too various 
 for a circumstantial detail. With a scandalous breach of trust the com- 
 missioners appointed to distribute lands, deprived the natives by fraud and 
 violence of possessions reserved to them by command of the King ; some- 
 times leaving them a pittance — sometimes in fact no means of subsistence 
 at all. In the words of Leland { the resentment of the sufferers was 
 in some instances exasperated by finding their leases transferred to 
 hungry adventurers who had no services to plead, and sometimes even 
 to those who had been rebels or traitors. Neither the actors nor the 
 objects of such grievances were confined to one religion. The most 
 zealous in the service of Government and the most peaceable conformists 
 were numbered in the ravages of avarice and rapine, without any dis- 
 tinction of principles or profession." 
 
 This was the case in Ulster. 
 
 In other places the provision for the old inhabitants was still more 
 liberal. Of confiscations in Longford more than one-half was 
 appropriated by the king to the old proprietors. The reservations 
 
 * In the case before the late Master of the Rolls he decided that since the Union 
 the condition would be satisfied by settling Irish born natives on the estate. 
 
 + This history of Ireland was published in 1805, as the title page informs us, by a 
 pluralist of the Protestant Church — " By the Rev. James Gordon, Rector of Killegney, 
 in the Diocese of Ferns, and of Cannaway, in the Diocese of Cork. 
 
44 THE SETTLEMENT OF MUNSTER. 
 
 in favour of the latter were almost everywhere defeated by the 
 fraud or the violence of the Irish officials. In Wicklow, when 
 everything else had failed, when the English sovereign had thrice 
 overruled the injustice of his subordinates in the Irish government, 
 the Irish owner was sent to prison on a false accusation of murder, 
 and tried by a jury expressly packed by the sheriff for the purpose 
 of convicting him. 
 
 If we are to credit Sir John Davis, even in Munster especial 
 care was taken by King James to secure " fixity of tenure" to the 
 occupiers of the soil. Describing the trouble which was taken to 
 obtain the surrenders of the estates from the " Irish and degenerate 
 English and the regranting estates unto them according to the course 
 of the common law," he claims for his royal master the credit of 
 having changed the old forms of inquisitions. He tells us that 
 since the accession of the king the inquisitions had always separ- 
 ately found the lands which were occupied by the lord himself as 
 demesne lands, and those which were in the hands of tenants. 
 As to the latter, a money value was set upon all the different 
 customs or duties which the lord had been in the habit of exacting, 
 and in the regrant the interests of the tenant were preserved, 
 subject to an annual rent equivalent to the value of these customs 
 and duties. Subject to this rent the occupying tenant was fixed 
 in the possession of his farm : — - 
 
 " The lands which are found to be in possession of the tenants are left 
 with them respectively, charged with the certain rents in lieu of all 
 uncertain Irish exactions." 
 
 But this was not all. This policy was not confined to the estates 
 surrendered by " Irish, or degenerate English." Whenever there 
 was a regrant to cure a doubtful or defective title — fixity of tenure 
 was secured to the occupier. 
 
 " In like manner, upon all grants which have passed by virtue of the 
 commission for defective titles, the commissioners have taken especial 
 caution to preserve the estate of the particular tenants." 
 
 The effects of securing fixity of tenure to the occupier, Sir 
 John Davis thus describes : — * 
 
 " And thus we see how the greatest part of the possessions (as well of 
 the Irish as of the English) in Leinster, Conaght, and Munster are settled 
 and secured since his Majestie came to the crowne ; whereby the hearts 
 of the people are settled not only to live in peace, but raised and 
 incouraged to builde, to plant, to give better education to their children, 
 and to improve the commodities of their lands, whereby the yearly value 
 thereof e is already increased double of that it was within these few years, 
 and is like daily to rise higher till it amounts to the price of our lande in 
 England." 
 
 Sir John Davis was not the friend or advocate of the Celtic 
 
 * Tracts by Sir John Davis — page 709. 
 
SIR JOHN DAVIS ON TENANT RIGHT. 45 
 
 race. Yet he took a view of the best mode of effecting the 
 improvement of the country, rather more favourable to them than 
 that which is taken either by Lord Lifford, Lord Dufferin, or Lord 
 Rosse. He did not think it necessary to drive them from the 
 land. He did not even deem it an indispensable condition of 
 Irish prosperity that there should be over them the absolute 
 dominion of the landowner, or, to borrow the expressive phrase of 
 Lord Rosse, that " the landlord's hands should be untied." On 
 the contrary, he prided himself on the fact that whenever in 
 Munster it was found that the lands had been in the occupation 
 of tenants, fixity of tenure had been granted to the tenants, and 
 as a consequence " the hearts of the people were not only settled 
 to live in peace, but raised and encouraged to build, to plant, to 
 give better education to their children, and to improve the commo- 
 dities of the lands." 
 
 " Whereby " — I pray your Lordship's attention to this — " the 
 yearly value thereof is already increased double of that it was within 
 these few years." 
 
 Would it be a great calamity to Ireland if Sir John Davis had 
 continued Irish Attorney-General to this day ? What would have 
 been his reply to a proposal to adopt, in the case of the regranted 
 estates of Munster, a measure as little favourable to the tenants as 
 that which I propose ? 
 
 In our days, as in those of King James, there are " Irish exac- 
 tions" from tenants which need to be converted into fixed and 
 certain rents. There are Irish holdings for uncertain and precarious 
 tenures, which need to be converted into certain terms of years. If 
 I am right in saying that there is scarcely an Irish estate upon 
 which the terms of the original grant are observed, or the purposes 
 of the original grant fulfilled, a commission of defective titles might 
 not improperly regrant all Irish estates, " taking especial care to 
 preserve the estates of the occupying tenants." 
 
 It would be impossible for me, with the space or time, or, I may 
 add, with the resources at my command, to trace out the historic 
 documents which throw light upon the grants of Elizabeth and 
 Cromwell. The grants of Cromwell were admittedly framed on 
 the model of the Ulster plantation of King James. An attempted 
 and indeed partial plantation of Ulster by Queen Elizabeth had 
 preceded its settlement by James. I have no doubt that a careful 
 enquiry into the documents which illustrate the Elizabethan grants, 
 would establish with equal clearness that they were made on 
 conditions intended to secure the settlement on the estates of an 
 independent and contented tenantry. 
 
 It is not necessary for my argument to go back to these. The testi- 
 mony of Lord Clare, which I quoted in the Plea for the Celtic 
 Race" refers only to the confiscations which took place after the 
 accession of King James. Since that period the greater extent of 
 
46 THE SETTLEMENT OF B1UNSTER. 
 
 the island has been the subject of confiscation — some of it has been 
 subjected to the process several times. And without drawing in aid 
 the regrants upon surrenders, or on the commission of defective titles, 
 which Sir John Davis describes, we may safely assert that almost 
 the entire island is now held under grants of which the avowed 
 policy was to compel the proprietors to give up all arbitrary 
 exactions, to renounce all lettings upon precarious tenures, and to 
 place independent and— to use the expressive words of Pynnar's 
 survey — "estated" occupiers upon the soil. 
 
 The grants of Cromwell were recognized after the restoration. 
 A Parliament, called that of Ireland, but in reality a provincial 
 assembly of the delegates of the new proprietors, took especial 
 care not to cumber the title of the new masters of Ireland by any 
 inconvenient reference to the conditions upon which Cromwell had 
 given them the properties of the ancient proprietors of the soil.* 
 Cromwell's " usurpations " had been ignored for all purposes ex- 
 cept the robbery of the Irish nation. English judges had directed 
 in opposition to the settled principles of law, that adherence to the 
 de facto government of the Commonwealth was treason, because 
 Charles the Second was a king "de facto" as well as "de jure" while 
 " the usurper" was exercising supreme authority in England, and 
 the sovereign de facto was a fugitive in France. The acts of the 
 " usurping " government were only held legal when they robbed 
 the Irish nation. And while the bones of Cromwell were dragged 
 from his grave to the gibbet, and acts of Parliament canonized the 
 martyred king, in Ireland every trooper who had acquired property 
 as a reward for fighting against the sainted martyr was confirmed in 
 his grant. By an act, which it is not too much to call one of 
 treachery, the " innocent Papists," that is the men who had been 
 robbed by Cromwell for their adherence to the cause of their 
 sovereign, were actually despoiled of their ancestral estates, and 
 the compensation " in Connaught " which was awarded to them 
 was postponed to the pay due to the soldiers of the general who 
 had brought the "blessed martyr" to the block. 
 
 * There is something almost ludicrous in the solemn burlesque in which the Irish 
 Parliament in the preamble of the Act of Settlement described the robberies of 
 Cromwell's troopers and Cromwell's grants, confirming them as absolutely acts of 
 loyalty to the exiled king. After describing the "horrid " rebellion of the confederated 
 Irish Roman Catholics, this document proceeds: — 
 
 " Whereas several of your majesty's subjects, by whom, as instruments, the rebels 
 were totally subdued, did, in the time of your majesty's absence beyond the seas, and 
 to prevent the further desolation of this, your majesty's, kingdom, inquire inio the 
 authors, abettors, and contrivers of the said rebellion and war; and after much 
 deliberation among themselves, and advice from others had thereupon, did dispossess 
 such of the said Popish rebels of their land tenements and hereditaments, as were guilty 
 of, and found to have been engaged in the said rebellion and war, and did withhal 
 distribute, and set out the said lands to be possessed by sundry persons, their agents 
 and tenants, who by advancing of their money or goods, or by hazarding of their lives, 
 had contributed to the said conquest, or been otherwise useful in the suppressing the 
 said rebellion and war." 
 
OLIVER CROMWELL'S GRANTS. 47 
 
 All, however, that concerns my present purpose is to point out 
 that even the troopers who parcelled out Ireland in the " acts of 
 settlement and explanation" did not escape — it was not possible to 
 escape — the recognition of Cromwell's grants, and with those grants 
 of the conditions on which the grants were made. 
 
 Where are now the subverters of the rights of property ? Where 
 are the violators of ancient right? Are they those who insist 
 on the fulfilment of the conditions on which estates are held ; or 
 those who, in order to convert the proprietors into the tyrants and 
 despots of the nation, would disregard every obligation by which, in 
 Ireland, the very origin of proprietary right was bound, and trample 
 on all the principles of the policy upon which that right depends ? 
 How often does it happen that men denounce as " revolutionary" 
 proposals which, in reality, are a return to the most ancient and 
 sacred principles of the law.* 
 
 I ask of those who are accustomed to boast of the plantation of 
 Ulster as the one wise act of the English Government of Ireland 
 if the policy of that plantation was to place the new proprietors as 
 lords over a discontented tenantry of serfs? But I confine my 
 attention to the one stipulation I have quoted — the stipulation 
 that rents should be certain and tenures secure. I am not, as 
 
 * A very curious passage occurs in that introduction to Carte's Life of Ormonde, 
 from which I have already made an extract. Speaking of the Ulster plantation he 
 says: — "It was thought proper to avoid a mistake committed in the plantation of 
 Munster, where the Irish were mixed among the English in order to learn civility 
 and good husbandry from them ; but experience showed that they only learned to 
 envy the fortunes of the English, and to long for the lands improved by their 
 industry ; and that they made use of the freedom of access which they had to their 
 houses, and of conversation with their persons, only to steal their goods and plot 
 against their lives. It was therefore deemed advisable to lessen this intercourse between 
 the two people, and to plant them separately in different quarters ; the Irish in some 
 one place of the plainest ground of their own country, and the British by themselves in 
 places of the best strength and command." 
 
 In every project for the " plantation" of any part of Ireland some provision was made 
 for the " meer Irish." In the Elizabethan plantation of Munster they were freely mixed 
 with the English settlers. 
 
 In King James' plantation of Ulster they were relegated to separate districts, or at 
 least to separate estates. 
 
 In "the Croniwellian settlement" it was proposed to banish them to a province, 
 almost exclusively awarded them. 
 
 Every provision for them was thwarted by the rapacity of those who practically ad- 
 ministered Irish affairs ; and the old Irish Catholic people, contrary to the terms of 
 every settlement, were kept as serfs upon the lands which had been allotted to Protestant 
 proprietors upon the express terms of planting them with independent settlers. 
 
 The old proprietors were for ever deprived of the portions of land which were re- 
 served to them by the policy of James. Even Cromwell's provision of Connaught was 
 not left to the miserable victims of wrong. In the acts of settlement and explanation, 
 many of the "innocent Papists," that is Roman Catholics who had adhered to King 
 Charles, were cheated out of the lands in Connaught which had been allotted to them 
 in compensation for the estates which they had lost by their loyalty to the King. 
 
 The credit of the idea of sending the Irish to Connaught is due to the Irish Privy 
 Council, who first made up a project for carrying out the Ulster plantation, to be sub- 
 mitted to King James. This part of the project was omitted in the plan which received 
 the final sanction of the King. 
 
48 THE TRUSTS OF IRISH ESTATES. 
 
 Lord DufFerin accuses me, " antedating responsibilities." The 
 Irish proprietors hold their estates under a title which requires as 
 a condition that they should not let their lands in the very way 
 they are doing ; that they should not create the very mischief which 
 they are creating. The object of the prohibition was to prevent 
 their peopling their estates with dependent serfs. 
 
 This is, indeed, but a strong illustration of the truth I have 
 attempted to enforce, that all Irish estates were really granted on 
 conditions which attached to them a trust. It was a trust to train 
 up an orderly and loyal people. There was a positive and express 
 trust not to suffer those estates to be overrun by a population 
 destitute of any fixity of tenure, and subject, at the will of the 
 landlord, to an arbitrary variation of the rent. 
 
 I may be told that in referring to these old conditions and ancient 
 transactions I am attempting to apply to a long-settled and peaceful 
 order of things the principles which were intended only for the 
 days of unsettled relations — that I am falling into the error of 
 insisting, in the management of reclaimed and settled " countries," 
 on the terms which were designed only for the process of reclama- 
 tion and settlement ; that when a few years had passed over, and 
 the objects of the plantation been once attained, the owners of the 
 planted estates then held their properties free from the restrictions 
 of the early years. The argument would be this : — The right of 
 Government to control has ceased with the circumstances which made 
 that control necessary. Irish landed property is now in the same 
 condition as that of England, liable indeed to the general power of 
 interference which the State possesses, but bound by no special 
 responsibilities, and subject to no peculiar right of visitation by 
 Parliament or the Crown. Such a commission and survey as that 
 of Pynnar may have been very proper in the days of James I. 
 But no sovereign has now a right to inquire whether it suits the 
 pleasure or the convenience of any proprietor to place an " estated" 
 tenantry on his lands. Ireland has now reached that condition of 
 " civilized countries" in which, as your Lordship tells us, every pro- 
 prietor is allowed, and ought to be allowed, "to do what he likes 
 with his own." 
 
 In the first place, any one studying the conditions of the Ulster 
 plantation must see, with Lord Lyndhurst, that they were intended 
 to create permanent trusts, and impose lasting conditions on 
 the ownership of Irish estates. To go no further than one : every 
 grantee of 2,000 acres was bound to create four " fee-farms," each 
 consisting of 120 acres. A fee-farm grant is not a thing temporary in 
 its nature. The object and intention plainly was that there should 
 always be a class of higher and independent yeomanry upon each 
 estate. The provisions against letting for short tenures and at 
 uncertain tenures were equally intended to secure a lower but still 
 independent class of cultivators of the soil. 
 
UNFULFILLED TRUSTS. 49 
 
 But in the next place the conditions of the grants have never 
 been really fulfilled. In Ulster they have been partially complied 
 with ; yet even in that province the fulfilment has been generally 
 evaded by substituting the mere customary security known as 
 tenant right for the legal fixity of tenure specified in the grant. 
 In the rest of Ireland the properties are but few upon which 
 an estated tenantry were at any time placed to occupy the 
 soil. The leases for lives renewable for ever to middlemen may 
 have been the result — 4hey were not the fulfilment of these con- 
 ditions. No time can really run against the nation's right to have 
 these essential conditions of national tranquillity and prosperity 
 enforced. The bargain was made that, as the price of these estates, 
 the landowner should place an independent class of occupiers upon 
 the soil If I may use a professional illustration — as long as this 
 purchase money is unpaid the State has a lien for it on the lands. 
 Until they have given us that class of proprietors we have a right 
 to insist on any measure that is necessary to create them. 
 
 The truth is, Ireland has never yet got through that " transition 
 state " which of necessity intervenes between the imposition on the 
 country of an alien class of proprietors and the adjustment of their 
 new proprietary rights to settled and peaceful relations with the 
 occupiers of the soil. We have never passed over the state of 
 things for which these very conditions were intended. After the 
 lapse of two centuries we are still face to face with the " un- 
 reformed" and unsettled state of society which was the necessary 
 result of conquest and confiscation. Queen Victoria has just 
 the same interest as the first James in preventing the grantees of 
 the " escheated lands" from extorting " Irish exactions," and from 
 letting on insecure tenures and at uncertain rents. 
 
 It is vain to tell me that many of the present owners are the 
 representatives of those who purchased these " escheated lands." 
 They could not buy the lands without accepting the responsibilities 
 of those from whom they bought. No principle is better 
 established in law than that which recognizes covenants that " run 
 with the land;" and the great compact which was entered into 
 between the British Crown, and those who accepted grants of Irish 
 property from that Crown binds every owner who claims Irish 
 property by virtue of any of these grants. 
 
 If it be conceded, as it must be, that in the early days of these 
 grants — those who held them were amenable to the visitation and 
 control of the British Crown in respect to the tenure they created 
 on these lands — surely it cannot be said that this right of visitation 
 and control is gone as long as the landowner depends upon the 
 British Crown for force to protect him in his right. It never can 
 be forgotten, it cannot be too often repeated, that all proprietary 
 rights in Ireland are upheld solely by the military power of Eng- 
 land. It is vain for those whose rights are thus upheld to claim 
 
 D 
 
50 TRUSTS OF IRISH ESTATES. 
 
 the extreme privileges which may or not belong to landed property 
 in countries where that property is held by a tenure depending 
 upon the influences existing in the country itself. Ireland is the 
 only country in Europe in which proprietary rights in land are 
 upheld by foreign bayonets. While this is the case, Irish land- 
 owners can never say that the relations connected with land tenure 
 in Ireland have assumed their settled and normal condition. For 
 all practical purposes we are still dealing with the " unreformed 
 and unsettled countries" which were the objects of anxiety to the 
 councillors of Queen Elizabeth and King James. 
 
 The more this subject is reflected on the more apparent will be 
 the right and duty of the British Government to take up, even after 
 so long an interval, the work of settlement and plantation, which 
 was interrupted in the troubles of " the great Rebellion" and in 
 the case of the land included in Cromwell's grants, disturbed even 
 by the Restoration of Charles. It is not an unfair test of the con- 
 tinuance of the original trusts and conditions upon which Irish 
 property was granted, to ask whether England is for ever to bear 
 the odium and the expense of maintaining the present system of 
 " landlordism" in Ireland. Let me say, once for all, my Lord, that 
 in using this phrase " landlordism" I meant no disrespect to the 
 owners of land. I am happy that your Lordship has adopted it, 
 because it appears more expressively than any word I know of to 
 designate that system of dominion over the people which too many 
 people in Ireland confound with the just claims of proprietary right. 
 A phrase for which I have your sanction may, I hope, be used 
 without offending any prejudices of your Lordship's order. 
 
 "Landlordism" in Ireland has been maintained, and is maintained, 
 at a positive money cost to the British Crown, of which it is not easy 
 to reckon the sum. The troops that have been recently hurried 
 to Ireland and Canada have been sent to uphold it. The gunboats 
 that have been despatched in hot haste to the western coast of 
 Ireland are gone upon the same mission. Since the restoration of 
 Charles II. the defence of landlordism in Ireland has drained the 
 English Exchequer of millions of money. It is now draining it of 
 hundreds of thousands — if I add the loss of revenue from Ireland, 
 it is draining it of millions- — every year. It is lowering and 
 weakening England in both hemispheres of the globe. It is vain 
 to disguise it, Ireland is the weakness of England, and foreign 
 nations know it as well as we do ourselves. Irish " landlordism" is 
 hanging like a millstone round the neck of England, and dragging 
 her down from her once proud position in the commonwealth of 
 Europe. 
 
 I forbear to pursue this subject. But if it be true that proprietary 
 rights are upheld in Ireland at this enormous cost to England, would 
 it be unreasonable for English statesmen to say that all the burden 
 must not fall upon the State ; that Irish landlords must even share 
 
 I 
 
THE RIGHT OF STATE INTERFERENCE. 51 
 
 the losses of this ruinous partnership ; and that if the losses can be 
 put an end to by a sacrifice, on the part of the landowners, of their 
 extreme rights of property, which give them dominion over the 
 people, that sacrifice must and shall be made ? 
 
 These conclusions follow inevitably from the circumstances under 
 which Irish property was granted — from the circumstances in which 
 it is now placed. The time is come when the Legislature must call 
 on those who were and are but stewards of the " escheated lands" 
 for an account of their stewardship. England, in self defence, must 
 cease to connive at the violation of all the conditions on which 
 Irish property is held, and enforce upon Irish landowners an 
 observance of these stipulations, originally made to ensure the 
 peace and prosperity of the country, over the people of which those 
 proprietors were placed, and are kept, by the force of English arms. 
 
 I venture to say, my Lord, that no proposition is more clearly 
 demonstrated than that which asserts the present right and duty 
 of the British Government to regulate the letting of land upon 
 every Irish estate, so far at least as to secure that there be no pre- 
 carious tenures, and no exaction of uncertain rents. 
 
 I rest my proposal, so to regulate these lettings, upon clear and 
 distinct principles : — 
 
 First. — Upon the principle that the State has a right, by the 
 supreme law of the social compact, to regulate the enjoy- 
 ment and use of all property whenever the safety of the 
 whole community requires that this should be done. 
 
 Secondly. — Upon the condition of all landed property held under 
 the law of England, a law which vests all that property in 
 the Crown, and treats every owner as only enjoying its use. 
 
 Thirdly. — And lastly, and above all, I rest it on the peculiar 
 conditions and circumstances under which all Irish land is 
 held — conditions and circumstances which actually impose 
 upon every Irish landowner the most clear and distinct 
 obligation of giving to all occupiers under him that security 
 of tenure which I call on the Legislature to enforce. 
 
 If the measure I propose can really be sustained by such prin- 
 ciples, it is surely neither " revolutionary" nor " communistic." 
 
 I have still a few words to say in reply to some other portions of 
 your Lordship's letter. Before I do so I must claim your Lordship's 
 permission to offer some observations upon the letters of Lord 
 Dufferin. You refer me to the second letter of that nobleman 
 to The Times, " the unanswerable reasoning of which" seems 
 to your Lordship to " set the question of the culpability of Irish 
 landlords as regards the exodus at rest." So far as I am 
 
52 LORD dufferin's third letter. 
 
 concerned, that letter does not touch one single argument, or 
 question one fact which I adduced. It is only in a third letter that 
 Lord DufFerin incidentally notices the Plea for the Celtic Race. 
 Before noticing the second letter I claim your Lordship's permission 
 to offer some observations on the third. I cannot say that, in this 
 letter, Lord DufFerin has even made an attempt to answer me. I 
 gather, indeed, from the way in which he alludes to it that his 
 Lordship had not then condescended to read the tract upon which 
 he commented* In his third letter he observes that — 
 
 " It has been objected I have mistaken the nature of the accusations 
 directed against the landlord class in Ireland, who, / am informed, have 
 been ruthlessly gibbeted, not exactly on account of their own acts, but as 
 representatives of those bygone generations to whose vicious mismanage- 
 ment of their estates the present misfortunes of the country are to be 
 attributed. 
 
 " The writer who thus proposes to antedate our responsibilities seems 
 satisfied that he has arrived at the fountain-head of Ireland's calamities 
 when he points his finger at the Irish proprietary of former days. Nor 
 does he ever dream of enquiring whether the landlord of 100 years ago 
 may not himself have been the creature of circumstances involved in the 
 complications of a system of which he was as much the victim as his 
 tenants." 
 
 As in a subsequent part of the letter Lord DufFerin does me the 
 honour of mentioning me by name, I presume that I am " the 
 writer" referred to in this passage, and that this is intended as a 
 criticism on the Plea for the Celtic Race. The very language of 
 the reference, " I am informed," implies that Lord DufFerin had 
 formed his opinion of the tract upon the opinion of others. I did 
 not need, indeed, that reference to assure me that this was so. It 
 was, I believe, impossible, if he had read it, for a writer as intel- 
 ligent and able as Lord DufFerin so completely to misunderstand — 
 equally impossible for one of his station and character so entirely 
 to misrepresent. 
 
 If, as I have reason to believe from his subsequent letter, Lord 
 DufFerin has since read the Plea for the Celtic Race, I am sure he will 
 admit that it would not be fair to describe me as having "ruthlessly 
 gibbetted" Irish landlords or " gibbetted" them at all. My whole 
 argument was that " the landlord of 100 years ago" was, as Lord 
 DufFerin describes him, the creature of circumstances. I never once 
 alluded to any management, vicious or otherwise, of the estates of a 
 century ago. I did point to some specific instances of the manage- 
 ment of estates, but they were every one of the present day. 
 Looking at Irish landlordism, from the days of confiscation to 
 
 * It is needless to say that this was written before the publication of Lord Dufferin's 
 letter in The Times of January 31st. I have preferred leaving the text, with some 
 trifling alterations, as it originally stood. In subsequent pages I deal with that letter. 
 
REFERENCES TO PAST HISTORY. 53 
 
 the present, I believed the Irish landlord, in his character of 
 landowner, to be the vicious creation of the most vicious set of 
 circumstances that ever degraded a nation, or lowered the character 
 of a gentry. This is an opinion from which I do not know that 
 Lord Dufferin very much dissents. 
 
 But no one understands the Irish land question who does not 
 take into account the causes which created that feud between 
 proprietor and occupier which is perpetuated to our own day, 
 and which is now the Irish difficulty. The man who looks at 
 that question without considering the inheritance of enmity and 
 strife which has been bequeathed to us can literally know nothing 
 of the subject. The writer who would use the events of our past 
 history for any other purpose than that of laying bare our present 
 social condition would pervert them. The occurrences — the wrongs — 
 the oppressions of former days — have nothing to do with the 
 question except as they enter as elements into our present life. 
 That they do so enter is notorious. To ignore them is merely 
 childish. To attempt to discuss the question of land tenure with- 
 out reference to them is but trifling. It is by understanding their 
 influence that most of the anomalies of our social condition are 
 explained. It is only by making allowance for the feelings they 
 have created that we can estimate the nature of the difficulties with 
 which we have to deal. You might better think to understand the 
 Polish question while you had never heard of the partition of 
 Poland, or form a judgment of the condition and feelings of the 
 Venetians without taking into account the memories that are 
 attached to the history of the Doges. The existing relations of 
 the owners and occupiers of the Irish soil are the result of a long 
 series of causes, commencing in conquest and confiscation, and 
 running down, through dismal years of oppression, to the present 
 serfdom. No man who has written or spoken on Ireland, with 
 a mind above that of a land agent's clerk, has failed to see this. 
 Sir George Lewis glanced at it in a few sentences, in which, as 
 in all his sentences, much wisdom is condensed. I endeavoured 
 to trace out the operations of these miserable elements to their 
 present and actual result. I may have been successful, or I may 
 not; but Lord Dufferin himself, in the very arguments he uses, 
 admits that a writer could have no real apprehension of the subject 
 who would "dream" that he could dispose of it by speaking of 
 " antedating the responsibilities of landlords." 
 
 I am justified in saying so because in this very same letter 
 Lord Dufferin, notwithstanding his somewhat slighting allusion to 
 my reference to the origin and history of Irish proprietary rights, 
 proceeds himself to discuss the Irish land question by a review of 
 the injuries inflicted on Ireland in the last century by the commercial 
 jealousy of England. I believe these very injuries have something 
 to do with our present position, but little, immeasurably little, 
 
54 LORD dufferin's third letter. 
 
 compared to the blight which has been cast upon us by the never- 
 ceasing oppression inflicted on the occupiers of the soil. Although a 
 century has very nearly passed since the restrictions upon our trade 
 and our manufactures have ceased, I am far from saying that even in 
 estimating our present system of land tenure we may not reasonably 
 take the effect of these restrictions into account. But surely if we 
 may, it is of far more consequence that we should consider the 
 influence of the laws and circumstances which have ground down 
 and degraded the occupiers of the soil. 
 
 After tracing the effects of English commercial injustice, his 
 lordship thus proceeds : — 
 
 "Feeling that our best chance of dealing with the difficulties of 
 Ireland is to arrive at a correct appreciation of their origin, I have done 
 my best to detail the facts, which prove that it is unjust to refer them to 
 the influence of owners of property in Ireland, while I have detailed a 
 succession of circumstances amply sufficient to account for them." 
 
 " Our best chance of dealing with the difficulties of Ireland is to 
 arrive at a correct appreciation of their origin." To endeavour to 
 trace them to their origin was the whole aim and purpose of the 
 essay for which I am visited with his Lordship's contemptuous 
 rebuke. I should be sorry to suppose that my crime is, that I 
 traced them a little too clearly to an origin that does not quite suit 
 the views of high proprietary right. 
 
 Lord Dufferin is far too intelligent not to see that some cause 
 must be assigned for the present condition of our country. He 
 admits, in most remarkable words — 
 
 " Some human agency or other must be accountable for the perennial 
 desolation of a lovely and fertile island, watered by the fairest streams, 
 caressed by a clement atmosphere, held in the embrace of a sea whose 
 affluence fills the richest harbours of the world, and inhabited by a race 
 valiant, tender, generous, gifted beyond measure with the power of phy- 
 sical endurance, and graced with the liveliest intelligence." 
 
 Lord Dufferin's description, glowing as it is, is not more glowing 
 than that of Lord Bacon : — 
 
 " For this island it is endowed with so many dowries of Nature, con- 
 sidering the fruitfulness of the soil, the ports, the rivers, the fishings, the 
 quarries, the woods, and other materials, and especially the race and 
 generation of men — valiant, hard, and active, as it is not easy, no, not 
 upon the Continent, to find such confluence of commodities, if the hand 
 of men did join with the hand of Nature." * 
 
 There is a startling similarity in the complaints of Lord Dufferin 
 
 * Bacon's Works, Vol. iii., 321. 
 
ARGUMENT FROM ENGLISH INJUSTICE IN PAST TIMES. 55 
 
 and Lord Bacon, although an interval of two centuries and a half 
 divide them — an interval in which the " perennial desolation" of the 
 country has remained unchanged. 
 
 Is it possible to imagine words that more perfectly describe all 
 the elements of national happiness and greatness. If " natural 
 economic laws" had their free operation in Ireland, Ireland must be 
 prosperous and great. Some human and malignant agency has 
 disturbed them. What is it? This is the Irish question. The 
 very same question — immortal as the miseries of our country — 
 which Bishop Berkeley asked more than 120 years ago, and which, 
 if matters go on as they are, may be the subject of controversy 
 between our great grandchildren 120 years hence. 
 
 "What hindereth us Irishmen from exerting ourselves, using our 
 hands and brains, doing something or other, man, woman, or child, like 
 all the other inhabitants of God's earth?" 
 
 Lord Dufferin says it is because, in the reign of Elizabeth, Eng- 
 land prohibited the importation of Irish cattle : because, from the 
 reign of Charles II. to 1782, England did her best to destroy and 
 suppress the woollen manufacture of Ireland; because a century 
 ago England prohibited Ireland from trading freely with the colonies 
 and foreign nations; and because (I will do full justice to the 
 argument) the effect of this English policy was to drive the 
 whole population upon the soil for their support ; to cause an un- 
 natural competition for land, and so to create all the evils of a 
 redundant population and exorbitant rents. 
 
 Lord Dufferin has one great advantage in preferring an indictment 
 against England. The argument is one that would be dexterously 
 framed if it were intended to divert the attention of the Irish people 
 from the practical object before them; as bulls have been turned 
 from the men they have been pursuing by flaunting before them 
 a piece of scarlet cloth. Any argument that throws blame upon 
 England is popular with the Irish people. Something would be 
 gained for Irish " landlordism" if an appeal to the patriotic hatred 
 of English rule could be used to turn that people away from the 
 consideration of that great question of land tenure, in which their 
 very existence in their own country is now involved. 
 
 I do not deny that the matters to which Lord Dufferin refers 
 are important as the subject of historical study. They suggest 
 questions of the greatest moment to the mind of every thinking 
 Irishman ; but these questions relate not to the practical remedy 
 which is to redress the evils of our land tenure, but to the 
 opinion which asserts the absolute necessity of self-government for 
 this country. In this way the events which Lord Dufferin describes 
 have been used, and fairly used. All that Lord Dufferin has told us of 
 the past misconduct of England will be found far more fully, and I 
 
56 lord dufferin's third letter. 
 
 think more accurately, narrated in the publications of the Repeal 
 Association. If Lord Dufferin means to insist on the right of 
 Ireland to self-government he will find many, very many, of us per- 
 fectly ready to leave the settlement of the land question to an Irish 
 Parliament, as soon as he shows us the prospect of obtaining one. 
 
 But if Lord Dufferin does not draw or intend to draw this 
 practical inference, this " ruthless gibbetting" (is not this the proper 
 phrase ?) of the past generation of English statesmen and English 
 commercial men can help us but little to solve the problem we have 
 in hand. Lord Dufferin admits that we have to deal with this 
 question — a country with advantages — if Lord Dufferin's description 
 be true — with advantages unrivalled by any country in Europe ; and 
 yet the most miserable, poor, and discontented in Christendom. 
 We want to know can nothing be done to remedy this ? to permit 
 a people possessing all the noble qualities Lord Dufferin has 
 attributed to them to use and enjoy the advantages of their 
 native land ? Lord Dufferin tells us that England prohibited the 
 importation of our cattle into England, destroyed our woollen 
 manufacture, and deprived us of the benefit of a free trade. 
 
 If any stranger unacquainted with Irish history were to read 
 this, he would say at once — the remedy is plain ; let England give 
 up her unjust commercial policy; let her freely admit Irish 
 cattle to her markets; let her remove all restrictions on the 
 Irish woollen trade; and let her freely share with Ireland her 
 trade with the colonies and the world. With what astonishment 
 would he learn that all these remedies have been applied ! that 
 for sixty-seven years, indeed for eighty-five years, all vexatious 
 restrictions have been removed, and that the condition of 
 Ireland is every day getting worse and worse. I am disposed 
 to say that the stranger, upon hearing this, would say that 
 however much Lord Dufferin's speculations might be interesting as 
 an historical inquiry, they do not offer us much help in providing a 
 practical remedy for the evil condition of our affairs. 
 
 And, accordingly, Lord Dufferin proposes none.* Describing 
 Ireland as he has done, he offers no advice as to the means by 
 which the curse and blight that is upon her — a curse and blight 
 created by some malignant human agency — may be removed. The 
 only approach to a suggestion on the subject is a hint very plainly 
 thrown out that it is essential to the prosperity of Ulster that the 
 ruinous custom of tenant right should be destroyed. 
 
 But even though Lord Dufferin may decline to propose a remedy 
 for our national distresses, he may, I admit, contribute usefully to 
 the discussion, if he helps us to trace out the cause. I have, I 
 think, fairly stated the substance of Lord Dufferin's reply to 
 
 * In his letter of the 31st of January Lord Dufferin does suggest a mode of dealing 
 with the land question, of which in subsequent pages I say a few words. 
 
TRUE ORIGIN OF OUR EVILS. 57 
 
 Bishop Berkeley's question. Let me now endeavour to restate my 
 own. 
 
 I say that our condition is to be traced to this : — Wars which 
 were treated as rebellions eventuated in parcelling out the greater 
 portion of the island among a " motley crew of English adven- 
 turers,"* to make room for whom the old inhabitants were deprived 
 of their estates. The whole, or nearly the whole, property of the 
 island was held by a title of confiscation. The new proprietors 
 treated the old population as serfs. The relations between owners 
 and occupiers have been embittered and exasperated by long and 
 angry struggles, social, political, and religious, between the repre- 
 sentatives of the conquerors and the conquered ; and at this hour a 
 " hostile population brooding over their discontent in sullen indig- 
 nation," f are held by the descendants of those proprietors in a 
 state of the most abject thraldom and servitude, by the expedient 
 of keeping them without any tenure of the land, and, therefore, 
 without any means of livelihood except at the good will and pleasure 
 of their lord. 
 
 Will any one deny that if this be true it is a sufficient answer to 
 the question? " The human agency " that is " accountable for the 
 perennial desolation " of our whole country is, to use an expressive, 
 even if it be an incorrect, phrase, " landlordism." I do not say land- 
 lords— I believe many, nay most, of the Irish landlords are " the 
 victims of these complexities" just as much as their tenants; but I 
 say that the hindrances to " Irishmen doing something for them- 
 selves like all the other inhabitants of God's earth " are — the state 
 of serfdom in which they have been and are kept — the utter dis- 
 couragement to their industry which is involved in the insecurity 
 of tenure by which that serfdom is maintained. 
 
 It is a mere trifling with this question to talk of " culpability " 
 or "responsibility" of landlords past, present, or to come. We 
 are dealing with a great political and social question, which cannot 
 be frittered away in miserable quibbles about words. Lord 
 DufFerin seems to think that he is defending Irish landlords 
 against an indictment, and that he is successful if he' can pick holes 
 in it. His second letter is nothing more than a special demurrer to 
 some phrases in that which he calls the accusation of Mr. Maguire 
 and Mr. Bright. It matters not who is culpable or who is responsible. 
 We are not administering criminal justice, but searching for the 
 principles of remedial legislation. There is the state of things in 
 Ireland creating by " human agency " the " perennial desolation " 
 of the country. Is that state of things, however it originated, 
 perpetuated and aggravated by the present system of land tenure ? 
 If it be, that system must be changed. After all the information 
 we can derive from historical inquiry, it is with the existing state 
 
 * Lord Clare's Speech on the Union.— Land Tenure in Ireland^ p. 25. 
 t Lord Clare. 
 
58 lord dufferin's third letter. 
 
 of things — with the present condition of land tenure — that we are 
 concerned. No matter what produces it, it is there. To trace it 
 to its causes is important only as it may help us thoroughly to 
 understand it, or may guide us in the suggestion of a remedy. 
 
 I believe it of great importance to understand the relations that 
 have existed between owners and occupiers from the days of Oliver 
 Cromwell to the present day. But I do so because they are still 
 subsisting, and because their character in the present day is im- 
 pressed with the history of the past. It is a very different thing to 
 inquire into the operation of causes that have long since passed 
 away. I admit this inquiry fairly occupies a place in the dis- 
 cussion, but the place of that inquiry is very secondary and sub- 
 ordinate to an investigation which traces out the result of elements 
 which, though existing for two centuries, are still actually present 
 in, and actually influencing our existing social condition. If that 
 which I have stated of the present relations of landlord and tenant 
 be true the remedies I have suggested would not be the less 
 necessary or applicable, even though Lord Dufferin should succeed 
 in proving that these relations would never have assumed their 
 present miserable form if England had given free scope to our 
 manufacturing industry at the time of the Revolution. 
 
 It is of such immense importance that the real question should 
 be understood — that we should get rid of all false issues, and be 
 distracted by no irrelevant inquiries, that I venture, even at the 
 risk of being tedious, to repeat the propositions which I attempted 
 to support in the tract on Land Tenure ; propositions which, at all 
 events, are clear, intelligible, and distinct. 
 
 They were these : — 
 
 "i. 
 
 "The position of the occupiers of the soil of Ireland is at present 
 generally that of serfs, without any security either for their tenure or 
 the fruits of their industry. They are dependent for their very means, 
 of existence on the will of their landlord, while the amount of that which 
 is called rent is regulated, not by any economic law, but by the disposition 
 of the landlord to extort, and their own ability to pay. 
 
 "ii. 
 " This state of things has originated remotely, perhaps not very re- 
 motely, in the fact that English power confiscated the whole property of 
 our island, and placed over the inhabitants alien and hostile proprietors 
 without making any sufficient provision to secure or protect the right of 
 the old inhabitants to live upon the soil.* 
 
 "m. 
 " The evil effects of the original injustice were increased by the in- 
 
 * Some provision was made for this purpose in the settlements of King James ; 
 even in those of Oliver Cromwell there was a pretence at making it. Inadequate, as 
 these provisions^were, especially in the latter case, they were defeated by the venality 
 and the rapacity of those to whom the administration of Irish affairs was entrusted. 
 
THE "PLEA FOR THE CELTIC RACE." 59 
 
 fluence of the laws, which for a long period after the confiscations, reduced 
 a great proportion of those occupying the soil to the condition of slaves in 
 I the religious and political disabilities to which they were subjected. 
 
 "IV. 
 
 " They have been up to the present hour aggravated and continued by 
 ; the antagonism of religion, of habits, and of race, which exists between 
 j! the class that constitutes the owner, and that which supplies the tillers 
 Ij of the soil. 4 
 
 "v. 
 "The events of the last fifty years have brought these evils to a 
 climax, which is now rapidly completing the extermination of the old 
 Irish race." 
 
 These five propositions resolve themselves into matters of fact, 
 or very nearly so. From these matters of fact I deduced a sixth 
 proposition, which, of course, rests on inference and opinions. 
 
 It was this : — 
 
 "VI. 
 
 " The only remedy that can be applied to this lamentable and miserable 
 state of things is to elevate the occupier from his position of serfdom, by 
 giving him an interest in the soil ; to do so at any price — to do so by 
 giving him that without which every other remedy is but a miserable 
 palliative — by giving him fixity of tenure — while we leave to the 
 owner of the soil every right and every power, except those which he 
 cannot continue to exercise without the waste and destruction of human 
 life, and without bringing ruin both on himself and the entire com- 
 munity." 
 
 Has Lord DmTerin in all his letters written one single line to 
 disprove the first proposition? He has written much to confirm 
 it. If that proposition be admitted, the admission is fatal to the 
 system of land tenure. Are we, in the year 1867, seriously to 
 argue the question of serfdom ? I have sometimes felt in discussing 
 land tenure in Ireland as if I were only repeating the arguments of 
 the slave question. I have felt, indeed, as if I were throwing away 
 labour in proving that while the mass of the population are in a 
 practical condition of serfdom we cannot expect the blight of our 
 " perennial desolation" to be removed. 
 
 I am bold to say that in the Plea for the Celtic Race I have con- 
 clusively established every one of the five propositions which I 
 have stated as matters of fact. I have indeed seen no attempt at 
 their disproof, or even their contradiction. 
 
 Lord Dufferin's argument might perfectly consist with mine. It 
 might even strengthen it. If it were true that the destruction of our 
 woollen manufacture and the other commercial wrongs of the last 
 century had the effect of driving upon the soil a population which 
 would otherwise have found employment in manufactures, this might 
 
60 LORD DUFFERIN's THIRD LETTER. 
 
 have facilitated the exaction of exorbitant rents, and — in increasing 
 the number of serfs have aggravated and extended the powers of 
 serfdom. I am quite sure that political and religious disabilities 
 had that effect ; so, in some degree, had everything which discour- 
 aged the industry of any class. But all this would only amount to 
 saying that there were causes which made it more difficult for the 
 Irish occupier to emancipate himself from the state of servitude, in 
 which, by virtue of his land tenure, he was held. If it be true that 
 these things aggravated the case, it is only the more necessary that 
 a remedy should be applied. 
 
 Lord Dufferin, as I understand him, goes the full length of 
 saying that the evil condition of our present land tenure is to be 
 traced solely to the commercial injustice of past days which he 
 points out — that if England had not discouraged our industry and 
 our commerce there never would have existed unsatisfactory rela- 
 tions between landlord and tenant. He says that it "is unjust to 
 refer to the difficulties " that beset our land tenure " to the influence 
 of the owners of property in Ireland." All must be laid at the 
 door of England's jealousy and injustice. Let us examine the 
 proposition in which Lord Dufferin thus states his views : — 
 
 " It will be sufficient for me to record my own profound conviction — 
 a conviction shared by many of your readers — that had Ireland only been 
 permitted to develop the other innumerable resources at her command, 
 as she has developed the single industry in which she was permitted to 
 embark, the equilibrium between the land and the population dependent 
 upon the land would never have been disturbed, nor would the relations 
 of landlord and tenant have become a subject of anxiety." 
 
 " Relations between landlord and tenants became a subject of 
 anxiety ! " 
 
 " The equilibrium between land and the population dependent 
 
 On it DISTURBED I " 
 
 Who that reads this would not suppose that in the days which 
 followed the revolution — in the days of Swift and Primate Boulter — 
 the relations between the Irish owner and the Irish occupier were 
 long settled and peaceful relations rudely disturbed by the dis- 
 couragement of the Irish woollen trade? So that to gain "a 
 correct appreciation of the source of Ireland's difficulties" we are to 
 assume that in the days of William and Anne there were " relations" 
 and " equilibriums" which would never have been a cause of anxiety 
 if they had not been rudely disturbed. We are to ignore the wicked 
 confiscations which had just parcelled out two-thirds of the island 
 among Cromwell's soldiers, the policy of conquest and confiscation 
 which protected the new titles by reducing the old inhabitants 
 to be slaves, the penal laws that crushed down the native til- 
 lers of the soil into slavery, the laws of exclusion which 
 shut out Roman Catholics from admission to the manufacturing 
 
THEORY OF OVER-POPULATION. 61 
 
 guilds of our cities and our towns, the bigotry which in many 
 instances debarred them even from residence within their walls; 
 and we are to mourn over the disturbance of those happy relations 
 of owners and occupiers which would never have given cause for 
 anxiety if it had not been for England's suppression of our woollen 
 trade. 
 
 Between the new proprietors and the mass of the people there 
 never existed any relations to which Lord DufFerin's language could 
 be applied. In the history of Ireland's miseries I really do not 
 know what is meant by the disturbance " of the equilibrium between 
 the land and the population dependent upon it." It is, I repeat, 
 impossible to epitomize Irish history in a letter. Let us briefly glance 
 at the social condition of the people during the existence of these 
 restrictions, and from their cessation in 1782* to the present time. 
 
 In the period between the Revolution and the era of Irish inde- 
 pendence the population of Ireland was certainly not in excess of that 
 which might easily find employment and maintenance on her soil. 
 
 In 1712 it barely exceeded two millions.! 
 
 In 1782 it had not risen to three.f 
 
 Can it possibly be said that three millions of people could not 
 have been supported on the Irish soil? 
 
 The mere statement of the numbers of the population is sufficient 
 to displace the theory that the suppression of the woollen trade, or 
 any commercial injustice, disturbed an " equilibrium" previously 
 subsisting " between the land and the population dependent on the 
 land." When the restrictions were abolished, the population had 
 not yet reached the number actually required for the due cultivation 
 of the soil. 
 
 The wars of the great rebellion had depopulated Ireland. Her 
 grievance was not an excessive but a deficient population. Lord 
 Clarendon tells us that in his day the great want of Ireland was 
 men. So far, during this period, were Irish landlords from finding 
 an excessive agricultural population in the country that many of 
 them imported and planted German Protestants on their estates. 
 
 Where in this period are we to date the fatal " disturbance of 
 the equilibrium between land and the population dependent upon 
 land?" 
 
 It can scarcely be said that a population of two millions, which 
 in the days of Dean Swift was the entire population of Ireland, 
 could have created any extraordinary competition for land. We 
 shall see presently how he describes the condition of the " serfs" of 
 his day. 
 
 * " Some relaxation of the system," said Mr. Pitt, speaking in 1785 of the commer- 
 cial injustice to Ireland, " took place at an early period of the present century. Some- 
 what more of the restrictive laws were abolished in the reign of George the Second, 
 but it was not until a time nearer our own day, and indeed within the last seven years, 
 that the system had been completely reversed." — Pitt's Parliamentary Speeches. 
 
 t Sadler on Ireland, p. 5. t Ibid. 
 
62 
 
 I have now before me a volume, the opening pages of which I 
 wish earnestly could be read by every one who has to deal with the 
 condition of Ireland. I mean the work on the Evils of Ireland, by 
 Michael Thomas Sadler. I quote from one of his notes a striking 
 collection of testimonies, covering a long period, as to the condition 
 of the Irish occupiers of the soil. Where in the midst of these 
 shall we place the date at which the relations of landlord and tenant 
 became matter of anxiety ? 
 
 Edmond Spencer. — " The landlords there most shamefully rack their 
 tenants." 
 
 Dean Swift. — " Rents squeezed out of the blood, and vitals, and 
 clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English 
 beggars." 
 
 Archbishop Boulter. — " Here the tenant, I fear, has hardly ever 
 more than one-third for his share ; too often but a fourth or a fifth 
 part." 
 
 Arthur Dobbs. — " "What was it induced so many of the commonalty 
 lately to go to America but high rents ? These kept them poor and low, 
 that they had scarcely sufficient means to procure necessaries or till the 
 ground." 
 
 Lord Clare (when Attorney-General, 1787). — "The peasantry are 
 ground down to powder by enormous rents." 
 
 " Exorbitant rent." — Gordon's History of Ireland. 
 
 " Exorbitant rents." — Newenharrfs Inquiry. 
 
 "Exorbitant rents." — Bishop WoodwarcVs Argument for the Support 
 of the Poor. 
 
 "Exorbitant rents." — Curwen on the State of Ireland* 
 
 The passage from Swift thus described the relation of landlord 
 and tenant within the early years of the new state of things. 
 
 " A stranger would he apt to think himself travelling in Lapland or 
 Iceland rather than in a country so favoured as ours, both for fruitful- 
 ness of soil and temperature of climate. The miserable dress, and diet, 
 and dwelling of the people ; the general desolation in most parts of the 
 kingdom ; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones 
 in their stead ; the families of farmers, who pay great rents, living in 
 filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or a 
 stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English pig stye to 
 receive them. These, indeed, may be comfortable sights to an English 
 spectator, who comes for a short time only to learn the language, and 
 returns back to his own country, whither he finds all our wealth 
 transmitted. 
 
 " ' Nostra miseria tu magnus es.' 
 
 " The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and 
 clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars. The 
 lowness of interest, in all other countries a sign of wealth, in ours is a 
 
 * Ireland and its Evil. By Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P. for Newark. London. 1829. 
 
THE DAKK AGE OF IRELAND. 63 
 
 proof of misery ; there being no trade to employ any borrower. Hence 
 alone comes the dearness of land, since the savers have no other way to 
 lay out their money. Hence the dearness of the necessaries of life ; 
 because the tenants cannot afford to pay such extravagant rents for land, 
 which they must take or go a begging, without raising the price of cattle 
 and of corn, although they should live upon chaff."* 
 
 This description of the state of Ireland was written in 1727. 
 The generation who had been confirmed, by a second conquest, in 
 the possession of the rapine of Cromwell had scarcely passed away. 
 Down to the day of Ireland's independence that description is veri- 
 fied by the testimony of all who write of, or who even incidentally 
 allude to, the condition of the people. Through successive years 
 we trace the dismal sameness of a testimony that never varies in its 
 story of desolation and exorbitant rents. Archbishop Boulter, 
 Bishop Berkeley , Arthur Young, Arthur Dobbs, Bishop Woodward, 
 Lord Clare, and even Archdeacon Paley,t are among the witnesses 
 who bear an unbroken and continuous testimony to the wretched- 
 ness of the people, almost from the very hour when the dominant 
 caste were established as conquerors over the land. 
 
 Never, perhaps, was the physical misery of a country more 
 directly connected, by clear and overwhelming evidence, with its 
 national prostration and its political degradation— with its trampling 
 down by the iron hoof of conquest, and the subjugation of its people 
 to religious and social slavery. 
 
 The mere statement of events in the consecutive order of their 
 occurrence is sufficient to carry conviction as to their relation as 
 cause and effect. We find the confiscations and the penal code 
 immediately followed by such a state of things as Swift describes. 
 The property of the country was partitioned among men actuated 
 by the passions of fanaticism, of conquest, and of fear. The soldiers 
 of Cromwell had been suddenly made masters of the Irish people. 
 They implicitly believed that the very security of their title 
 depended on keeping that people as slaves. A penal code was 
 enacted which crushed to the earth all the professors of the religion 
 to which the mass of the population adhered. That code excluded 
 them from every civil privilege — from the meanest office. The 
 very exercise of their religion was tolerated by connivance, while 
 down to that of the village constable all authority was exclusively 
 vested in the adherents and partisans of the new masters of the 
 country. Immediately following on this we find that old population 
 
 * State of Ireland. Swift's Works. 
 
 1* There is something strange, to an Irishman humiliating in the singular variety of 
 quarters in which we meet with incidental testimony as to the degradation of our 
 people. We would scarcely look for it in the pages of the novelist and the theologian. 
 Paley, who had been in Ireland, selects the Irish peasant for one of his illustrations : — 
 "The lowest class of the Irish afford a proof in point. They are poor, and in point of 
 situation in a state of slavery." — Paley's Memoirs. By Meadly. 2nd edition, p. 379. 
 
64 lord dufferin's third letter. 
 
 on the estates of the masters set over them by confiscation, we 
 find them in poverty and wretchedness, submitting to exactions not 
 always in the shape of rent, which left them a bare and miserable 
 existence for themselves. Is it possible to conceive any connexion 
 of events more clearly established than that which is thus shown 
 to exist between the confiscations and the consequent policy of 
 conquest and the depressed condition and serfdom of the people. 
 
 From that serfdom the occupiers of the soil of Ireland have 
 never yet been raised. I know of no historic deduction more clear 
 than that which traces almost year by year the perpetuation of its 
 evil influences to the present day. The calm and philosophic 
 judgment of the late Sir George Lewis thus described the state of 
 the Irish occupiers of the soil. 
 
 In his work on Irish Disturbances and the Irish Church Ques- 
 tion, after pointing out the evils produced by grants to an absentee, 
 who was represented either by an agent or " middleman," he 
 proceeds : — 
 
 " The landlord, if resident and an Irishman, was almost invariably a 
 Protestant, as Catholics were incapacitated from holding land ; and, as 
 in the three southern provinces nearly all the tenants were Catholic, the 
 landlord exercised over his tenant not only that influence which a creditor 
 necessarily exercises over his debtor, but also that power which the law 
 gave to the Protestant over the Catholic, to the magistrate and grand 
 juror over the suspected rebel. In these two ways all friendly connexion 
 between the landlord and the tenant of the soil was broken ; either the 
 landlord was . . . represented by an oppressive, grasping middleman, 
 or ... he was the member of a dominant and privileged caste, 
 who was as much bound by his official duties as he was prompted by 
 the opinion of his order, by the love of power, and by the feeling of 
 irresponsibility to oppress, degrade, and trample upon his Catholic 
 tenants." . . . 
 
 Under this system the occupiers of the soil bore, of necessity, the 
 relation to their masters, not of tenants in any sense in which 
 tenancy is understood in England, but that of miserable, oppressed, 
 and discontented serfs. Sir George Lewis goes on to describe 
 the Irish peasants : — 
 
 " Deprived of all self-respect by the operation of the penal statutes, 
 prevented from rising in the world or from bettering their condition by 
 legal disabilities and the legalized oppression of their landlords ; without 
 education, excluded from a public participation in the rites of their own 
 religion,* they endured all and more than the evils which belonged to the 
 
 * Although this statement as to the exclusion of Roman Catholics from a public 
 participation in the rites of their religion is in one sense true, I have already pointed out 
 in the Tract on Land Tenure (p. 30, 31), that the penal laws were never executed in 
 their full and relentless rigour, partly owing to the good feeling, more perhaps to the 
 self-interest, of the Protestant settlers in the country. This statement is exactly 
 
SIR GEORGE LEWIS. 65 
 
 lot of a serf without looking forward to the interested protection and 
 relief which a master would afford to his bondman." 
 
 Sir George Lewis refers to the testimony of Arthur Young. 
 Half a century after Swift had written, that careful and accurate 
 observer found the people in this condition : — 
 
 "'It must,' he writes in 1776, 'it must be very apparent to every 
 traveller through that country, that the labouring poor are treated 
 with harshness, and are in all respects so little considered that their 
 want of importance seems a perfect contrast to their situation in 
 
 England The age has improved so much in 
 
 humanity that even the poor Irish have experienced its influence, and are 
 every day treated better and better ; but still the remnant of the old 
 manners, the abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppres- 
 sive conduct of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin of the 
 kingdom, who never were out of it, altogether still bear very heavy on 
 the poor people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we 
 ever behold in England. The landlord of an Irish estate inhabited by Roman 
 Catholics is a sort of despot, who yields obedience in whatever concerns the poor 
 to no law but that of his will? " 
 
 Sir George Lewis stopped in his quotation from Arthur Young. 
 I shall presently have occasion to refer to the authority of that 
 writer.* I am anticipating a little in completing that extract. If 
 it seems like a " ruthless gibbetting" of the Irish landlords of other 
 days — it was written by a man who had been the inmate of the 
 houses of the aristocracy and gentry — who, in his tour through 
 Ireland, was the honoured guest of many of the first men of the 
 kingdom, and whose writings are, let me say it, in many respects, 
 manifestly tinged by the tone of thought prevalent among his 
 entertainers. If such things be revived it is not my act, it is 
 that of those who expect us to ignore all history, and acquiesce in 
 the statement that it is " unjust to refer the difficulties of the 
 Irish land question to the influence of the owners of property," and 
 that the serfdom of the Irish people originated in the refusal of 
 England to allow us to export our cloth. 
 
 confirmed by a report given us by Arthur Young of a conversation which he had with 
 Lord Chief Baron Foster at his residence at Collon. 
 
 " In conversation upon the Popery laws, I expressed my surprise at their severity : 
 he said they were severe in the letter, but were never executed. It is rarely or never 
 (he knew no instance) that a Protestant discoverer gets a lease by proving the lands 
 let under two-thirds of their value to a Papist. There are severe penalties on carrying 
 arms or reading Mass ; but the first is never executed, except for poaching (which I 
 have heard), and as to the other, mass houses are to be seen everywhere: there is 
 one in his own town. His lordship did justice to the merits of the Roman Catholics, 
 by observing that they were in general a very sober, honest, and industrious people. 
 This account of the laws against them brought to my mind an admirable expression 
 of Mr. Burke's in the English House of Commons, Connivance is the relaxation 
 of slavery, not the definition of liberty."- — Young's Tour in Ireland, Vol. ii., 
 p. 151. 
 
 * Post. 
 
66 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 " A long series of oppressions, aided by many very ill judged laws, 
 have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, 
 and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission ; speaking 
 a language that is despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and 
 being disarmed, the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in 
 the bosom of written liberty. Landlords that have resided much abroad 
 are usually humane in their ideas, but the habit of tyranny naturally 
 contracts the mind, so that even in this polished age there are instances 
 of a severe carriage towards the poor, which is quite unknown in England. 
 
 " A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, 
 labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but 
 unlimited submission. Disrespect or anything tending towards sauciness 
 he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect 
 security, a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his 
 hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in 
 a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence 
 have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves 
 honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their 
 masters ; * a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which 
 such people must live. Nay, I have heard anecdotes of the lives of 
 people being made free with without any apprehension of the justice of a 
 jury. But let it not be imagined that this is common ; formerly it hap- 
 pened every day, but law gains ground. It must strike the most careless 
 traveller to see whole strings of cars whipt into a ditch by a gentleman's 
 footman to make way for his carriage ; if they are overturned or broken 
 in pieces, no matter, it is taken in patience ; were they to complain they 
 would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very 
 much in the hands of justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn 
 from the most illiberal class in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges a 
 complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chuses to call himself 
 a gentlemen, and the justice issues out a summons for his appearance, it 
 is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out. Where manners 
 are in conspiracy against law, to whom are the oppressed people to have 
 recourse ? It is a fact that a poor man having a contest with a gentle- 
 man must — but I am talking nonsense, they know their situation too well 
 to think of it ; they can have no defence but by means of protection from 
 
 * I am sure that this representation if applied to the manners of the people generally 
 was untrue. This does not affect the testimony of Arthur Young. It was the statement 
 to him " of landlords of conseqdence." The more mistaken they were the more 
 fearful is the testimony to the terrible vassalage in which " their cottars" were held. 
 Even in our own day we have seen the terrors of serfdom almost as cruelly crush 
 down the feelings, upon the existence of which in our peasantry we take most pride. 
 No one will deny this who will read the dismal story of the murder of the poor outcast 
 boy. Narrative in a subsequent page. 
 
 After all, while human nature is what it is, to give absolute power is to insure its 
 abuse. 
 
 Not two years ago I was present when those who filled a crowded court listened with 
 admiration to language even of vehement indignation, in which, from the judgment 
 seat, and in a charge to a jury, an Irish judge denounced a trafficking in landlord 
 influence for purposes as base as any that could justify the statements of Arthur 
 Young. Those who heard the almost impassioned charge of Judge Keogh, to which 
 I refer, have not, I am sure, forgotten, and will not easily forget it. 
 
TESTIMONY OF ARTHUR YOUNG. 67 
 
 one gentleman against another, who probably protects his vassal as he 
 would the sheep he intends to eat. 
 
 " The colours of this picture are not charged. To assert that all these 
 cases are common, would be an exaggeration ; but to say that an 
 unfeeling landlord will do all this with impunity is to keep strictly to 
 truth : and what is liberty but a farce, and a jest if its blessings are 
 received as the favour of kindness and humanity, instead of being the 
 inheritance of right ? "* 
 
 Subjects such as these were among those with which " I dealt 
 gently, very gently," f in the Plea for the Celtic Race, and on 
 which I was content to " assume that every Irishman was at least 
 moderately acquainted with the history of his country." J 
 
 When we speak of the agricultural population of Ireland during 
 that period between the revolution and 1782, which might, in one 
 sense, be called the dark age of Ireland, it is absolutely necessary 
 to distinguish between very different classes of persons connected 
 with the land. 
 
 There were, first, the owners of the soil, supposed by law to be 
 always Protestants, and who, almost universally, were so. Many 
 of these owners resided on their own estates, and dealt directly 
 with their tenantry. Many of them were absentees, whose agents 
 were, in truth, the lords of the soil. Some of these latter, and some 
 even of the resident gentry, let their lands to a class of persons 
 known as middlemen, who, holding considerable portions of lands 
 re-let them at a considerable increase of rent. These middlemen 
 were very often mere rent farmers, taking land already occupied 
 by tenants for the very purpose of making profit by the collec- 
 tion of the rents. In many instances they were persons who 
 had acquired leasehold interests when the value of Irish pro- 
 perty was not understood, and who, in the course of some years, 
 found that their leasehold interest while it lasted was, in fact, 
 equivalent to a very valuable estate in the land. They preferred 
 being landed proprietors to being farmers ; and they relet their lands 
 very often in small portions. In very many cases the grants were 
 for so a long period, and the rents reserved so small, that these 
 persons were the proprietors; the owner in fee a mere rent charger 
 on the estate. Many even of the gentry — the " county families" of 
 Ireland — held their properties on a tenure peculiar to this country, 
 that of leases for lives, with a covenant for perpetual renewal, an 
 ingenious contrivance to give to the grantee a perpetual interest 
 in the land, while the chief lord still retained the feudal remedies 
 and powers which the law then conferred only on an owner who 
 retained a reversion in his hands. 
 
 I shall presently have occasion to refer again to these interests 
 which were so often interposed between the chief lord and the 
 
 * Young's Tour in Ireland. Vol. ii., part ii., p. 51. f Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 95. 
 X Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 7. 
 
68 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 occupiers of the soil. But upon the soil itself were located three 
 classes of persons in a very different position from each other. 
 
 There were, first, the Protestant freeholders, holding farms often of 
 very considerable size and at a very moderate rent, cultivating these 
 farms themselves, almost universally holding leases for three lives, 
 generally with the addition of thirty-one years, either concurrent or 
 in reversion. These persons formed a body of rich independent and 
 substantial farmers ; and with the Protestant gentry and with the 
 Protestant traders and artizans they constituted that which in the 
 history of the last century is known as the Irish nation. Upon this 
 tenantry no oppression ever was — none ever could be practised. 
 The English tenantry did not hold their lands upon terms as in- 
 dependent or as easy, and so far as they were concerned the relation 
 of landlord and tenant was in a state, perhaps, more satisfactory 
 than in any country in Europe. 
 
 Protestant tenants in many parts of Ireland could not be found 
 numerous enough to occupy all the land. We know in the history 
 of landed property in Ireland of more than one instance in which 
 the attempt was made to supply the deficiency by importing German 
 and other foreign settlers. If land was to be cultivated at all it 
 must be cultivated by heretic hands, " Popish spade and scythe" 
 must dig and cut the soil and the crops of the " Sassenach " pro- 
 prietor. From this necessity arose the indulgence in the penal laws, 
 that Papists might have leases not exceeding thirty- one years and 
 at not less than two-thirds of the letting value. To the very same 
 necessity we may trace the universal non- enforcement of the worst 
 atrocities of these laws. Accordingly a considerable number of 
 Roman Catholic farmers were put in possession of large farms, which 
 they cultivated themselves, holding by leases for the thirty-one years 
 which the law allowed. They also held their lands at moderate 
 rents, sometimes below the legal limit of two-thirds of the full value, 
 and were often independent and substantial cultivators of the soil. 
 
 Their position was not, and it could not be, as good as that 
 of the Protestant of the same class. The very law which admitted 
 them to tenure declared that their tenure must not be as beneficial 
 as that of their Protestant neighbours. It must not exeeed a 
 certain term, and it must not be below a certain rent. The rent of 
 the Catholic farmer was higher than that of the Protestant ; and 
 this absurd and mischievous distinction was actually the creation of 
 the law. This was not all. The Catholic could only exercise his 
 religion by sufferance and connivance. Mass houses and priests 
 were common, but it was felony by law for a priest to say mass. 
 For the non-execution of the law the Catholic was indebted to the 
 forbearance of his Protestant landlord and neighbours. It is an 
 entire mistake in Irish history to suppose that the laws which 
 actually prohibited the exercise of the Catholic religion were 
 enforced. They were — as the power of eviction is now — the sword 
 
THE TENANTRY AND THE SERFS. 69 
 
 suspended over the serf, the lash kept hanging up to terrify the 
 slave. It would be even a mistake to say that between Catholics 
 and Protestants a very large amount of good feeling and good fellow- 
 ship did not exist. Yet the Catholic farmer, even the gentleman 
 farmer, belonged to a degraded caste. He was generally the 
 object of distrust and suspicion. He was excluded from the common 
 rights of citizenship by the denial of the elective franchise, perhaps 
 even more so by the law which prohibited him from serving on 
 juries. His children could not aspire to any of the learned profes- 
 sions, nor even enter into trade upon terms as advantageous as 
 their Protestant neighbours. Roman Catholics, even of the better 
 class, were prohibited from bearing arms, and the legal prohibition 
 was sometimes enforced when the jealousy of a Protestant sportsman 
 was excited by seeing a Papist carrying a fowling piece in pursuit 
 of game. Their tenure of thirty-one years was shorter than that 
 which Protestants generally enjoyed. It was denounced by every 
 one — by statesman and practical agriculturist, by Edmund Burke, 
 and Arthur Young — as one utterly inadequate to give a real interest 
 in the improvement of the soil. Yet after all they held an interest 
 in their lands which gave them a certain amount of independence. 
 They accumulated wealth even by the industry which they could 
 venture to expend on a thirty one years' lease ; and they have been 
 mainly the creators of that great Roman Catholic community which 
 has at last vindicated its place in the Irish nation. 
 
 Below these two classes lay the great mass of the Irish people. 
 Beside, or even on, these large farms of prosperous tenants, that 
 people were living, an inferior and degraded caste. Driven out from 
 their land by the Cromwellian or Williamite persecutions, in some 
 instances they actually " fled to the mountains," and settled in 
 miserable colonies of their own. Of course the landlord followed 
 them and exacted not a rent but a tribute. From these mountain 
 regions they could be seen at seed time or harvest, descending to the 
 towns — shaggy and ill-clad savages, exhibiting themselves on 
 Sundays at the market- cross, carrying their mattock or their reaping 
 hook, and waiting to be hired of any farmer who wanted extra 
 labour on his farm. 
 
 Some few of them were admitted as cottier labourers upon the 
 large farms, giving their labour for a house, a potato garden, and a 
 few pence a day. Some were clustered as cottier tenants in 
 miserable assemblies of cabins called towns or villages, paying for a 
 few fields exorbitant rents, "squeezed out of their very blood and 
 vitals." More of them obtained small holdings, frequently on the 
 lands of middlemen, generally with leases, but always at exorbitant 
 rents and on slavish conditions.* These rents were throughout 
 
 * Mr. Wakefield, who wrote his View of Ireland in 1812, points out that the leases 
 of these miserable tenants were in fact instruments by which the lessees were legally 
 bound as serfs and " bondsmen " to their lords. 
 
70 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 three-fourths of Ireland invariably exacted, whether by landlords 
 or middlemen, upon the cottier lettings, and upon those of 
 the smaller farms. Then as now the people who wanted them 
 were ready to promise any rent. Then as now they had to 
 get the bit of ground or go a-begging. There was an interval 
 so complete between them and the men who could hold or 
 cultivate large farms that they did not interfere with each 
 other. There were many parts of Ireland on which, although the 
 vast majority of the occupiers of the soil were serfs, the larger 
 portion of the surface of the soil was occupied by independent 
 men. The anxiety, indeed, of the landlords in some parts of the 
 country appears to have been then as now to get rid of such a 
 tenantry. In Tipperary, and, I suspect, in other parts of the 
 country, they were unquestionably driven out of their little holdings 
 to make room for vast sheep farms ; and there is the strongest 
 reason for believing that the anxiety of the landowners for the 
 freedom of the woollen trade originated in the feeling that it would 
 enable them to carry out this object without loss, or even with 
 profit to themselves. 
 
 But, whatever may have been the condition of the upper tenantry; 
 in whatever proportion, in any district, the land may have been 
 apportioned to them, beyond all question the mass of the people 
 were settled on the soil in a miserable state of serfdom and 
 degradation; and Ireland presented a state of things without parallel 
 in any nation. There were prosperous and independent tenants, 
 long leases, and moderate rents. There were occupiers of the soil 
 ground down by oppression, with uncertain tenures, and paying 
 rents that scarcely left them enough to sustain a miserable existence. 
 The latter was the condition of the great mass of the people. It 
 was actually made more miserable by the presence of the free and 
 independent occupier under whom, or beside whom, they worked 
 on in their hopeless misery and degradation. 
 
 It was not possible for such a state of things to last for 
 ever. Those, who were ready to give exhorbitant rents, were in 
 the end almost sure to get the land. The slave labour was 
 preferred to the free.* The class of independent occupiers gradually 
 disappeared. It was of course the trade of the " middleman " 
 to accept the tenant from whom he could extract the highest rent. 
 It was the business of the agent of the absentee to swell, by 
 any means, the remittance, the amount of which was in the eyes of his 
 principal the only measure of his good or bad management of the 
 estate. The Protestant freeholders who held large farms were 
 gradually tempted to underlet them at exhorbitant rents. The 
 chief landlords, as leases fell in, did the same. The serfs who had 
 
 * Arthur Young mentions that even when he wrote the most wretched of cottier 
 tenants were ready and anxious to get more land. 
 
THE SERFS OCCUPY THE SOIL. 71 
 
 been originally scattered throughout the country, gradually overran 
 it. Among the causes which led to this result there is one that 
 must not be forgotten. The habit of dealing with wretched 
 dependents made the landed proprietors unfit to deal with those who 
 would not submit to the same usage. Men whose spirit was 
 not broken by persecution and a sense of inferiority, would not 
 brook the treatment of serfs. The habits of imperious command 
 overcame the sympathies of caste and of religious creed. There is 
 abundant evidence that tenants of the dominant caste have given up 
 their farms and been replaced by others, sometimes because they 
 would not undertake a higher rent, frequently because their 
 independence did not suit a landlord or an agent who had learned 
 to enjoy the mean luxury of trampling upon slaves. 
 
 In the presence of serfdom an occupation by freemen could scarcely 
 last. In many districts of the country the prosperous Protestant 
 freeholders or Catholic leaseholders were displaced by tenants of an 
 inferior grade, holding indeed by leases, but in lesser portions, at 
 far higher rents. There is scarcely any part of Munster in which 
 you cannot find in the large and ruined farm mansion — it was more 
 than a farm house — in the broken gates and tumbled down out 
 offices, the traces of this process. This is the subdivision of farms 
 which is so much complained of. It was the inevitable result of 
 keeping an enslaved population upon the soil. It was impossible per- 
 manently to combine the degradation of the great mass of the people 
 with the continuance of a higher and better class of occupiers on 
 the land. This is a subject upon which a volume might easily be 
 written. The process may have been accelerated by the premium 
 in the shape of political importance which the enfranchisement of 
 the Catholics offered to the proprietors, who wished to multiply small 
 freeholds on his estate. But after all it was slower than is generally 
 supposed. An independent tenantry lingered for some time. It 
 was not until some years after the Union that the degradation of 
 the Irish occupier was complete. 
 
 It is only by bearing in mind the peculiarities of the social con- 
 dition of Ireland that we can intelligently estimate any accounts 
 that have come down to us of Ireland's condition. We must 
 remember that accounts either of prosperity or misery which are 
 perfectly true as applied to one class of the people or of the tenantry, 
 would be perfectly untrue as applied to another. Even Arthur 
 Young, whose description of the miserable state of the degradation 
 of the Irish peasantry I have quoted, had been, throughout the 
 records of his tour, giving descriptions in every part of Ireland, 
 except Ulster, of prosperous and well-to-do tenants holding by 
 long leases and at moderate rents. 
 
 Whatever was the position of the upper portion of the tenantry, 
 there is abundant evidence of the miserable condition to which the 
 great mass of the people were reduced. Let us take the period 
 
72 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 from the Revolution to the period when Young wrote, just on the 
 eve of Irish independence. 
 
 I have pointed out that it cannot be said that during this period 
 an excessive population created an undue competition for land. 
 Throughout the greater portions of that period the population of 
 Ireland was little more than half what it is now. In the days of Swift 
 it was little more than one-third. We shall presently see that with the 
 prosperity or depression of the manufacturing industry of the country, 
 this miserable peasantry had only one connexion — their poverty effec- 
 tually debarred them from being consumers of manufactured goods. 
 It is impossible to read ever so carelessly the records of the 18th 
 century and not see that the wretchedness of the Irish people is 
 wholly and solely to be traced to the state of serfdom in which the 
 great mass of the occupiers of the soil were held. 
 
 Although it be correct to say that, during that century, the com- 
 plaints were generally of exorbitant rents, rather than of evictions, 
 yet the latter were, even then, the source of misery and even outrage. 
 About the period of the accession of George III. " The Levellers" 
 disturbed the peace of Tipperary. At a later period " The Hearts of 
 Oak," and " The Hearts of Steel," convulsed some of the northern 
 counties. Still later, the Whiteboys, or Right Boys, threw 
 Munster into a state of open insurrection. The complaints every- 
 where were the same. It can scarcely be forgotten that it was 
 with reference to the same period that Goldsmith described his 
 Irish " Deserted Village," and pointed out, in lines so often quoted, 
 the ills of the State in which 
 
 " Wealth accumulates and men decay." 
 
 Unhappily, it is in the history of crime and criminal conspiracies 
 that the grievances of the Irish people are most clearly to be read. 
 Leaving aside for a moment the effect of the penal laws, not only 
 in crushing down the native population as occupiers of the soil, but 
 also in excluding them from manufacturing industry, let me very 
 briefly state throughout the eighteenth century the history of Irish 
 agrarian crime. 
 
 In the century which elapsed between the Revolution and the 
 Union, Ireland was agitated by local insurrections, some of them 
 of a formidable character. They, every one, originated in oppres- 
 sions practised on the occupiers of lands. The first of these dis- 
 turbances which has attracted the attention of those who have 
 written on Irish history — at present I can deal with none other — 
 was that created in Tipperary by persons calling themselves 
 " Levellers," about the period of the accession of George III. The 
 grievances of which they complained were, the turning of arable 
 land into sheep walks, " and the consequent expulsion of great 
 numbers of labouring peasants;" "while those who remained 
 unexpelled had no means of paying exorbitant rents." By these 
 
LEVELLERS AND WHITEBOYS. 73 
 
 expulsions were formed the monster farms in that county, the 
 gigantic dimensions of which excited the wonder and admiration of 
 Arthur Young. The misery of the poor people was brought to 
 a climax by the illegal enclosure of the commons, upon which the 
 right of commonage had been granted them with their holdings, 
 for which they paid exorbitant rents. Their fury was first directed 
 against the fences which bounded the fields of the enclosed com- 
 mons ; and their violent destruction of these fences gave them the 
 name of " Levellers." 
 
 The atrocities of these insurgents are said to have been great. 
 They probably were so. The truculence of every servile insurrection 
 is proportioned to the cruelties with which the slaves have been 
 treated. But at the same time we must remember that we have 
 only the accounts of the upper classes, and a very little experience 
 must lead any one to distrust the picture drawn of Irish rebels by 
 the frights and the passions of these classes. The fury of religious 
 and political fanaticism was directed against the levellers, by tales 
 implicitly believed, which represented their movement as the creation 
 of a plot of Jesuits and Jacobites, the undoubted work of the Pope 
 and the Pretender. The judges who were sent down to try the 
 peasants accused of participation in these outrages, had to interfere 
 between the blind fury of partizan juries and the accused; and 
 Chief Justice Aston, who presided at the special commission at 
 Clonmel, was met, as he left the town, by crowds, who knelt on the 
 road, praying blessings on him for his impartiality. 
 
 Previous to this period we find in Irish histories no notice of 
 agrarian outrages. It may be that they existed, but were not of 
 magnitude enough to attract notice. The spirit of the oppressed 
 people may have only then begun to rise in a reaction against the 
 cruelty of the penal laws ; or possibly when the last hope of political 
 relief appeared to expire with the downfall of the cause of the 
 Stuarts, the despair of the peasantry prompted the wildness of 
 these desultory attempts. 
 
 The rising of the Levellers was, beyond all question, caused 
 by the oppression of the landowners ; and from that year to the 
 present the very same cause has produced all the peasant insurrec- 
 tions which, under many a fantastic name and symbol, have per- 
 petuated in Ireland the chronic condition of suppressed civil war. 
 
 In Munster " The Levellers" were followed, at no distant interval, 
 by " The Whiteboys," insurgents whose fantastic designation has 
 become a household word in the legal history of Irish crime. They 
 had the questionable honour of giving their name to laws of 
 Draconian severity, still in force in Ireland, known as the Whiteboy 
 acts. Their name was originally derived from the white shirts which 
 they placed over their dress when they went upon their nightly expe- 
 ditions of vengeance or marauding. These insurgents spread widely 
 through Leinster. They extended into Carlow, Kilkenny, Queen's 
 
74 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 County, and even to Wexford. Dr. Troy, then Catholic Bishop 
 of Ossory, in vain delivered a pastoral, in which he denied the 
 rites of the Church to any one engaged in the illegal association. 
 It is stated that this pastoral threatened that no service of the 
 church should ever be performed for any of them after their death. 
 The terrors of this world were brought to bear on them as well as 
 those of the next. The severities which had been visited on the 
 Levellers were of course resorted to again, and Special Commissions 
 and gibbets vindicated against the crimes of the oppressed people 
 the supremacy of the law. 
 
 In 1786 an armed association, starting with the name of " Right 
 Boys," disturbed the counties of Kerry and Cork. Originally they 
 assailed the tithe exactions of the clergy, and while they did so the 
 gentry were suspected of, at least, conniving at their movements. 
 They very soon began to regulate the wages of labour, and to fix 
 a limit to the rent of land. 
 
 Mr. Fitzgibbon, who was then Attorney-General, declared, in 
 his place in the House of Commons, that this insurrection was 
 owing solely to the cruelty of the landlords, and that " the 
 peasantry of Munster, bound to pay six pounds an acre in rent, and 
 to work for their landlords at five pence a day, could no longer 
 exist under the wretchedness they endured." 
 
 In a debate upon the bill for the suppression of these disturb- 
 ances he used these remarkable words : — 
 
 " I am well acquainted with the province of Munster, and I know that 
 it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable 
 peasantry of that province. I know that the unhappy tenantry are 
 ground to powder by relentless landlords. I know that far from being 
 able to give the clergy their just dues, they had not food or raiment for 
 themselves ; the landlord grasps the whole. And sorry I am to add, that 
 not satisfied with present extortion, some landlords have been so base as 
 to instigate the insurgents to rob the clergy, not in order to alleviate the 
 distresses of the tenantry, but that they might add the clergy's share to 
 the cruel rack rents already paid. . . The poor people of Munster live 
 in a more abject state of poverty than human nature can be supposed 
 able to bear ; their miseries are intolerable." * 
 
 This statement, it will be remembered, was made under the 
 responsibility which attaches to official station. It was the deli- 
 berate assertion of the Irish Attorney-General, made in the Irish 
 House of Commons, an assembly almost exclusively composed of 
 the Irish gentry, in the presence of the representatives of the very 
 persons whose oppression of their tenantry he described. 
 
 Fully to understand these references we must remember two 
 incidents connected with the tenure of Irish land. 
 
 In many, indeed most, districts of Ireland an instrument of small 
 
 * Irish Parliamentary Debates — Speech of Mr. Fitzgibbon, Attorney-General, 1787. 
 
 
TITHES AND DUTY DAYS. 75 
 
 but yet very galling oppression was found in a reservation almost 
 universal in Irish leases, of " duty days." Each tenant, in addition to 
 his rent, was bound by his lease to work for the landlord a certain 
 number of days in the year. In the larger farms the obligation 
 extended to supplying horses. The result naturally was, that the 
 landlord demanded this labour exactly at the time when it was 
 most wanted — that is, at the very time when it was most required 
 on the tenant's own farm. But the evil did not end even there. Those 
 who were bound to this duty work were often compelled to exceed 
 the stipulated number of days. Some miserably low remuneration, 
 more in the nature of a gratuity than of wages, was given them 
 for this extended labour. In many instances their leases bound 
 them to work at some low rate whenever they were called on. It 
 was to this Lord Clare alluded when he stated, as one of the 
 grievances of the Munster Whiteboys, that the peasantry were 
 compelled to work for fivepence a day.* 
 
 It must be remembered that throughout all this period the 
 miserable peasantry were subject to another exaction, less, indeed, 
 in its amount, but far more harassing, or at least vexatious, in its 
 attendant circumstances than that of rent. The Protestant clergy- 
 man was entitled by law to the tenth of the produce, and this 
 throughout the south of Ireland, was claimed not only from sub- 
 stantial farmers, but from wretched cottiers struggling for the 
 means of life. The tithe of potatoes, not levied in the north, was 
 enforced from the potato garden attached to the hovel of the ill-fed 
 labourer in the South ; and those who had not fuel to supply the 
 wants of the Winter were compelled to compound with the parson 
 for every tenth creel of the turf which they cut and dried on the 
 
 * Arthur Young thus described the system which prevailed in Kerry in 1776 : — 
 "The state of the poor in the whole county of Kerry represented as exceedingly 
 miserable, and, owing to the conduct of men of property, who are apt to lay the blame 
 on what they call land pirates, or men who offer the highest rent, and who, in order to 
 pay this rent, must, and do redet all the cabbin lands at an extravagant rise, which is 
 assigning over all the cabbins to be devoured by one farmer. The cottars on a farm 
 cannot go from one to another, in order to find a good master as in England: for all 
 the country is in the same system, and no redress to be found. Such being the case, 
 the farmers are enabled to charge the price of labour as low as they please, and rate the 
 land as high as they like. This is an evil which oppresses them cruelly, and certainly 
 has its origin in its landlords, when they set their farms, setting all the cabbins with them 
 instead of keeping them tenants to themselves. The oppression is, the farmer valuing 
 the labour of the poor at 4d. or 5d. a day, and paying that in land rated much above 
 its value. Owing to this, the poor are depressed ; they live upon potatoes and sour 
 milk, and the poorest of them only salt and water to them, with now and then a 
 herring. Their milk is bought ; for very few keep cows, scarce any pigs, but a few 
 poultry. Their circumstances are incomparably worse than they were 20 years ago ; 
 for they had all cows, but then they wore no linen : all now have a little flax. To 
 these evils have been owing emigrations, which have been cosiderable." — Young's Tour, 
 Vol. ii. 
 
 We shall see presently that this extortion was carried far beyond anything stated by 
 Young. In many leases the tenants were bound to work for the landlord whenever 
 called on at a miserably low rate, and this has been continued down to recent 
 times. 
 
76 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 bog, the right of turbary over which, together with their potato 
 garden, very often constituted their whole possessions upon earth.* 
 
 The system that required the husbandman to set aside the tenth 
 sheaf as an offering to pious purposes was never intended for such a 
 state of things as this. The exaction had become more intolerable 
 since the landowners of Ireland had determined, by a vote in the 
 House of Commons, that no tithe should be paid for pasture lands, 
 and enforced this decree by resolving that any person who took 
 part, even professionally, in enforcing that claim in a court of 
 justice, should be committed to prison for a breach of the privilege 
 of the House of Commons. 
 
 The exemption of the pasture lands of the rich threw the clergy- 
 man more for his living upon the potato gardens of the poor. It 
 may have been true, as stated by Lord Clare, that the actual 
 receipts of the clergy fell short, very far short, of their legal rights. 
 But this leniency was chiefly manifested in compositions with the 
 more opulent of the cultivators of the soil. Upon the poor the 
 system pressed with very disproportionate severity. There were 
 middlemen of tithes as well as of rents. And tithe farmers, tithe 
 " viewers," tithe bailiffs, and tithe proctors, constituted a goodly 
 array of ecclesiastical oppressors, who frequently led the way to the 
 miseries of a suit in the Bishops' Court for " the subtraction of 
 tithes." 
 
 This exaction occupied, it may well be thought, a place in the list 
 of grievances which all these disturbances attempted to redress. 
 A local tithe oppression gave the first occasion for the Munster 
 outbreak in 1786.f It was even said that the landowners of the 
 district connived at, if they did not actually encourage, the move- 
 ment against the clergy, whom they regarded as taking away some 
 of the earnings of the peasants which they would otherwise have 
 
 * At a period nearly thirty years later Wakefield tells us, with just indignation, of 
 clergymen who exacted tithes from gleaners; for whom the superstition or the religion 
 of the Irish cultivators of all creeds was wont to leave, after the example of Boaz, and 
 in accordance with Scripture precept, some stray ears of corn scattered on the field. 
 I cannot but hope that this is a mistake. 
 
 1* There was something very "unsectarian " in the mode in which many of the in- 
 surgents dealt with ecclesiastical affairs. The Right Boys in Kerry claimed the 
 nomination of Protestant curates and Protestant parish clerks. The " Threshers " in 
 Roscommon claimed the right of regulating the amount both " of tithes and of priests' 
 dues." In some instances they regulated the morals of the Protestant clergy in cases 
 in which the Bishops' Court would seem sadly to have neglected that duty. 
 
 Mr. Curran said, in the Irish House of Commons, when opposing the Right Boy Bill, 
 "I will mention a cirumstance of disturbance in that very diocese from which the 
 publication so much reprobated issued, in a parish worth 800 or 900 pounds a year, 
 which would make the House blush. It was a rising to banish a seraglio kept by a 
 rector who received near a thousand pounds a year from the Church, and to reinstate 
 the unoffending mother and innocent children in their mansion." — Irish Parliamentary 
 Debates. February 27th, 1787. 
 
 Among many strange objects which have been contemplated by the lawless societies 
 of more recent times, they have in some instances undertaken to regulate the moral 
 conduct of the gentry. — Mortimer O'Sullivan — Byeways of Irish History. 
 
PROTESTANT REBELLION — HEARTS OP OAK AND STEEL. 77 
 
 seized on themselves. The tithe owners and the landlords were 
 rival claimants for the privilege of fleecing the people. Both rent 
 and tithe were the imposts of confiscation levied without mercy 
 upon a conquered race. And no serfdom in any European nation 
 brought men down to the wretchedness of the Munster occupier 
 of the soil, paying to the landlord the utmost rack rent which that 
 landlord thought he could squeeze " out of his blood and vitals," 
 obliged to hand over to the tithe proctor a portion of the little that 
 was left — and carried off from his own miserable industry to do 
 " duty work" for his landlord, frequently without any payment, in the 
 most favourable cases for the wretched pittance of fivepence a day. 
 
 Predial disturbances were not confined to the Catholic peasantry 
 of Munster. The most formidable occurred among the Protestant 
 population of the North. At the same time that the Levellers and 
 Whiteboys disturbed Tipperary, the Hearts of Oak, in 1763, occupied, 
 in tumultuous bodies, first the county of Armagh, and afterwards the 
 counties of Tyrone, Fermanagh, and Deny. They insisted on re- 
 gulating the amount of tithe, and of rent, especially the rent of turf 
 bogs. Their chief grievance was an oppressive impost connected 
 with that extraordinary system of local taxation administered under 
 laws known as the Grand Jury Laws — a system by which an 
 inquest, selected by the sheriff for the purposes of aiding in the 
 administration of criminal justice, imposed an indefinite amount of 
 taxation, for the repair of roads, and other fiscal purposes, upon the 
 occupiers of land. 
 
 " The Hearts of Oak" were Protestant. They wore the English 
 emblem, the oak leaf, in their hats, and swore men to be true " to 
 the King and the Hearts of Oak." They were followed, a few 
 years later, by " The Hearts of Steel." This insurrection assumed 
 far more formidable dimensions. It originated in an attempt to 
 enforce exorbitant renewal fines on the dropping of leases, on the 
 estate of the Marquis of Donegall. It began in the county of 
 Antrim, but a large proportion of the population of all Ulster joined 
 in the revolt. Thousands of armed men marched into Belfast, and 
 forced, without bloodshed, from the military commander, the 
 surrender of one of their confederates, who had been committed to 
 the gaol. A large military force was sent into the disturbed dis- 
 tricts ; the ringleaders were seized and put on their trial for high 
 treason. Northern juries, unlike those of Tipperary, sympathized 
 with the insurgents, and refused to bring in verdicts of conviction. 
 A statute was passed authorizing the trial in other counties of per- 
 sons accused of the insurrectionary movements. Trials in Dublin 
 were attended with the same result as in Antrim. Protestant juries 
 everywhere sympathized with Protestant insurgents. Popular feeling 
 forced the repeal of the law, changing the venue when it had been 
 not two years in force. It was passed in the month of March, 1 772, 
 and repealed in December, 1773. When these things happened in 
 
78 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 the case of a Protestant agrarian .insurrection, we can, perhaps, 
 understand how the tenant right of Ulster has been preserved.* 
 
 * The spirit of "The Hearts of Steel " is not yet extinct in Ulster, at least it was not 
 twenty years ago. From the Report of the Committee of the Repeal Association on 
 Tenant Right, I borrow some extracts from the evidence taken before the Devon 
 Commission in 1845 : — 
 
 " 82. Do you consider, that if the tenant right was abolished in the district with which 
 you are acquainted, that it would lead to outrage ?—[Mr. Orr.] — I have not the least 
 doubt of it, not the slightest." 
 
 "John Andeews, Esq., Agent to Lord Londonderry. 
 
 u 39. With regard to Lord Londonderry's estate, can you state the usual amount of 
 the purchase of the tenant right \ — Yes, I can. I would give as the average £10 the 
 English acre ; the tenant right will sell for that with or without a lease. 
 
 " 40. Is there much difference ? — Very little ; I would say almost none. 
 
 "42. Do you think that curtailment of the tenant right can be carried out without 
 danger to tne peace of the country ? — I am sure it cannot. You would have a 
 Tipperary in Down, if it was attempted to be carried out." 
 
 "Rev. John Lynch, Co. Antrim, 
 
 " 14. You spoke of the landlords beginning to question the tenant right ; do you 
 think if landlords were to attempt to abolish the tenant right, that it would lead to any 
 disturbance in the country ? — I have not the least doubt of it. 
 
 "Rev. James Poeter, Presbyterian Minister, County Down. 
 
 " 33. What effect has the holding without lease on the condition of the tenants, the 
 improvement of the farms, or the rent ? — On those estates where what is called tenant 
 right amongst us is yet allowed, the want of a lease does us little injury ; but where 
 that is beginning to be altered, it has paralyzed real improvements every where. 
 
 " 34. Are there many estates upon which the tenant right is not allowed ? — There is no 
 property where it is entirely denied. There were just three instances in which there 
 were agrarian outrages committed since I settled in this country, and these originated 
 in the total denial of the tenant right ; that was a denial on the part of the landlord of 
 the tenant right. It is right to say those were aggressions of Protestants. The 
 landlords yielded the claim of tenant right, to the popular feelings in those three cases. 
 
 " 37. In those cases where the tenant right was disallowed, was it an attempt on the 
 part of the landlord to put the purchase-money into his own pocket, or to charge an 
 additional rent? — An attempt was made to dispossess the owner, without allowing him 
 to sell, which has been invariably the practice throughout our own country, and we 
 were greatly scandalized by it. In fact, armies were brought in, and honest men were 
 involved, and surprised at the violence and murderous dispositions manifested, when 
 parties were excited about it ; for I ought to state, perhaps, that every particle of 
 improvement, every stone upon my farm, and every slate, was put together by myself, 
 and every drain was made, and every tree planted out of my own pocket, and I did it 
 with great confidence ; because, when I purchased, I paid a very high value for what 
 I got, and I considered that I was to have the same right to remuneration." 
 
 "Robert Smith, Esq., Cleric of Peace, Co. Monaglian. 
 
 "81. Where the tenant is ejected for non-payment of rent by his landlord, is he 
 allowed to sell his tenant right ? — I am not aware that any such right of sale is recog- 
 nized by the landlord ; but it is generally known throughout the country that an 
 agrarian law exists, such as to intimidate any of the lower class of farmers from taking 
 land from which a tenant has been ejected for any cause without the person coming in 
 making compensation to the party turned out. 
 
 " 82. That applies to the tenant going out, under all circumstances ? — I think so." 
 
 John Lindsay, Esq., Banbridge, Co. Down. 
 
 " 39. Is the tenant right, or sale of good-will, prevalent in the district; and to whom 
 is the purchase-money paid ? — It prevails in the district; the tenants who have held the 
 
TENANT RIGHT VINDICATED. 79 
 
 On the repeal of the law convictions were obtained in the 
 northern counties. Some of the leaders of the revolt were 
 executed. The Marquis of Donegall renewed the leases without 
 the fines, and no Ulster landlord ventured to attempt a similar 
 exaction. The oppressive road tax was abolished. " The insurrec- 
 tion was quelled, but its baneful effects long remained. So great 
 and wide was the discontent, that many thousands of Protestants 
 emigrated from these parts of Ulster to the American settlements, 
 where they appeared in arms against the British Government, and 
 contributed powerfully, by their zeal and valour, to the separation of 
 the American Colonies from the Empire of Great Britain" * 
 
 England has already felt the mischief of raising up, even on the 
 other side of the Atlantic, a hostile community of exiled Irishmen. 
 
 With the suppression, or the success, of the Hearts of Steel 
 ceased all Protestant disturbances in Ulster directed against 
 
 land think they have aright to dispose of the land when they are going to leave it; he 
 thinks always he has a right to do so; and very reasonably, I think. 
 
 " 40. Is it generally recognized by the landlords ? — Some recognize it, and some do 
 not; but where they do not recognize it, and set their face against it, they are very 
 generally defeated, and have been obliged to do it, after risking life, in some instances, 
 in my neighbourhood. 
 
 "41. Is it done behind their backs, without their knowing it ? — No; they have even 
 ejected the tenantry. I have known some of them to do it in the parish I live in; one 
 of them put a man out of his farm, and there is no person will take it; he sent down a 
 person to cultivate the farm, and he was sent home again. The people gathered that 
 night and desired him to go home and not come there again; and the man got leave to 
 sell his tenant right afterwards. 
 
 " 42. How long ago is that ? — About three years ago. Something similar happened 
 to a man about two or three miles from my place, last Winter was a year." 
 
 " Mr. Handcock, Lord Lurgan's Agent, Down, Antrim, and Armagh. 
 
 " 38. The landlords are compelled to recognize tenant right, as, in several instances 
 in this neighbourhood, where they have refused to allow tenant right, the in-coming 
 tenant's house has been burned, his cattle houghed, or his crops trodden down by 
 night. The disallowance of tenant right, so far as I know, is always attended with 
 outrage. A landlord cannot even resume possession to himself without paying it. In 
 fact, it is one of the sacred rights of the country, which cannot be touched with 
 impunity ; and if systematic efforts were made amongst the •proprietors of Ulster to invade 
 tenant right, I do not believe there is a force at the disposal of the Horse Guards sufficient 
 to keep the peace of the province ; and when we consider that all the improvements have 
 been effected at the expense of the tenant, it is perfectly right that this tenant right 
 should exist ; his money has been laid out on the faith of compensation in that shape." 
 
 A very distinguished gentleman — one subsequently connected in a professional 
 capacity with the Irish Government — one well acquainted with Ulster — did not 
 hesitate to use this language in a paper read before the Statistical Society of Ireland, 
 in May, 1864. I quote from a paper of Mr. Heron's : — " If another Vico were to pro- 
 phesy on the future of Ireland, he would say :- — ' No insurrection in Ireland will occur 
 until in the progress of the destruction of the rights of the peasantry the tenant 
 right of Ulster shall cease to be recognized. The tenant right of Ulster is worth 
 twenty-four millions of money. If some political seer, gifted with political insight 
 into the future of nations, was to prophesy as to Ireland, he would, in all probability 
 say, the last Irish insurrection will be made by the peasantry of Down and Armagh, 
 upon their tenant right being finally taken away from them.' " — Transactions of the 
 Irish Statistical Society. Paper read by Denis Caulfield Heron, Esq., Q.C. May 18th, 
 1864. 
 
 * Gordons History of Ireland, Vol. ii., p. 249. 
 
80 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 grievances in land. The Peep of Day Boys, who disturbed 
 Armagh in 1795, were a band of Protestant zealots; and their 
 outrages were directed entirely against the Catholic inhabitants. 
 
 In Munster, the insurrection of Catholic serfs was attended with 
 different results. Landlord oppression continued, and the combi- 
 nation of the people continued too. A criminal association, known 
 as that of the " Defenders," professing to be formed to resist the 
 Peep of Day Boys, spread from the border counties of Ulster into 
 the south. It contemplated treasonable objects; some of its leaders 
 suffered the penalties of high treason ; and it finally merged in the 
 attempt at insurrection in the year 1798. Since the Union, the mo- 
 notony of the long roll of criminal confederations is varied only by 
 the strange selection of new names. The Threshers, in the western 
 counties, in 1807. The Whitefeet and Blackfeet, in the 
 Leinster counties, in 1832. The Terry- Alts, in Clare, in 1830. 
 Captain Rock, throughout Munster, in 1822. Captains Starlight 
 and Moonlight, in some obscure localities. The Shanavests and 
 Caravats, in Kilkenny and Tipperary, in 1810. The Ribbonmen, 
 in all places and at all times. These, and " whatever other, were 
 the vagrant names by which tumult delighted to describe itself,"* 
 were all but varying forms of the many-headed but indestructible 
 civil war in which the Irish people have now for a century and 
 seven years maintained their bloody protest against the iniquity of 
 the land tenure by which they were trampled down. 
 
 That which is instructive in this dismal catalogue is, that under 
 many forms and many names, there is everywhere and always one 
 feeling, everywhere abiding and everywhere active — hatred of the 
 oppressions which were practised in connexion with the land. 
 Through the blood-stained records of a century, we trace with a 
 wearying and dreary sameness the working of the one miserable 
 cause of Ireland's misery and crime. In 1822, Lord Glenelg, then 
 Mr. Grant, pointed the attention of the House of Commons to the 
 unvarying character of Irish insurrectionary crime. He traced the 
 unbroken chain which bound together the " Levellers " of 1760 
 with the " Rockites " who were disturbing Munster when he 
 spoke. Nearly another half century has passed, and the links of the 
 same dismal chain are still dragging slowly on. In this remarkable 
 speech, Mr. Grant was dealing with an insurrectionary state of 
 things, to suppress which Parliament had just armed the Government 
 with the extraordinary powers of the Insurrection Act. They were 
 days when it was not a matter of course to suspend the constitution, 
 and the assent to this Act was followed by a motion for a redress of 
 grievances. In his speech on that motion, Mr. Grant referred to the 
 earlier disturbances. Describing the insurrection of the Hearts of 
 Steel, as resembling in its origin the then existing troubles, he said : — 
 
 * Grattan. 
 
IRELAND IN 1822 — SPEECH OF MR. GRANT. 81 
 
 " A disturbance which, in its origin, so far resembles the present (the 
 insurrectionary movement of 1822), that its exciting cause was the re- 
 sentment produced in the minds of a body of tenantry by what they 
 deemed the oppressive conduct of the agent of a great landed proprietor. 
 The evil was, as usual, suppressed by force. 
 
 " With respect to the latter, it is notorious, as I have already intimated 
 that they originated in the discontent and resentment excited in the 
 minds of the tenants of a very extensive property by the proceedings of 
 the agent under whose management that property was placed. This 
 was the proximate cause ; and without reference to any other circum- 
 stances, it is obvious how widely the peace of a county would be affected 
 when a body of tenantry, amounting to 20,000 persons, were thrown into 
 a state of furious agitation 
 
 " Such, sir, has been the series of commotions which for the last sixty 
 years have tormented and desolated Ireland. It is remarkable how 
 nearly they resemble each other in their principal features, though vary- 
 ing unquestionably in the shades of atrocity. It would be easy to quote, 
 with regard to each of them, passages of speeches pronounced in Parlia- 
 ment, or of publications written at the time, which, with slight alterations, 
 would describe them all. The complaints respecting the causes of these 
 calamities are, through this long period, nearly echoes of each other. In 
 truth they all spring immediately from local oppressions, and were 
 diffused and propagated by the operation of the same peculiar circum- 
 stances in the character and condition of the people of Ireland. They 
 were all, in succession, quelled ; but as yet no effort has been made by 
 the Legislature to effect a permanent and satisfactory cure. This very 
 fact, however — I mean the continued recurrence of such events — is itself 
 a proof that there must be something diseased in the system. In every 
 country local oppression may take place, and local commotions may 
 follow. But the question that naturally suggests itself with respect to 
 Ireland is this : — How does it happen that a local commotion becomes so 
 rapidly a general disturbance? How does it happen that the spirit 
 which at first discovers itself in a small district spreads almost instan- 
 taneously over a large territory, and throws, in a very short time, nearly 
 half a province into the most frightful convulsions ? This is the 
 peculiarity of the subject. What is the state of society that admits of 
 such an evil ? Are there no laws — no guards and preservatives of civil 
 order — no barriers to resist encroachments on the public tranquillity ?" * 
 
 In tracing out this strange descent and pedigree of Irish crime — 
 making out, so to speak, the genealogical tree of our turbulence — 
 let me recall attention to that great characteristic which has marked 
 all the varying forms in which the resistance of the people to the 
 oppression connected with land tenure has assumed. 
 
 All of them in which the Roman Catholic peasantry have been 
 engaged, have been more or less identified with general projects of 
 revolt. It is quite true " that those who have cried ' down with 
 landlordism,' have been equally ready to cry ' down with the British 
 
 * Speech of Mr. Grant on Sir John Newport's motion, April 10th, 1822. 
 
 F 
 
82 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 Crown.' "* This fact has long since been pointed out and strongly- 
 relied on by the ablest of those who have advocated towards Irish 
 discontent, a policy, not of concession, but of coercion. Whatever 
 may be the inference to be drawn from it, the fact is certain. In 
 the minds of the Irish peasantry, a resistance to landlord oppres- 
 sion is associated with revolt against the British Crown. Rebellion 
 against that Crown is regarded as a movement against the griev- 
 ances which are connected with the tenure of land. There seems 
 an instinct or a memory in the breasts of the people which unites 
 in an inseparable connexion the rule of England in their country 
 with the oppressions that have been inflicted on them in their 
 occupation of their native soil. This is equally apparent in the 
 annals of every insurrectionary movement, and in the story of every 
 agrarian crime. Conspiracies of a general agrarian character, like 
 the ribbon society, have invariably included among the objects 
 specified in their oath and in their constitution the subversion of the 
 government. This is not all ; even in the case of those isolated 
 disturbances in which local discontent attempted to suppress local 
 grievances, or avenge local oppression, a general purpose very soon 
 became engrafted on the particular object,f and "lodges" that were 
 formed for the purpose of preventing an ejectment, or shooting a 
 landlord, soon bound their members by an oath to resist national 
 oppression, and be ready to aid in subverting the authority of the 
 Sovereign. The open insurrections in which this latter object has 
 been avowed, so far as the Southern peasantry took part in them, 
 engaged that peasantry by the promise that the success of an insur- 
 rection would rid them of the local miseries and exactions under 
 which they groaned. 
 
 In Ulster this was not the case. If " Hearts of Oak" were 
 executed for high treason it was not because they conspired to 
 subvert the King's crown, but because, by construction of law, 
 they made war upon the Sovereign by attempting a general redress 
 of grievances by armed force. The Ulster Protestant had no 
 
 * Lord Lifford. 
 
 f '" It was one of the great peculiarities of these agrarian crimes that they scarcely 
 ever existed without becoming associated with objects of a more general character. 
 The illegal combination which was formed to protect the tenantry of a particular locality, 
 or to avenge their wrongs, very soon included in its objects a conspiracy hostile to all 
 English power and law. One who knew Ireland well, the late Major Warburton, 
 thus describes the course of secret societies in the country : — 
 
 " 'The propagators of the Ribbon system avail themselves of any local disturbances 
 for the purpose of introducing their own principles ; and it is invariably found that 
 where disturbances are of long continuance, they lose their desultory character and are 
 methodized into political organization.' " — Tract on Land Tenure, p. 97. Third Edition. 
 
 In the tract on Land Tenure I collected the evidences which appear to place these 
 peculiarities of Irish agrarian disturbance beyond all doubt. They are all but acts of 
 the civil war in which to this hour the mass of the Irish people believe themselves to be 
 engaged. Lord Clare, Mr. Bright, Mr. Poulett Scrope, Mortimer O'Sullivan, and 
 Charles Boyton were among the witnesses whose testimony, agreeing with a marvellous 
 coincidence, even of expression, I cited to establish this. 
 
IRELAND AFTER THE UNION. 83 
 
 traditions of confiscation or presence of a penal law to remind him 
 of the fact that it was the iron hoof of conquest which had trampled 
 him down. 
 
 Throughout the other three provinces the case was as I have 
 stated. To the Irish occupier of the soil English authority was 
 known in the oppression of " Sassenach" landlords ; and from the 
 days of Oliver Cromwell to the present, the whole life of that people 
 has been a revolt — often crushed and often broken — but a never- 
 abandoned revolt against the proprietary rights, in which they see 
 nothing but their own oppression by the hand of English power. 
 In the minds of the peasantry the discontents and the resentments of 
 the conquered still live. Unhappily, in those of their masters the 
 passions and prejudices of the conqueror are not extinct. Unhappy — 
 most unhappy, for all parties — has been the identification of land- 
 lordism with the authority of the British Crown. 
 
 In this review of our social history I have only glanced at the 
 condition of Ireland between the Union and the great famine of 
 1846. Throughout the earlier part of this century all the political 
 and social oppression to which Arthur Young bears testimony still 
 existed uncontrolled. In many respects it was aggravated by the 
 unsuccessful attempts at revolt of 1798 and 1803. I am happy 
 that I am not called on even to advert to the history of the former of 
 these years. It is enough to say that, whatever were the origin or 
 designs of the United Irishmen in the North — in the South that 
 rebellion assumed the invariable form of all Irish insurrectionary 
 movements. It was the rising of an aggrieved peasantry against 
 oppressions connected with the tenure of the land. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary for me to adduce evidence of the miserable 
 state of the Irish peasant in the years which followed the Union. 
 Nobody, I believe, will deny it. In 1835 the inquiries of the 
 Poor Law Commission disclosed an amount of misery and 
 wretchedness for which no parallel can be found in any country or 
 in any age. In 1845 the inquiries of the Devon Land Commission 
 could add nothing to these disclosures, but they confirmed them. I 
 am spared the necessity of dwelling on the miseries of the later 
 period, that which comes down to the days of this generation, 
 when at last, before our own eyes, " centuries of horrors, for which 
 history has no parallel, appear to be closing in the expatriation of 
 the people." * 
 
 And yet to complete the miserable chain of testimony which 
 identifies, in an unbroken series of causation, the present condition 
 of Ireland with the miseries and oppressions of by-gone days — 
 let me dismiss this part of the subject by a reference to an authority 
 which describes the state of the people ten years after the Union, 
 completely verifying the contemporaneous statement of the Knight 
 
 * Godwin Smith. 
 
84 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 of Kerry, in the House of Commons, that "the condition of the 
 Irish peasant was not superior to that of the negro." * 
 
 In the year 1809 Ireland was travelled over by Mr. Edward 
 Wakefield, a gentleman who came to the country for the purpose of 
 informing himself, and writing on its state. His review of its con- 
 dition is written in imitation of the tour of Arthur Young. Far 
 inferior to Arthur Young in breadth of view and sagacity, he had, 
 perhaps, one advantage over him — his mind was not wholly occupied 
 with the views of an agriculturalist, and he had, at all events, escaped 
 the passion of his predecessor for the consolidation of farms. His 
 work supplies a curious comparison with the account which Arthur 
 Young gives of the country only thirty years before. The large 
 farms were disappearing — the process by which the serfs overran 
 the country had made way. In other respects there is a dismal 
 sameness in the description of the degradation of the people/)" On 
 some matters Mr. Wakefield's inquiries give us details with a 
 minuteness which we do not find in the pages of Young.J 
 
 At this period the exaction of work from the tenant at a low rate 
 of wages appears to have been almost universal. § Throughout a 
 
 * Cobbett's Parliamentary Register, May, 1810. 
 
 f It is needless to repeat those statements. In one respect, that relating to the last 
 badge of the degradation of the serf, he goes far to confirm the testimony of Arthur 
 Young. 
 
 These statements throw some light on the strange fact already mentioned, that the 
 ribbon societies have included among their objects the regulation of morals. 
 
 $ Mr. Wakefield adduces many instances of magisterial oppression, authenticated 
 from the Records of the Courts of Justice. 
 
 He also narrates incidents of personal chastisement, inflicted by gentlemen upon 
 persons not belonging to their own class, such as would not have been endured in any 
 other country. 
 
 Young states such matters generally — Wakefield mentions the details. 
 
 Both agree in a picture of serfdom, on the part of the people, as complete as it is 
 possible to conceive existing in any civilized country. 
 
 § I extract one out of many passages of this volume, one in which Wakefield gives 
 an account of an interview which he had with an English gentleman who had 
 experience in the employment of agricultural labour in several counties in Ireland. 
 "He complained of not being able to get labourers to go on with his work. I shall never 
 forget," says Wakefield, "the account which he gave me on this occasion. It is im- 
 possible to repeat it without pity and indignation. ' These poor people,' said he, 
 ' are glad to get a holiday in order that they may enjoy a little relaxation at a pattern 
 or a fair.' On inquiring the reason, his answer was — 'Because they are paid only 
 sixpence a day for their labour, and seldom obtain a settlement in less than six months. 
 By the terms of their lease they are obliged to work as many days as will pay their 
 rent, and when they have accomplished this it is difficult to get them at all ; for if they 
 worked at home their landlords would see them, and order them to their demesnes, so 
 that they must remain idle or work for their landlords for the paltry sum of sixpence a 
 day.' Is this generally the case? — 'Throughout all the West of Ireland you may 
 rely upon it.'" — Wakefield's Account of Ireland, Vol. i., page 510. 
 
 I cannot tell to what extent this practice prevails in modern times. But this I do 
 know, that in one of the cases in which my advice has been sought by tenants on an 
 estate — not in the West of Ireland — one great grievance of the tenants was, that their 
 landlord compelled them to work for him. and give him the use of their horses and 
 carts at wages far below the general rate. The new agreements which were tendered 
 to them for signature, on pain of instant eviction, contained a clause binding tbem to 
 supply work, when called on, at this inferior rate. 
 
THE FLEECING OF THE SERFS. 5 
 
 great portion of Ireland the leases bound the tenant to work for the 
 landlord whenever he called on him, frequently at less than half 
 remuneration. The oppression he describes as connected with this 
 practice prove more forcibly than any general account the serfdom 
 of the people. 
 
 Not only were duty days exacted in. addition to the rent, but con- 
 ditions which made the landlord almost the pilferer of the cottier's 
 small store of poultry were rigidly enforced.* The lease always 
 reserved a high penal rent if these petty robberies were not sub- 
 mitted to.| " In consequence of the service required by this clause 
 being neglected, I have seen," writes Wakefield, " a poor man's 
 cattle taken from his door, and driven away, without the least ex- 
 pression of feeling or regret." f But the exactions were not confined 
 to those which were authorized by an instrument, miscalled a lease, 
 in reality the covenant by which the bondsman sold himself to 
 his landlord.§ Agents and landlords insisted on the tenant work- 
 ing for them for nothing, and vengeance followed those who dis- 
 obeyed the hint that such gratuitous labour would be acceptable to 
 their lord.|| In other respects a system of fleecing the tenantry was 
 pursued, in comparison with which the oppressions and exactions of 
 the Turkish tax gatherer upon the Christian subjects of the Porte 
 are not very tyrannical.^ The whole secret was, the tenant was a 
 serf, and his master extorted from him all he could. The tenant 
 resorted to the usual device of those who are thus oppressed. Like 
 serfs in all countries, he hid his money by burying it in the 
 
 * "The beggarly system of extorting duties from tenants is so shamefully reprehensible 
 in this enlightened age, that it is surprising to see such claims still insisted on in 
 leases. It is not on such paltry considerations that men of rank and fortune should 
 hold their superiority." — Oootes Survey of Monaghan. 
 
 " A poor man who enjoys these ' conveniences/ as they are called, would be thought 
 a rebel did he not abandon his own crop to gather in that of his master ; and if to this 
 be added the duty fowl, the duty turf, and, in short, the duty in general, which 
 is but another term for personal service, it will be seen to what a great extent this 
 kind of slavery is carried in Ireland." — Wakefield, Vol. i., 599. 
 
 *T " A still more grievous oppression was resorted to in connexion with these penal 
 rents. The 'duties' were not demanded. The receipts were passed for the ordinary 
 rents, without mentioning the duties ; and the penal rents were afterwards enforced." — 
 Sir Charles Coote's Survey of Monaghan. 
 
 X Vol. i., p. 245. 
 
 § These covenants in leases were by no means confined to leases granted by landlords 
 of an inferior class. 
 
 " The leases granted by Lord Belmore oblige his tenants to work with their horses 
 and cars a certain number of days in the year, especially at the season of cutting 
 turf."— Wakefield, Vol. i., p. 259. 
 
 || "The landlord, to get in his crop, cart his turf, thrash his oats, or accomplish any 
 other work, obliges his tenant to neglect his own occupation in order that he may 
 perform his labour at a fixed rate of payment, which is always less than that which 
 he pays to a person who does not reside under him." — Wakefield, Vol. i., p. 507. 
 
 Tf In a subsequent page will be read his account of the exactions practised on the 
 people by the agents of the absentees. 
 
86 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 ground. The actual burying of guineas was common among the 
 Irish peasantry ; * it has not altogether ceased. Well might Wake- 
 field contrast the condition of the Irish peasant with that of the 
 Russian boor to the disadvantage of the former. Well might he 
 say that tenants so circumstanced must be considered as slaves — 
 " that, as between the bondsman and his master, to call the former 
 tenant would be a perversion of terms, to name the latter landlord a 
 prostitution of language."! 
 
 This was the state of the peasant in many districts of Ireland in 
 1810. Is it really unjust to refer the difficulties of the landowners 
 to the influence of the owners of property ? It is vain to distinguish 
 between the acts of owners in fee, and their agents, or their middle- 
 men. For the acts of the agent the landlord was strictly responsible ; 
 but all the oppressions that were practised upon the occupiers by 
 any class were only possible from the miserable slavery to which the 
 people were crushed down. 
 
 Fully to examine the whole character of the change which had 
 passed over Ireland between the visit of Arthur Young and that of 
 Wakefield would be far beyond the object of this letter. These 
 are things which can only be fully understood by patient and 
 laborious investigation of a number of small facts to be collected 
 from many quarters. It is not always easy to gather the information 
 which enables us to trace the progress of a nation, not in the great 
 events that are supposed to make up its history, but in the 
 
 * Mr. Wakefield describes the practice of burying money as one common in his time, 
 and quotes from several writers to show that it was so. — Vol. i., p. 593. 
 
 He adverts to the singular fact that it " was the child of latter times." Such a 
 practice, if prevalent at the time of Arthur Young's visit, could not, he thinks, have 
 escaped the notice of so acute an observer, and there is not a trace of it to be found in 
 the tour of Young. 
 
 This is one of the many points of comparison between the accounts of the two 
 visitors which suggest some strange reflections. 
 
 In the interim that great change had taken place which I have attempted to 
 describe as the process of overrunning the country by the serfs. 
 
 Those who read the history of that process, as sketched in the next pages, will 
 probably think that if guineas were not hid in the days of Arthur Young it was 
 because the serfs had no guineas to hide. 
 
 They acquired them as soon as they were permitted to occupy the soil. 
 
 f View of Ireland. Vol. i., p. 518. 
 
 I dismiss for the present Mr. Wakefield's volumes by citing one most singular, 
 but most instructive, passage, which will show how far economic laws regulated the 
 rent exacted from the occupiers of the soil : — 
 
 "October 20th, 1809, Wocdlawn. — Mr. Trench says that if the occupying tenants 
 be desired to state how much they will give for their land, they are so frightened that 
 they never make an offer, but rather remain silent, and afterwards consent to any terms 
 the middleman may choose to impose. He knows no instance of their quitting the land 
 leather than accede to the proposed conditions. This information agrees with an instance 
 which I witnessed in the county of Waterford, where 900 acres were re-let at an 
 advance of 15s. an acre, by a gentleman, in the course of a week after he had obtained 
 a lease of them, though the tenants had refused an offer of the land at the same rent 
 at which he had taken it." — Vol. i., p. 260. 
 
 Strange as it may seem he confirms this by other instances. 
 
EDWARD WAKEFIELD — IRELAND IN 1810. 87 
 
 changes of the everyday life and habits of the people, which are 
 unrecorded, and almost unnoticed, by the generation over whom 
 they pass. There is yet no part of our history in which so many 
 changes of importance to Ireland have taken place — none into which 
 a minute investigation would throw more light upon many of the 
 anomalies of our present position. The labour would be well repaid 
 which would be devoted to that investigation ; which would gather 
 up the details which are to be found in obscure chronicles of rural 
 affairs — the incidental revelations which are met with in records 
 written or prepared for very different purposes — and would mould all 
 the facts that could thus be ascertained into a review of the change 
 of the state of Ireland from the condition in which it was found by 
 Arthur Young to that in which it was when George IV. came to 
 the throne, the period at which Mr. Grant made the speech to 
 which I have referred. 
 
 Within that time large farms had been generally broken up into 
 small ones, and at the period of Wakefield's visit the process was 
 nearing its completion. Strange to say, it commenced after the 
 period upon which all injurious restrictions on our manufacturing 
 industry had been removed ; during their existence the reverse 
 process had been going on. Up to 1783 the subdivision of farms 
 had only taken place in the province in which a free manufacturing 
 industry prevailed. In the interim between 1783 and 1810 it had 
 become almost universal.* 
 
 Without any attempt to go fully into the history of that change, 
 there are considerations so obvious that they must not be overlooked. 
 I have pointed out that, under any circumstances, it was the inevi- 
 table result of the serfdom of the mass of the people that the class 
 of independent occupiers should disappear, and the soil be overrun 
 by those who were willing to till it as slaves. But there are many 
 other circumstances which we must not forget. The change was 
 not only one from large farms to small, but from pasture land to 
 tillage. While the process was going on Ireland had been converted 
 from a grain-importing to a grain-exporting country. When 
 Arthur Young visited Ireland, Dublin was supplied with bread 
 partly by an importation from England, partly by grain sent to the 
 metropolis under the stimulus of a bounty which more than paid 
 the average expense of its inland carriage. In 1810 Ireland 
 
 * The subdivision of large farms among an inferior class of tenants commenced 
 immediately after 1782. Arthur Young saw Ireland just on the eve of the transition. 
 
 In a speech against the bill giving the elective franchise to Roman Catholics, 
 delivered in the Irish House of Commons, on the 18th of February, 1793, Sir Laurence 
 Parsons described the change which even then had taken place : — 
 
 " Consider the state of the country ; first, the great increase of tillage. Those large 
 farms which a few years ago were all in pasture ground, each occupied by a single 
 Protestant farmer, are now broken into several patches, tenanted for the most part by 
 Catholic husbandmen, so that seven or eight Catholics hold the ground at present 
 which one Protestant held formerly." "Consider this also, land within five or six 
 years has risen one-fourth of its value." — Irish Parliamentary Debates, 1793. 
 
38 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 exported to England 800,000 quarters of grain. The unparalleled 
 advance of the tfnglish manufacturing system, at the close of the 
 last century, created a demand for corn which gave a stimulus to 
 the agriculture of the whole United Kingdom, from which 
 Ireland could not be exempt. The effect was increased by the 
 long revolutionary war. Pasture land was turned into corn 
 fields. The trade in provisions declined.* The export of wool was 
 given up, because tillage presented a more profitable occupation to 
 the farmer.j In the ten years preceding the visit of Arthur Young 
 the average price of wheat was 45s. the quarter ; in the ten years 
 preceding that of Wakefield it was 82s. In the first decennial period 
 it had never risen above 53s. ; in the second its maximum was 1 10s. 
 In 1774 it was 52s.; in 1810 it was 106s4 I n estimating the 
 latter price some allowance must be made for the depreciation of the 
 currency caused by the suspension of cash payments at the Bank of 
 England. Still the rise of price was really enormous, and its natural 
 effects followed — not only were pasture fields turned into tillage, but 
 cultivation was carried to soils which before it had never reached. 
 
 It is not difficult to estimate how such a process resulted in a 
 country circumstanced as Ireland was. If the landowners had been 
 ready to spend the eighty-eight millions which Arthur Young cal- 
 culated was the expenditure necessary to put the Irish land in the 
 same condition as that in which English farms were let — if there 
 had been Irish farmers possessed of the capital necessary to cultivate 
 them in the most profitable manner — possibly the system of large 
 farms might have been at least partially maintained. But when 
 tillage became profitable the cheapest and the readiest way of 
 making the profit was to give the land to those who were ready to 
 take it at any price that was demanded. The population who were 
 then located on the land, in many instances, were even unacquainted 
 with the language of their masters — law had doomed them to be 
 uneducated ; oppression had crushed them down into slavery, without 
 any spirit of independence or manly feeling. They took the land 
 upon any terms upon which it was offered to them — in any state 
 in which they could get it — they bound themselves by the conditions 
 of bondsmen, and paid, or endeavoured to pay, any rent which they 
 were asked. They were placed on the land to till it, unprovided 
 with a house, and unsupplied with the conveniences without which 
 no English tenant would have taken a farm. Everything that was 
 
 * "There has been, since the Union, a decrease of the more valuable export provi- 
 sions, and an increase in the less valuable, viz., the live animals." — John O'ConnelVs 
 Argument for Ireland. 
 
 *T " Ireland exported no unmanufactured wool ; it worked up all it had ; and there 
 was little reason to suppose the quantity would be enlarged, as the great increase of 
 agriculture, and of the linen manufacture, gave a better profit in the land than sheep 
 afforded." — Speech of Mr. Foster, Irish House of Commons, 1799. 
 
 J Porter's Progress of the Nation. M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary. 
 
THE BREAKING UP OF THE FARMS. 89 
 
 requisite they had to do for themselves, while the rent was fixed at the 
 very utmost limit which it was thought the produce of the land could 
 yield. They grew the corn not for themselves but for the landlord, 
 and his bailiff often went with it to the merchant's store, and 
 received the price in payment of the rent. The few guineas which 
 they were able to gather together untouched by the exactions of the 
 landlord, the middlemen, the tithe proctor, or the agent, they hid 
 by burying in the ground. This is the state of things described by 
 all who, during this transition period, give us a view of the condition 
 of the people ; and every sentence of this sketch can be corroborated 
 by abundant testimonies derived from all the sources I have indicated 
 as those in which information is to be found. 
 
 I express no opinion upon the effect which this process had upon 
 the real welfare of the country. To the observers who viewed the 
 country as Young and Wakefield did, it would have seemed disastrous. 
 Great and thriving farms were broken into small and, to all appear- 
 ance, miserable tenements A great population of serfs displaced 
 a few free occupiers of the land. But the serfs had been there before, 
 although at the earlier period they were permitted only partially 
 to occupy the land. The hungry cattle had overleaped the bounds, 
 as the old proverb tells us hungry cattle always will. Wretched 
 as the results were in all that we are accustomed to regard as the 
 indications of national prosperity, I am very far from being sure that 
 the breaking up of the large farms, the " placing six or seven " 
 Catholic occupiers where before there had been one Protestant,* 
 was not in reality a boon to the miserable population which had 
 previously been dwelling on the outskirts of these farms. If the 
 hungry cattle trampled down the fences and spoiled the pastures, 
 they had, at least, the more to eat themselves. 
 
 To many classes in Ireland the result was to give a prosperity 
 which, in one sense, may be called fictitious, but which for the 
 time at least was real. The rental of Ireland — meaning by the 
 rental the sum actually paid, whether to landlord or middlemen, 
 by those who tilled the soil, for the privilege of tilling it — 
 was, in the southern and western districts, multiplied three-fold. 
 There were, no doubt, many persons besides the landlords who 
 profited by this state of things. A great milling trade grew up 
 in the country. Corn merchants throve in many of the sea- 
 port towns. As far as the owners of land were concerned a 
 grievous reaction came with the cessation of war prices, and the 
 return to a currency measured, not by the value of a paper 
 obligation, but in gold. It is utterly impossible to describe the 
 depression which fell upon the agricultural interest in the south of 
 Ireland between 1815 and 1826. Leases had been granted to the 
 occupiers, partly in compliance with ancient and universal custom, 
 partly to secure the political influence attached to the tenant's vote. 
 * Speech of Sir Laurence Parsons. Note to page 87. 
 
90 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 But the rents at which farms were let in 1816 were mere rents on 
 paper. In 1821 the attempt was made still to extract them from the 
 wretched occupiers of the soil. Hence arose, in the first instance, 
 the insurrectionary movements which disturbed Munster at the time 
 when Mr. Grant spoke. Hence, too, arose to the landowners them- 
 selves the unnumbered evils of fictitious rentals, of incumbrances 
 proportioned not to the real value of the land, but to the rents 
 which pauper tenants had covenanted to pay. Habits of extrava- 
 gance contracted upon false notions of their income — debts incurred 
 upon the same exaggerated estimate — family charges placed upon 
 the inheritor out of all proportion to the true value of the estate — 
 all conspired to make Irish landed property, in too many instances, 
 a delusion and a cheat. Pauper tenants and bankrupt proprietors 
 were the natural result of such a state of things. Chancery re- 
 ceivers and the Incumbered Estates Commission were, as directly 
 as Captain Rock and Captain Starlight, the creations of the system 
 by which a tenantry of serfs were placed upon the lands, without 
 capital, without intelligence, and without anything supplied to them, 
 yet bound by an instrument, called in mockery a lease, to pay the 
 uttermost farthing which an unnatural demand at any time enabled 
 them to realize for the corn which they grew, not for themselves, 
 but for their lords. 
 
 It was during this process, or in this process, that the subdivision 
 of farms took place which is now so often the subject of complaint 
 with the advocates of " landlordism," as if it was something done 
 against the will of landlords, and which landlords would have pre- 
 vented their immediate tenants doing if they could. That sub- 
 division was the inevitable result of the circumstances of the 
 country — the working of an economic law which neither landlords 
 nor even legislators could control. It is very easy to blame sub- 
 division of farms for the wretchedness of the beings who occupied 
 small plots of ground. But there is behind this the inquiry — what 
 would have been the condition of these very persons if they had not 
 had their small plots of ground to occupy ? 
 
 In Ulster subdivision had been carried to an extent which it has 
 never yet reached in Munster. In Ulster it has given us a loyal, 
 a contented, and even a prosperous population. In Munster and 
 in Connaught it has been the multiplication of misery, simply 
 because in these provinces the people were miserable, and every new 
 habitation, and every new family, and every new patch of potato 
 garden, made an addition to the sum of wretchedness that festered 
 and fretted on the soil. 
 
 These observations must be borne in mind when I come in future 
 pages to discuss the subject of middlemen, and the subdivision of 
 farms — a subdivision, in the circumstances of the country, which could 
 no more be controlled than could the instinct which bade even the 
 Irish peasant to multiply and increase, and which, like that instinct, 
 propagated prosperity or misery exactly according to the circum- 
 
THE "HUMAN AGENCY 1 ' AND "PERENNIAL DESOLATION." 91 
 
 stances of the people among whom it acted. I have thought it 
 more convenient, in this part of my argument, even partially to com- 
 plete the view of the condition of the country down to the period of 
 the insurrection which was the subject of the speech of Mr. Grant. 
 
 From the date of that speech to the great famine it will be found 
 in the statements of the Poor Law Commission, in 1835, and those 
 of the Devon Land Commission, ten years later. 
 
 Is it possible to conceive more accumulative or more decisive 
 testimony to this one great truth, a truth never to be overlooked 
 in our enquiries into Ireland's social state. There is, and there must 
 be, one cause always existing and always unchanged, which is always 
 creating misery and discontent. What is it ? What is that something 
 which existed in 1727 and which exists in 1867? — which blighted 
 Ireland in the days of Swift as it is blighting Ireland now ? — which 
 armed the Levellers of 1760 as it has armed the Fenians of the 
 present day? Through how many changes has Ireland passed? 
 How many political disabilities have been removed ? Yet there is 
 one discontent and one misery "in all the changes and chances" of 
 our national existence unremoved and unchanged. There must be 
 some unchanging cause. It was not excessive agricultural popula- 
 tion that created the evil in the days of Swift. The misery was 
 then as it is now. All restrictions upon the woollen trade have 
 been removed for nearly a century. It cannot be these restrictions 
 which create it. Among all the varying grievances of Ireland — 
 in all the changing complaints of political, and social, and com- 
 mercial injustice — there is one constant evil that meets us always, 
 unchanged and unchangeable — the " perennial" cause of a " peren- 
 nial " desolation. The perpetual origin of misery and degradation 
 has been the fact that the great mass of the people have been 
 treated as belonging to a conquered race. All legislative and 
 administrative efforts have been directed to secure the position 
 of the landowners, to protect them against the people, and to 
 enable them to raise as much as they can from the serfs that were 
 located on their estates. No effort has been made to elevate 
 or improve the condition of the occupiers. In a country of which 
 the dominant caste consists of those who hold their properties by 
 a title of confiscation, it is not, perhaps, surprising that the rights 
 of property have been religiously, or rather irreligiously, upheld — 
 the rights of industry and labour slighted, and no account taken 
 of the first and most sacred of all rights — the right of the Irish 
 people to live in their native land. I have adverted to this account 
 to bring down the description of Irish serfdom to the time bordering 
 on our own. When Wakefield visited Ireland our manufacturing 
 industry and our trade had been free for thirty years. I return to 
 the period of the restrictions, and pass from this view of our social 
 condition to the question whether it be possible to suppose this 
 miserable state of things to have been either caused or aggravated by 
 that restriction on our woollen trade which finally expired in 1783. 
 
92 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 All measures that affect the industry or the progress of a nation 
 must be judged of by the state of society in the nation whose wel- 
 fare they are supposed to affect. We must remember what Ireland 
 was when we consider the influence of the commercial or economic 
 injuries which England inflicted on her in the hour of her depen- 
 dence. These injuries and wrongs may have affected, nay, did, no 
 doubt, affect the upper and the dominant caste of the country. They 
 exercised no perceptible influence upon the misery and degradation 
 of those who were reduced to a state of serfdom. 
 
 From the battle of the Boyne to the year 1792, the Roman 
 Catholic population did not in truth constitute any part of the 
 Irish nation with which in history we are concerned; they were 
 excluded from admission to any trading guilds in cities or towns, 
 and no man could follow a handicraft in a city or town who was not 
 free of a guild. The provisions of the law may have been evaded, 
 but by law manufacturing industry was confined to Protestants. 
 In point of fact, even to a comparatively recent period, the effect of 
 these laws continued. Within the memory of living men, the 
 majority of artisans were Protestant. It is very hard for us now 
 to realize the condition of society in which no Roman Catholic 
 could pursue the practice of medicine, except under terms of 
 degrading inferiority — or could, on any terms, be admitted to 
 practise as a barrister or an attorney. Yet I myself have conversed 
 with many men who remembered such a state of things. 
 
 In everything which we read of the condition or the claims of the 
 Irish nation during this period we must remember that the Irish 
 nation was then represented by the Protestant colony that was 
 planted in the country. There was a population of slaves outside 
 the pale of that nation of whom no account was taken, except as 
 far as it suited the purposes of their masters. The suppression 
 of the woollen trade injured the Protestant artisans ; it had no effect 
 upon the Catholic serfs who were excluded by persecuting laws from 
 the industry of towns. I have already stated my belief that if it were 
 worth while to pursue the inquiry we would find that the suppres- 
 sion of the woollen trade of Ireland, so far from being an injury, 
 was a boon to the old occupiers of the soil. There are many of the 
 queries of Bishop Berkeley which point clearly to the conclusion 
 that the success of tho woollen manufacture would only have led to 
 the extermination of the peasantry by making it the interest of the 
 proprietors to turn their estates into sheep walks. The grievances 
 of " The Levellers" are plainly pointed in the same direction. The 
 " Irish nation" complained of the injustice of England, because the 
 " Irish nation" consisted wholly of the Protestant proprietors and 
 farmers, the Protestant professional classes, and the Protestant 
 traders and artisans. It does appear that some at least of the 
 landed proprietors of Munster desired a woollen manufacture because 
 it would have enabled them to get rid of their " Popish tenantry" by 
 
HOME INDUSTRY — FLAX AND WOOL. 93 
 
 making sheep walks of their estates. Whatever loss that suppression 
 may have occasioned to the Protestant landlords or the Protestant 
 artisans, I am disposed to think that the discouragement of the 
 woollen trade was, if anything, an advantage to the mass of the 
 people. 
 
 The effect of the encouragement of the growth of Irish wool 
 would have been to offer a premium for the turning of tillage land 
 into sheep walks — that is, it would have been a premium on the 
 extermination of the people. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say that this was not and could 
 not be the effect of encouraging the linen manufacture. The culture 
 and management of a field of flax requires absolutely more hands 
 than are employed upon a field of corn. The manufacture of flax 
 into yarn, and of yarn into linen was, as I have pointed out, 
 then wholly a domestic one. The growth of the linen manufacture 
 encouraged small holdings just as much as the growth of a woollen 
 manufacture would have destroyed them. The flax, in all its pro- 
 cesses, from the sowing of the seed to the weaving of the web in 
 the loom, gave profitable employment to many inmates of the 
 peasant's home The conversion of estates into vast sheep walks 
 would have driven many peasants from their homes. 
 
 May not these considerations throw a gloomy light upon that 
 strange fact in Irish social history, that the cultivation of flax was 
 not, as a general rule, encouraged in any districts of Ireland except 
 those in which the occupiers were attached to the dominant caste ? 
 If a Tipperary landlord had taken the advice of Bishop Berkeley,* and 
 
 * I do not think it is any undue regard for an illustrious name which induces me so 
 often to refer to the authority of Berkeley. Very many of his queries plainly point to 
 the strange neglect of the southern gentry to introduce the growth of flax and the 
 linen manufacture among their tenantry. When we read the history of the time, there 
 is no mistaking the meaning of such questions as the following : — 
 
 "Whether it would not be more prudent to try and secure ourselves in permitted 
 branches of industry, than to fold our arms and repine that we are not allowed the 
 woollen V 
 
 " Whether, if all the idle hands in this kingdom were employed on hemp and flax, 
 we might not find sufficient vent for these manufactures ?" 
 
 "If all the land was tilled, that is fit for tillage, and all that sowed with hemp and 
 flax, that is fit for raising them, whether we would have any sheep-walks, beyond 
 what was necessary to supply the necessities of the kingdom ?" 
 
 " Whether it is not a sure sign of a country's thriving to see it well cultivated and 
 full of inhabitants, and if so, whether a great quantity of sheep-walks be not ruinous 
 to a country, rendering it waste and thinly inhabited V 
 
 " Whether the employing so much land under sheep be not, in truth, an Irish 
 blunder V 
 
 " Whether the county of Tipperary be not much better land than the county of 
 Armagh, and yet whether the latter be not much better improved and inhabited than 
 the former ?" 
 
 '• Whether every landlord in the kingdom doth not know the cause of this, and yet 
 how few there are the better of the knowledge ?" 
 
 "Whether large farms under few hands, or small ones under many, are likely to be 
 made most of, and whether flax and tillage does not naturally multiply hands and 
 divide lands into small holdings, and well improved ?" 
 
 " Whether a scheme for the welfare of this nation should not take in all the 
 
94 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 taught his tenants to cultivate flax instead of "patriotically" demand- 
 ing a woollen manufacture, the Popish serfs upon his estate must 
 have shared in the prosperity which a linen manufacture would have 
 created. Encouragement for the growth of wool would have 
 enabled him to get rid of them without loss. 
 
 While the penal laws were in force whatever commercial wrongs 
 were inflicted by England on Ireland were really inflicted on the 
 Protestant population. They could scarcely reach the depths of 
 the misery to which the old people had been thrust down. The 
 traders in wool were Protestants; even the wool combers must 
 have been Protestants ; and so were the landowners, who could 
 have made profit by replacing human beings over the surface of 
 their estates with sheep. The Catholic people would have known 
 the prosperity of the woollen trade only as it led to their exter- 
 mination. During the period in which the penal code was in force 
 the manufacturing prosperity of Ireland would have but little 
 enriched the miserable occupiers of the soil. Lord Dufferin has 
 probably heard of the inscription over the gates of Bandon. The 
 most prosperous woollen factory within those gates would have done 
 little for the peasantry of the district outside the walls of that 
 " ancient and loyal" town. 
 
 But it is a mistake to suppose that before the Union Ireland had 
 no manufacturing industry, except that of linen. Surely Lord 
 Dufferin has heard of our silks and our tabinets. In the city of 
 Dublin this manufacture gave employment to thousands of opera- 
 tives ; it laid the foundation of many noble fortunes. The desert 
 by-ways of the Liberty were once the busy haunts of industry. 
 There were Irish hosiery manufacturers known in the great marts 
 of commerce. Who has not heard of Limerick gloves and Limerick 
 lace? of twenty other industries, in some of which we even 
 excelled ? The startling fact is that all these manufactures have 
 both flourished and declined since the period at which all restric- 
 tions were removed. Whatever be the reason of their fall it 
 cannot be traced to these restrictions. 
 
 It would be impossible in these pages to collect the evidence 
 which shows that immediately before the Union Ireland enjoyed a 
 great manufacturing industry which is now gone. I would have 
 thought this one of the facts of Irish history which might have 
 been assumed. I can only refer to one or two testimonies which 
 occur to me as the most striking. 
 
 In a very remarkable speech delivered by Mr. Boyton, at the 
 Irish Conservative Society, on the 23rd of February, 1833, he 
 
 inhabitants, and whether it be not a vain attempt to protect the flourishing of our 
 Protestant gentry exclusive of the bulk of the natives?" 
 
 These and many others of his questions pack up in small parcels strong arguments 
 against the depopulation schemes of his day — the encouragement of the woollen 
 trade, and the consolidation of farms into sheep-walks. 
 
THE RUIN OP IRISH MANUFACTURES. 95 
 
 pointed to the proofs of the existence of great manufacturing indus- 
 tries in Ireland, and traced the falling away of those industries. 
 From this masterly essay on the decline of Ireland I extract one 
 sentence as to the woollen trade : — 
 
 " Formerly we spun all our own woollen and worsted yarn. We 
 imported, in 1790, only 2,294 lbs. ; in 1800, 1,180 lbs. ; in 1826, 662,750 
 lbs. — an enormous increase. There were, I understand, upwards of thirty 
 persons engaged in the woollen trade in Dublin, who have become 
 bankrupts since 1821." 
 
 Let me ask attention, upon this very subject of the woollen trade, 
 to some startling facts collected by the tradesmen of Dublin in the 
 year 1841. I add some few notes of the present day: — 
 
 In 1800 there were, in the city of Dublin, engaged in the woollen 
 manufacture, 91 master manufacturers. 
 
 In 1840 there were but 12. 
 
 In 1864 there were 8. 
 
 In 1800 the hands employed were, - - - 4,038 
 
 In 1841, - ^ - - - - - 682 
 
 In 1800 there were in the town of Roscrea, in Tipperary, 900 
 persons supported by the woollen manufacture. 
 
 At present there is not one. 
 
 In the year 1800 the manufacture of flannel employed 1,000 
 looms in the county of Wicklow. 
 
 At present, in all that county, there is not one. 
 
 In 1800 there were 30 master wool combers in Dublin. In 
 1834 they were reduced to 5. 
 
 In Kilkenny, in 1800, a blanket manufacture existed which gave 
 constant employment to 3,000 operatives. In 1841 they were 
 reduced to 925. I am not able to say the number that there are 
 now. 
 
 In 1800 there were 1,491 persons employed in the city of 
 Dublin in stuff serge manufacture. In 1834 there were 131. 
 
 In 1800, 720 operatives were employed in the carpet manu- 
 facture, under 13 masters. In 1841 there was but one carpet 
 maker. 
 
 If the inquiry were extended to other branches of industry, the 
 result would be still more striking. Dublin, at the time of the 
 Union, had 2,500 broad looms in the silk manufacture; in 1840, 
 just one-tenth of the number. 
 
 When Arthur Young visited Ireland, just as the restrictions 
 upon Irish trade were drawing to their close, he found the manu- 
 facturing industry of Ireland very far from being destroyed. It is 
 a great although a common mistake to suppose that before the 
 Union the linen trade was confined to Ulster. It flourished 
 wherever the landlords encouraged it. I confine myself to the 
 reports given us by Young. In the neighbourhood of Slane, under 
 
96 IRELAND SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 
 
 the fostering care of Lord Conyngham, " there was a loom in 
 almost every cabin." In Mayo there was an extensive linen market 
 in many of the towns. At Westport, he found a weekly market 
 in which £10,000 a-year was expended in the purchase of linen 
 webs. Under the care of Lord Altamont, " the progress," he 
 writes, " of this manufacture is prodigious. Three hundred pieces 
 of linen were sold in Castlebar every week, and in the town and 
 neighbourhood 200 looms were employed." " Spinning of yarns was 
 universal throughout Leitrim and Longford" — " all Connaught 
 was full of weaving." Even in the extreme South Mr. Longfield, 
 animated very probably by the precepts of Berkeley, had estab- 
 lished a linen manufacture in the neighbourhood of Cloyne. 
 
 Of other manufactures he found numbers, if not very flourishing, 
 yet certainly far from being in decay. In Wicklow " all the wool of 
 the county was wrought up by the inhabitants, spun, combed, and 
 wove into flannel and frieze ;" and to such an extent, " that numbers 
 paid half their rents by this manufacture." Cork gave employment 
 to a vast number of wool combers — " half the wool in Ireland was 
 combed in Cork." Bandon had a large manufacture of stuff and 
 camlet exchanged for one of brown linen. Carrick-on-Suir had its 
 great manufactories of rattans and serge. There were few, very 
 few parts of Ireland in which some species of manufacturing 
 industry did not prevail. But this industry was, in all its higher 
 branches, in the hands of Protestants. Arthur Young thus sums 
 up the general result : — 
 
 " The only considerable manufacture in Ireland which carries in 
 all its parts the appearance of industry is the linen, and it ought 
 never be forgotten that this is wholly confined to the Protestant 
 parts of the kingdom. The poor Catholics in the South of Ireland 
 spin wool very generally, but the purchasers of their labour, and 
 the whole worsted trade, is in the hands of the Quakers of Clonmel, 
 Carrick, Bandon, &c." 
 
 Of the strange connexion between the linen manufacture and 
 Protestantism we shall presently see some explanation. 
 
 Such was the condition of Irish manufactures at the very time 
 when all restrictions upon them were finally removed. All reliable 
 evidence assures us, that between that period and the Union those 
 manufactures had advanced with a rapidity not surpassed in any 
 country in the world. Surely I have cited sufficient to show that 
 even as regards the working of woollen fabrics, the displacement of 
 our people from that manufacturing industry is not attributable 
 to the restrictions of days that have long since passed away. 
 
 But again it is implied in Lord Dufferin's argument that the 
 effect of the linen trade was to diminish the number of agricultural 
 holdings — to prevent " the disturbance of the equilibrium between 
 land and the population dependent on the land." Its effect was 
 directly the reverse. Up to a comparatively recent period the 
 
ULSTER — THE WEAVERS' PATCHES. 97 
 
 linen manufacture was a domestic one; the yarn was spun by- 
 women at the spinning wheel which always stood beside the cottage 
 fireside. The farmer on a wet day or of an evening worked in 
 his own farmhouse, at his own loom. Spinning in mills and weaving 
 in manufactories were unknown. The result was that which is 
 now happening in Belgium — the cottier tenant could by the aid 
 of this domestic industry live* comfortably on a few acres of land. 
 Small holdings multiplied. The County Down has been always 
 justly looked on as the model county of Ireland. In that county, 
 in 1841, there were, in proportion to its extent, more holdings 
 under fifteen acres than there were in any three of the southern or 
 western counties in Ireland. 
 
 This mistake of Lord DufTerin's is the more unaccountable 
 because all the objections which are now made against tenant right 
 and small farms were in former days urged against the linen 
 manufacture. It caused, it was said, the endless subdivision of 
 farms. 
 
 " Farms," says Arthur Young, in recording his visit to Shane's 
 Castle, "farms, as in all the linen counties, are very small. They 
 rise from five acres to one hundred, but they are in general from 
 five to thirty. Scarce any of them but are weavers or the employers 
 of weavers, but they have such a custom of splitting their farms 
 among their children that one of six acres will be divided." 
 
 In Derry, again, he complains of " the weavers' patches of four 
 and five acres," of " farms lessened to seven or ten acres by the 
 farmers dividing them among their children." In Armagh farms 
 were " constantly getting less and less." In this county " there were 
 no flax farmers, scarcely any flax but what was raised on patches by 
 the cottiers." It was true that many weaving families had tea for 
 breakfast; but even this — for the poor man at that time a very 
 unusual luxury — could not reconcile the great agriculturalist to 
 small farms and the unscientific husbandry of men who knew 
 nothing of the rotation of green crops. Of the effect of the linen 
 trade upon the size of farms, he says : — 
 
 " The variety of these is very great in Ireland. In the North, where 
 the linen manufacture has spread, the farms are so small, that ten acres 
 in the occupation of one person is a large one, five or six will be found a 
 good farm, and all the agriculture of the country so entirely subservient 
 to the manufacture, that they no more deserve the name of farmers than 
 the occupiers of mere cabbage garden. In Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, 
 Meath, and Waterford, there are to be found the greatest graziers and 
 cow-keepers perhaps in the world, some who rent and occupy from 
 £3,000 to £10,000 a year: these of course are men of property, and are 
 the only occiipiers in the kingdom who have any considerable substance." * 
 
 The landlords hated the linen manufacture because they supposed 
 
 * Tow in Ireland, Part ii., p. 21. 
 
98 LORD DUFFERIN AND THE WOOLLEN TRADE. 
 
 it reduced their rents * Scientific agriculturalists hated it because it 
 gave the land to small farmers, who grew flax on " weavers'" patches; 
 and actually went out hunting hares,| in some instances, having 
 actually clubbed to keep a pack of hounds — who gave their families 
 tea for breakfast, and yet only grew " a few beggarly oats on a 
 variety of the most fertile soils." " A whole province peopled by 
 weavers." " The lands infinitely subdivided." " Ten acres are not 
 an uncommon quantity to be in one man's occupation ; four, five, or 
 six are the common extent." " The whole region is the disgrace of 
 the Kingdom." " The crops are contemptible." " There is not a 
 farmer within a hundred miles of the linen country in Ireland." 
 Such is the language in which the advocate, in his day, of the con- 
 solidation of farms describes the effects of the manufacture which the 
 leniency of England left to Ireland to withdraw the people from the 
 soil. At last, repeating the statement of Lord Tyrone, as to the 
 worst of its evils, that of lowering the rents, he winds up, in 
 a climax of disgust and indignation, by saying: — 
 
 " I am so convinced of this, that if I had an estate in the South of 
 Ireland, I would as soon introduce pestilence and famine as the linen 
 manufacture upon it, carried on as it is at present."! 
 
 Ulster violated all the laws of political economy, of scientific 
 agriculture, and of landlord social science — and Ulster prospered. 
 Possibly there could be no better rebuke to such theories than to 
 read these very passages of Young, and then remember what 
 Ulster is now. 
 
 They will, perhaps, be sufficient to satisfy Lord Dufferin that 
 the preservation of the linen trade had not the effect of diminishing 
 the agricultural population on the soil. They may go some way 
 to prove that even the excessive subdivision and re-subdivision of 
 farms are not in themselves sufficient to account for the misery and 
 
 * "Lord Tyrone is clear that if his estate in Londonderry was in Waterford, or that 
 all the inhabitants of it were to emigrate from it, so as to leave him to new model it, he 
 would be able to get full one-third more for it than he can do at present ; rents in 
 the North depending not on quality, but on price of linen." — Young's Tour, Vol. ii., 
 p. 178.^ 
 
 t It is strange, in many cases, to trace in the diary of Arthur Young, the same 
 prejudices among the upper classes which still prevail in our own day. Mr. O'Neill, 
 of Shane's Castle, complained, with some reason, that the linen trade and the sub- 
 division of farms, in some years, when the linen trade was bad, deprived him of his 
 rents. At the Palace, in Armagh, Young was taught to believe that the weaving trade 
 was injurious to the morals of the weavers, who were guilty of the enormity of wasting 
 their time in coursing, and even keeping hounds of their own. He was told by others 
 that the linen manufacture was identified with turbulence, and that it was the unruly 
 temper of these republican weavers that caused the rebellion of the Hearts of Oak. 
 One gentleman informed him that the emigration which had been complained of had 
 done the country a great deal of good, it carried away "the vicious and idle," and had 
 certainly not been caused by Lord Donegall's high rents. And another was firmly 
 convinced that the great mischief to Ireland was the leniency of the Government in 
 pardoning some of the Hearts of Oak. The country would have been all right if they 
 had hanged all the rebels whom they caught. 
 
 X Young's Tour. Part ii., p. 163. 
 
FKEE LABOUK AND THE LOOM. 99 
 
 wretchedness of the Irish people. With testimonies such as these 
 before us, and there are many of them, and with the admitted 
 prosperity of Ulster, we must seek in something that lies deeper 
 than subdivision of farms, or cottier patches, or even the want of a 
 trade in woollen fabrics, for the " perennial" cause of our " peren- 
 nial desolation." 
 
 I think we can understand why the linen manufacture was almost 
 coterminous with the Protestantism of the tenantry. It was the 
 home industry of the farmer. The web was woven by a man who 
 had leisure hours to himself. It could not be the industry of serfs. 
 Neither did it find favour in the eyes of the landlord : it produced 
 bad oats, and it did not raise the rent. Under an exorbitant rent 
 for the " weaver's patch," and duty work at five pence a day, the 
 weaver's shuttle would soon have ceased to ply, even if one of such 
 wretched serfs could ever have been the owner of a loom. The 
 industry that gave extra hours to the plying of that shuttle was 
 that of men who knew that the fruits of their labour would be 
 their own. 
 
 Can any other reason be given to account for the marvellous 
 fact, that manufacturing industry has long since been extin- 
 guished in every other part of Ireland, and has prospered only 
 in some districts of Ulster? and those districts precisely those in 
 which the sturdy spirit of Protestant independence asserted a prac- 
 tical security of tenure by forcing on the landlords the custom of 
 tenant right. Why was the linen manufacture a failure out of 
 Ulster ? Surely, to all this there is and can be but one answer. In 
 every other part of Ireland the occupiers of the soil were ground 
 down to slavery ; in Ulster they were Protestants, belonging to the 
 conquering race — they extorted security of tenure, and therefore 
 Ulster is the land of linen, bleach-greens and tenant right. 
 
 There are matters of Irish history which it is impossible fully to 
 discuss, or even to state in a letter like this, and upon which, there- 
 fore, it is absolutely necessary to appeal to the knowledge and the 
 candour of those with whom we reason. But surely, I may assume, 
 that during the period which passed between the Revolution and 
 1782 the cultivation of the soil was open to the Irish nation. 
 The discouragement of the woollen trade did not prohibit the 
 application of industry to that soil. The Irish Parliament actually 
 were giving bounties on the inland conveyance of corn to try and 
 stimulate agricultural industry. There were then other manufactures 
 besides that of linen. England was freely taking from us our pro- 
 visions. She was, to some extent, especially in the article of 
 woollen fabrics, enforcing against us the system of protection, which 
 was then believed to be the wise rule. But throughout the South 
 and West of Ireland the people were, to use the language of Bishop 
 Berkeley, starving in the midst of plenty. Landlord oppressions were 
 producing misery, and even provoking insurrectionary movements 
 
100 LORD DUFFERIN AND THE WOOLLEN TRADE. 
 
 and praedial or agrarian crimes. Population certainly was not 
 unduly pressing on the powers of the soil. Why were the rural 
 peasantry thus miserable and wretched ? We are driven to account 
 for it, as we do now, by the miserable state of serfdom in which 
 they were held. It matters not whether they were so held by the 
 superior landlord or by " the middleman." For all purposes with 
 which we have to deal the middleman was the landlord. He was 
 the man who to the occupier had the giving of the soil. 
 
 Is it possible for any one who reads ever so carelessly the records 
 of that period, to say that the misery and wretchedness of that 
 period proceeded from an excessive agricultural population, being 
 driven by the suppression of manufactures upon the resources of 
 the soil? 
 
 But more than this — for nearly a century the causes to which 
 Lord Dufferin attributes the miserable condition of our land tenure 
 have ceased to exist. Why has that condition not improved ? As 
 to insecurity of tenure, it is worse, absolutely worse now than it 
 was in 1782. Nay, more, it is since such restrictions were removed 
 that manufacturing industry has wholly disappeared, except that 
 which is still preserved in the districts of tenant right. 
 
 The answer is obvious — they are the vainest of " dreamers" 
 who imagine that manufacturing industry can flourish, or even 
 exist, where the great mass of the people are impoverished and 
 slaves. The south of Ireland has lost her manufactories exactly 
 because " landlordism" has kept the people serfs. Belfast is great, 
 and Derry is prosperous, not because the "clemency of England" 
 spared the linen manufacture, but because the freedom of the people 
 won from the landlords fixity of tenure — and the habits of manly 
 independence and industry trained a people to enterprise, energy, 
 and thrift. 
 
 The growth of flax, and its manufacture, have been as open for the 
 last century to the people of Munster as to those of Ulster. Why are 
 they not as prosperous? More than a century ago, Bishop 
 Berkeley pressed that industry upon the miserable people among 
 whom he lived. There was wanting the very first element of all 
 national prosperity, a free and independent people. 
 
 AVith these things before us it is impossible to regard the sup- 
 pression of the woollen trade as accounting for all the wretchedness 
 of the Irish people. English power, it will be remembered, never 
 ventured to interfere with the right of the Irish nation to manufacture 
 woollens for themselves. It prohibited their export to England and 
 foreign countries. Ireland was deprived of nothing but the foreign 
 trade in her woollen fabrics — and we are seriously told that this is 
 to account for the misery and wretchedness to which the people of 
 Ireland were reduced ; that because they could not supply foreign 
 countries with those fabrics a population of three millions could not 
 find sustenance and comfort on the Irish soil ! If there had been an 
 
MR. OTWAY'S HAND-LOOM WEAVERS' REPORT. 101 
 
 independent and comfortable population on the soil, a respectable 
 woollen manufacture could have been maintained in Ireland by the 
 home demand. The wretchedness of the people prevented the 
 existence of a domestic market, and therefore our manufacture fell. 
 The history of industry abundantly teaches us that it is from the 
 encouragement of home consumption that all manufactures take their 
 rise. It is from the gatherings of home industry that manufacturing 
 capital is created. It was not by prohibiting our export of broad- 
 cloth, but by defending and protecting the landlords who " ground 
 the people to powder," that England prohibited the first rise of all 
 prosperity and all " capital" among the Irish people. The blight and 
 the blast of all Irish industry was at home. The " east wind" may 
 have brought the locusts, but the locusts ate up and devoured on 
 the Irish ground. If English power had left the people their own 
 soil ; if it had not planted over that people a horde of extortioners, 
 who, by themselves or their deputies, wrung from the wretched 
 natives all that could be raised from the soil by the blood and toil 
 of slaves — if it had not upheld the extreme rights of proprietors 
 while it crushed the occupiers to the earth — if the soil of Ireland 
 had been occupied by freemen and not by serfs, all the laws by 
 which England could have repressed our woollen manufacture 
 might have injured our wealth, but they could not have kept down 
 the industry and the enterprise of a free people. 
 
 In confirmation of the views which I have expressed I am for- 
 tunately able to quote an authority which at least has the merit of 
 being perfectly independent. In the year 1840, a commission of 
 enquiry as to the condition of the hand-loom weavers was issued. 
 The report of Mr. Csesar Otway, one of the commissioners 
 appointed to conduct that enquiry, and who conducted its Irish 
 department, contains, perhaps, the clearest view of the causes of the 
 position, during the eighteenth century, of Irish manufacturing 
 industry which has ever in the same space, been given to the 
 public. I certainly take no credit to myself for the omission — in 
 saying that, when I wrote the Plea for the Celtic Race, I had not 
 read this most remarkable and instructive document. I do take 
 credit to myself when I say that by a perfectly independent train 
 of thought and enquiry I have arrived at conclusions almost 
 identical with those so clearly and ably expressed by the author 
 of this report. 
 
 Mr. Otway thus traces the causes which blighted the prosperity 
 of Irish manufactures. : — 
 
 " One great and fatal error in the system of colonization to which 1 
 have adverted was, that it became a fixed principle of policy to exclude 
 the native Irish from the benefits of all the improved arts introduced by 
 the new settlers. It had been found, that the Anglo-Norman lords who 
 had obtained estates from the Plantagenets, became, in the course of 
 time, alienated from English allegiance and usages ; to use the phrase of 
 
102 LORD DUFFERIN AND THE WOOLLEN TRADE. 
 
 the day, they were ' Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores.' To prevent such a result 
 from the new settlement was perversely regarded as an object of greater 
 importance than the settlement itself ; it was said to be essentially neces- 
 sary ' to preserve and maintain an English interest in Ireland.' But for 
 the unhappy difference of religion between the settlers and the natives 
 this exclusive system would not have been long maintained ; the Irish 
 and English would gradually have amalgamated, like the Normans and 
 the Saxons ; but the distinction of religion gave strength and permanence 
 to the distinction of race, and rendered the line of demarcation scarcely 
 less broad than if it had been perpetuated by difference of colour and 
 physical organization. 
 
 " The hand-loom weavers, the wool-combers, the clothiers, the dyers, the white- 
 smiths, and even the mariners, in the south of Ireland, were so exclusively 
 Protestant that they would not allow a Roman Catholic apprentice to be received 
 in any of their trades. The only branch of manufactures permitted to ' the 
 meer Irish ' was that of brogues or common shoes ; and even this trade 
 was not permitted to be carried on within the precincts of walled towns. 
 Hence, these manufactures were, and continued to be, exotics ; they 
 struck no root in the soil. 
 
 " The early settlers were long a nourishing and numerous body. In 
 1689, William and Mary were proclaimed in several small towns in 
 Munster ; and the Protestant artizans raised a respectable army to resist 
 James. At an earlier period the desertion of the Royal cause by the 
 Munster Protestants, under Lord Broghill and Inchiquin, was the princi- 
 pal cause of the easy conquest by Cromwell. It may be added, that 
 James IL, in his letters, ascribes his failures in Ireland to the fact that 
 the Protestants alone understood the art of making and mending gun- 
 locks, and that in consequence he never was able to keep his partisans 
 supplied with serviceable arms. 
 
 " During the reigns of William and Anne this exclusion of the Irish 
 from all manufactures was rigorously continued ; but to compensate for 
 this, great encouragement was given to the immigration of foreign Pro- 
 testants, especially the Huguenots, who had fled from France on the 
 revocation of the edict of Nantes. The bigotry of Louis the XIV. upset 
 the magnificent schemes of his minister, Colbert, by the expulsion of his 
 Huguenot subjects ; and numbers of these men brought their arts, their 
 industry, their capital, and their faith into Ireland — they established 
 several branches of trade in various parts of the country — the woollen 
 manufacture in the South — linens and cambrics in the Counties of Down 
 and Armagh, and the silk manufacture in Dublin. In support of these 
 refugees, and the arts they carried with them, the Irish landed proprietors 
 were very active — a subscription was raised, as appears from Primate 
 Boulter's letters, for establishing the cambric manufacture in the town 
 of Dundalk, amounting to £30,000, and a Monsieur De Joncourt was 
 appointed to collect French operatives, and conduct the establishment. 
 But the Huguenots adopted the baneful system of exclusion, and exerted 
 themselves to prevent the Irish from learning their arts or profiting by 
 their industry. The Duke of Ormond, following the example of the Earl of 
 Cork, also prohibited the instruction of Roman Catholic apprentices, as did the 
 principal landholders, who encouraged foreigners to settle on their estates. 
 
 "Now this exclusive system at once destroyed the basis of all 
 
 
ME. OTWAY'S HAND-LOOM WEAVERS' REPORT. 103 
 
 manufacturing prosperity — the home market. The fabrics introduced by 
 the English and French settlers were of a superior quality, for which the 
 native Irish could only gradually acquire a want, as they were raised in 
 the scale of civilization. But instead of thus raising them, the foreign 
 manufacturers, aided by the legislature, employed every possible means 
 to depress them, and thus blindly drove from their market a whole nation 
 of customers, and confined them to the use of the rude and cheap fabrics 
 which were woven amongst themselves. The manufacturers were thus 
 forced to rely on their foreign trade ; but here they came into competition 
 with the English merchants, and aroused the spirit of commercial 
 jealousy. 
 
 " The act of William, prohibiting the export of Irish wool and woollens, 
 destroyed the Irish woollen manufactures, simply because they depended almost 
 solely on foreign sale for their support. There was no independent peasantry 
 or respectable and wealthy middle class, for them to supply. 
 
 " It may be asked why the manufacture of the North did not share 
 the same fate of those of the South ; but the question is easily solved by 
 a glance at the state of the population in the province of Ulster. The 
 settlement in Ulster was more complete and extensive than that in any 
 other part of Ireland. The natives had been either wholly exterminated 
 or driven into mountainous and remote districts. The landlords and 
 tenants in the manufacturing districts of the North thus belong to one 
 class ; they did not regard each other as hereditary enemies ; there was no 
 legacy of oppression on one side, and revenge on the other. The Ulster 
 tenant felt {and feels) he had a property in his farm — something on earth he 
 could call his own ; and the fruits of his industry would be allowed to 
 accumulate into a small capital, and in point of fact, such an accumulation 
 did take place ; for the greater part of the capital in the linen manufactures of 
 Ulster was derived from the savings of agricultural industry, and hence arose 
 the numerous class who were each at the same time a farmer, a weaver, 
 and a linen-dealer (jobber). In the south of Ireland the title to property 
 was unsettled ; for more than a century confiscation and re-confiscation 
 followed each other, until the Acts of Settlement and Explanation secured 
 the followers of Cromwell in their estates ; there was no community of 
 feeling or interest between the proprietor and the occupants brought 
 about by these acts. The great object was to establish an English 
 interest in Ireland ; and to accomplish this hereditary policy, the two last 
 Stuarts, while they patronised Roman Catholics in their own courts, 
 rigorously maintained the new Protestant proprietary in the south of 
 Ireland. It was not until James II. was driven from England, th^t 
 he would allow even of an enquiry into the Act of Settlement, and it is 
 doubtful whether he would have consented, even in Dublin, to its repeal, 
 if a large portion of the re-confiscations had not reverted to the Crown. 
 The repeal of the Irish Act of Settlement, by the Parliament of James 
 the 2nd, gave the Protestant proprietors a fright from which they have 
 not perfectly recovered even to this day ; since that time they have been 
 persuaded that every change of policy, or isolated disturbance, threatens 
 their titles ; they deem that they only garrison their estates, and therefore 
 they look upon the native occupants (I cannot call them tenants) as 
 persons ready to eject them upon a favourable opportunity. Hence, 
 the Minister landlord was afraid to give the persons who accupied his 
 
104 LORD DUFFERIN AND THE WOOLLEN TRADE. 
 
 ground a permanent hold upon the land, or a beneficial interest in its 
 occupancy. 
 
 " The old struggle of title, in natural course, produced the new contest 
 of tenure ; and Captain Rock and Lady Clare were as legitimately 
 descended from the Catholic lords of the pale, as Jack Straw and Wat 
 Tyler were from the Saxon thanes, who fought at Hastings, There is, 
 and until the relation between landlord and occupant are altered, there can be 
 no accumulation of savings in the South of Ireland from agricultural industry — 
 and hence there was not and can be no spontaneous growth of manu- 
 factures from small capitals." 
 
 This report, it will be remembered, was made in the year 1840 
 when no agitation existed on the subject of tenant right. No 
 political object could be served by the expression of such views. 
 There was no social or party discussion then going on which could 
 exercise the slightest influence over the mind of the clear-sighted 
 and able writer whose enquiry into the condition of Irish manu- 
 facturing industry led him to these results. 
 
 I say, then, that Lord DufFerin's solution of the causes of our 
 misery is utterly inadequate to account for it. It fails, because for 
 nearly a century the causes which he assigns have absolutely ceased 
 to exist — it fails, because it does not touch, throughout an entire 
 century, the question of the miserable condition of the occupiers 
 of our land — it fails, because it assigns no reason for the superiority 
 of one province over the rest of Ireland — it fails, because it is 
 utterly insufficient to account for the degradation of a people such 
 as he eulogizes, placed in a country such as he describes. It fails, 
 lastly, because, if the Irish tenantry had been independent, the 
 home demand would have sustained a woollen manufacture to 
 supply the wants of the tenantry itself. Whatever we may think 
 of the commercial policy of England as to our wool, we must go 
 deeper, far deeper, to find the causes of the "perennial desolation" 
 of our land. 
 
 I am still unwilling to part with Lord DufFerin's third letter 
 without noticing two passages of no little significance; one, in 
 which he avows himself the apologist of exorbitant rents ; the 
 other, in which I think he acknowledges his enmity to Ulster 
 tenant right. The first passage to which I ask attention runs thus : — 
 
 " Whether even the middleman is deserving of all the abuse which is 
 heaped upon him may be a question. It has always seemed to me that 
 the moral responsibility of accepting a competition rent is pretty much 
 the same as that of profiting by the market rate of wages. If the first is 
 frequently exorbitant, the latter is as often inadequate ; and inadequate 
 wages are as fatal to efficiency as a rack-rent is to production ; though 
 each be the result of voluntary adjustment, it is the same abject misery 
 and absence of an alternative which rule the rate of both.' 
 
 This is but a plain and, I must say, a consistent following out of 
 
SQUEEZING UP THE RENT. 105 
 
 the principles of those who tell us that all things connected with 
 the tilling of land are to be left to voluntary adjustment, and the 
 natural laws which regulate prices. The value of everything is 
 just what it will bring. Upon this principle competition rent and 
 competition wages are the value of the land or the work, and he 
 who takes less than he can get for the one, or gives more for the 
 other than that for which he can get it, is taking less or giving 
 more than the value, and is making a gift of the difference to his 
 tenant or his workman. 
 
 There are, after all, great principles implanted in our conscience, 
 which tell us that the man does not do his duty by his neighbour 
 when he avails himself of his distress to exact from him his toil for 
 some miserable pittance. There are laws of God as well as of 
 political economy, and some, at least, of the former, are written in 
 our hearts. 
 
 I cannot stop to argue the question upon the grounds at which, 
 in the Plea for the Celtic Race, I have already glanced. There is 
 an instinct in human nature which revolts at the idea that no moral 
 responsibility attaches to the Irish landlord, who would squeeze 
 from the miserable peasant the last penny he could extort from his 
 dire need of a bit of land. This is to make the landlord a usurer 
 (I admit usury is become respectable), but a usurer who is neither 
 respectable or honest ; a usurer who remorselessly trades upon the 
 necessities of his victims. 
 
 I notice the passage for the sake of a fallacy which pervades 
 a great deal that is written on this subject. There is no 
 process of competition in the raising of Irish rents. As a 
 general rule a landlord does not raise his rent because some 
 other person has offered more for the land than the existing 
 tenant pays, but because he thinks that he is entitled to or 
 can exact the additional amount. When an unscrupulous proprietor 
 thinks that the circumstances of the tenant will bear the exaction of 
 an increased rent he simply sends the land bailiff to tell him that his 
 rent will be raised. If the tenant does not sign the new agreement 
 the refusal is followed by notice to quit. In the immense majority of 
 cases the tenant has no choice but to submit. The increased rent 
 very probably will beggar him as soon as the little hoard of savings 
 upon which his conscientious landlord speculated is gone. To 
 speak of rents being fixed in Ireland by "competition" is to speak of 
 something utterly foreign to the great majority of instances with 
 which we have to deal. A very little reflection will make it plain 
 that whatever be the case in any other country, in Ireland at least 
 the letting rent of land is not fixed by the same laws as that which 
 in open market regulate generally the price of commodities. 
 
 The process by which the price of every commodity is fixed, in 
 ordinary cases, is familiar to every one who has studied even the 
 elements of political economy. A knowledge of it is in truth 
 
106 ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES AND IRISH RENTS. 
 
 the foundation of all the reasonings of the science. It is fixed on 
 the one hand by the competition of buyers anxious to obtain the 
 article, and by the competition of sellers anxious to get rid of the 
 articles which they have to sell. In any case in which these two 
 things do not freely act, political economy teaches us distinctly 
 that we cannot apply the rules which determine, in ordinary cases, 
 price. Neither of the elements of adjustment act freely in fixing 
 the price of Irish land. The landlord has his tenant, in most cases, 
 so completely in his power, that he is not driven to regulate his 
 land even by the principle of competition among buyers. If he 
 were even compelled to the alternative of leaving his land waste, he 
 knows he can insist on the tenant paying him exactly the rent which 
 he chooses to fix, and he fixes it not by any consideration of the 
 probability of obtaining another tenant, but by his own view of 
 what the tenant ought to pay. 
 
 The second element, that of competition among sellers, exercises 
 an influence so feeble and insignificant that it may be said to be 
 wholly absent. The man who would seriously say that there is a 
 competition among Irish landlords to undersell each other in the 
 letting of land, may then appeal to the laws of political economy 
 and the process which regulates the natural price. Scientific reason- 
 ings will only lead us astray, if these reasonings are based on the 
 assumption that an Irish landlord is generally influenced in the 
 fixing of his rent by the fear that another landlord will attract away 
 his tenants by offering his farms at a cheaper rate. 
 
 In denying, then, that the rent of land in Ireland is fixed by the 
 operation of the mercantile laws of price, I am not impugning, but 
 actually upholding and applying the principles of the science of 
 political economy. One of the very objects of that science is to 
 fix and determine the cases in which price is regulated by the 
 process of competition. Its investigations have determined that 
 where certain conditions exist price will be regulated by certain 
 rules. But they have equally determined that where these 
 conditions do not exist these rules do not prevail The conditions 
 do not exist in the case of either the letting or taking of Irish land. 
 
 I might as well be told that the ransom which the brigand 
 demands for his captive is a matter within the ordinary rules of 
 commercial demand and supply — or to use, perhaps a more appro- 
 priate illustration, that those rules adjust the price which could be 
 extorted for a night's lodging from a traveller benighted on a 
 solitary road. In all instances of this nature the sum that is paid 
 depends upon the conscience or the cunning of the one party, and 
 on the ability to pay possessed, or presumed to be possessed, by the 
 other. Political economy warns us not to apply to such cases the 
 calculations which ascertain for us the " market overt" price. So 
 to apply them is simply a blunder in science, and an outrage upon 
 common sense. 
 
LORD DUFFERIN ON THE ULSTER TENANT RIGHT. 107 
 
 The other passage in Lord Dufferin's letter which demands 
 notice is one which seems to be a very clear and distinct warning 
 to the Ulster tenant-farmers that unless they make common cause 
 with those of the rest of Ireland, and force a legislative recognition 
 of fixity of tenure, their own provincial custom of tenant right is 
 doomed.* 
 
 * I am not sure that there is any where to be found as full and accurate information 
 on the subject of the Ulster tenant as that which is contained in a report, to which the 
 name of the late Mr. O'Connell is attached, and which was presented to the Repeal 
 Association in April, 1845, the same from which I have already taken the evidence 
 bearing on tenant right. 
 
 To this report are appended very well selected and most valuable extracts from the 
 evidence taken before the Committee of the House of Commons on townland valuations 
 in 1844, and before the Devon Commission, which made its report in 1845. 
 
 The general result is thus accurately summed up in the report : — 
 
 "That it also appears from the Report and Evidence of the said Commissioners, and 
 of the Committee on the Townland Valuation of Ireland, that throughout the greater 
 part of Ulster the practice of Tenant-right prevails, and that along with it are found 
 industry, comfort, and peace. 
 
 " That according to the practice of this right, no person can get into the occupation 
 of a farm without paying the previous occupier the price of his right of occupation or 
 good-will, whether the land be held by lease or at will. 
 
 " That on the ejectment of any occupying tenant, he receives the full selling value of his 
 Tenant-right, less by any arrears due to the landlord; but this does not extend to 
 middlemen. 
 
 "That the same custom, unrecognized as it is by law, prevents the landlord who has 
 bought the tenant-right, or otherwise got into possession of a farm, from setting it at 
 such an increase of rent as to displace Tenant-right. Thus, middlemen are almost 
 unknown, and the effect of competition for land is principally to increase the value of 
 the Tenant-right, not the amount of the rent. 
 
 " That Tenant-right exists even in unimproved land, and that five years' purchase is an 
 ordinary payment for the Tenant-right of such land, while 15 or 20 years' purchase 
 is often given for the Tenant right of highly improved farms." 
 
 The report then proceeds in words of warning and suggestion, more applicable now 
 than they were when they were written : — 
 
 "That, nevertheless, this right is regarded by many of the present landlords of 
 Ulster with jealousy and dislike ; that several of them have endeavoured to shackle 
 and reduce this right ; that some of them on the borders of the customary counties, 
 have tried, with success, to abolish it, and that ' it is in danger ' (in the words of The 
 Northern Whig) ' of being frittered away in course of years, and no equivalent provided 
 in its stead.* 
 
 " That the said Commissioners appear to have studiously endeavoured in their ex- 
 amination of witnesses, to disparage the character of this Tenant right, which the 
 present farmers of Ulster bought with their money, or inherited from their fathers — a 
 right, of which one witness (the agent of Lord Lurgan) said, that were it disallowed, 
 there was ' no force at the disposal of the Horse-guards which could keep the peace of 
 the province.' 
 
 " That the Commissioners (not daring openly to attack such a right so defended) 
 have insidiously reported that any ' hasty or general disalloioance ' of the right would 
 be inexpedient — purporting thereby that its gradual and cunning disalloivance would be 
 expedient, and proposing many schemes for this purpose. 
 
 "That portions of the said Report and Evidence, presented herewith, fully bear out 
 the preceding propositions on the tenant-right. 
 
 "That, under these circumstances, it is desirable that a law should be passed re- 
 cognizing tenant right in the customary districts of Ulster, and giving process from a 
 tribunal of arbiters, with an appeal to the Assistant Barrister's Court, for the adjust- 
 ment of disputes as to this right." — Report of Parliamentary Committee of Repeal 
 Association of Ireland, Vol. ii., p. 298. 
 
108 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE ULSTER TENANT RIGH1. 
 
 " In Ulster," says Lord Dufferin, " though under a more subtle guise, 
 rack rents and the middlemen are as rampant as they are in Connaught." 
 
 In a note this is explained : — 
 
 "The tenant right, or good-will of the tenant is disposable; the incoming 
 tenant pays the purchase, almost invariably made with money borrowed 
 at a high rate of interest. This interest is, of course, a second or rack 
 rent paid to the lender of the purchase money, and the recipient who 
 walks off with it is neither more nor less than a kind of bastard middle- 
 man, who takes a fine in lieu of an annual payment for a non-existing 
 value. As a consequence, the new tenant commences his enterprize 
 burdened with debt and destitute of capital. Hence low farming, 
 inadequate profits, uneducated children, and, too frequently, the ruin 
 and emigration of the Ulster tenant, in spite of indulgent landlords and 
 a secure tenure." * 
 
 The right of sale is essential to the very existence of the custom 
 of tenant right. Lord Dufferin himself so defined tenant right 
 before the Land Tenure Committee of 1865 : — 
 
 " The custom may, I think, be thus defined : — Tenant right is a custom 
 under which the tenant farmers of the North of Ireland, or, at all events, 
 in those districts where the custom prevails, expect, when they have 
 occasion to give up possession of their farms, that their landlords will 
 allow them to obtain from the incoming tenant such a sum as shall re- 
 munerate them for their improvements upon the farms." — {Lord Dufferin, 
 Question 966.) 
 
 The definition, as Lord Dufferin intimates in another part of the 
 same answer, is inadequate. It is put in the cautious and guarded 
 language of one unfavourable to the custom, but it describes that 
 custom as consisting entirely in the practice of the sale of the out- 
 going tenant of an interest in the farm. I do not admit this to be 
 anything like an adequate account of the custom of tenant right. 
 It is that which would be given by a person anxious to 
 find a plausible excuse for destroying it. Tenant right is the 
 insufficient substitute for the old right of every occupier on the 
 
 * I cannot take much credit to myself for sagacity in having, months before Lord 
 Dufferin wrote these sentences, predicted this. In July last I urged the necessity of a 
 legal enactment to preserve the Ulster tenant right. 
 
 " Of the necessity of some such legal enactment there is unhappily too much proof. 
 In those which may be termed the border districts of tenant right, the sacredness of 
 the custom is gradually encroached upon. There are estates from which, as opportu- 
 nity offers, it is excluded. The right which it confers is, in other instances, frittered 
 away ; and one after another the debateable points are ruled by the landlord in favour 
 of himself. Political economy and public policy are always at hand to supply excellent 
 reasons for the extinction of a custom which requires an incoming tenant to expend what 
 is called his capital before he enters on his farm. It cannot be very difficult to prove to the 
 satisfaction of a landlord that his capital could be better expended in improvements upon 
 the soil, while the want of the tenant right was represented by an addition to the rent." — 
 Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 61, Third Edition. 
 
THE " WARNING" OF TENANT RIGHT. 109 
 
 Ulster plantation to be an " estated tenant" on his farm. It had 
 its origin in the days when Lady Drummond pretended to the 
 King's Commissioner that her knight was gone to Scotland, and 
 that having lost the key of his paper desk, she could not produce 
 the counterpanes of the leases which the tenants complained they 
 had not got. If Lord DufFerin's description be accurate, this custom 
 robs the landlord of a rack rent, which is paid to a usurer who is 
 the owner of money, not of land. The custom which leads to 
 "low farming, inadequate profits, uneducated children! and, too 
 frequently, the ruin and emigration of the Ulster tenant," cannot 
 too soon be abolished. 
 
 This is certainly not the light in which, in other parts of Ire- 
 land, we have been accustomed to regard either Ulster tenants or 
 Ulster tenant right. Wise men have spoken of it in terms of 
 admiration as the glory of the province. Men as well acquainted 
 as his Lordship is with Ulster have described the maintenance of 
 tenant right as the sole guarantee for its prosperity and peace. 
 
 When a nobleman of Lord DufFerin's character and station pal- 
 liates the exaction of exorbitant rents, and classes the custom of 
 Ulster tenant right with the system of rack-renting middlemen, it is 
 high time for the Ulster tenantry to look out for themselves. 
 
 And yet Lord DufFerin has the strange boldness to say that 
 arguments derived from the confiscations and the settlement con- 
 sequent on them point to the extermination of the Protestant 
 population of Ulster. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more 
 singular or more complete misrepresentation of the whole effect of 
 such arguments. The advocates of fixity of tenure invariably point 
 to Ulster as the illustration of its value — to its effects upon the 
 inhabitants of that province as the conclusive proof of the wisdom 
 of perpetuating it by law where it exists, and establishing it where 
 it does not. Can this strange statement be a miserable and unmanly 
 appeal to the religious passions of the Protestants of Ulster to pre- 
 vent them joining in the demands for justice to all Irish occupiers 
 of the soil? I am very unwilling to impute this to Lord DufFerin, 
 yet I hardly know what else this marvellous allusion to the exter- 
 mination of Protestants means. I do not know that in immediate 
 connexion with this singular argument he named me ; if he did so, 
 it is scarcely worth my while to say my whole argument w^as that 
 the Protestant population of Ulster were to be taken as a model for 
 the rest of Ireland, exactly because their freedom and independence 
 had won for them tenant right.' I stated that whenever that 
 custom was broken down, the prosperity and the peace of Ulster 
 would be destroyed — that in the Protestant population of that 
 province were to be found the qualities of industry, of manly 
 independence, and of self-relying energy and thrift. I argued that 
 the tenant right which had made them what they are ought — just 
 because it had made them so — to be extended to the rest of Ireland. 
 
110 PROTESTANT EXTERMINATION. 
 
 There is indeed a policy which would tend to the extermination 
 of that people — it is the policy of " landlordism" which drove many 
 of the Ulster Protestants into exile just a century ago* — the policy 
 which would make way for landlords' improvements by getting rid 
 of " small holdings" and of the obnoxious custom of tenant right ! 
 I would do Lord Dufferin injustice if I described him as the 
 advocate of the extermination of the Protestant population of the 
 County of Down, yet there would be surely some excuse for so 
 designating arguments which tell us that Ulster tenant right is 
 only a form of the worst class of rack rent middlemen, and assume, 
 as an axiom, that no farmer who holds less than fifteen acres can 
 continue with advantage to occupy his farm, 
 
 I cannot avoid adding that if Lord Dufferin's proposal to graft 
 on a land bill provisions enabling landlords to borrow public money 
 to buy up their tenants' improvements — in other words, to purchase 
 out their tenant right — should ever unhappily be adopted, a very 
 large extermination of the Protestant population of Ulster will be 
 the result. Except to facilitate the removal of many of them from 
 their farms, I can see no object in the proposal. 
 
 Let us argue out this question fairly, but let us have no evasions 
 of the real issue on either side. 
 
 * In a previous page I have adverted to the singular fact of a large emigration from 
 Ulster of the Protestant population in the beginning of the last century. It was very 
 considerable at the time of the suppression of the rebellion of the Hearts of Oak. 
 Arthur Young, who visited Ulster some years later, was assured that this latter 
 emigration was confined to "the dissenters," "the idle," and "the worthless." It 
 must be remembered that his reports on the state of Ireland were generally derived, so 
 far as they were not the result of personal observation, from the aristocracy and high 
 gentry. His tour in Ireland was a succession of visits to the houses of noblemen, 
 bishops, and great landed proprietors. Occasionally the answers to his inquiries 
 disclosed a very different result. Primate Boulter, in his lettings, gives a totally 
 different representation of the earlier Protestant emigration. He draws a very melan- 
 choly picture of the distress which, upon his visit to Derry, he found prevailing among 
 the people, even in the Protestant districts of the North. 
 
 The subject is well worth a careful inquiry. Some materials for it must certainly 
 exist. I am very much disposed to believe that the emigration was caused, like our 
 present emigration, by landlord oppression. That the last expatriation was of those 
 who went in despair, upon the suppression of the insurrection of the Hearts of Oak — ■ 
 the last struggle to vindicate tenant right. They went before they knew that the 
 struggle had been really successful in its object. With that insurrection ceased all 
 attempts at interference with the Ulster tenant right. 
 
 An inquirer who would follow out the matter "too curiously," might fall into a 
 strain of reflections on the different results of the "risings" in Ulster and Munster. 
 He could hardly overlook the fact that the Protestant rebels of Ulster were tried by 
 sympathising juries, who brought in repeated verdicts of acquittal under circumstances 
 which were thought to justify the legislature in passing the extreme and unconstitu- 
 tional measure of enacting that the trials should be in Dublin. In Dublin the 
 prosecutions equally failed, and the unpopular statute was obliged to be repealed. 
 
 In Munster the " Popish" rebels were tried by juries, the fury of whose partizanship 
 against the prisoners the judges were compelled to moderate and restrain. 
 
 The Ulster people obtained their fixity of tenure. The Munster serfs were left to 
 the landlords, the Whiteboys, and Captain Rock. 
 
 There are many passages in English history — there are very few in Irish — which 
 tell us how trial by jury has really vindicated popular liberty and right. 
 
LORD DUFFERIN ON MIDDLEMEN. Ill 
 
 \ I must do Lord Dufferin the justice to say that his views upon 
 these questions are only legitimate — indeed necessary deductions 
 ffrom the theories of the absolute right of property in the landlord, 
 and from the economic argument which is employed against any 
 interference with contracts relating to land. If these arguments be 
 valid against fixity of tenure, they are equally valid against the 
 Ulster tenant right. If land is to be dealt with in its letting, as a 
 grocer sells his tea and his sugar, and if landlords be mere traders 
 in the article, they are not to be blamed for exacting the 
 market price, and the market price is the utmost which any one 
 will give. I have endeavoured to show that these principles are 
 not applicable to the letting of Irish farms. I believe that any 
 theories founded on them must be delusive, but I give Lord Dufferin 
 full credit for the boldness and the clearness with which he has fol- 
 lowed out those principles to their logical and inevitable conclu- 
 sion. If land is really in the market an article of free trade, then 
 rack rents are but the healthy development of natural and inevitable 
 laws, and rack-renting middlemen were as useful as " regraters and 
 forestallers." They were the retailers to the small customer of the 
 article of land purchasing at the wholesale price, and making the 
 profit on the retail. They bought in the cheapest, and sold in the 
 dearest market, and were only the useful agents in carrying out the 
 great object of bringing land to the consumer at its true market 
 value ; and the profits they made upon their share in the transaction 
 would not have been paid if they had not rendered services to all 
 parties equivalent to the commission which they charged. 
 
 There are, no doubt, persons who will think that as long as the 
 argumentum ad absurdum is recognized as a legitimate mode of 
 reasoning, it is one of the most conclusive arguments against the 
 application of those principles to land tenure in Ireland that they 
 lead by an inexorable logic to these results. But unquestionably 
 Lord Dufferin has done nothing more than follow them out to their 
 inevitable conclusion. 
 
 Upon this subject of " middlemen" I must say that the observa- 
 tions of Lord Dufferin, much as I dissent from them, like all the 
 mistakes of able men, are far from being destitute of some founda- 
 tion * I cannot agree in his defence of the middlemen whom he 
 describes. I believe the exaction of extortionate rents to be both 
 an evil and a crime, whether the rents be wrung from the people 
 by a middleman or an owner in fee. But it is an absurdity to say 
 that the existence of middlemen was the cause of the miseries of 
 the people. At the very worst they were the administrators of a 
 
 * The Edinburgh Review, in one of its early numbers, justified the existence of 
 middlemen upon grounds not very unlike those upon which Lord Dufferin defends 
 them. If rent in Ireland be regulated by the same economic laws as those which fix 
 generally the price of commodities, it is impossible to maintain the argument against 
 middlemen. 
 
H2 THE IRISH MIDDLEMEN. 
 
 vicious system of land tenure — not its creators. They may ha 
 preyed upon the miseries of the people, but they did not ma 
 them. The fact that a man paid rent himself gave him no pow 
 over the occupiers which the chief landlord did not personally posse 
 A system of extortion was possible, because the occupiers of t 
 soil were crushed down by oppressive laws, and the worst effect 
 interposing an intermediate agent between the owner in fee a 
 that occupier was to place the power of extortion and oppress 
 in the hands of a class of persons who may be supposed more lik 
 to be remorseless in its use. In the circumstances of Ireland t 
 was injurious. It placed over the tenantry a landlord of lower ran 
 and therefore one more likely to oppress the people. It deprived t 
 people on the estate on which the owner was resident of the bene 
 of whatever humanising influence high rank, and superior educatic 
 and great possessions, might be supposed to exercise upon the d 
 position of their landlord. Injurious as all this may have been, ii 
 not possible to carry the argument against middlemen farther th 
 this. It is plain that whatever the middleman did the ch 
 landlord might do, and if the power of extortion and oppressi 
 did not exist in that chief landlord it was not possible for hi 
 to delegate it to another. The middleman was obnoxious becai] 
 wherever he did exist he was the instrument of oppression w 
 came in contact with the people ; and it was the natural tenden 
 both of the people and the aristocracy to throw all the blame 
 every oppression upon him. 
 
 In the first place we must remember that many of the hold( 
 of these intermediate interests were in reality the owners of t 
 estate. Large tracts of land in Ireland are held under fee fai 
 grants, or leases in perpetuity, paying an inconsiderable rent, 
 am acquainted with a district in the South of Ireland thick 
 studded with gentry, in which, a few years ago, there was just o 
 man, and he was not of the higher rank of gentry, living on 1 
 own fee simple estate. The ancestral mansion of one of t 
 proudest families among the landowners of Ireland was built up 
 a tract of land held under a neighbouring nobleman, at an almc 
 nominal rent, for 999 years. A title in the family has becor ( 
 extinct; but that mansion in modern times was the residence of 
 peer more influential than the nobleman from whom he rent 
 his estate.* To speak of persons of this class as middlemen wou 
 be an entire misapplication of the word. They were, and are, 
 all intents and purposes, the real owners of the soil. 
 
 The frequency of grants of this nature forms a singular featu 
 in the history of landed property in Ireland. In many instanc 
 they were the result of unsettled times, when little value was s 
 
 * Sales have recently taken place in the Landed Estates' Court in which the trifl: 
 head rent has been bought up ; and the representative of Lord Longneville can n 
 say that he lives upon his own fee-simple estate. 
 
THE IRISH MIDDLEMEN. 113 
 
 upon property in many districts of Ireland, and men were ready to 
 *ive it for almost anything they could get. Many of the new 
 oroprietors parted with their estates in perpetuity, because they 
 I ad not the means of meeting the expenditure which appeared abso- 
 lutely necessary to make them productive at all, Others granted 
 raese long tenures because, while they claimed the rank and the 
 Jknity of landed proprietors, they did not choose to have the 
 £rcuble and annoyance of managing property in a country to which 
 n dy were strangers, and with the people of which they had no 
 mmmunity of habit or of feeling. They were made very frequently 
 ff grantees who desired to draw a certain revenue from their Irish 
 states without either risk or trouble to themselves. In many 
 instances these long leases were the result partly of this feeling, and 
 ? urtly of the proverbial recklessness with which men part with ill- 
 o tten possessions. Facile parta, facile dilabuntur. The history of 
 >iush titles abounds with instances that seem the mixed result of 
 *a<odigal generosity and ignorance, the feeling which makes the 
 aidier sell for a trifle the articles he has seized in his pillage.* 
 *< There were, no doubt, many persons who ought to have been 
 tinners holding long leases of large quantities of land, who, instead 
 }f occupying it, let the land to under tenants; and there were 
 instances in which those under-tenants were grievously oppressed. 
 ? But it would be the greatest of all mistakes to suppose that all 
 uch persons were peculiarly extortionate, or still greater to imagine 
 aat oppression and extortion were confined to estates which were 
 h let. 
 
 On the contrary, the agent of the absentee proprietor was 
 Generally, if not always, a more grievous oppressor than even the 
 "orst of the middlemen;! and the resident landowner, having just 
 t 
 
 j* Every one acquainted with Irish titles or Irish estates must remember many such 
 [-stances. Occasionally they were like the acquisition of property in the early days of 
 L e Incumbered Estates Commission ; bargains made at a time when the state of the 
 nxntry made Irish property of little value. 
 
 Arthur Young tells us that the great Munster estates of Lord Lansdowne had a 
 • tow escape of such an alienation. 
 
 1( ;'The present Earl of Kerry's grandfather, Thomas, agreed to lease the whole estate 
 m £1,500, a year, to a Mr. Collis, for ever, but the bargain went off upon a dispute, 
 j f ether the money should be paid at Corke or Dublin. Those very lands are now 
 i at £20,000 a year." 
 
 l ^f Mr. Collis had been fortunate enough to close the bargain his descendant could 
 Uircely be called a middleman . 
 
 3 Wakefield gives a later instance. Writing in 1809, he tells us: — 
 i" Lord Donerail's father let an estate for ever at £2,000 a year, and lived to see it 
 H-let at a profit rent of £18,000." 
 
 :!+ Mr. Wakefield, in 1812, gives us a vivid picture of the extortions practised even 
 
 • men of high character, the agents of absentee estates. The forcing of unpaid work 
 
 am the tenants was really the least of these. Tenants holding even by leases were 
 
 e slaves of the agent, and literally bound to submit to whatever he ordered. Agents' 
 
 r es were an impost levied at the discretion of the receiver, and " gratuities" in one 
 
 •rm or another attended every step taken on the estate. " Lease money" was 
 
 '.variably exacted on the renewal of a lease. Wakefield mentions an instance which 
 
 \me to his knowledge, in which new leases were granted on an estate of £10,000 
 
 H 
 
114 THE IRISH MIDDLEMEN. 
 
 the same opportunity for oppression, used it just as often. The 
 " tornybeg," as the people designated the middleman, may have' 
 been, from his position, more insolent and more rapacious; but 
 insolence and rapacity were certainly not confined to those landlord? 
 who happened themselves to pay rent for their estates. The fact 
 that the oppressor was himself but a tenant gave a bitterness to 
 the popular feeling, and a sting to the popular reproach ; but that 
 fact affected the condition of the occupier not much more than did 
 the payment by the chief landlord of a quit rent to the Crown. 
 
 All the grievous instances of oppression which have become 
 historical by provoking serious insurrections were upon estates in 
 which the occupiers held direct from the chief lord. The exactions 
 of an agent of Lord Donegall excited all Ulster to the rebellion of 
 the Hearts of Oak. The Munster insurrection of 1821 was 
 distinctly traceable to the oppressions directly practised upon one 
 great estate. Both middlemen and chief landlords had the power 
 of persecution in their hands. It is an absurdity as well as an 
 untruth to say that all of one class used it, and that none of the 
 other did. 
 
 Of middlemen, properly so called, there were two classes ; there 
 were men who originally took their leases for the very purpose of 
 collecting the rents from the occupying tenants. There were 
 others, who having originally farmed their own property, gradually 
 parted with the possession to a large number of tenants occupying 
 small portions. As to the first, they were really mere farmers of rents. 
 Their occupation existed because there were owners of estates who 
 desired to draw a certain and secure income from them without any 
 trouble and without the necessity of personal contact with the misery 
 and poverty from which this income was wrung. That occupation 
 would have no place if there had not been such landowners, aliens 
 in every sense to the country, and a miserable tenantry. Both 
 these elements must have been in existence to give any opportunity 
 for the rent farmer's trade. 
 
 But we would suppose, from some of the arguments that are now 
 used, that long leases were used only for the purpose of subletting. 
 
 a year. The agent demanded and received from each tenant one year's rent, pocketing 
 the sum of £10,000. On single transactions the per centage was much larger. 
 
 These payments, or presents, or exactions, were received by men of "unblemished 
 character" — men selected, a3 Wakefield tells us, " for their probity and independence." 
 It was the custom of the country. More than this — these extortions were connived at, 
 or even sanctioned by the landlord, who, so long as his agent secured his rent, had 
 no objection to his doing a bit of plunder on his own account. 
 
 Wakefield tells us of a nobleman of the highest character and rank, who, " upon the 
 appointment of a new agent, borrowed of him £20,000. The agent, who was a man of 
 character, being desirous to have it understood whether he was to follow the usual 
 custom and receive presents from the tenants, asked his employer in what manner he 
 should act. The reply was, ' Get all you can.' " — View of Ireland, Vol. i., p. 299. 
 
 How is all this to be accounted for except by believing that — in that class opinion 
 which after all upon such matters determined class morals — the Irish occupier was 
 regarded as a being made and existing only for the purpose of being fleeced. 
 
THE BOOK OF ARTHUR YOUNG. 115 
 
 I will take the period of 1777, because it is one as to which the 
 curious record preserved to us in the publication of Arthur Young, 
 supplies us with something like authentic information.* In the 
 
 * The book of Arthur Young, to which I have so often referred as an authority, 
 contains a most valuable and instructive account of the state of agriculture in the 
 several districts of Ireland in the three or four years preceding 1780. 
 
 Arthur Young came to Ireland in the Summer of 1776. He spent nearly two years 
 in residing at the seats of the principal nobility and gentry in Ireland, principally en- 
 gaged in enquiries into the agricultural condition of each neighbourhood. After this 
 he spent some time at Mitchellstown, with Lord Kingsborough, as an agricultural 
 manager of his estate. He published, in two volumes, in a species of diary the result 
 of his observations in each district, together with a summary of his general views of 
 the country. The former is given us with some minuteness of detail. We can learn 
 how Mr. Jeffreys, of Blarney Castle, then farmed his estate — what rotations of green 
 crops Lord Courtown adopted on his admirably farmed demesne — how Mr. French, of 
 Monivea, grew his hops — the care and taste with which Lady Clanwilliam planted 
 her shrubberies — how many acres of turnips Lord Mornington grew at Dangan — the 
 food Lord Doneraile gave his hogs — how Mr. Herbert at Mucruss persisted in planting 
 his potatoes in the "lazy bed" fashion, and maintained against all his visitors' argu- 
 ments that it was the best — how Lord Shannon made his bullocks draw by the horns, 
 and supported the practice by authorities from the most recent travels in the East — and 
 even the weight of the farm carts whioh were used at Shane's Castle, by Mr. O'Neill. 
 
 This singular detail of the mode of husbandry adopted, by each of nearly a hundred 
 Irish proprietors, a century ago, has a deep interest even for those who might take 
 none in its purely agricultural details. Combined with observations upon the con- 
 dition of the surrounding farms— and with descriptions more or less full of the 
 condition of the peasantry and the labouring class — it supplies us with almost a photo- 
 graph of the actual state of many rural districts in Ireland at the time. 
 
 In this lies its value. Young came to Ireland as an agriculturist. He exhibits in 
 every page of his diary his ruling passion for large farms. Of the state of political 
 feeling in the country he says nothing ; of its social condition very little ; and the little 
 that he does say is coloured by the tone of society in which he moved. An intelligent 
 and travelled Englishman could scarcely fail to be struck by the degradation and 
 slavery of the Irish peasant ; and he has recorded in the strongest terms his protest 
 against the folly and iniquity of the penal laws. 
 
 His observations upon the country are, however, those of " the mere agriculturist." 
 In the heart of the country which had been just agitated by the treason of the Hearts 
 of Oak he devotes more pages to his morning rides with Primate Robinson to visit his 
 improvements than he does lines to that remarkable insurrection. Strange to say, in all 
 his enquiries into the condition of Ulster he never once mentions the custom of tenant 
 right. Possibly, he was so indignant at the existence of the linen manufacture, and 
 the consequent multiplication of smali farms, that he turned from the province in 
 disgust. It is still more singular that it is only in an incidental allusion that he notices 
 the most striking difference between the rural economy of England and Ireland, the 
 absence in the latter country of any legal provision for the poor. On the eve of the 
 great struggle for Irish independence he incidentally mentions that, " since Mr. Flood 
 has been silenced with the vice-treasurership of Ireland, Mr. Daly, Mr. Grattan, Sir 
 Wm. Osborne, and the Prime Sergeant Burgh, are reckoned high among the Irish 
 orators.'' In his proper place Sir William Osborne is honoured with several pages 
 as the intelligent and humane improver of his estate. 
 
 Taking the book for what it is, it is not possible to overrate its value as a dry matter- 
 of-fact record, made by a most intelligent and accurate observer of many of the most 
 important points connected with the rural economy of Ireland at the time. 
 
 Possibly, to the minds of many, a careful perusal of it will suggest the same dismal 
 reflection that it has done to me. Ireland, in the year 1777, was in a far better con- 
 dition than it is now. The promises of improvement even in the breeding of sheep, the 
 feeding of bullocks, and the growing of turnips, were far brighter than they are now. 
 An Arthur Young, who would now travel round Ireland, from the Primate's at Armagh 
 to his resting place at Mitchellstown, could record no such signs of present improve- 
 ment, nor such hopeful prospects of future advancement as are told in the graphic, 
 although homely, pages of the diary of this tour. 
 
116 LONG LEASES AND LARGE FARMS. 
 
 North of Ireland farms were at that time small, as they are now, 
 generally below the magic fifteen acres. As we have seen they 
 provoked Young — who was an enthusiast for " husbandry'* and an 
 advocate for large farms and great capital applied to agriculture — 
 to say that the linen manufacture was " the pest and ruin of any 
 country in which it prevailed." It enabled persons to live upon small 
 patches of land. But in the South and West, and even in the 
 midland counties of Ireland, the farms were generally of considerable 
 size, often containing 200 or 300 acres, in some districts as many 
 thousands. Young tells us in perfect ecstasy of one farm in Tipperary 
 containing 10,000 acres farmed by one man. In the same county 
 another farmer occupied 13,800 (! ! !) acres in his own hands. In 
 Waterford and Limerick farms were often of the size of 2,000 or 
 3,000 acres.* At this period certainly the evil of Southern Ireland 
 was not the absence of large farms. 
 
 I have already offered some observations on the process by which 
 a country like this was converted, in a great degree, into one of 
 small holdings.f The owners in fee had just as much to do with it 
 as " the middlemen." The creation of forty-shilling freeholders 
 was carried to an almost incredible extent upon some estates, many 
 of which were expressively called " warrens of freeholders," but, in 
 addition to all this, subdivision was profitable — letting in small 
 portions for tillage became, for the reasons I have adverted to, 
 
 * " Farms are generally large, commonly 3,000 or 4,000 acres, and rise up to 10,000, 
 of which quantity there is one farm, this is Mr. M'Carthy's, of Spring House, near 
 Tipperary, and is, I suppose, the most considerable one in the world." — Young's Tour, 
 Vol. ii., p. 457. 
 
 Even this appears to have been exceeded by another farm in the same county — in a 
 subsequent page he writes : — 
 
 " I had heard much of the late Mr. Keating's farm of Garrahland, as the largest 
 that ever was. His son gave me the following particulars : — 
 
 "£10,000 a year rent; 13,800 Irish acres; 3,000 head of black cattle; 16,300 
 sheep ; 300 horses ; 500 couple of ducks ; 300 turkies ; 70 hogsheads of cider a year." 
 
 "This county (Waterford) is divided into large farms." 
 
 Kerry. — "The best part of the county is under dairies; great farmers have vast 
 quantities of land." — Ibid, 122. 
 
 Cork. — " Castle Oliver — Farms of all sizes, but the occupying tenants have from 15 
 to 100 acres, some 300." 
 
 Limerick. — "The farms are of all sizes ; the bullock farms rises to 600 acres." — Ibid, 
 144. 
 
 Wexford. — " Farms are large, few less than 500 or 600 acres." 
 
 Kildare. — "Farms generally about 100 acres." 
 
 Kilkenny. — "About Kilfaine the farms generally rise from 100 to 200 acres, 
 among many very small ones." 
 
 Granard. — " The farms are in general large, many about 200 acres." 
 
 Leitrim. — "The size of farms rises commonly to 500 or 600 acres, but the general 
 size is about 100 acres, with many small ones." 
 
 Strokestown. — " The farms rise to 3,000 acres, few under 400 or 500." 
 
 Elphin. — " Farms in general from 100 to 1,500 acres." 
 
 These descriptions are taken from his account of districts in various parts of Ireland. 
 In many places he speaks of farms from 15 to 20 acres. But out of Ulster large farms 
 were generally met with. It is only where the linen manufacture prevailed that the 
 land was almost everywhere portioned out in plots under 15 acres. 
 
 t Ante, pages 84, 85. 
 
SUBDIVISION OF FARMS. 117 
 
 the mode of using the land which appeared to offer the largest 
 and the easiest profit to the need or the rapacity of its owner. 
 Those who held the land by long leases were, of course, the only 
 persons, as to lands so let, who could take advantage of this turn 
 of affairs, and therefore middlemen are blamed for the subdivision. 
 But we have not the slightest reason to believe that if these lands 
 had been in their own hands the owners in fee would not have done 
 the same as they did in point of fact do in the cases in which they 
 were so; * and while they complained that middlemen were violating 
 covenants against alienation, they acquiesced. Mr. Wakefield tells 
 us that this was the case in 1810. " A landlord if he sees his 
 tenant making money by dividing his farm looks forward with 
 anxious hope to the expiration of the lease, when he expects to 
 enjoy the benefit of alienation, mud cabins, and tillage, instead of 
 grass lands; he therefore favours, rather than opposes, the custom."f 
 If this be so, as far as the subdivision of farms is concerned, the 
 only crime of the middleman would appear to be, that he happened 
 to be, for practical purposes, the owner of the lands at the time 
 when motives of avarice tempted the owner, whoever he was, to 
 give it in small parcels into the possession of the serfs. 
 
 But again I say all descriptions of Ireland lead us astray if we do 
 not bear in mind that on the surface of the country there were in tact 
 two nations settled. Two castes as distinct in their feelings, their 
 habits, and even in their interests, as if seas and mountains had 
 separated their habitations. There were the Protestants and upper 
 class — well treated by the landowners — holding large farms by 
 long leases and at moderate rents, and there were the conquered 
 and the plundered class — ground to the earth by penal laws and 
 local oppression. The latter, unfortunately, were the great majority 
 of the people. These constituted the cottier class and the " small 
 farmers,*' who were everywhere miserable and oppressed. They 
 were treated as an inferior race. J In some few instances kind and 
 
 * Sir L. Parson's speech, ante, p. 92. 
 
 t Wakefield's View of Ireland, Vol. i., p. 284. 
 
 % After what I have written I will not be understood as asserting that all the Roman 
 Catholic tenantry of Ireland were crushed down to the rank of cottiers, but the mass 
 of the people were. Roman Catholic farmers had, as I have elsewhere said, more 
 security of tenure than they have now. They held very generally the statutory leases 
 for 31 years — the tenure against which Burke directed his invective, as a tenure so 
 short as to destroy all rational hope of improvment of the country. But still even 
 Roman Catholic tenants of this class were in every respect treated differently from 
 those of the favoured caste. From that marvellous collection of photographs of Irish 
 rural life which Arthur Young has left us, I take one instance of an improving 
 " Popish" tenant : — 
 
 " July 4th, — Lord Longford carried me to a Mr. Marly's, an improver in the neigh- 
 bourhood, who had done great things, and without the benefit of such leases as 
 Protestants in Ireland commonly have." 
 
 He then proceeds to describe this gentleman as renting 1,000 acres of wild mountain 
 land ; he recounts his expensive and laborous improvements by which the mountain 
 land was improved, the raising of his rent after his improvements from 20 pence an 
 
118 THE IRISH MIDDLEMEN. 
 
 considerate masters did something to ameliorate their condition. 
 These instances, as we might expect, were more frequent where men 
 of high rank and large possessions were residing personally on their 
 estates, but whether in the case of resident landlords or the agents 
 of absentees, or the middleman, who represented either a resident 
 or an absentee, the " meer" Irishman was trampled on. It was almost 
 the religion — it certainly formed the politics of the upper classes — 
 to keep him down. He was a rebel, and the enemy of the " Protest- 
 ant interest ;" and with the dominant caste the " Protestant interest" 
 meant their ascendancy and their estates. 
 
 But to say that the misery of the people resulted from the fact 
 that they often took their small tenements from the Protestant 
 freeholder, instead of obtaining them direct from the Protestant 
 owner in fee, is simply to pander to the prejudices of a landed 
 aristocracy, who are always anxious to blame for the miseries of the 
 county any one but themselves. Middlemen and chief lords were 
 both oppressive, because conquest, and confiscation, and penal laws 
 had kept an outcast population upon the soil ; a population who 
 would only be admitted as serfs, to be the tillers of the ground, and 
 whom poverty and oppression made ready to be the serfs of any 
 one whether landlord or middleman, who would give them.a morsel 
 of land. 
 
 In whatever varying forms the malignant " human agency " may 
 disguise itself, in whatever changing shape it may attempt to elude 
 the chains which wisdom and liberality would throw around its 
 powers of mischief, we have but fearlessly to follow every disguise, 
 and after all it must appear in its true form* We grasp the one 
 old monster grievance of the Irish race — the " landlordism" which 
 embodies the policy and the passions of territorial conquest — a 
 policy which has for two centuries trampled on that race — passions 
 which are at this moment driving them from their homes. 
 
 It is very reasonable to contend that either the system of 
 
 acre to £850 a year; and, after some fastidious criticisms on his mode of fallowing, he 
 thus concludes : — 
 
 " It was with regret I heard that the rent of a man who had been so spirited an 
 improver should be raised so exceedingly. He merited for his life the returns of his 
 industry. But the cruel laws against the Roman Catholics of this country remain the 
 marks of illiberal barbarism. Why should not the industrious man have a spur to his 
 industry, whatever be his religion ? . It is impossible that the industry of a 
 
 nation should have its material progress where four-fifths of the people are cut off 
 from these advantages which are heaped upon the dominering aristocracy of the 
 remainder." — Vol. i., p. 66. 
 
 * ""Verum ubi correptum manibus vinclisque tenebis, 
 Turn varise illudent species atque ora ferarum. 
 
 Sed, quanto ille magls formas se vertet in omnes, 
 Tanto, nate, magls contende tenacia vincla : 
 Donee talis erit, mutato corpore, qualem 
 Videris, incepto tegeret cum lumina somno. — 
 
 Georgics, iv. 405. 
 
 
LOED PUFFERIES SECOND LETTER. 119 
 
 middlemen or the commercial injustice of England has aggravated 
 the evils of our land tenure. It is unreasonable to say that they 
 have caused them. 
 
 It is always of some consequence upon social questions connected 
 with past history, as far as possible to ascertain the exact truth. 
 Yet, for the purpose of our present enquiry, I am not sure that it 
 would make any, even the slightest difference whether the present 
 evils, which require present remedies, are to be traced to the 
 dealings with the people, of middlemen, or of the owners in fee. 
 I have devoted so much space to the subject because it has been 
 made one of some importance in the discussion of the proposal I 
 have made. 
 
 I now turn to the second letter of Lord Dufferin, in which he is 
 supposed to have completely vindicated the landlords of Ireland from 
 the charge of having caused the emigration of the people. 
 
 His first argument is that drawn from the proof that those who 
 emigrate are not actually evicted persons. This argument evades 
 the real issue, which is this : — Has insecurity of tenure the effect 
 of driving the people from their native land? That it has this 
 effect has been established by a clearness of evidence very rarely 
 attained upon any social question. The assertion is not that 
 the emigrants consist of tenants who have been actually evicted. 
 The assertion is that in consequence of the insecurity of tenure, and 
 all the evils that follow in its train, the occupiers are leaving a country 
 in which they have no opportunity of exercising their industry — that 
 the farm labourers are emigrating because they cannot get employ- 
 ment on the farms — that the country towns are ruined because the 
 farming classes are destroyed, and that ruined shopkeepers and un- 
 employed and educated young men all are compelled to leave a 
 country in which they cannot find a means of living. In this 
 melancholy bead roll of emigrants the actually evicted tenants 
 present but a very inconsiderable portion of the array. 
 
 It does not follow that the landlords, or rather the present con- 
 ditions of land tenure, have not caused the emigration, because the 
 persons who emigrate are not all driven out by actual evictions from 
 their farms. I do not know that any one ever asserted that they 
 were. For myself, I was so far from making such a statement that 
 I thought it essential to one point of my argument to state directly 
 the reverse. My statement was this : — 
 
 " That the emigration is caused by the deep-rooted discontent of the 
 people with the existing arrangements connected with land tenure, no one 
 who studies it attentively will doubt. It would be a mistake to represent 
 it as the aggregate of a number of isolated movements of individuals, or 
 
120 CAUSES OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 as resulting from the pressure of individual distress. In many instances 
 no doubt it has been so. A great deal of emigration was that of persons 
 actually evicted under the operation of the present land laws. Thousands 
 of Irishmen have left the country from personal inability to find the 
 means of supporting themselves at home. But in addition to these there 
 are other causes now acting. A passion for emigration appears to have 
 seized upon a whole class. Those who are comparatively well to do in 
 the world are often the most anxious to go. This general desire to leave 
 the country originates in the conviction in the minds of the people, that 
 under the present system of land tenure they have not fair play at home. 
 The emigration of the people in masses is not the proof or result of indi- 
 vidual suffering, but of general discontent. They believe that as a class 
 they have not fair play under the present land laws, and they are at last 
 beginning to despair of a change."* 
 
 On turning to the evidence given before the Land Tenure Com- 
 mittee of 1864, I find exactly the same statement made by those 
 witnesses who represented the cause of tenant right. Dr. Keane, 
 the Roman Catholic Bishop of Cloyne, in answer to the question 
 whether he attributed emigration to the eviction of small farmers, 
 said : — 
 
 " Yes, to a certain extent I do ; but I attribute emigration principally 
 to the want of employment ." — (Question 3403.) 
 
 Again — 
 
 " A man who has only 10 or 12 acres, and who is only a tenant-at-will, 
 finding that the land requires improvement, he is afraid to waste it, and 
 he goes away. / see many of these poor people in Queenstown every day." 
 (Question 3612.) 
 
 Those who really desire to understand the connexion between 
 emigration and the present system of land tenure will do well to 
 read the whole of the evidence of this distinguished prelate. It is 
 not evidence of opinion, but evidence of matter of fact. He had 
 conversed with the emigrants. He had ascertained from themselves 
 the reasons of their emigration. He found it was in the case of the 
 labouring classes want of employment, in the case of the tenant 
 farmers the same cause in another form. They were farmers 
 willing and anxious to improve, but they had no security that 
 the improvements, if they effected them, would be their own. 
 They had waited patiently to see if any of the promises of the 
 Legislature would be fulfilled. Disappointed and despairing, 
 they at last made up their minds to give up their holdings and 
 abandon their native land. 
 
 Strange to say — the admission is not to my credit — I had not read 
 this evidence when I wrote the sentences which I have ventured 
 to reprint. 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland, Third Edition, p. 9. 
 
THE EVIDENCE OF BISHOP KEANE. 121 
 
 The evidence of Bishop Keane is full of instruction. I have 
 given a very imperfect condensation even of its general result. But 
 there are statements so striking, so vitally important, that I 
 must endeavour to extract the passages in which they are con- 
 tained : — 
 
 " I HAVE MADE INQUIRIES OVER AND OVER AGAIN, IN QuEENSTOWN AND 
 ELSEWHERE, AND I NEVER YET HEARD THAT A SINGLE FARMER EMIGRATED 
 AND LEFT THE COUNTRY WHO HAD A LEASE." (Question 3401). 
 
 " Those who go attribute their being compelled to go to the want of 
 good legislation. Their disappointment is made more bitter in conse- 
 quence of all that has been done, or rather in consequence of all that has 
 been discussed, within the last twenty years or more." — (Question 3408.) 
 
 And after referring to the measure of Lord Derby, in 1844, and 
 especially to Mr. Napier's clause for retrospective compensation, in 
 1852, the Bishop continues: — 
 
 " The cup of hope is presented to them over and over again, and it is 
 dashed from them at the time they least expect it ; and the disappoint- 
 ment they feel on that account is doubly bitter. — (Question 3408.) 
 
 " I do not think I could overrate the amount of discontent which is in 
 the very depths of their soul. — (Question 3409.) 
 
 " Many persons give up their farms because they are in such a position 
 with regard to the law that they cannot establish a claim to compensation, 
 which they would willingly establish if they were certain that the fruits 
 of their industry would be their own." — (Question 3423.) 
 
 " Is it," he is asked, " within your own knowledge that many 
 persons do give up their farms on that ground?" 
 
 The answer is — " Several." 
 
 And, lastly, the Bishop describes the emigrants as consisting in 
 a great proportion of those who have thus thrown up their farms 
 for want of security for their improvements; "but besides, in that 
 mass, there are the labourers, the tradesmen, and the broken down 
 shopkeepers." 
 
 " I never knew," he repeats, " I never knew of a single tenant, though 
 I made several inquiries, who left who had a lease." — (Question 3425.) 
 
 I say again that this evidence is not a statement of speculative 
 opinion. It is evidence as to matter of fact. Here we have a 
 Roman Catholic Bishop, residing at the port from which the 
 greatest number of emigrants depart, conversing with the emigrants 
 as they leave the shores of their native land, making inquiries of all 
 who can throw light upon the strange spectacle which is going on 
 
122 CAUSES OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 before his eyes. It is impossible for any one to read a page of this 
 prelate's evidence without seeing that these inquiries were directed 
 by a mind vigorous and large enough to grasp the whole question 
 of Irish land tenure. Is it possible to conceive evidence more 
 important or more decisive in enabling us to understand the real 
 causes and motives which are driving our people from the land ? 
 
 I quote it not only for the value of the testimony but to show 
 that it is a mere evasion of the real issue which has been raised to 
 inquire whether the emigrants consist of those who have been 
 actually evicted. That was never the argument of those who trace 
 the emigration to our system of land tenure. If emigration were 
 really confined to those who are actually driven out it would not 
 bear the same testimony as it now does to the discontent of the 
 people. The worst feature of that emigration is — that it is the 
 voluntary departure of a whole people — a flight from oppressive 
 laws which leave them no hope of ever living in comfort in their 
 native land. 
 
 I turn from the evidence of Bishop Keane to that of Mr. 
 M'Carthy Downing. This gentleman, as well acquainted as any 
 man living with the practical condition of land tenure, distinctly 
 describes the emigration of late years as voluntary, and the evictions 
 as comparatively rare. He describes the emigration as that of men 
 of superior intelligence : — 
 
 " Who leave their Country with pain and sorrow, and who would re- 
 main in that country if they thought they could live in it. — (Q. 3141.) 
 
 " It is the strong man, and the man that has capital, that go. We are 
 left with the old and feeble. — (Question 3142.) 
 
 " They go because they find that no matter how they may work and 
 slave in their own country they do not reap the fruits of it." — (Q. 3143.) 
 
 " That is your view," he is asked by an adverse questioner. 
 
 His emphatic answer is — "I know it." — (Question 3144.) 
 
 This was the case, and the only case, that was made as to 
 emigration before the Land Tenure Committee. It was not that 
 tenants were driven out by the landlords. It was that tenants 
 were throwing up their farms of their own accord, and flying from 
 the operation of the land laws. That they were doing so because 
 insecurity of tenure left them no opportunity of exercising their 
 industry, or raising their position in their native land. That the 
 ban which is thus put upon all national progress has driven out the 
 labourer, who can no longer find employment. That as the small 
 farmer sinks, or departs, the country towns decay, and bankrupt 
 shopkeepers and broken tradesmen swell the miserable train of 
 exiles who " leave their country with pain and sorrow," victims to 
 that evil system which leaves the soil of Ireland untilled, and 
 dooms to beggary and serfdom the Irish peasant who lingers 
 behind his fellows in his native land. 
 
THE EMIGRANTS NOT THE EVICTED. 123 
 
 This was the case made against our land laws, founded on the 
 emigration which is carrying away the Irish people. I believe no 
 proposition was ever more incontestibly proved than that which 
 asserts that it is insecurity of tenure, and discontent with the 
 system of land tenure, which is driving the Irish race from their 
 home. The very evidence I have quoted proves it beyond doubt. 
 But this is a fair subject of inquiry. It may be that insecurity of 
 tenure has nothing to do with it — that the people are really flying 
 from the unjust restrictions of the last century on our woollen 
 manufacture, or from the commercial restrictions against which the 
 volunteers so energetically and so successfully protested in 1782. 
 But let the real question be discussed — that is, whether the Irish 
 people are voluntarily leaving their country in hatred of the 
 present system of land tenure — not whether the emigrants are the 
 actual victims of arbitrary eviction. 
 
 I am afraid the melancholy truth is, that of those actually evicted 
 in the earlier period of the last twenty years a large number were 
 not fortunate enough to find shelter in emigration. 
 
 In 1849 Lord Derby complained that a neighbouring proprietor 
 had evicted no less than 349 persons, who came and settled on his 
 Lordship's estate. There is scarcely a town or city in Ireland that 
 is not at this moment burdened with heavy poor rates to support 
 paupers who have been driven from the rural districts by evictions, on 
 estates, an element which has formed no inconsiderable item in the 
 aggregate account of the injury inflicted by these evictions on our 
 country towns.* 
 
 Unhappily indeed, unhappily for the character of Irish landlords, 
 some years ago the population were driven from the soil by a 
 general process of extermination unparalleled in modern history. 
 The statement quoted in the note will show that these evictions by 
 
 * See the Pamphlet report of an admirable speech delivered in the House of Com- 
 mons on Union Rating, by Sergeant Barry, the Member for Dungarvan. In that 
 speech Sergeant Barry quoted a most remarkable statement on this subject, made at 
 a public meeting in Tralee, by Mr. James O'Connell. 
 
 " What," says he, " did this law of electoral division rating do ? It gave a premium 
 and encouragement, even before the famine, for depopulation on every estate. When 
 the famine came, and we had staring us in the face rates from eight shillings to four- 
 teen shillings in the pound, landlords and farmers had a fearful dread of the labourers 
 coming into or near their farms. If they came into their farms they were looked upon 
 as if they were wild beasts. They were hunted out, and we know too much of the 
 fatal results that followed. ... I say with as much solemnity as if I were giving 
 testimony in a court of justice that it would be impossible for me to describe the 
 odious acts of oppression that were then perpetrated, consequent on this electoral 
 division rating. The poor were driven into the town, estates were cleared, and notices 
 to quit were served. If that did not answer, the houses were levelled. Perhaps fifty 
 families were cleared for every three or four kept. The only refuge of those poor 
 creatures then was to go into the town. The young and healthy, and those who could 
 afford it, left the country for England or Scotland ; for emigration to America was not 
 as easy then as it is now. The old, the indigent, and infirm, came into the towns, went 
 into those dens that Mr. Downing described, and dragged out a miserable existence, 
 at most for a few years, and then became chargeable on the town electoral division." 
 
124 CAUSES OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 no means proportionately swelled the emigration. The evicted 
 tenants had not the means of emigrating. Enough to say, that in 
 1848 the Legislature found it necessary to pass a law prohibiting 
 the execution of eviction decrees on Good Friday or Christmas 
 Day ! The same Act made it a misdemeanour to pull the roof off 
 a house before the inmates had left it; and it also contained a 
 provision that before any landlord executed an ejectment he must 
 give notice to the relieving officer of the poor law union, that 
 some provision might be made for the wretched beings he was 
 about to turn out.* 
 
 This statute speaks volumes as to the character of the evictions 
 with which the Legislature had to deal. 
 
 Upon Lord Dufferin's estimate of the number of evictions, I have 
 only one remark to make. Lord Dufferin states that those upon which 
 he relies have been ascertained by " the indefatigable industry of Mr. 
 Handcock." Upon turning to Mr. Handcock's essay I find them 
 stated by that gentleman to have been " ascertained by the police." 
 Mr. Handcock does not inform us how, or when, or by what 
 authority the police collected these statistics. Lord Dufferin, in a 
 subsequent letter, offers an apology for not having used the parlia- 
 mentary returns of Lord Belmore which, it seems, vary from those 
 obtained by " the indefatigable industry of Mr. Handcock." Lord 
 Belmore's return goes back only to 1860 — covering the period 
 within which, all parties agree, that evictions have been less 
 frequent. If the statistics of eviction for the last twenty years were 
 of any value in determining the question we are discussing, we 
 have no full and reliable information on the subject. 
 
 But of this I am quite sure, that the most reliable information 
 we can have of the number of evictions for the last six years cannot 
 throw the least light upon the enquiry whether the effect of our 
 present system of land tenure be to drive the Irish people from 
 their native land. I am very much disposed to think that within 
 the last few years some of the landlords have been more anxious 
 for the present to retain the people than to drive them away. The 
 process of emigration is going on in some districts too fast for that 
 of " consolidation." The people are as far-seeing as the landlords, 
 and will not remain while the system of land tenure remains as it is 
 now. There are tenants who are stupid enough not to appreciate 
 the boon of the Cyclops, and will not wait with thankfulness in the 
 expectation of being devoured the last. 
 
 Lord Dufferin then points attention to the fact that a greater 
 number of emigrants go from Ulster than from any other of the 
 three provinces of Ireland. Therefore, he argues that as tenant 
 
 * For reference to this statute, I am indebted to the same speech of Sergeant 
 Barry, to which I have acknowledged my obligations in the last note. 
 
EMIGRATION FROM ULSTER. 125 
 
 right prevails in Ulster it is not insecurity of tenure that is driving 
 the people away. 
 
 In the first place, and even admitting the representation to be 
 correct, a great fallacy pervades this argument, in supposing that the 
 " Ulster" which is included in the emigration returns is coextensive 
 with the " Ulster" in which tenant right is observed. 
 
 Within the nine counties which constitute the province of Ulster 
 there are large districts in which it does not even nominally exist. 
 The two strongest illustrations of the evils of insecurity, which I 
 cited in the tract on Land Tenure, both occurred on Ulster pro- 
 perty. Glenveagh is in the county of Donegal. The Shirley estate, 
 the other with regard to which I mentioned instances of its 
 management, proved in a court of justice, is situated in Monaghan. 
 Upon the latter estate, one of £30,000 a year, the landlord stated 
 on his oath that he never thought of permitting the claim of tenant 
 right. No mistake could be greater than to suppose that every 
 tenant within the magic limit of the province called Ulster enjoys 
 the protection of the custom of tenant right.* 
 
 But more than this ; it is unhappily true, that in very many even 
 of the tenant right districts of Ulster the integrity of the custom 
 has been gradually broken down. No one can carefully read the 
 Ulster newspapers without seeing constantly accounts of instances 
 in which that custom is violated. There are large estates in Ulster 
 upon which the right has been of late years reduced to a mere name. 
 There are many upon which it no longer exists. The prediction of 
 O'Connell, made more than twenty years ago, is realized ; and that 
 custom, which has been the glory and the pride of the province, is 
 now gradually broken in upon and undermined. 
 
 It is easy for any man to look wise in quoting figures — but it 
 often happens that exactly as he looks wise he is really foolish. 
 
 It will scarcely be credited that Lord Dufferin makes out his 
 representation by leaving out of account the relative 
 proportion of the population of ulster to that of the 
 rest of Ireland. 
 
 * There is great difficulty in fixing the precise limits of the tenant right districts of 
 Ulster. 
 
 When Judge Longfield was asked to do so by the Irish Land Committee of 1864, 
 he could only answer that tenant right was strongest in Down, Antrim, and Armagh, 
 and extended into part of Tyrone." 
 
 This is certainly not an accurate, or at least a full answer, but its very vagueness 
 shows the difficulty of fixing the limits. 
 
 At ail events, in his opinion, the custom of tenant right is far from extending over 
 Ulster. 
 
 His evidence contains a still more important statement on the subject. He tells us 
 that where estates on which tenant right prevails are set up for sale in the Landed 
 Estates Court, unscrupulous purchasers often give a higher price for them with the 
 very intention of destroying tenant right. 
 
 He proposed, that when such estates were sold the Court should have the power, 
 before selling the estate, to protect the tenant's interest by granting him a lease. 
 
126 CAUSES OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 It is not necessary to use more words than those "which are 
 requisite to make this clear. 
 
 By the census of 1861 the population of the whole of Ireland 
 was, in round numbers, 5,700,000; that of Ulster was 1,900,000; 
 about a third of the entire. The total emigration from Ireland in 
 the year 1864 was 114,908 persons, in round numbers, 115,000. 
 Of these, Ulster ought, in proportion to its population, to have 
 supplied 38,500. The number of emigrants for that year from 
 Ulster was 19,815. Leinster, with a smaller population, supplied 
 the same number. The population of Connaught is not one half 
 that of Ulster, yet. the number of its emigrants was very nearly 
 the same. 
 
 Let us compare the population and the emigration from Ulster 
 
 and Minister in the years 1864 and 1865. These figures are few 
 
 and simple, they can be understood by every one. By the census 
 
 of 1861 the population of the two provinces was as follows: — 
 
 Ulster, - - 1,900,000 
 
 Munster, - - 1,500,000 
 
 If, therefore, emigration were in proportion to population, the 
 emigrants from Ulster would have exceeded those from Munster in 
 a proportion of 19 to 15, that is, by a little more than one-fourth. 
 
 How stand the facts as to the last two years. The emigration 
 of these two provinces was as follows : — 
 
 1864. 1865. Two years. 
 
 Munster, - 48,387 37,426 85,813 
 
 Ulster, - 19,853 22,302 41,635 
 
 So that the actual emigration from Ulster, with a population of 
 1,900,000, was not one-half of that from Munster, with a population 
 of 1,500,000. In proportion to the population, the emigration 
 from Ulster was 41 out of 1,900, or little more than two per cent., 
 in Munster it was 85 out of 1,500, or very nearly 6 per cent. 
 
 It cannot be said that the last two years are exceptional. For the 
 statistics of emigration, as for most of the information of this 
 nature which we possess on the state of Ireland, we are indebted to 
 the exertions of Mr. Donnelly.* In each year he gives us a 
 
 * The services which this gentleman has unostentatiously and disinterestedly rendered 
 to the cause of social science in Ireland have never been sufficiently acknowledged. 
 The agricultual statistics, which he has now brought to a reasonable perfection, he 
 began to compile under every difficulty and discouragement. While Irishmen are 
 constantly accused of deficiency in methodical administrative ability, an Irish official 
 has devised and almost brought to perfection a system of collecting information which, 
 in the sister country, English ministers and the English Parliament were for years vainly 
 attempting to obtain. 
 
 These emigration statistics have been furnished by the personal enquiries of the police 
 at every port, from the emigrants themselves, and at the offices at which they take 
 their passages. 
 
 Carefully as these enquiries are conducted and analysed, I am far from saying that 
 after all they can present a perfect account of the places from which the several emigrants 
 come who embark in each port ; but they unquestionably present an account 
 
ULSTER EMIGRATION — LORD DUFFERIN'S MISTAKE. 127 
 
 summary of the returns which, since the year 1851, he has, with 
 marvellous skill and industry, obtained ; in the fifteen years ending 
 with the year 1865, the emigration from these two provinces was as 
 follows : — 
 
 Munster, - - 626,968 
 
 Ulster, - - 436,000 
 
 In proportion to the population the emigrants from Ulster do 
 not number one-half of those from Munster. 
 
 And yet from these very figures Lord Dufferin rushed recklessly 
 by the conclusion that want of security of tenure could not be the 
 cause of emigration, because it was as great from Ulster, where 
 tenant right prevails, as from the other provinces of Ireland. And 
 more strange still, this wild statement, disproved by a reference to 
 the figures on which he relied, was accepted as "proof from Holy 
 Writ," by many of the most influential — I cannot add best informed 
 guides of public opinion. " Lord Dufferin has proved," in the 
 language in which this burlesque upon all statistical argument was, 
 and is still cited by the defenders of the present system of Irish 
 land tenure, at the English and even at the Irish press. There 
 never was such an instance of the credulity with which the rash 
 assertions of a man of rank are accepted by some portions of the 
 public as proof. 
 
 This extraordinary fallacy — respect for Lord Dufferin prevents 
 me from saying blunder — was detected and exposed by Mr. Dalton, 
 the gentleman who, under the name of "Philocelt," has written so 
 ably in the columns of the Daily News. Every one seemed to 
 acquiesce in the imposing array of Lord Dufferin's figures, until the 
 publication of Mr. Dalton pointed out the palpable error upon which 
 the argument was based.* 
 
 sufficiently accurate for all practical purposes of general enquiry ; at all events they 
 give the information upon which Lord Dufferin relied. The errors, which in such a 
 process are unavoidable, may be safely supposed to compensate each other, and it adds 
 to the confidence with which these returns of the enumerator may be regarded, to find 
 that they class many of the emigrants— leaving a proportion of about two per cent, to 
 the entire — as persons whose locality has not been ascertained. 
 
 * " I come now to Lord Dufferin's third point, pronounced to be unanswerable by The 
 Times, that if, as Mr. Maguire states, insecurity of tenure produces emigration, there 
 ought to be hardly any emigration from Ulster, where a custom of tenant-right gives 
 that security ; whereas the emigration from Ulster is in excess of that from Connaught 
 and Leinster, and as 23 to 27 when compared with all Ireland. 
 
 " I turn to the statistics again, and I find (page x.) that the total number of farms 
 above one acre decreased, between 1841 and 1864, by 15*1 per cent, in Leinster, 29 -9 
 per cent, in Munster, 22 - 6 per cent, in Connaught, and only by 14*2 per cent, in 
 Ulster. So that, other things being equal, though there is little difference between 
 Leinster and Ulster, the emigration of occupiers from Munster was about two to one, 
 from Connaught as three to two, compared with Ulster. 
 
 " But other things are not equal. It is not fair to take Leinster into consideration at 
 all, for there, owing to the general nature of the soil, better adapted for grazing than 
 tillage, a good deal in the way of consolidation had been effected before the potato 
 famine. It should be remembered that if the smallness of the holdings were the sole 
 cause of the emigration of the occupiers, it ought to have been nearly twice as great 
 from Ulster as from the other provinces, aa the following figures taken from the 
 
128 CAUSES OF EMIGRATION. 
 
 But this is not all. Lord Dufferin virtually tells us that no tenant 
 of a holding under fifteen acres can, with any advantage, retain pos- 
 session of his farm. He tells us in words that this is the smallest farm 
 upon which any farmer can live comfortably. We might suppose, 
 therefore, that emigration from each district would be in proportion 
 to the number of such farms. How stands the fact as to Ulster. 
 
 We must take our information from Mr. Donnelly's statistics. 
 In the year 1864, the last year for which, on this subject, they have 
 been made up, there were in Ireland, in round numbers, 150,000 
 holdings between five and fifteen acres. Of these, 71,000 were in 
 the province of Ulster, not very far from one-half of the entire. 
 
 But there are four counties in Ireland which, perhaps, any one 
 would select as displaying the largest amount of prosperity and 
 comfort in the general class of the occupiers of the soil. I exclude 
 Derry, because the ownership of a great portion of it, by the 
 London Companies, introduces distinct elements of calculation; 
 the other four counties are unquestionably Antrim, Down, Tyrone, 
 and Armagh. In these four counties there are nearly one-fourth 
 as many holdings, between five and fifteen acres, as in all the rest 
 of Ireland put together. Of a total, in round numbers, of 150,000 — 
 there are in the county Down 10,700, in Antrim 6,000, in 
 Armagh 9,400, in Tyrone 9,000. Mr. Donnelly's returns enable us 
 to fix the proportion which the emigration from these counties bore 
 to all that from Ireland in the last fifteen years ; it is as follows : — 
 
 Antrim, - - <• 6*19 
 
 Armagh, - - - 2'33 
 
 Down, - 364 
 
 Tyrone, - * . 3'20 
 
 15-36 
 
 statistics, page lxvii., will prove. Leinster, area 4,876,211 acres, number of holdings in 
 1864, 104,438; Munster, area 6,096,990 acres, number of holdings 114,921; Ulster, 
 area 5,478,867 acres, number of holdings 203,066; Connaught, area 432,043 acres, 
 holdings 120,698. 
 
 "Thus, according to Lord Dufferin's argument, the emigration of farmers ought to 
 have been, from Ulster, at least two to one as compared with Munster, whereas the 
 proportions are reversed. Has tenant-right nothing to do with this ? 
 
 " Again, Lord Dufferin states that the emigration from Ulster is as 23 to 27 as 
 compared with the other provinces, and therefore he argues, tenant-right has nothing 
 to do with it ; but as he mixes here the emigration of the labourers with that of the 
 farmers, he does not state the case quite fairly. I will however take it in this way 
 (though it has only an indirect bearing on the argument), and what is the truth. The 
 decennial census of 1861 (the last) tells us that the population of Ulster in that year 
 was 1,914,255, exceeding that of Leinster by 456,843, of Munster by 400,697, and of 
 Connaught by 1,001,247; and yet with this enormous excess of population in Ulster, 
 the proportion of its emigrants to the total population is less than the average from 
 the other three provinces. 
 
 " ' Parliament,' exclaims Lord Dufferin, ' parliament and unjust landlords, we are 
 told, are depopulating the south; what occult agencies are depopulating the north !' 
 
 "I think I may now answer this question in the orthodox Irish fashion : — 'What 
 occult agency checks its depopulation.'" — Irish Peers on Irish Peasants, by Gustavus 
 Tuite Dalton. 
 
EMIGRATION FROM ULSTER. 129 
 
 It is not possible to glance at these figures without being struck 
 by the disproportion between Antrim, and the other three counties. 
 Antrim included almost the entire of the manufacturing population 
 of Belfast. 
 
 In the above figures I have taken only the farms above five 
 acres. The result will be equally striking if we extend it to all 
 above one acre. To include holdings below one acre is only to 
 mislead, as such holdings include, of course, tenements in towns 
 and villages — houses, and not lands. I may observe that the four 
 counties I have chosen are not the best for my argument, but they 
 are the fairest test of Ulster. 
 
 We may expect, I think, emigration to be from any district — 
 first, absolutely in proportion to its population ; next, in proportion 
 to the number of small holdings to be found in it ; next, in propor- 
 tion to " the disturbance of the equilibrium between land and the 
 population dependent upon land" — in other words, we would expect 
 emigration from agricultural districts to be greatest where there 
 were most people on each acre of arable ground ; and lastly, we 
 may fairly expect emigration to be swelled by the migratory and 
 unsettled habits of a manufacturing population. 
 
 Let us apply these tests to Ulster emigration, and so far from 
 coming up to its share of Irish emigration, it is plain that it is not 
 one-third of that which our experience of the rest of Ireland would 
 lead us to expect from districts peopled and occupied as those of 
 Ulster are. 
 
 The best and shortest way of dealing with this is to extract from 
 Mr. Thorn's valuable statistics a tabular statement of the quantity 
 of arable land in each of these four counties — its population, the 
 number of small holdings, and the number of emigrants, and leave 
 it to every one to work out the problem for themselves : — 
 
 Acres of Population , , -t j i K Emigrants, 
 
 it l -j ion-, between 1 and 15 -,o-il i o^< 
 
 arable land 1861 , oc , 18ol to 1864 
 
 acres, 1864 
 
 Antrim, 500,000 378,000 8,000 95,000 
 
 Armagh, 265,000 190,000 14,000 36,000 
 
 Down, 514,000 300,000 15,000 56,000 
 
 Tyrone, 450,000 238,000 12,000 49,000 
 
 I will add to these figures the statement that of the population of 
 the County Antrim, more than 100,000 are in the town of Belfast, 
 and that the total emigration from Ireland from 1851 to 1864, was 
 1,546,000. I believe any one studying these figures must come to 
 the conclusion that as compared with the rest of Ireland there has 
 been some powerful influence checking in Ulster the tendencies 
 which in the other portions of the country led to a large emigration. 
 Between 1851 and 1861 the population of all Ireland diminished 11^ 
 per cent., that of Ulster but 4. The character of the emigration from 
 
 I 
 
130 LORD DUFFERIN'S STATISTICS. 
 
 Ulster is indicated by the fact that " the decrease in the number of 
 families has been least in that province , where it amounts only to 3,686, 
 or 0*97 per cent" * We cannot have a better test of the character 
 of emigration than is afforded by the inquiry whether it is the 
 departure of families or of individuals. That of individuals may be 
 it often is a healthy and natural emigration. When that of families 
 is general it is the departure of a people from their homes. 
 
 Mr. Dalton has well pointed out that we have no means of 
 distinguishing between the emigration of the labouring classes and 
 the tenant farmers. We have, however, valuable, although imper- 
 fect, information from these statistics of Ulster emigration. In 
 the first place we have the emigration from Ulster in proportion 
 to its population, just one-half of what it is from Munster. 
 Taking the rural counties of Tyrone and Armagh, we find them 
 to contain a proportion of farms, between five and fifteen acres, 
 nearly an eighth of all such holdings in Ireland, while they supply 
 to the emigrants of Ireland a little more than five per cent. We 
 have not the statistics which would enable us to carry our deduc- 
 tion beyond these general results. These general results establish 
 by figures, which, no more minute investigation could alter, that the 
 emigration from Ulster, tried by any test that could possibly be 
 suggested, falls far short of that from the rest of Ireland. To gain 
 all the instruction we could from these statistics, we should have them 
 illustrated by living evidence. In the case of the southern emigra- 
 tion we have this. The testimony of the Roman Catholic Bishop of 
 Cloyne has told us, from actual inquiry, the elements of which 
 emigration from the port of Queenstown is composed. He has 
 emphatically told us that in no instance has he been able to trace a 
 single instance of an emigrant who held a lease. Similar information 
 might have been given to us as to the northern emigration. It 
 might have been told us by witnesses acquainted with that which is 
 actually going on, how many of the Ulster emigrants are from that 
 manufacturing population, which must, in every country, supply a 
 large addition to those who are leaving the country. We might 
 have been told whether, in fact, emigration goes on from estates on 
 which the custom of tenant right is still religiously observed. We 
 might have learned how many of the emigrants have been crushed 
 from their farms by the growing consciousness that the Ulster 
 tenant right no longer supplies a security against eviction. All 
 these things were within the enquiries of the Committee of 1864. 
 The landlord interest had its able and intelligent advocates on that 
 committee. Lord DufFerin himself was examined as a witness in 
 defence of his order ; from beginning to end of that evidence we 
 have nothing to establish that Ulster farmers are emigrating where 
 Ulster tenant right is established and is observed. 
 
 * " Statistics of Ireland." Thorn's Almanac, 1865. 
 
ULSTER CATHOLICS AND ULSTER EMIGRATION. 131 
 
 I have scarcely a doubt upon my mind that if the question were 
 thus examined it would be found that even the small proportion of 
 Irish emigrants which come from Ulster, compared with its popu- 
 lation, is supplied almost entirely from its great manufacturing dis- 
 tricts, from the parts of it in which tenant right is not acknowledged, 
 or proceeds in the tenant-right districts from that landlord tampering 
 with tenant right of which Lord DufFerin is the ingenious and 
 able, although I cannot say the successful, advocate. We have no 
 official means of ascertaining the relative proportions of Protestants 
 and Roman Catholics among the emigrants from Ulster. There 
 is no doubt whatever that by far the greater number are Roman 
 Catholics. I am not about to advert to any of t lie questions 
 connected with the general position of the Roman Catholic people 
 of Ulster. They are every day made to feel in many of the old 
 modes the oppression of the ascendancy which still insults and 
 crushes them down. This is a subject beyond the limits of this 
 letter, and I cannot enter on its discussion. I confine myself 
 entirely to their position in relation to the custom of tenant right. 
 Taking the whole Roman Catholic population scattered through the 
 nine counties of the province, they have not the benefit of that custom 
 at all to the same extent as the Protestants. Upon estates like those 
 of Lord Abercorn, upon which tenant right is respected in all its 
 integrity, the Roman Catholic tenant enjoys it equally with the 
 Protestant. I hope there are not many properties — there are some — 
 upon which indirect attempts are made to get rid gradually of a 
 Roman Catholic tenantry. There are many upon which Protestants 
 are more favoured. But I am now comparing the professors of the 
 two religions over the entire surface of the province, both in the 
 districts in which tenant right is fully or partially recognized, and 
 those in which it is not — in the mountain districts, to which a large 
 and poor population, in many instances exclusively Roman Catholic, 
 have been driven — as well as in the well-cultivated hills of Down, 
 or the rich corn lands which lie round the banks of the Foyle. 
 
 Looking at the whole, province in this way, and including all the 
 people that dwell from Farney to Fairhead and between Strangford 
 Lough and the point where the western cliffs of Donegal meet the 
 billows of the Atlantic — of the persons who within these nine counties 
 really enjoy the security of tenure which is conferred by the custom 
 of tenant right — the immense majority are Protestants. If this be 
 so, and if, on the other hand, the vast majority of the emigrants be 
 Roman Catholics, it leads inevitably to the conclusion that emigra- 
 tion is not supplied from the class that are protected by tenant 
 right. Bishop Keane has told the Committee of 1864 that by 
 personal inquiries he was able to say that he had never known a 
 southern emigrant who had held by lease. 
 
 If a Protestant Bishop had been examined, equally well acquainted 
 by personal observation with the circumstances of the poorer portion 
 
132 lord dufferin's statistics. 
 
 of his flock, he would have told the Committee that the emigration 
 of a family from an estate where tenant right is observed is very- 
 rare. And yet we must remember that when a tenant gives up, or 
 even is evicted from his farm in such a district, he has generally the 
 means of emigrating — he derives them from the proceeds of the sale 
 of his tenant right. The evicted Munster tenant scarcely ever has. 
 
 I have used the expression " emigration of a family," because 
 this is the emigration which really shows that the people are flying 
 from their country. Younger sons and younger daughters have at 
 all times gone, even from well-to-do households, to better their 
 fortunes in other countries. When a whole family leave their 
 native land we may well suppose that it is some pressure drives 
 them away. Between the years 1851 and 1861, Ireland lost 
 76,000 families. Of these, but 3,600 had gone from Ulster,* 
 although a third of the entire population are within the limits of 
 that province. 
 
 The change in the character of Ulster, indeed of Irish, emigra- 
 tion has been very remarkable, in respect to the religion of the 
 emigrants. Not very many years ago it was believed to be drain- 
 ing Ireland of its Protestant population. About the year 1830, 
 the emigrants were very generally Protestants. They are now 
 almost exclusively Roman Catholics. In connexion with this 
 subject, it ought not to be forgotten that emigration from Ireland 
 began with the Protestant people. Primate Boulter's letters com- 
 plain of a passion having seized on the Protestants more than 150 
 years ago. The denial of security of tenure was then the cause of 
 that emigration. There were Protestant emigrants who were 
 driven, by the State trials of 1773, to swell the ranks of American 
 revolt. Thirty years ago Protestant emigration was the great 
 grievance constantly put forward by Protestant partizans. The 
 explanation is to me obvious. It is notorious that Protestants, 
 up to a very recent period, held a higher position among the 
 peasantry than Roman Catholics. They were, therefore, the first 
 to feel the growing pressure of landlord domination, the down- 
 ward tendency of the country, and accordingly they left it.f 
 
 * " Statistics of Ireland." Thorn's Almanac, 1864, p. 774. 
 
 *f- In a previous note I have adverted to the Protestant emigration of the last century. 
 About the period of Catholic Emancipation a rage for emigration seemed to have seized 
 on the Protestant people. They went in such numbers as, among Protestant politicians, 
 to give rise to serious alarm. The emigration from Ireland was almost then exclusively 
 Protestant. The cry was raised that the Protestants were driven out of Ireland. Very 
 influential persons started a scheme of "Protestant colonization;" large sums were 
 subscribed, and a few "Protestant colonists" were actually settled upon wild waste 
 lands in the county of Donegal, the estate of the late Sir Edmond Hayes. 
 
 I believe that in the text I have assigned the main reason for this strange passion 
 for emigration seizing on a whole class; but other causes, no doubt, contributed to it 
 at the time. 
 
 Political questions exercise, a very great, and, to superficial observers, an unaccount- 
 able, influence over the movements of both of the great religious divisions of the Irish 
 people. Each party believe, their personal welfare, if not their personal safety, to be 
 
DECREASE IN NUMBER OF SMALL HOLDINGS. 133 
 
 Lord Dufferin then adverts to the fact, that since 1841 the 
 number of holdings in Ireland between 15 and 30 acres has 
 increased Lord Dufferin thus states the proposition: — 
 
 " But it so happens that the total number of holdings in Ireland con- 
 taining 15 acres and upwards has increased enormously since 1841. In 
 fact, there are now nearly twice as many small farmers — using the term 
 even in its most modest acceptation — as there were before the famine. 
 This, will, undoubtedly, be considered an extraordinary statement, but it 
 is nevertheless, the fact, that holdings between 15 and 30 acres have 
 increased by 61,000, or 75 per cent., within the last 20 years; and 
 holdings above 30 acres by 109,000, or 107 per cent., during the same 
 period ; the emigration, so far as it has affected the occupying class at 
 all, having been almost entirely confined to the poor people who attempted 
 to get a living out of bits of land ranging in size from half-an-acre to 
 five or six acres." 
 
 As to the increase in the number of the larger holdings we need 
 no statistics to tell us this. As farms were consolidated and the 
 occupiers of small farms exterminated, the numbers of large hold- 
 ings must increase. There is no mystery in these statistics ; I take 
 the numbers from Mr. Donnelly's statistics for the year 1864. In 
 that volume we will find the increase or decrease of each class of 
 holdings between 1841 and 1864. The figures differ slightly from 
 those of Lord Dufferin, probably because those I quote are brought 
 down to a later period. 
 
 Between 1841 and 1864 the holdings in Ireland, between one 
 and fifteen acres, diminished in number 315,000, the diminution of 
 those under five acres being 222,000. Between fifteen and thirty 
 acres they increased by 57,000, over thirty acres by 109,000. On 
 the entire number of holdings over an acre the diminution amounted 
 to 138,000. 
 
 Many very amazing things have occurred in the progress of these 
 discussions, but none more amazing than this— that Lord Dufferin, 
 or any one else, should have imagined he had made any discovery in 
 these figures, or that they tell us anything which can exercise the 
 slightest influence upon the question at issue. 
 
 bound up in the triumph of their cause. The victory achieved by the Roman Catholics in 
 carrying Emancipation, and the depression of what was called the Protestant interest, 
 had its effect in making many Protestants emigrate to Canada. 
 
 But there was also another cause. The old system had been, on the whole, to show 
 favou^ to Protestants in the occupation of land. They held, to use the expression of 
 Arthu; r oung, " at favoured rents." In many cases they were placed above their 
 Roman vJatholic neighbours. As liberal opinions prevailed, this preference gave way; 
 and mr y of the landlords displayed their liberality by no longer allowing the Protest- 
 ant a T favour in his rent ; they were depressed to the common level of the Irish 
 peasants, and they went away. 
 
 After all, the first Protestant emigration from Ireland is that recorded by Nicholas 
 Pynnar, in his Survey: — 
 
 u The tenants have no leases ; they said they never could get anything but promises, 
 and therefore, for the most part, they are leaving the land." 
 
134 lord dufferin's statistics. 
 
 Three hundred and fifteen thousand holdings, under fifteen acres, 
 have unquestionably disappeared. Of course the number of holdings 
 over fifteen acres has been increased. Two millions of acres,* which 
 we may assume to have been included in the extinct holdings, have not 
 been suffered to lie waste ; neither have they been all consolidated 
 into gigantic farms like those described by Arthur Young. What 
 has happened is exactly that which Lord Rosse describes in his 
 pamphlet, but which everybody knew. The holding of the going 
 away tenant is added to that of his next neighbour. It so happens 
 that in the returns we have of the sizes of farms, there is a division 
 made at thirty acres. We have three classes distinguished: a 
 class of farms below fifteen acres, a class of farms between fifteen 
 and thirty acres, and a class above thirty. When a man of ten or 
 twelve acres is driven out, his farm is annexed to the adjoining one. 
 It may happen to raise that farm from the second class to the third, 
 by swelling its size above thirty ;f it may raise it from the first to 
 the second, by bringing it above fifteen acres. In point of fact, by 
 far the greater portion of the two millions of acres have been 
 annexed to the larger farmers. The third class of farms, those 
 over thirty acres, have been increased by 109,000, the second class, 
 that between fifteen and thirty, by only 57,000. 
 
 Lord Dufferin may indeed fairly say that he has proved that 
 these small holdings have not as yet been consolidated into farms of 
 very overgrown dimensions. But as no one ever said or ever 
 imagined that they had, the discovery, is not one of very vital 
 importance. The reference to these statistics exactly leaves the 
 
 * I assume with Lord Dufferin the small holdings average six acres. 
 
 + Mr. Dalton has, with his usual clearness, pointed out the real effect of Lord 
 Dufferin's statistics : — 
 
 " 1st. An emigration of over two millions of souls from a purely agricultural country 
 has had the effect, according to Lord Dufferin, of increasing the number of small 
 farmers. This, unless there has been a simultaneous immigration of the same class 
 (which is not the case) is either, unless subtraction be equivalent to multiplication, 
 pure nonsense or a miracle. To prove his position, however, Lord Dufferin points to 
 the fact that the holdings between fifteen and thirty acres have increased by 61,000, 
 or 75 per cent. It is simply the necessary consequence of so large an emigration from 
 a country of such small holdings. 
 
 "In one sense, indeed, it does by a sort of fantastic arithmetic, increase their 
 number. It has turned many a large farmer, as we understand the term in Ireland, 
 into a small one, by adding to the size of his farm, thereby increasing his expenses 
 and diminishing his capital. We have more small farmers in the true sense of the 
 word— that is, farmers with small capital — than we had before the famine. 
 
 " The increase in the number of holdings over fifteen acres has been effected in the 
 worst possible way. A ten-acre farmer has been converted into one of twenty acres 
 by the Procrustean device of stretching him. With his limited capital, in many cases 
 diminished by the purchase of the good- will of the outgoing tenant, he is called upon 
 to do twice as much as he had to do before, and he can not do it. Nor is he the only 
 loser by the transaction. As the emigration goes on the Government statistics, on 
 which both Lord Dufferin and I rely, prove that the yield per statute acre of every 
 crop, both green and cereal, is gradually decreasing. The decrease from 1847 to 1865 
 inclusive is considerable. Comparing 1847 with 1865, the exact decrease in the princi- 
 pal crops is per cent. — oats, 163 ; flax, 47*9; turnips, 36*1 ; potatoes, 50*. Some 
 years would show a greater decrease, but on the whole it has been gradual since 1849. 
 
DISAPPEARANCE OF SMALL FARMS. 135 
 
 matter what it was. Where three holdings of eight acres have 
 been destroyed, they have been in many instances consolidated in 
 one of twenty-four. 
 
 Lord Dufferin may, of course, say that it is better for the country 
 that there should be one holding or farm of twenty-four acres on 
 land which before there were three of eight acres. But it does not 
 throw much light upon this question to cite elaborate statistics to 
 prove the marvellous discovery that the result actually is — that 
 there is one more farm of the extent of twenty-four acres than 
 there was in the island before. As for the statement that "there 
 are now twice as many small farmers" (meaning holders of farms 
 between fifteen and thirty acres) "as there were before the 
 famine," it must be remembered that even where a holding is 
 unaltered in its dimensions it does not at all follow that a farmer 
 has not been driven out. Lord Dufferin himself tells us that in 
 many cases cottiers or labourers have been promoted to be farmers. 
 The farmer who has still something to lose throws up his farm. 
 He is replaced in that very farm by a man of an inferior class. 
 The result is that diminution in the agricultural produce of the 
 country which Mr. Dalton has pointed out.* 
 
 In the beginning of the process of consolidation we must, of 
 course, expect that the farms of the more moderate size will increase 
 in number. The great majority of the holdings are small, and two 
 farms of ten acres can only make one of twenty. As the process 
 advances, the consolidation will be with still larger farms. When 
 the man who has got the two united farms of ten acres each leaves 
 the country his going will add twenty acres, not ten, to the holding 
 of his neighbour, and accordingly we find the process has reached 
 this stage. In 1864, 3,777 holdings between five and fifteen acres 
 were given up. But these, instead of being attached to farms under 
 thirty acres, were all merged in farms of larger size. Even Lord 
 Dufferin's small farms, those between fifteen and thirty acres, 
 diminished in that year in number by 1,962, and this diminution 
 has been steadily taking place every year since 1861. In the year 
 1864 all holdings over five acres diminished by 5,842. 
 
 It is well to understand these things. It is worth while even to 
 see clearly what Lord Dufferin means. His assertion means this — 
 the consolidation at present tells more largely on small farms. As 
 the process advances we must expect it to be a little slower. The 
 landlord is not himself prepared to meet the expense requisite to fit 
 up a large farm, and he cannot always meet a tenant qualified to 
 undertake one. When farms of thirty acres or upwards are thrown up 
 
 * I do not desire to involve myself in any disputed statistics, but I believe I may 
 say that, after a sifting and full discussion, a statement made by Mr. Heron at the 
 Statistical Society, and by Mr. Fisher at the Royal Dublin Society, may be considered 
 as established : — 
 
 In 1847 the crops of Ireland were worth fifty-two millions, in 1861 they were worth 
 thirty-four millions. 
 
136 lord dufferin's statistics. 
 
 it will therefore frequently be relet to a new tenant, instead of being 
 thrown into the adjoining farm. Yet in the year 1864 2,000 farms 
 of this class have disappeared. 
 
 Lord Dufferin's real argument, put into a strange statistical form, 
 is this : — Emigration has as yet done no harm, for it has only 
 lessened the farms below fifteen acres. Judge Longfield has given 
 his opinion that this is the smallest farm upon which a farmer can 
 live comfortably, and therefore it is not desirable that any such 
 should exist. This may or may not be so. I only repeat that Lord 
 Dufferin's statistics leave the question exactly where it was before. 
 
 These statistics do not affect in the slightest degree the argu- 
 ments that have been used. It is impossible to deny that the Irish 
 people are leaving their native land. Of what avail is it to tell us 
 that there are more large farms now than there were in 1841? 
 That the small holdings of which the occupiers have been banished 
 have been consolidated into larger ones, I readily admit, and this 
 is all that Lord Dufferin's statistics prove. 
 
 Does Lord Dufferin mean to tell us that every holder of a farm 
 between 15 and 30 acres is now secure in his position, that the 
 process of consolidation and extermination will have reached its 
 terminus when it has swept away all the holders of farms under 15 
 acres. If he does not mean this, his statistics are only calculated 
 to mislead. 
 
 I have already said that emigration has actually mitigated the 
 evils resulting from the present system of land tenure. It was far 
 better for an evicted tenant to go away than to remain at home to 
 be a burden on the poor rates. It was better for the agricultural 
 labourer to earn a sufficient livelihood in America than to waste 
 away a miserable life in Ireland upon a pittance that barely kept 
 body and soul together. Nobody in his senses ever denied this. 
 But what many men in their senses did say and think was, that 
 the necessity for his going arose, to use the language of Lord 
 Dufferin, from some malignant " human agency," that blasted and 
 blighted with " perennial desolation " the rich resources of his 
 native land. 
 
 But there is now, beyond all question, an emigration of a different 
 class going on, an emigration which is no relief to the misery of the 
 country, but an aggravation of it. Men are going away who have 
 means, and industry, and strength, and who, if permitted to remain 
 in their native land would, even under existing circumstances, add 
 something to our stock. It is said, and it is proved,* that men like 
 these are leaving Ireland because the insecurity of tenure which 
 is now the necessary condition of an Irish farmer's life, deprives 
 them of all opportunity of bettering their condition at home. 
 
 The whole argument founded on emigration is this : — The people 
 are leaving the country, because a vicious system of land tenure 
 * Ante, the evidence of Bishop Keane. 
 
PROCESS OF CONSOLIDATION OF FARMS. 137 
 
 has depressed the whole industry, lowered the whole character, 
 and condemned to barrenness the whole resources of the country. 
 
 Does it matter, in the slightest degree, to this argument, to 
 show that as small holdings diminish larger ones increase — more of 
 small holdings than of any other class must disappear because small 
 holdings are the most numerous class. What avail the manipu- 
 lations of letting which have substituted one set of miserable, 
 because dependent, set of occupiers for another? What use to 
 establish, which is not established, that the tillers of small farms 
 have been the first to go? I am sure that many of those who 
 have left the country have occupied farms far above the size of 
 Lord Dufferin's magic " fifteen acres." Any one acquainted with 
 arithmetical calculations will see that if the farms actually " con- 
 solidated''' 1 in each class has been exactly proportionate to the number 
 of the class, the result would be exactly the same as that deduced from 
 the tables upon which Lord Dufferin relies. 
 
 I have used the expression, " the first to go." Lord DufFerin, 
 and Lord Rosse, and all those who coincide in their views, contem- 
 plate a still larger emigration of the people. If this be so, of what 
 use is it to tell us the number of the farmers holding farms under 
 30 acres who are waiting their turn to be driven out. 
 
 I bring no charge of inhumanity against such men as Lord 
 DufFerin and Lord Rosse because they so contemplate a large 
 emigration of the population that still remains. We are dealing 
 with questions of fact, and not of sentiment. The question is, can 
 we devise means of supporting the people at home. If not we 
 ought not to keep them. I will even go farther* and say that if 
 our present system of land tenure is to continue, the only chance 
 of seeing rich and prosperous farming in Ireland is the extermina- 
 tion of the people. If we could only quietly get rid of its present 
 inhabitants we might divide Ireland into vast tillage, or better 
 still, pasture farms, for which, probably, English or Scotch, or even 
 some Irish undertakers might be found. I really believe that this 
 is the inevitable result of the reasonings of those who defend our 
 present system of land tenure. It is not necessary to say that their 
 reasonings are fallacious. Their defect is that they overlook the 
 trifling difficulty in the way, that of shipping off the people. 
 While the people remain our present system of land tenure must 
 keep that people miserable and poor. 
 
 Lord DufFerin is unquestionably justified in saying that, twenty 
 years ago, and long before, many men of strong national feeling — 
 the ardent and sincere advocates of popular right — regarded emi- 
 gration not as a means of remedying the evils of Ireland, but as a 
 palliative of the miseries of the people. Even then there were 
 those who regarded these opinions as wrong, and who thought that 
 if human law did not mar the bounty of Providence there was 
 abundance to sustain them in their own land. But twenty years 
 
138 
 
 ago the great preponderance of educated opinion was with those 
 who desired to see emigration encouraged and even aided by the 
 State. 
 
 This supplies no authority whatever for the views of those who 
 now look forward to a more extended emigration as an indispensable 
 condition to their plans of Irish prosperity. The emigration that is 
 now going on is of a character wholly different from any that was 
 then thought of. The population, in the first place, has fallen 
 from more than eight millions to less than six. It is a totally 
 different thing to desire emigration in the one case and in the 
 other. Those who thought the country might well spare some 
 from a population approaching nine millions, might yet be startled 
 at hearing that it is necessary to reduce it below five. 
 
 Besides, it is a total confusion of the subject to confound the 
 emigration which was then recommended with that which is now 
 going on. They have no resemblance except in name. " Volun- 
 tary emigration," wrote Sir Robert Kane in his work on The 
 Industrial Resources of Ireland, contrasting " voluntary" with 
 aided emigration, " carries off just the class of persons whom it is 
 most important to keep at home — persons of both foresight and 
 enterprise, and possessed of some small capital." This is exactly 
 what is now going on. The men who are going are those who, 
 in the language of Lord Rosse, put together something before 
 they go. The emigration which it was proposed thirty years 
 ago to aid would have been the emigration of the indigent — 
 of those who had neither means nor employment. The voluntary 
 emigration of an entire class can only result from something that 
 makes that whole class miserable at home. The persons who go 
 under such conditions are not emigrants but refugees. 
 
 There is, indeed, a voluntary emigration which no one in his senses 
 would deprecate ; if we mean by emigration that movement which 
 carries off bold and adventurous or even restless spirits from the old 
 abodes of civilized man to carry intelligence and civilization to the 
 remote and unpeopled regions of the globe. This is indeed, the fulfil- 
 ment of the Divine precept, which, when it commanded men to 
 increase and multiply, bade them also to go forth and replenish the 
 earth. This was the emigration which, in the palmiest days of Greece 
 and Rome, bore their hardy sons to found colonies in distant lands. 
 It is that by which England has settled a new Anglo-Saxon race 
 beyond the western ocean. It is that by which the vast centre of 
 Europe sends every year thousands and tens of thousands to swell 
 on the western prairies the still advancing European population, 
 who have made the great American people. 
 
 Is this the emigration that is now drawing away the life-blood of 
 the Irish nation ? The Irish is not an emigration from the people but 
 of the people. It is not the bold, the adventurous, or the indigent 
 who are going. The emigrants are not confined to the young and the 
 
CHARACTER OF EMIGRATION. 139 
 
 enterprising. Whole families are leaving their native land. Old men 
 take their departure. Men of staid and sober habits — the fathers of 
 the village — desert the home of their manhood — men whose emigra- 
 tion would in any settled state of society, be heard of with amazement, 
 and whose leaving is, in any state, a portent and an omen of ill. 
 This emigration is one that tells of the upheaving of its inhabitants 
 from the land. It is vain to speak of this as the ordinary 
 movement which at all times stirs some of a population to wander 
 from their home. If all the landlords of Ireland were suddenly to 
 sell their estates, to abandon their ancestral homes, and leave 
 Ireland for ever, would this be accounted for by telling us that 
 in every state of society, even the most prosperous — adventurous 
 spirits have been found among landowners, who have parted with 
 their home possessions, and sought the perilous and daring pros- 
 pects which open to the imagination of the adventurous, in climes 
 that are attractive because they are distant and unknown ? Can 
 we account for an equally strange and equally signal departure of 
 other classes of the people by the remembrance that at all times 
 many of those classes have sought a new fortune in a new land ? 
 
 Common sense tells us the wide difference between one class of 
 emigration and the other. It is trifling with a solemn subject; it 
 is almost jesting with the agonies of the Irish nation to pretend not 
 to know to which class the emigration that is now going on is to 
 be referred. 
 
 But more than this. Passionate appeals were made to the 
 Government during the famine years to provide means of enabling 
 the people to emigrate, and these appeals were unheeded With 
 corn and cattle going literally to waste in other countries, our 
 rulers were implored, if they would not bring food to the people, to 
 carry the people to the food. It was a time when the saving 
 of human life was the first grand consideration. The people were 
 starving at home. There seemed no choice between this and their 
 going to other lands. 
 
 Who would hesitate in the choice? Who would hesitate now 
 between emigration for the Irish people and their continuance at 
 home in their present misery and serfdom ? Let us not mistake the 
 issue. The complaint is not that emigration is preferred either by 
 the people or any one for them. The complaint is that such a choice 
 is the only one offered to them — that home is made by human law 
 a place unfit for them to live. 
 
 I agree with Lord DufFerin in this. If our present " desolation" 
 is to be " perennial," emigration is a boon to every Irish peasant 
 whom it carries from Ireland to any other region upon earth. If our 
 present condition cannot be remedied except by parting with our 
 people — then, for their own sake, for the sake of humanity, let the 
 people go. But it is because it can be remedied by other means 
 that we protest against a contented acquiescence in their flight. 
 
140 LORD DUFFERIN'S STATISTICS. 
 
 The choice is not between emigration and keeping the people in 
 misery at home ; it is between driving them, " sorrowing and 
 reluctant exiles," from their native land and giving them that 
 security of tenure which would make them the happy and indus- 
 trious occupants of the Irish soil. And even now, if our present 
 state must be perpetuated by a refusal to give security of tenure 
 to the tenant ; if serfdom is to be the perpetual doom of those who 
 remain at home ; if, in a word, we are to despair of any improve- 
 ment in the land laws — to give up all hope of any legislative 
 protection for the occupiers of the soil — surely he would be the best 
 friend of the Celtic race who would advise the old people, with one 
 consent, to go — and leave their curse and their country to the 
 malignant " human agency" which drives them from their fathers' 
 homes. 
 
 Fortunately we have indications that all, even of Irish land- 
 owners, do not take the same dismal view of our position as that 
 which is taken by Lord Dufferin and Lord Rosse.* There are 
 those who recognize a duty to the Irish people distinct from that 
 of driving them from their native land, and who admit that before 
 we fling them away like " weeds," some effort ought be made to 
 provide for them at home. The Marquis of Abercorn, himself an 
 
 * I should be very sorry to do Lord DufFerin any possible injustice ; and it is right 
 to say that, in a letter to the Daily News, of which I will have a few words to say 
 presently, he has very indignantly disclaimed that which he considers an imputation, 
 that "he is anxious to see the population permanently reduced." 
 
 "To any one who cares to study my opinions with candour it will be apparent, not 
 that I do not regard emigration as -per se a great calamity, but that I consider as 
 long as people find themselves in straitened circumstances at home it is folly to expect 
 them to stay there ; that an endeavour by artificial means to tether down to the soil 
 more persons than can be maintined in comfort by its cultivation is likely to prove 
 abortive ; that the true remedy for emigration is the development of the country's 
 industrial resources ; and that in the meantime, the opening presented by America to 
 those who can find no opportunity at home for the remunerative employment of their 
 energies is an unspeakable blessing." — Letter to the Daily News, January 24th, 1867. 
 
 I perfectly agree with Lord DufFerin, that "the true remedy for emigration is the 
 development of the country's industrial resources ; " although he will pardon me for 
 saying the phrase " development of Ireland's resources" has long since degenerated 
 into a cant. The only way I know of to "develope" our two great "industrial 
 resources," land and labour, is to give to every occupier an interest in improving by 
 his industry the land. 
 
 I presume that Lord DufFerin, among other right-minded men, would, as an abstract 
 question, much prefer that our population should remain in comfort at home, just as 
 he would wish, as an abstract question, that every man could dine every day upon roast 
 beef. I think I see the means by which they can live in comfort at home. I presume 
 Lord DufFerin does not, or he would not have concluded his first letter to the Times 
 with the sentence : — " For these reasons I believe that emigration has been, and will 
 continue to be a blessing to Ireland ; and I disagree with those persons who consider 
 that the Almighty pronounced a curse, and not a blessing upon his children when 
 he told them to go forth and multiply, and replenish the earth." 
 
 This bears out the only assertion I have made on the subject — the prospects of 
 Ireland, which Lord DufFerin and those who think with him set before us, involve a 
 further expatriation of our people. 
 
 It does not affect the question in the least that Lord DufFerin contemplates this 
 feature in his prospect with regret. 
 
LORD ABERCORN ON EMIGRATION. 141 
 
 Irish peer and an Irish landowner, thus spoke, a short time ago, 
 at the inaugural banquet of the Lord Mayor : — 
 
 " Closely connected," said the Lord Lieutenant, " with the happiness 
 and the well-being of the people is the subject which of late has 
 been prominently before the public, and has been ventilated by many 
 writers of great ability — I mean that of emigration. I will venture in 
 reply to say a few words upon it ; and in what I say, I wish to speak, 
 not with reference to the past, but solely as to the present and the future. 
 I am aware that according to strict economic principles, the population 
 of Ireland is somewhat in excess. I admit that if you were to make a 
 new Ireland you would arrange to have a somewhat smaller population. 
 But this is not the question. You must take Ireland as it is. You 
 
 MUST TAKE THE POPULATION AS YOU FIND IT. MEN AND WOMEN ARE NOT 
 CATTLE OR MACHINES, TO BE PLACED *OR DISPLACED AS THE EXIGENCIES 
 OR THE WHIM OP THE MOMENT MAY SUGGEST. YOU MUST TAKE THE 
 POPULATION AS IT IS, AND DO THE BEST YOU CAN FOR IT. You must find 
 
 the means of livelihood — you must find employment, and you must ad- 
 vance their social and moral well-being. This is the problem which those 
 who have the interests of Ireland at heart should study — not relying 
 upon the deportation of a population which, after all, is but little 
 in excess of what the rules of economic principles allow. Let me not 
 be supposed to deprecate a wholesome emigration, such as that which 
 flows from the superabundant population of the sister isle. An emigration 
 of that nature is a proof, not of weakness, but of strength. It is the 
 superabundance of vigour and enterprise as well as of numbers. But 
 when emigration reaches excess it becomes the hemorrhage which drains 
 the life-blood, while it evidences the disease which lurks beneath." 
 
 I will not stop to cavil at the unsound political economy which 
 teaches his Excellency that the population of Ireland is even " a 
 little" in excess. I do not think that if his Excellency were to 
 make a new Ireland he would need to " arrange to have a somewhat 
 smaller population ;" he would not do so if all the occupiers were 
 treated as they are treated on his own estates. That which concerns 
 the Irish people is this — the representative of their Sovereign has 
 told them that: — "Her Government must take Ireland as it is. 
 Must take the population as they find them." That " men and 
 women are not cattle or machines, to be displaced as the exigencies 
 or the whim of the moment may suggest." 
 
 We must form plans of improvement " not relying ON the 
 deportation of the population." These are noble words. 
 
 I am no partizan of Lord Abercorn's administration. But it is 
 impossible to withhold from language like this, spoken with the 
 authority of a Viceroy, the tribute of admiration and respect.* 
 
 * It is an act of simple justice to Lord Abercorn to say that his acts as a landlord 
 are, if report speaks truly, in perfect accordance with the sentiments he thus expressed. 
 
 It is strange to observe that in Pynnar's Survey, the lands of " the Earl of Abercorn" 
 were among the few upon which he found an " estated tenantry" placed. 
 
 It would throw some light upon Lord Dufferin's statistics if his Excellency would 
 inform us how many families have emigrated from the Abercorn estates. 
 
142 LORD dufferin's statistics. 
 
 By a singular coincidence the chief magistrate, who was his 
 entertainer, had but a short time before expressed very similar 
 sentiments, both on his own behalf and on that of an Irish noble- 
 man like Lord Abercorn, the owner of great possessions in our 
 land. In replying to a deputation of tenantry who presented him 
 with a well-deserved testimonial of their regard, the Lord Mayor 
 had used this memorable language, worthy of one chosen, solely by 
 the force of his ability and his character to fill the first civic chair 
 of our country : — 
 
 "Emigration is the hemorrhage which drains the life-blood of Ireland 
 away ; and I deeply regret that a noble lord, of hereditary talents, of 
 great parts and accomplishments, should have reanimated the Sangrado 
 prescription of more blood-letting and hot water. Ireland has too much 
 of that already. I fear to face the future, when one and a-half million 
 of our population is to be reduced. I fear to face the deep and untold 
 misery to thousands — the quenched fires, the household gods scattered, 
 the trading classes in the towns still further reduced and ruined, and 
 the professional and middle classes feeling the want of that life-blood 
 which it is the duty of true statesmen to keep in the body politic, and, 
 above all, arrest its continual flow."* 
 
 But while I cheerfully pay my tribute of respect to language 
 such as this, whether spoken by a Viceroy or a Lord Mayor, let 
 me say also that when spoken by a ruler imposes a deep responsibility 
 upon him who uses it. It conveys an invitation to the Irish people 
 to remain at home. They will be justly regarded as cruelly deceiving 
 them, who, from the place of authority, so invite them, unless they 
 use their utmost efforts to make their native country one in which 
 the people can live. That can only be done by making it a country 
 in which they can expend their industry on its fields with a certainty 
 that the fruits of their industry will be their own. 
 
 An inspired apostle has warned us of the hollowness of the 
 charity which contents itself "with words : — 
 
 " If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of 
 you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled ; but, not- 
 withstanding, ye give them not those things which are needful to the 
 body — what doth it profit?" — (St. James, ii. 16). 
 
 * Mr. Wm. Lane Joynt, the present Lord Mayor of Dublin, is the manager of Lord 
 Annaly's estates in the county of Clare. 
 
 It was in reply to a deputation from the tenantry of that estate that he used the 
 language I have quoted above. 
 
 He was able to tell that deputation that on a large property only three tenants had 
 been evicted in the course of ten years. 
 
 On that estate a custom of permitting an outgoing tenant to sell his interest has 
 been introduced. I have been assured that from the whole of that estate not a single 
 family has been contributed to swell the emigration. 
 
 It is by examining individual instances of this nature that we can really learn the 
 causes that are driving the Irish people from their homes. If I found whole families 
 flying from the estates of Lord Abercorn in the north, and Lord Annaly in the south, 
 I would begin to distrust my own opinions as to the connexion between emigration 
 and the want of tenant right. 
 
THE FIFTEEN ACRES. 143 
 
 The charity would be worse than hollow; it would be a cruel 
 deception which, when " the brother or sister naked and destitute 
 of daily food," were about "to depart in peace," would say to them, 
 " Remain at home and be ye warmed and filled," if, notwith- 
 standing, ye give them not those things "which are needful for the 
 body." 
 
 The first is the charity of those who adopt the views of Lord 
 Dufferin and tell the Irish people to go to — America, and there be 
 " warmed and filled." The second would be the worse charity 
 of those who use words like those of Lord Abercorn, unless when 
 they tell them to remain in Ireland, they really intend to secure 
 them the means of living in their native land. 
 
 Sentences like those, spoken by Lord Abercorn, will be treasured 
 up in the hearts of the people to add to the bitterness of disappoint- 
 ment if the hopes they create, are once more dashed in cruel 
 mockery to the ground. 
 
 In passing, let me say that I cannot admit that which Lord 
 Dufferin assumes, that it has been an advantage to the country to 
 turn out every man who held a farm under "fifteen acres." I 
 could almost fancy Lord Dufferin had been led astray by some con- 
 fused memory of the traditions of our early years when he invites 
 us to a controversy on these everlasting " fifteen acres." Except in 
 these recollections there is no magic in the phrase. These small 
 holdings existed principally in Ulster, and above all counties in 
 Ireland in Down and Armagh. You could almost measure the 
 prosperity and the comfort of the population by the multiplication 
 of these holdings. In an excellent tract, to which, I regret to say, 
 I can only refer from memory, the late Mr. Sharman Crawford bore 
 conclusive testimony upon this point to the condition of the county 
 Down. Mr. Blacker, whose name will long be remembered in 
 connexion with the improvement of Irish agriculture, bore similar 
 testimony as to the county of Armagh. Sir Robert Kane,* in his 
 work on the industrial resources of Ireland, quotes, with approval, 
 
 * From a very admirable essay in the Industrial Resources of Ireland, I extract a 
 few passages, the statistical facts of which are sufficient, at all events, to show that we 
 must not take it as an established principle in Irish social science, that the existence 
 of farms under 15 acres is destructive to the prosperity of the country, or inconsistent 
 with the comfort and independence of the occupiers of the soil. 
 
 " By the returns of the census of 1841, the number of farms in Ireland, and their 
 magnitude, was 
 
 Provinces. 
 
 Leinster, 
 Munster, 
 Ulster, - 
 Connaught, 
 
 Farms from 1 
 to 3 acres. 
 
 - 49,152 
 
 - 57,028 
 
 - 100,817 
 
 - 99,918 
 
 Farms from 5 
 to 15 acres. 
 
 45,595 
 61,320 
 98,992 
 45,221 
 
 Farms from 15 
 to 30 acres. 
 
 20,584 
 
 27,481 
 
 25,099 
 
 5,790 
 
 Above 
 30 acres. 
 
 17,889 
 16,557 
 
 9,591 
 
 4,275 
 
 Total. 
 
 133,220 
 162,386 
 234,499 
 155,204 
 
 Total, - 306,915 251,127 78,954 48,312 685,309 
 
 " The following table exhibits the number and the average size of farms, compared 
 with the total area and area of arable land of each province : — 
 
144 lord dufferin's statistics. 
 
 a calculation of that gentleman, that if all Ireland had been tilled 
 and occupied like Armagh, Ireland could have supported in comfort 
 more than double her then population. 
 
 Armagh supports, for each square mile of its arable ground, by- 
 far the largest population of all the Irish counties. Down comes 
 next in the number of its population compared with its cultivated 
 soil. In Down, the population on each square mile of arable ground 
 is 317; in Armagh, 387; in Tipperary, 146; and in Cork, 148.* 
 
 Yet between 1851 and 1861, as I have already pointed out, the 
 whole province of Ulster lost but 3,886 families, a decrease of not 
 quite one per cent.f A large share of one year's proportion was 
 supplied by the evictions of Glenveagh. 
 
 It does not at all follow that the labourer who held a few acres 
 of land, or even a smaller portion, was therefore entirely dependent 
 on it for support. In many instances, especially in the north of 
 Ireland, the system assumed a form very nearly equivalent to that 
 allotment system which persons have taken so much pains to intro- 
 duce into many parts of England. The man who worked as a day 
 
 Province. 
 
 Number of 
 Fanns. 
 
 Total area 
 in acres. 
 
 Area of 
 arable land. 
 
 Average size 
 of farms. 
 
 Leinster, - 
 Munster, - 
 Ulster, 
 Connaught, 
 
 - 133,220 
 
 - 162,386 
 
 - 234,499 
 
 - 155,204 
 
 4,860,642 
 6,049,886 
 5,466,648 
 4,388,166 
 
 3,961,188 
 3,874,613 
 3,407,539 
 2,220,960 
 
 297 acres. 
 23-8 „ 
 14-5 „ 
 14-3 „ 
 
 "It is thus seen that in every province the great majority of the farms are under 
 fifteen acres, and the average magnitude of the farms in the north and west, appears 
 to be but one -half that of the southern and eastern provinces. The geographical 
 association is very much at variance with other social circumstances, and it will form 
 just now an interesting object of inquiry." ..... 
 
 " That the greater or less magnitude of farms is not in any way necessarily connected 
 with the condition of agriculture, or with any other elements of social comfort of the 
 population, becomes fully evident on reference to the table of the sizes of farms given 
 in page 305. It is there seen that in Connaught the average size of farms is almost 
 exactly the same as in Ulster, and yet these two provinces are the extremes of ignorance 
 and of intelligence, of activity and of industrial indolence, which this island presents. 
 The difference has certainly nothing to do with the smallness of the farms." 
 
 The following is the extract from Mr. Blacker 's work entitled Ireland as it Was, Is, 
 and Ought to Be : — 
 
 "The county of Armagh contains 212,755 acres, and a population of 220,653 souls, 
 and that the entire kingdom contains 17,190,726 acres, and 7,839,469 souls ; now, in 
 the county of Armagh, by a recent survey, more than one-seventh of the surface is 
 taken up by lakes and unprofitable land, and the remainder is, for the greater part, 
 but indifferently cultivated, and yet the peasantry are better clothed, lodged, and fed, 
 than they are in most other counties in Ireland. I cannot, therefore, be accused of 
 taking away from the comforts of the rest of the kingdom, by taking the county of 
 Armagh as a standard, and its proportion of unprofitable surface is not very remote, 
 I believe, from the average of the others; if, then, 212,755, the number of acres in 
 Armagh, give a population of 220,653 souls, 17,190,726 acres, the entire contents of 
 the kingdom, ought to give a population of 17,828,888, in place of 7,839,469, the 
 population at present. It, therefore, appears, that supposing the other parts of Ireland 
 to be as well cultivated as Armagh, it would support about two and a half times the 
 number of its present inhabitants, and be able to export provisions largely besides ; for 
 Armagh, notwithstanding its population, exports pork, butter, and grain, in great 
 quantities." 
 
 * "Statistics of Ireland," Thorn's Almanac, 1865. t Ibid. 
 
LARGE AND SMALL FARMS. 145 
 
 labourer held with his cabin a small patch of ground, upon which 
 he worked at extra hours, and which enabled him to supply the defi- 
 ciencies of his wages. Various forms of domestic, or even outdoor 
 employment, gave opportunity to members of his family to assist 
 in obtaining the humble livelihood of his little household. In such 
 a life as this many an Irish family has lived happy and contented 
 with their lot. 
 
 But, surely, in Ireland it is not open to us to choose between the 
 one system and the other. We have a population living upon small 
 farms. We have them so after all the pitiless exterminations of the 
 last thirty years. It is impossible to discuss the question without 
 taking the existence and, as I think, the interest, of these people 
 into account. All government ought to be carried on for the benefit 
 of the Irish people — that is, for the good of the men, women, and 
 children now living on the Irish soil. What are we to think of reason- 
 ings which begin by asking us to exclude a large number of these 
 men, women, and children from all our calculations. But the condition 
 of these very people is a far greater subject, in any rational estimate 
 of the duties of Government, than the condition of all the landlords 
 in Ireland put together. I say with Lord Abercorn, " we must 
 take Ireland as we find it," we must deal with " the population as 
 they are." We have to deal with human beings " our own flesh 
 and blood," and " not with cattle or machines." I ask, what is to 
 become of the two millions of Irish men, women and children 
 who now depend for their existence upon small farms. Are we 
 to " displace them as the exigencies or the whims of the moment 
 may require?" Are we to have no " fear to face the deep and un- 
 told misery of thousands, the quenched fires, the household gods 
 scattered." In the name of the God of mercy, has there not been 
 in Ireland enough of this for one country and for one age? Yet 
 surely I may say, that all those who use the reasonings I am 
 combating content themselves by quietly assuming that the country 
 would get on better if they were out of the way. I deny that any 
 question which affects the homes — the daily bread, the very 
 existence of a large number of our people, is to be determined by 
 considerations of what can be most profitably done for the land- 
 owners with our fields. 
 
 This question really lies at the root of all our discussion. 
 Whose interests are we to consider in legislation as to land ? The 
 social compact is not one between the owners of property binding 
 them to maintain its rights against those who have none. It is a 
 compact between all the people who are living in the land — and 
 every man whom you bind by virtue of that supposed compact to 
 obedience to your laws, is entitled, by the reciprocal obligation of 
 obedience and protection, to have his interests considered in any 
 deliberation on any question affecting our social state. 
 
 No statesman and no Legislature has a right to adopt a scheme 
 
 K 
 
146 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE RATE OF WAGES. 
 
 for the improvement or the settlement of Ireland in which no pro- 
 vision is made for the great mass of the people. The social system 
 fails in its first and most sacred obligation, under which any man, 
 without any fault of his own, is excluded from the means of living 
 in his native land. If we must resort to the first principles of 
 human nature — to what would the first law of our nature, that of 
 self-preservation, lead those whom you thus deliberately exclude 
 from the great partnership of society ? 
 
 It is not my fault if we must revert to propositions like these. 
 Those who propose to carry out the improvement of Ireland after 
 the departure of the Irish people compel us to recur to the first 
 principles of government and of society. They are the revolu- 
 tionists who, by proposing to rest national prosperity on the 
 expatriation of the people, subvert all the principles upon which 
 the fabric of society is based. 
 
 There may be revolutionary theories which subvert the sacred 
 rights of the people as well as those which subvert the less sacred 
 rights of property. When either are propounded it is the duty of 
 those who hold by the principles upon which the authority of all 
 government, and the foundations of all society are based, to restate 
 these principles, and call on all lovers of social order to uphold 
 them. I brand as " revolutionary " every theory of national 
 improvement in which the well-being of the great mass of the 
 Irish people has no place — and in this I mean by the Irish people 
 the human beings who are now living and moving on this Irish 
 soil. 
 
 In this view of our condition and our duties it is a delusion to 
 discuss upon the abstract grounds, upon which the question has been 
 discussed, the relative merit of large or small farms. The true 
 question is, by which system can provision be best made out of 
 the resources of Ireland for the people that rightly or wrongly, 
 fortunately or unfortunately, are located upon our land. 
 
 Before I pass from these earlier letters of Lord Dufferin I am 
 bound to notice a statement quoted by your Lordship — that to 
 which you refer when you say : — 
 
 ^ " Next as to the prices of labour, we are told by Lord Dufferin that 
 1 in the west of Ireland some fifteen years ago the rate of agricultural 
 wages varied from 2s. 6d. to 5s. a-week. Ever since it has gradually 
 advanced, ranging in the south and west of Ireland from 10s. Od. to 
 12s. Od.' In this neighbourhood, the rate of wages has risen from 2s. 6d. 
 and 5s. a-week to 6s. Od. and 9s. Od."* 
 
 Your Lordship has not done altogether justice to the statement 
 of Lord Dufferin. He describes agricultural wages in the south and 
 west as " ranging from ten to twelve, or even fourteen shillings a- 
 week," and rising even higher in Ulster. When your Lordship speaks 
 
 * Lord Lifford's letter to Mr. Butt— page 11. 
 
ADVANCE IN IKISH WAGES. 147 
 
 of wages as having risen in your neighbourhood to six or nine 
 shillings a-week, 1 believe I may understand you as meaning not 
 that any labourer can get regular and constant employment at any 
 thing like nine shillings a week ; but that the remuneration of 
 labour under ordinary circumstances is but six shillings a-week, 
 rising in exceptional cases, or at seasons of unusual demand to a rate 
 as high as nine. 
 
 With regard to the rate of wages paid in former years, there is some 
 difficulty in fixing it. The very expression " 2s. 6d. and 5s." shows the 
 uncertainty of the statement. The table prepared by the Commis- 
 sioners of Poor Enquiry, in 1836, exhibits a remarkable variety in 
 the wages in different districts of Ireland.* But they were not 
 uniform even in the same locality. In the district to which your 
 Lordship refers, I know that cottiers living on the glebe land nearest 
 to your Lordship, a great many years ago, received rather regular 
 employment — not from farmers of the very highest class — at the 
 rate of tenpence and one meal a day. At the same period I have 
 not the least doubt that, within a very short distance, there were 
 men often working at a lower rate. 
 
 There can, however, be no doubt that before the famine, agricul- 
 tural labour could in many districts of Ireland be obtained at a rate 
 of wages miserably low. It is equally certain that over the whole 
 surface of Ireland a very great improvement has taken place, but I 
 think I may say it is equally certain that the passage which you 
 
 * This table, referring to the year 1835, states the average rate of wages in Donegal 
 to be a shilling a day. In Antrim and Derry, in Armagh and Down it was tenpence 
 in Winter and a shilling in Summer. Generally throughout Ulster it varied from ten- 
 pence to a shilling. It was only in a few districts that even in winter it fell so low as 
 eight pence. 
 
 A rate so low as sixpence a day appeared to be unknown, except in Connaught and 
 some of the wildest districts of Clare, Kerry, and Cork. 
 
 In Connaught it was in few places above eight pence ; in the barony of Mohill, in 
 the county in which the town of Boyle is situated, in summer it ranged between eight- 
 pence and tenpence. 
 
 In Leinster it generally rose to tenpence, and this was the lowest in the Summer 
 mo nths. 
 
 In Munster it ranged from eightpence to tenpence, the lower rate more generally 
 prevailing. 
 
 This table supplies us with an approximate estimate of that, which at first sight, 
 appears a still more important element in the labourer's condition — the constancy of 
 his work. In this respect the variation is very great. In Ulster, generally, the 
 labourers were supposed to find employment at the wages specified for about half 
 the days in the year. In parts of Mayo they could find employment at sixpence for 
 only thirty days in the entire year. 
 
 But even this latter element is far from an unerring test of the labourers condition. 
 Most of these labourers, especially in the West, had their small plots of ground on 
 which they worked themselves, the rents of which they paid by working for their 
 landlord. I can perfctly recollect many years ago, when I did take an interest in the 
 condition of a few cottiers in Lord Lifford's district, some of them refused to bind 
 themselves to work for the farmers for more than three days in the week, even 
 when guaranteed tenpence a day and their breakfast. 
 
 There are many, very many, elements to be considered before we can form a per- 
 fectly just estimate of the relative condition of the Irish labourer at any two given 
 times. 
 
148 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE RATE OF WAGES. 
 
 have quoted from Lord Dufferin is a wild and monstrous exaggera- 
 tion of that improvement. When even your Lordship's knowledge 
 of rural affairs, with the power of testing it derived from your own 
 experience in a district at least as prosperous as most of these in 
 Connaught, has been led astray by that statement, we must not 
 wonder if it has received implicit credence from those who had less 
 opportunity of being informed. I am quite sure that in all inves- 
 tigations connected with the land question the condition of the 
 mere agricultural labourer has an importance which has not been 
 sufficiently regarded. But I advert to this singular statement of 
 Lord DufFerin's not only on account of the intrinsic importance of 
 the subject to which it relates, but also because it appears to me to 
 supply a very striking illustration of that strange facility of rush- 
 ing to conclusions without any examination of the steps by which 
 they are reached by which Lord Dufferin has been able to invest 
 even his statistical deductions with all the wildness, and, I admit, 
 with much of the interest which belong to the fictions of a romance. 
 Laputa or Utopia does not differ more from any existing country 
 than — in respect to the labourer's condition — the Ireland which Lord 
 Dufferin describes does from the Ireland of real life. If there were 
 any subject upon which we might presume it impossible for Lord 
 Dufferin to fall into error, it would be on the subject of agricultural 
 wages, especially in Ulster, and considering the weight and import- 
 ance which have been attached to the statements of Lord Dufferin, 
 it may not be without its use to try by this very simple test his 
 claim to be the infallible instructor of the English nation upon Irish 
 affairs. 
 
 Those who believe that emigration has proved a blessing to the 
 Irish people, at least to that portion of them who have remained at 
 home, must of necessity contend that the outgoing of the labouring 
 population has bettered the condition of the labourer who remains. 
 Lord Dufferin, in support of his argument, describes in very strong 
 terms the improvement. He actually goes the length of stating 
 that 
 
 " The Irish labourer has already risen from a serf to be his 
 employer's equal!" 
 
 Again, he asserts that the evicted tenant has been converted from 
 a struggling farmer into " a well-paid labourer." 
 
 Again, " the wages of labour have doubled within the last fifteen 
 years." 
 
 And, finally, he clearly and unequivocally asserts that throughout 
 the South the wages of agricultural labourers " range from ten 
 
 SHILLINGS TO TWELVE SHILLINGS, OR EVEN FOURTEEN SHILLINGS, 
 A WEEK." 
 
 These are clear and distinct statements of very great importance 
 if they be accurate, but statements by the accuracy of which we 
 
ADVANCE IN IRISH WAGES. 149 
 
 may fairly try the right of the noble lord to be considered an 
 unimpeachable authority upon Irish affairs. 
 
 It is quite true that emigration has already caused farm labour 
 to become scarce — that is, there are not quite so many idle hands 
 as formerly always at the disposal of the person who may desire at 
 any time to employ extra labourers. But I am very much afraid it 
 would be inaccurate to say that wages have risen at all in proportion 
 to the diminution in the number of labourers. 
 
 The strangest feature of our present condition is, that while our 
 labouring population is so much diminished by emigration, the 
 wages of those who remain have not increased at all in proportion 
 to the diminished supply — apparently a proof that the demand for 
 labour must be lessening. The wages of agricultural labour 
 have unquestionably increased ; I am not sure that they have in- 
 creased in a ratio much greater than is measured by a correspond- 
 ing rise in the price of all the necessaries of life, especially if we 
 take into account, as we must do, the difference of the diet to 
 which the failure of the potato has compelled the labourer to have 
 recourse. I am quite sure that they have not at all increased as 
 much as we might have expected from the reduction in the number 
 of those seeking for employment.* We must not be led astray by 
 the accounts which are occasionally published on this subject — 
 accounts in which exceptional rates of wages, under the pressure 
 of some unusual demand, are confounded with the ordinary pay- 
 ments. In this way, I confess, I was disposed to account for the 
 strange passage which your Lordship has partially quoted from one 
 of Lord Dufferin's letters to The Times — letters intended to inform 
 the English people, upon the authority of a resident proprietor, of 
 the actually existing condition of Irish rural affairs. 
 
 That whole statement is this : — 
 
 " When I was in the west of Ireland, some fifteen years ago, the rate of 
 agricultural wages varied from half-a-crown to five shillings a week. 
 Ever since it has gradually advanced, ranging in the south and west of 
 Ireland from ten shillings to twelve shillings, or even fourteen shillings a 
 
 * In some parts of the country, and at some times of the year, labour is unquestion- 
 ably deficient, and I have heard apprehensions expressed that if emigration continued 
 there would be a difficulty in obtaining a supply sufficient for the proper cultivation of 
 the soil. 
 
 These complaints come, it must be remembered, from persons who have all their lives 
 been accustomed to a state of things in which there was no difficulty in obtaining any 
 amount of extra labour — in which Irish labourers went over to England to supply that 
 very extra labour at the time of harvest. 
 
 There is not employment in Ireland for ail those who are seeking for it. 
 
 Bishop Keane says, in his evidence in 1864 : — " I can state, of my own knowledge, 
 that I am not acquainted with a single town in the diocese of Cloyne, or of Ross — 
 with which I was formerly connected — where almost every day throughout the year, 
 except during three weeks of harvest, and occasionally for a short period during the 
 spring or seeding time, men having families will be looking for an occasional day's 
 work and cannot find it." — Evidence of Bishop Keane. Question 3,341. 
 
150 LORD DTJFFERIN ON THE RATE OF WAGES. 
 
 week ; while in the north the labourer is almost absolutely master of the 
 market, and can dictate what terms he pleases." 
 
 There could be no mistake as to the meaning of this sentence in 
 the mind of any one who read it. It was introduced to support the 
 argument that emigration was really bettering the condition of the 
 labouring classes, both of those who went and those who remained. 
 It refers distinctly to lc agricultural wages," to the wages of labourers 
 who, to Lord Dufferin's own knowledge, fifteen years ago, were 
 paid wages so low as five shillings and half-a-crown a week. And 
 the statement made is that the rate of these identical wages has 
 ever since gradually increased, and that the same labourers who 
 were thus paid, fifteen years ago, five shillings, and sometimes half- 
 a-crown a week, are now, owing to the effects of emigration paid at 
 the rate of ten, twelve, or even fourteen shillings a week. 
 
 But this is not all. The northern labourer is still better off. 
 His condition is contrasted with even that of the Connaught 
 labourer, receiving fourteen shillings a week. " In the north 
 the labourer is almost absolutely master of the market, and can 
 dictate whatever terms he pleases." 
 
 If there be meaning in words it means that the labourers in the 
 north can dictate terms exceeding fourteen shillings a week, and that 
 the wages mentioned are not an exceptional rate, but the ordinary 
 wages of ordinary agricultural labourers. 
 
 1 am the very last person in the world who would wish to take 
 advantage of the unguarded expression of an opponent. I know by 
 experience how very easy it is for a quick and impetuous reasoner 
 to fall into error in writing upon such subjects. But with all this 
 I must say that if any confusion of thought or hastiness in writing 
 has led Lord Dufferin into an erroneous statement in the passage 
 I have quoted, it is impossible to regard his Lordship as a safe 
 guide to follow, even as a witness, in the tangled complication of 
 Irish affairs. 
 
 Let any Englishman who is, or has been, disposed to accept 
 Lord Dufferin's representations of Irish affairs — let him read over 
 and over again the sentences I have quoted. Let him rejoice, as 
 I am sure every true Englishman would rejoice, in the prosperity of 
 Ireland which enables us to pay our agricultural labourers ten, 
 twelve, or even fourteen shillings a week, and when he has pondered 
 a while upon this happy state of things, let him hear what, un- 
 happily, is the truth — 
 
 The average rate of agricultural wages throughout Ireland does 
 not exceed seven shillings a week. 
 
 And in that highly favoured North, in which the labourer " can 
 dictate what terms he pleases," Lord Dufferin's own labourers, when 
 he wrote these sentences, were paid eight shillings a week. 
 
 Upon the very day on which I read your Lordship's letter 
 referring me to Lord Dufferin's statement, it so happened that I 
 
LOED DUFFERIN'S RATE MORE THAN DOUBLE THE TRUE ONE. 151 
 
 was engaged as " a Nisi Prius Advocate" in a trial in which it 
 became necessary for a very respectable farmer,' residing in the 
 County Leitrim, to produce the account books of his farm for the 
 harvest months of the year 1865. I saw with surprise that he was 
 paying his labourers tenpence a day, with an additional allowance 
 of twopence for their night's lodging, when they were required to 
 work at a distance of nearly six miles from home. There seemed 
 to be no difficulty in getting extra labourers at the same rate. This 
 was incidentally proved in a court of justice, of course without the 
 slightest reference to any inquiry into the general rate of wages. 
 These labourers were working close to the town of Boyle.* 
 
 I need not say it is not easy for a private individual, unacquainted 
 practically with rural affairs, to ascertain the average rate of wages 
 throughout Ireland. Still I made such effort as was in my power. 
 From every part of Ireland I received assurances that a rate of wages 
 such as that mentioned by Lord DufFerin was unknown. Mr. 
 McCarthy Downing writes to me that throughout the whole 
 southern and western districts of Cork, the average rate of wages 
 does not exceed seven shillings a week. Your Lordship publicly 
 tells us, with Lord Dufferin's statement before you, that in your 
 neighbourhood, one in the far North, they range between six 
 shillings and nine. In Donegal, a gentleman residing in the same 
 neighbourhood as your Lordship informs me that he gives his farm 
 labourers six shillings a week, with a house and a potato garden. 
 Throughout Connaught I am told a shilling a day is considered high 
 wages. In Down and Antrim I was assured that, except in the imme- 
 diate vicinity of Belfast, the general rate of wages does not, on the 
 average, exceed eight shillings. Of course all doubts were set at 
 rest when I soon afterwards read Lord Dufferin's own statement 
 that, in the best part of the County Down, his own labourers were 
 receiving eight shillings a week — "from Is. 4d. to Is. 6d. a day." 
 All information points to one result, and I fear I am exaggerating, 
 not diminishing the rate, when I say that, excluding the vicinities 
 of large towns, the ordinary wages of labourers throughout Ireland 
 do not average more than seven shillings a week. Labourers 
 cannot get constant employment even at that rate. 
 
 I need scarcely say that this state of facts is entirely irrecon- 
 cilable with the plain and literal meaning of the passage I have 
 quoted from Lord Dufferin's letter in The Times. His statements 
 having been challenged by Mr. Dalton, in a letter to The Daily 
 News, Lord Dufferin, in a letter to that journal, of the 24th of 
 January, thus explained, or qualified, or retracted them : — 
 
 " With regard to his criticisms on my estimate of the present rate of 
 wages in the South and West your correspondent has greater justification. 
 
 * See table of wages referred to in note to page 147. 
 
152 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE RATE OF WAGES. 
 
 But though my words quite bear the interpretation he has put upon 
 them — what I alluded to when I named ten or twelve shillings a week 
 was, not the wages of the ordinary farm servant — though I admit I have 
 inadvertently used the term agricultural in the previous sentence — but 
 of the best description of unskilled manual labour. I merely repeated, in 
 fact, a statement made in the speech already quoted, which referred to 
 such labour as that which is employed on railways, and by contractors. 
 The point is of no importance to my argument ; for if agricultural wages 
 are still so low it only proves that, at all events till now, the emigration 
 of the labourer has not been excessive. But in justification of my 
 general statement as to the rise of wages, T may mention — in his evidence 
 before Mr. Maguire's Committee — that Judge Longfield estimated the 
 increase between 1844 and 1860, at from 25 to 80 per cent. I myself 
 have been paying from Is. 4d. to Is. 6d. a day ; in the County Down, 
 during harvest, a labourer cannot be had under 2s., or Is. 6d., with his 
 food supplied." 
 
 I hope I will not be accused of " ruthlessly gibbetting" any land- 
 lord, past, present, or to come, if I place in parallel columns that which 
 Lord Dufferin wrote, and that which we now know he meant : — 
 
 " When I was in the West of Ire- " What I alluded to when I named 
 
 land, fifteen years ago, the rate of ten or twelve shillings a week was, 
 
 agricultural wages varied from half-a- not the wages of the ordinary farm 
 
 crown to five shillings a week. Ever servant — though I admit I had inad- 
 
 since it has gradually advanced, rang- vertently used the word agricultural 
 
 ing, in the South and West, from ten in the previous sentence — but of the 
 
 shillings to twelve shillings, or even best description of unskilled manual 
 
 fourteen shillings a week ; while in the labour 
 
 North the labourer is almost abso- I myself have been paying from Is. 4d. 
 
 lutely master of the market, and can to 1 s. 6d. a day." — Lord DufFerin's 
 
 dictate what terms he pleases." — Lord second letter. 
 DufFerin's first letter. 
 
 Whatever Lord Dufferin thought or meant it is as clear as words 
 can make it that the sentence in his first letter contained a precise 
 and circumstantial statement of the rate of agricultural wages in the 
 South and West of Ireland, and in the North ; representing them 
 in the first as "ranging from ten to twelve or even fourteen shillings 
 a week," and as rising still higher in the North. 
 
 The explanation certainly invites criticism. I have too often 
 admired, on other subjects, the happy elegance of Lord DufFerin's 
 light and graceful style not to feel an interest in the comparison 
 between these two sentences. We now know that the mistake 
 proceeded from the " inadvertent" use of the word " agricultural" 
 "in the previous sentence." The "previous" sentence is, "When I 
 was in the West of Ireland, fifteen years ago, the rate of agricultural 
 wages varied from half-a-crown to five shillings a week." The 
 next sentence — " It gradually rose until." As a full stop intervenes, 
 its intervention is perhaps to be considered, in courtesy to the 
 
WHAT LORD DUFFERIN SAID AND WHAT LORD DUFFERIN MEANT 153 
 
 monarch of punctuation, to constitute two sentences ; but a full stop 
 never yet divided words which looked more like a continuation of 
 one. " Fifteen years ago the rate of agricultural wages varied from 
 two-and-sixpence to five shillings a week. It rose." What varied, 
 and what rose ? " It" seems very like a mere repetition of " the rate 
 of agricultural wages." This unfortunate "it" is the point of the 
 whole confusion — a huge mistake has hid itself in that little word. 
 " It" plainly means "agricultural wages," but "it" does not mean 
 "it;" but when "it" is mentioned "it" means the wages of the 
 best " unskilled manual labour," whatever "it" may be. 
 
 I confess I cannot see why in the explanation the farm "servant" 
 is introduced. He is not exactly the personage whom we had 
 known in the previous statement as the agricultural "labourer." 
 Neither his position or his wages are the same. But images elude 
 our closest observation as they glide into each other in the marvel- 
 lous disappearances of that dissolving view in which all that Lord 
 Dufferin said so exquisitely vanishes into something that he meant. 
 
 But not satisfied with leaving us even in this perplexity, Lord 
 Dufferin entangles us in still more hopeless bewilderment when he 
 tells us that the mistake arose, not in the " it," but in the " inad- 
 vertent use of the word 'agricultural' in the previous sentence," or, 
 as I should say, part of the sentence. It was "inadvertent," and, 
 therefore, erroneous, to describe the wages which fifteen years ago 
 varied from half-a-crown to five shillings a week, as " agricultural" 
 wages. In the name of common sense what wages were they then? 
 No flattery can possibly congratulate Lord Dufferin on the clear- 
 ness and felicity of his explanation. There is, however, one con- 
 solation. Lord Dufferin is very angry with Mr. Dalton for having 
 described him as advocating emigration when he said that "emigra- 
 tion was, and would continue to be, a blessing to Ireland ;" but he 
 graciously admits that for the second mistake there is " more" 
 excuse. When Lord Dufferin wrote the sentence — " fifteen years 
 ago the rate of agricultural wages varied from half-a-crown to 
 five shillings a week. It has ever since gradually advanced, 
 ranging now, in the South and West of Ireland, from ten shillings 
 to twelve shillings, or even fourteen shillings a week" — he admits 
 that his words " bear the interpretation" (! !) that agricul- 
 tural wages have risen to ten, twelve, or fourteen shillings a week. 
 Giving Lord Dufferin every credit for the candour of this admis- 
 sion, it would have been very desirable if he had " condescended" — 
 if I may use a phrase of his own — to suggest any other conceivable 
 interpretation which the most strained or the most perverted in- 
 genuity could put upon them. 
 
 Were I disposed to pursue this criticism I might remind Lord 
 Dufferin that his first statement can scarcely be called an 
 " estimate," it was an assertion of a matter of fact. I might even 
 ask him what wages he intended to "estimate" when he spoke of 
 
154 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE RATE OF WAGES. 
 
 the half-crown wages of fifteen years ago and the fourteen shillings 
 of the present day. I might even inquire who is " the labourer," 
 emphatically " the " labourer, whom he describes as " dictating his 
 own terms " in the North. Perhaps I might even suggest that it 
 is a strange thing for a resident country gentleman to support any 
 statement he makes on the subject of agricultural wages by the 
 authority of Judge Longfield. Judge Longfield has, perhaps, 
 rather less opportunities of learning them than I have myself. I 
 would have thought that if either Judge Longfield or I had 
 wanted information on such a subject we would have been only too 
 happy to receive it from Lord Dufferin. I confess I would be 
 scarcely satisfied with Judge Longfield's information if he left me 
 to make out the truth between the rather vague and indefinite limits 
 that range " from 25 to 80 per cent."* Lord Dufferin might also be 
 reminded that in letters professing to deal with the great improve- 
 ment in the condition of the agricultural labourer this is the 
 only passage in which he makes any estimate of his wages. There 
 were repeated statements of a general rise of wages of agricultural 
 labour — that they were doubled — that the evicted tenant had 
 been elevated from a struggling farmer to a well-paid labourer — 
 that the labourer, " the agricultural labourer," is become the 
 master of his employer. The only particular statement of the rate 
 of wages — upon the very subject upon which, of all others we 
 would look to Lord Dufferin for information, is that statement 
 upon which I have been commenting. 
 
 If Lord Dufferin is to be judged, as every public writer, no matter 
 what may be his rank or his ability, must be judged by that which 
 he has published and deliberately given to the world ; it is difficult 
 to suggest an excuse for the carelessness of this statement. The real 
 wages are little more than one-half of that which Lord Dufferin assured 
 the English people Irish labourers were receiving. The statement 
 
 * Lord Dufferin says, K In justification of my general statement as to the rise of 
 wages, I may mention that in his evidence before Mr. Maguire's Committee, Judge 
 Longfield estimated the increase between 1844 and 1860 at from 25 to 80 per cent." 
 I confess I do not know the meaning of a rise from 25 to 80 per cent. Neither 
 advance would bear out Lord Dufferin's statement that "the wages of labour (I 
 presume Lord Dufferin here means agricultural labour) have doubled within the last 
 fifteen years." 
 
 I am disposed to think that in quoting this, as Mr. Longfield's evidence, Lord 
 Dufferin has fallen into some mistake. 
 
 I have searched in vain through his printed evidence for such a statement. 
 "From 25 to 80 per cent." is very unlike the accuracy of that distinguished 
 gentleman. 
 
 I have, however, found in the evidence of Mr. McCarthy Downing an important 
 statement that in his opinion the Irish labouring class were not in a better condition 
 in 1864 than they were in 1846. 
 
 He made to this statement the remarkable and important addition that the late Mr. 
 Senior, whose position unquestionably gave him better means of judging than any man 
 in Ireland, had very strongly the same opinion. 
 
 It is quite plain that this is a subject deserving of much more investigation than it 
 has yet received. 
 
LORD DUFFERIN'S EXPLANATION. 155 
 
 was made with all the circumstantiality of time and place. " Fifteen 
 years ago, when I was in the West." It pledged Lord Dufferin's 
 personal knowledge to a part of the statement, it appeared to pledge 
 it to the whole. And this was done in a controversy in which Lord 
 Dufferin had volunteered to come forward as the impugner of the 
 accuracy of others — to convict Mr. Maguire and Mr. Bright of 
 having inaccurately represented to the people of England the 
 condition of Ireland. For a misrepresentation so wonderfully 
 incorrect in its general statement — so marvellously, I might almost 
 say miraculously, put together, as to convey a wrong impres- 
 sion in every detail of the combination of its words — nothing in 
 Lord Dufferin's explanation furnishes anything like a sufficient 
 excuse. 
 
 No one will suppose that in his original statement, precise and cir- 
 cumstantial as it was, Lord Dufferin had any intention of deceiving 
 the English people, whom he undertook to inform. Apart from 
 higher reasons, the very nature of the subject forbids even the sus- 
 picion. It was a public matter upon which no one could expect a mis- 
 statement to pass uncorrected. Nevertheless, the statement was — 
 as I have said, a positive, precise, and most circumstantial testimony 
 as to a state of things alleged to exist in Ireland — in its plain and 
 literal meaning, entirely contrary to the fact. Lord Dufferin fell, no 
 doubt, into some strange confusion between some exceptional high 
 wages of which he had heard, and which were running in his memory, 
 and the ordinary rate of agricultural wages of which he was writing. 
 But, unfortunately, those who read letters in the newspapers know 
 only what is written or printed, and have no means of even guessing 
 at the confusion in the writer's mind which makes him say one thing 
 when he means another. Indeed, in the case of Lord Dufferin, the 
 suspicion of such a confusion is the very last thing that would enter 
 into his reader's mind. The more clear and lucid the style the less 
 could he imagine it. The mischief is as great as if the misleading 
 had been intentional. Lord Dufferin's original statement was given 
 to the public with all the weight and authority of Lord Dufferin's 
 high character and name. It was so given in the most influential 
 organ of opinion and information in the world. It was even believed 
 by thousands and tens of thousands of Englishmen who are desirous 
 of obtaining accurate information on the state of Ireland, and who, 
 not unnaturally, received with implicit credence any statement made 
 by Lord Dufferin in a letter to The Times, It is still believed by 
 many of them — for the retractation has not been as full, as distinct, 
 or as widely circulated as it ought to have been. Lord Dufferin has 
 never written to the journal in which his statement was published to 
 confess his mistake. No statement could be more calculated to 
 injure the cause of Ireland. What sympathy could any Englishman 
 have with those who complain of Irish misery while we are rich 
 enough to pay our agricultural labourers a higher rate than 
 
J 56 LORD dufferin's explanation. 
 
 Englishmen receive? It brands as deceivers those who have said that 
 want of employment is driving the Irish people from their homes. 
 And this statement, thus wholly misrepresenting our condition, has 
 been circulated throughout England on Lord Dufferin's authority, 
 and as a fact within his knowledge, and except in the meagre and 
 bewildering explanation I have quoted, no retractation of it has ever 
 yet appeared. Lord Dufferin has published none in the great 
 journal in which he gave the statement to the English nation. 
 
 But Lord Dufferin's explanation, or rather his original statement as 
 amended by that explanation, is open to a graver, or at least more 
 important criticism — the criticism which denies, or at least questions, 
 the existence of any remuneration for " unskilled manual labour in 
 Ireland" to which the description of Lord Dufferin can possibly 
 apply. Lord Dufferin gives us no more accurate account of the 
 occupation he means than by calling it " the best description of 
 unskilled manual labour," and in another passage " such labour 
 as is employed on railways and by contractors." If by the labour 
 employed by railways, he means the men employed as porters, and 
 in other inferior capacities, I believe he has exaggerated their wages ; 
 but whether or not, such wages are fixed by railway companies to 
 give their servants good places, and supply no test whatever of the 
 general condition of the country. It would be a perfect absurdity to 
 say that the wages of such persons have been doubled within the last 
 fifteen years. If they have been raised at all they have been raised 
 merely to meet an increase in the price of the necessaries of life. 
 As to the labour employed generally through the south and west of 
 Ireland by contractors I am utterly at a loss to know what it is. I 
 cannot reason upon an unknown quantity. If Lord Dufferin speaks 
 of the workmen known as " navvies,".the whole assertion, as applied 
 to them, is unspeakably absurd. Their labour is certainly not 
 generally classed with " the best unskilled manual labour." 
 
 Even in the difficulty of dealing with an unknown quantity, and 
 groping and guessing at the meaning of these hieroglyphical 
 expressions, I think I may venture with confidence to say that there 
 does not exist in Ireland " any unskilled manual labour," of any 
 class or kind, to which the expression could be applied, I will, not 
 say with accuracy, but without palpable absurdity, that within the 
 last fifteen years "their rate of wages gradually advanced, in the 
 south and west, from half-a-crown and five shillings to a rate ranging 
 from ten shillings to twelve shillings and even fourteen shillings a 
 week, while in the North the labourer is almost absolutely the 
 master of the market, and can dictate whatever terms he pleases." 
 
 At all events, so far as relates to the wages of agricultural 
 labourers, into whose condition alone we are enquiring, in connexion 
 with the land question, Lord Dufferin's dream of wages ranging 
 from ten to twelve or fourteen shillings a week in the South and 
 West of Ireland, and the labourer dictating his own terms in the 
 
LORD DUFFERIN'S CREATION OF 160,000 FARMS. 157 
 
 North, must be classed with the unrealized visions of Irish prosperity, 
 which are so often and so cruelly mocking our hopes. 
 
 Lord Dufferin's letters have never been published in a collected 
 form. Such a publication has been expected, if not promised. If 
 ever the expectation or the promise be realized, I venture to predict 
 that the publication will be accompanied by a retractation, or a modi- 
 fication for all purposes of argument equivalent to a retractation, of 
 many of the most striking statements they contain. 
 
 I hope I will be forgiven by Lord Dufferin if I say that it is not 
 only in his historical statements, and in his estimate of the present 
 amount of wages, that we can detect the traces of a similar inaccu- 
 racy of thought. Could there be a greater instance of it than that 
 which occurs in the following passage in his second letter : — 
 
 "But it is well known that vast numbers of the cottier tenantry, 
 instead of emigrating, were converted into labourers, and either found 
 employment in the neighbourhood of their own place, or removed into 
 the adjoining town, or came over to England, while hundreds of others 
 were provided for by being placed in possession of some of the 160,000 
 farms which, as I have already stated, have been created since the famine 
 year." 
 
 One hundred and sixty thousand farms created since 
 the famine year; and these farms have provided for the evicted 
 tenants ! The landlords have turned their tenants out of one farm 
 to place them upon another ! ! 
 
 " The cottier tenantry removed into the adjoining towns ! ! ! " 
 I must quote, in contrast with this passage, the description given 
 of this very removal of these cottiers, by Mr. James O'Connell, in 
 a speech I have already quoted, at a meeting in Tralee : — 
 
 " They were hunted like wild beasts. ... I say with as much 
 solemnity as if I were giving testimony in a court of justice, that it would be 
 impossible for me to describe the odious acts of oppression that were then 
 perpetrated. . . . The poor were driven into the town, estates were 
 cleared, and notices to quit were served. If that did not answer, the 
 houses were levelled. Perhaps fifty families were cleared for every three 
 or four kept. The only refuge of those poor creatures then was to go 
 into the town. The young and healthy, and those who could afford it, 
 left the country for England or Scotland ; for emigration to America was 
 not as easy then as it is now. The old, the indigent, and infirm, came 
 into the towns, went into those dens that Mr. Downing described, and 
 dragged out a miserable existence, at most for a few years, and then 
 become chargeable on the town electoral division." * 
 
 This is the process which Lord Dufferin describes by the 
 
 euphemism, the evicted " cottier tenantry removed into the towns." 
 
 And it is by a reference to this process he discreetly vindicates the 
 
 * Speech of Mr. James O'Connell, ante — Note to page 123. 
 
158 LORD dufferin's euphemisms. 
 
 Irish landlords against the charge of having caused emigration by 
 their evictions ! 
 
 Those who were evicted did not emigrate — they went into the 
 towns. It is quite true, my Lord — Lord Dufferin forces me say it — 
 they did not emigrate, they had not the means — and they were 
 not given them — they went into the towns to meet the fate which 
 Mr. O'Connell describes, or — I say it with shrinking — they crawled 
 to the poorhouse, or they perished — many of them did so — by the 
 way side or in the fields. 
 
 But as to the creation of 160,000 farms — how is this proved? 
 The proof is that holdings over fifteen acres have been increased 
 by the very simple process of the consolidation of farms. Lord 
 Rosse, as we shall presently see, correctly describes that process as 
 frequently consisting of the addition of the holding of an evicted tenant 
 to the farm of his next neighbour. Of course there is one farm of 
 twenty acres where before there were two often. This process cannot 
 go on without multiplying the number of the larger farms, and this 
 Lord Dufferin treats, in reasoning, as the creation of 160,000 farms, 
 affording a place for the very tenants whose eviction caused the 
 consolidation. In truth, throughout every one of Lord Dufferin's 
 letters it is taken for granted that the effect of all the evictions has 
 been to increase the number of farms- His syllogism is this: — A 
 farm of fifteen acres is the smallest farm which a tenant ought to 
 hold. The evictions have increased the number of farms over 
 fifteen acres — therefore, they have increased the number of farms. 
 In subsequent reasoning this proposition is used as if it were estab- 
 lished that there has been a numerical increase in the actual farms. 
 It is obviously a very different thing to say that farms have increased 
 in number, if we mean agricultural holdings above fifteen acres in 
 extent, or to use the very same set of words with the meaning that 
 the number of all actual agricultural holdings has increased. Lord 
 Dufferin begins by proving the first proposition — he uses it after- 
 wards as if he had established the second. And yet even Lord 
 Lifford regards this reasoning as unanswerable! and the most in- 
 telligent of English journalists adopt the formula, when quoting 
 Lord Dufferin's assertion, " Lord Dufferin has proved!!" 
 
 I may refer to the same class of statements the guarded and 
 softened language in which Lord Dufferin speaks of the evictions 
 of former years. In his very first letter, while Lord Dufferin 
 gives the hesitating admission — 
 
 " That many acts of harshness and cruelty have been perpetrated in 
 Ireland, more particularly during the time of the famine, I have no 
 doubt." 
 
 He qualifies it by the addition — 
 
 "In all countries there have been unrelenting creditors who have 
 
LORD DUFFERIN'S EUPHEMISMS. 159 
 
 insisted on their pound of flesh ; but would it not be unreasonable on that 
 account to stigmatize the recovery of debt as injustice ?" 
 
 Any language which implies that the clearances which were made 
 some years ago on Irish estates were the mere isolated instances of 
 harsh enforcement of legal rights which occur in every state of 
 society, does not accurately describe the events that did occur. To 
 say that the acts then perpetrated were not acts of injustice because 
 law was on the side of the perpetrator, is to confound all the dis- 
 tinctions of right and wrong. Lord Dufferin " has no doubt" that 
 many acts of cruelty " were committed," just as "in all countries 
 there have been unrelenting creditors who have insisted on their 
 pound of flesh." There is not a man in Ireland who has a doubt, 
 thatj even before the introduction of poor laws, still more at the 
 time of the famine, a system of general eviction was adopted upon 
 a large number of estates, a number large enough to prevent us 
 from treating them as altogether "exceptional" cases. The phrase 
 which designated such a process as "a clearance" became a house- 
 hold and familiar word in Ireland. There were many counties in 
 Ireland in which popular indignation fastened the odious epithet of 
 the "crowbar brigade" upon those who levelled the habitations 
 of the poor. The extermination that was thus carried out did 
 not consist of mere isolated acts. 
 
 There are many districts in Ireland, which bear to this day 
 the traces of that relentless havoc. I know nothing more intensely 
 painful in a travel through Ireland, than to cast one's eyes over 
 rich and verdant fields, and see everywhere the roofless walls of 
 dwellings that had once been human homes — to perceive the traces 
 of the "leveller" upon the half-tumbled gables of the peasants' 
 habitations — and to be told, when you enquire, that these are 
 the marks of the desolating " clearance." Let us argue this ques- 
 tion fairly on its true grounds ; we do not so argue it when we start 
 with palliative descriptions of that mighty extermination. It was 
 no casual exercise of individual hardheartedness — it was no isolated 
 oppression by a creditor here and there enforcing his pound of flesh. 
 It was too often wide enough and general enough to be regarded 
 as the movement of a class. It would be hard, it would be unjust, 
 even under the indiscreet provocation of the palliatives of their 
 advocate, to speak thus of a whole class. There were landlords, 
 ay, many landlords in Ireland, who nobly struggled to aid and 
 support their tenantry in the sore visitation with which it 
 pleased God to visit the land. But it is vain to deny it, there 
 were whole districts of Ireland where extermination was the rule. 
 I have no wish to bring back these things to mind But the 
 question between the landowners and the Irish people cannot and 
 must not be argued upon the supposition that acts of oppression and 
 cruelty have been " few and far between." With just as much truth 
 
160 THE PAMPHLET OF LORD ROSSE. 
 
 might we say that the visits of the leveller "were like angel's 
 visits." These acts of cruelty and oppression would be most 
 unjustly imputed to all, or even the majority of Irish land- 
 owners ; but they were quite numerous enough to entitle us, for 
 the purpose of practical legislation, to regard them as the acts of a 
 class. There is but one way in which landlords, as a class, can escape 
 the odium of these acts, and that is by consenting to lay down 
 the power which enables them to be committed. 
 
 I reserve to a future page some observations which I propose to 
 offer on a letter from Lord Dufferin which has appeared in The 
 Times of the 1st of February, in which he distinctly criticises the 
 plan I have prepared; and I proceed, in the first instance, to 
 make some comments on a publication which seems to me to 
 be one of the most instructive that has ever appeared upon the 
 subject of tenant right, although I am not sure that the instruction 
 I gather from it is that which its noble author intended it should 
 convey. It comes, however, from a nobleman eminently entitled, 
 by his scientific attainments, his ability, and his character, to 
 command for everything that falls from his pen the respect of 
 his countrymen. I refer, I need scarcely say, to the pamphlet 
 of Lord Rosse.* Of the fifty-three pages which that pamphlet 
 contains, twenty-three are devoted to an examination of the 
 arguments of Mr. Mill, drawn from the science of political 
 economy, in favour of the system of peasant proprietors. In any 
 observations I may make upon his pamphlet, I will confine myself 
 to the first thirty pages, in which his Lordship professes to deal 
 practically with the land question, and with the suggestions made 
 in relation to it; among others, with the possibility of passing a 
 measure, the description of which I believe I may fairly regard as 
 intended for the " Act of Parliament" which I have myself pro- 
 posed : — 
 
 " A cunningly devised Act of Parliament which would break through the 
 contract, and give the tenants, without purchase, some of the privileges of 
 owners." 
 
 It is impossible for any one carefully to read these thirty pages 
 without seeing that Lord Rosse admits the whole case, which incon- 
 testably establishes the necessity of legislative interference. He 
 admits, and he justifies, the refusal of leases, not on any grounds 
 connected with property, but on political considerations. " There 
 
 * A Few Words on the Relation of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland and in other 
 parts of the United Kingdom. By the Earl of Rosse. 
 
THE LANDLOKDS KEEP THEIR HANDS UNTIED. 161 
 
 is no doubt," says Lord Rosse, " a strong objection to make leases." 
 There are apprehensions entertained in which Lord Rosse does 
 not share — that Parliament may be induced to pass some measure 
 of tenant right : — 
 
 " So long as these apprehensions exist many will be reluctant to make 
 leases. They think if they have to contend for their rights they had better do 
 so with their hands untied.'* 
 
 And more than this — I pray the attention of every reader to 
 what follows. They are the words of Lord Rosse : — 
 
 " The apprehension with some goes even further, extending not merely 
 to the leasing but to the letting of land. Some people ask the ques- 
 tion — is it not safer to farm the land ourselves ? And, in point of fact, 
 a great many small proprietors, just as in England, have long farmed 
 their own estates, and with, I understand, a favourable pecuniary result." 
 
 What is the obvious meaning of these sentences ? Plainly this — 
 that the owners of the soil in Ireland have such a distrust of the 
 occupiers that they will not trust them with leases, but insist on 
 keeping them as tenants at will. 
 
 With what object? "That if they have to contend for their 
 
 rights THEY MAY FIGHT THE BATTLE WITH THEIR HANDS 
 UNTIED." 
 
 Their hands untied by leases. In other words, their distrust of 
 the occupiers is such that the landlords think it necessary to retain 
 in their hands the power of driving the people from the soil when- 
 ever such a measure will aid them in fighting the battle for that 
 which they please to consider their right-. 
 
 But Lord Rosse's description of the state of feeling on the part 
 of the landlords to the tenantry does not end even here. " The 
 apprehension extends not merely to the leasing but even to the 
 letting of the land." That is, there are landlords who dis- 
 trust the people so much that they will not even trust them with a 
 tenancy from year to year, but to avert the creation of such a 
 tenancy cultivate their own estates. What is this but the exter- 
 mination of the people? The cultivation of his own estate is 
 adopted by the landlord not because he believes it the best for his 
 interest, but because he has " apprehensions" which cause him to 
 refuse to permit tenants to exist on that estate. Is not this to say — 
 and say in the strongest words — that the relations of the owners 
 and occupiers are not regulated by any economic laws, but by the 
 rankling and deep-rooted hostility between classes, which disturbs 
 the natural operation of all these laws. The comparatively few 
 persons who possess the land in Ireland find it necessary, for the 
 defence of their rights, that they should either at once drive the 
 people from the soil, or retain the power of doing so, in order that 
 
 L 
 
162 PAMPHLET OF LORD ROSSE. 
 
 when the proper time comes " they may be able to fight the battle 
 with their hands untied." 
 
 In the Plea for the Celtic Race I ventured to make, in milder 
 terms, this very statement of the feelings and motives which I 
 believed to be most unhappily influencing the landlord classes in 
 Ireland. I endeavoured to point out that the distrust — -to use no 
 stronger phrase — which exists between the owners and occupiers of 
 the soil had led latterly to a systematic refusal on the part of land- 
 lords to grant leases ; and to all the consequent evils of insecurity of 
 tenure and resulting serfdom on the part of the tenant. All these 
 assertions are now more than confirmed by the distinguished 
 authority of Lord Rosse, with this significant addition, he tells us, 
 that this distrust has led landlords, in some instances, not only to 
 refuse any security to the occupier, but absolutely to deny him a 
 place in which to live upon his native soil. 
 
 This testimony, borne by such a person as Lord Rosse, is surely 
 calculated to excite grave and melancholy reflections in the mind 
 of any man who will weigh and consider all that it implies. What 
 peace or prosperity can there be in a country in which such prin- 
 ciples guide the actions of the landlords? Whatman with any 
 spirit or independence will remain in a country in which he can 
 only obtain a place to live, upon terms which leave his landlord's 
 hands " untied" to strike the fatal blow that is to ruin him, when- 
 ever the caprice or the passions of that landlord will tell him that 
 the blow is necessary in the contest for his rights? What tenant 
 will improve his lands on such a tenure ? In the absence of a lease, 
 Lord Rosse tells us, " the landlord's honour is the tenant's security 
 for fair dealing." The honour of a landlord who tells him fairly 
 that he refuses him the lease that he may keep his hands untied in 
 the battle which he anticipates ! 
 
 To me the most melancholy feature of this dismal picture is the 
 fact that Lord Kosse gives to such a landlord policy more than the 
 implied sanction of his character and name. When Lord Rosse, 
 speaking for the landowners, says that, looking to a battle for their 
 rights, they think it better " to keep their hands untied," it surely 
 is not too much to describe the present relation of landlord and 
 tenant as one of " suppressed civil war." 
 
 With such an avowal on the part of Lord Rosse, extending even 
 to the statement that the owners of land are " asking the question 
 
 IS IT NOT SAFER TO TILL THE LAND OURSELVES ; " of what use 
 
 are all Lord Duiferin's statistics to prove that emigration is not 
 caused by the landlords. When landlords ask " of themselves 
 such questions must not tenants ask of themselves" another — 
 whether it be not safer for them at once to fly from their native 
 land? Where landlords act upon the principles of Lord Rosse 
 emigration is the only safety for the tenant. 
 
 The statement is so important, as throwing the clearest light on 
 
WHY LEASES AEE NOT GIVEN. 163 
 
 what is passing in the minds of landowners, that I must quote it at 
 length : — 
 
 " Many are dissatisfied that leases are not freely given by Irish land- 
 lords. In the absence of a lease, the landlord's honour is the tenant's 
 security for fair dealing ; and, throughout the greater part of the province 
 of Ulster, where the tenant by old customs dating many generations ago 
 enjoy certain privileges, that security has been found sufficient. An 
 attempt was made in 1852, upon imperfect information, to improve that 
 security ; but it was soon found that the opposite effect would be pro- 
 duced, and it fell to the ground. 
 
 " There is no doubt a strong objection to make leases ; every one well 
 recollects the ruin brought upon estates by the subdivision of land, which 
 took place under them. There is, perhaps, no one thing which injured 
 the agricultural districts so much as such leases : the estate of Lord 
 Palmerston, already referred to, is a sample. In 1828 an Act was 
 passed to prevent subdivisions : in 1832 that Act was virtually repealed, 
 it was said, under pressure from Mr. O'Connell — that was the year of 
 the Reform. Another Act was passed in 1860, containing a clause 
 against subdivision ; there is still a strong feeling of doubt as to whether 
 that would be effectual. There is also another objection. In the 
 counties there is an occupation-franchise ; in many the occupiers have 
 swamped the owners, and members have been returned to Parliament 
 unconnected by property with the county. As they have no standing 
 in the county they must rest their claims upon the promise of political 
 services, and could they but persuade the occupiers that the land having 
 been once let to them, it would be possible to procure a cunningly- 
 devised Act which would break through the contract, and give them 
 without purchase some of the privileges of owner, the prospect would be 
 very tempting, and a better election-cry there could not be. Some, no 
 doubt, rather scrupulous, would say that the proceeding would not be 
 honest ; it would at once occur to them that it was like the case of the 
 man who had lent his horse to his friend to ride, and the friend having 
 cut off the mane and tail, brought in a large bill for improvements, and 
 upon the strength of it demanded joint ownership. However, such 
 scruples are often easily reasoned away, when clever men undertake the 
 task. The members thus returned for the counties would find many 
 powerful auxiliaries in the boroughs ; to this body of some thirty or 
 forty members would be added such men as have expressed strong 
 opinions adverse to the rights of the landed proprietor, whether English 
 or Irish. They fear lest this powerful body, watching their opportunity, 
 taking advantage of the exigencies of party, might succeed in inflicting 
 upon them some grievous wrong. I have no such fear. Parliament 
 would never pass such a measure : it would affect English property 
 almost as soon as Irish. No special pleading would succeed in devising 
 an excuse for treating property as one thing in Ireland, and another 
 thing in England, Wales, and Scotland. 
 
 "It cannot, however, be said that such apprehensions are unreasonable; 
 and so long as they exist, many will be reluctant to make leases. They 
 think if they have to contend for their rights, it will be better to do so 
 with their hands untied. This apprehension with some goes even 
 
164 PAMPHLET OF LORD ROSSE. 
 
 further, extending not merely to the leasing, but even to the letting of 
 land. Some people ask the question, is it not much safer to farm the 
 land ourselves ? And, in point of fact, a great many small proprietors, 
 just as in England, have long farmed their own estates and with, I 
 understand, a favourable pecuniary result. It is very desirable that the 
 farmers should calmly consider all this, and ask themselves whether it is 
 just to blame the landed proprietors, who, under these circumstances, 
 hesitate to let on lease ; and whether, if they were in their place, they 
 would not perhaps do the same." 
 
 Let us examine this statement with the attention which it 
 deserves as an authoritative exposition (at least an exposition upon 
 the highest authority attainable in such a case) of the feelings and 
 motives which influence the landowners in refusing leases to their 
 tenantry — and so keeping them without any security of tenure. 
 This is exactly the information which is required for the adoption 
 of satisfactory legislation on the Irish land question. 
 
 The first object of the landlords in refusing leases is a social or 
 economic one ; there is the danger, that once the landlord's hands 
 were tied, the tenant might permit an increase of population upon 
 his farm. Lord Rosse, it will be remembered, is here not speaking 
 for himself, but giving us an account of the feelings and motives 
 which influence the landlord class, especially in the refusal of leases. 
 One of the reasons of that refusal is the fear that granting leases 
 may lead to an over-population of the country. . 
 
 It is not easy to deal with this part of the question, and yet this 
 very declaration opens up to us one of its most important portions. 
 
 So far as the granting of a lease may tend to promote an excess 
 of population by the subdivision of farms, Lord Rosse appears to 
 think that there are decisions of the Irish Courts of Justice which 
 interfere with the enforcement of clauses in leases, prohibiting sub- 
 divisions. I do not know of any such. I am quite sure that it is 
 not only possible, but easy, to draw covenants in a lease which 
 would give to the landlord the most effectual power of prohibiting 
 a subdivision. If I may venture to refer to my own " cunningly 
 devised Act of Parliament," which gives the tenant a 63 years 
 lease, it gives it to him with restrictions against subdivision, which 
 the shortest and simplest appeal to a legal tribunal could most 
 certainly enforce. It is one of the few subjects connected with 
 this question upon which I may assume to know more than Lord 
 Rosse ; and, I think I may venture to assure him that he may grant 
 leases to his tenants, and insert in them covenants against subletting 
 which no court of justice, not even an Irish one, can possibly 
 refuse to enforce.* 
 
 * Lord Rosse in his pamphlet mentions two cases — one his own, the other Lord 
 Derby's, in which it was found impossible to enforce covenants against subletting : — 
 
 "There was a lease apparently drawn with great care to prevent subdivision, end- 
 ing with a sweeping covenant against alienation. The tenants were still in the act of 
 
TOO MANY IN THE LAND. 165 
 
 But there is, unfortunately, more — much more — in the statement 
 than this. The dread of an excessive population has become an 
 active and moving principle with most Irish landowners. I will 
 not now stop to inquire whether this fear of the presence of human 
 beings be not in itself the deepest proof of the wretchedness of our 
 country. It is enough for us to know that events have happened 
 which have burned and branded this fear of over-peopling deep 
 upon the hearts of the proprietary class. We did not need even 
 the testimony of Lord Rosse to assure us that the protection which 
 the landlord seeks is one against the multiplication of people on his 
 estate. This, as I have already pointed out, is the inevitable 
 effect of the poor law, enacted without a law of settlement. So 
 long as there was no obligation on property to provide for 
 poverty, many of the landowners never troubled themselves about 
 the subdivision of farms; they let cottiers multiply, because 
 cottiers swelled their rents. When there was a prospect of a 
 poor law some of the most prudent, or the most hard-hearted, began 
 to clear their estates. When the law actually passed, numbers of 
 others followed their example.* To this hour one of the actuating 
 motives with the proprietary class in refusing leases is to keep the 
 occupiers so entirely under their control that they may prevent the 
 settling on the land of a single human being who may afterwards, 
 by possibility, come upon the rates. Hence it is that with every Irish 
 landlord the most popular remedy for every evil of the country is 
 emigration. Hence it is that no man, not even Mr. Mill, knows 
 even the elements of political economy unless he adopts, as an 
 axiom, the theory that Ireland is over-peopled. Hence, too, many 
 of the restrictions, which it seems at first sight a mere capricious 
 tyranny to impose upon Irish tenants at will. 
 
 When we read of a widow lady being evicted because she 
 brought a widowed daughter to reside in her house — of " rules of 
 the estate" which punish with eviction any tenant who marries, or 
 permits any of his family to marry, without a written license from 
 the agent — of injunctions enforced by the penalties of eviction that 
 
 subdividing the land, and the farm besides had been alienated. This appeared to me 
 to be an extreme case, and the best counsel's opinion was taken ; but the opinion was 
 decisive that nothing could be done. Lord Derby produced a similar lease in the 
 House of Lords, upon which he had taken counsel's opinion, and. with the same result ; 
 so that it was quite clear that the courts had been so hampered by previous decisions 
 that they could do nothing." 
 
 Either the covenant must have been very ill drawn or some act of the landlord him- 
 self must have waived the forfeiture which the violation of the covenant created. 
 
 English not Irish decisions have long since determined that if such a covenant have 
 been once waived by the landlord, it is altogether gone. This was probably the 
 difficulty in the cases to which Lord Rosse refers. The Irish Judges are not answer- 
 able for it. It is as old as the days of Lord Coke. 
 
 * "Nearly two-thirds of the whole of the lands of Ireland have fallen out of lease, 
 and are now held by occupiers at will. The landlords are rapidly clearing their 
 estates in apprehension of the effects of the poor law." — Sir Matthew Barrington's 
 Letter to Sir Robert Peel, 1844 — Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 44. 
 
166 PAMPHLET OF LORD POSSE. 
 
 two families should never live under the same roof — of rules made 
 peremptory on all tenants that they should not harbour a visitor or 
 a lodger — of stern decrees which prohibit them from giving a 
 night's shelter to a homeless wanderer, we, at first, regard these 
 things as the mere caprices of a wanton and objectless tyranny.* 
 
 * Very few persons are aware of the extent to which restrictions of this nature are 
 enforced upon Irish estates. 
 
 I brought forward in the Plea for the Celtic Race some instances of this nature which 
 have fallen under my own knowledge (Third Edition, pp. 36, 37). I invite the special 
 attention of the reader to the testimony of Mr. Molloy, which I there cited — a 
 testimony amply confirmed by all the information which I have since received from 
 many independent quarters. 
 
 These restrictions are as old as the institution of the Poor Law. Perhaps the most 
 remarkable instances of their cruel operation is to be found in an occurrence which, as 
 long back as the year 1851, was brought before the readers of The Times by that 
 excellent and truly philanthropic writer who has made the initials " S. G-. O." familiar 
 to all those who love justice. 
 
 On the estate of the Marquis of Lansdowne, in Kerry, an order of this nature had 
 been issued. I will not attempt to weaken the effect of the narrative of " S. G. O." 
 by any paraphrase: — 
 
 " On the estate of the Marquis of Lansdowne there lived, a few months ago, a man 
 and his wife, Michael and Judith Donoghue ; they lived in the house of one Casey. 
 An order has gone forth on the estate (a common order in Ireland) that no tenant is 
 to admit any lodger into his house. This was a general order. It appears, however, 
 that sometimes special orders are given, having regard to particular individuals. The 
 Donoghues had a nephew, one Denis Shea. This boy had no father living. He had 
 lived with a grandmother who had been turned out of her holding for harbouring him. 
 Denis Shea was twelve years old — a child of decidedly dishonest habits. Orders were 
 given by the driver of this estate that this child should not be harboured upon it. This 
 young Cain, thus branded and prosecuted, being a thief — he had stolen a shilling, a 
 hen, and done many other such crimes as a neglected twelve-year-old famishing child 
 will do — wandered about. One night he came to his aunt Donoghue, who lodged with 
 Casey. He had the hen with him. 
 
 "Casey told his lodgers not to ' allow him in the house,' as the agent's drivers had 
 given orders about it. The woman, the child's aunt, took up a pike, or pitchfork, and 
 struck him down with it ; the child was crying at the time. The man Donoghue, his 
 uncle, with a cord tied the child's hands behind his back. The poor child after a 
 while crawls or staggers to the door of one Sullivan, and tried to get in there. The 
 maid of Sullivan called to Donoghue to take him away. This he did ; but he after- 
 wards returned with his hands still tied behind his back. Donoghue had already 
 beaten him severely. The child seeks refuge in other cabins, but is pursued by 
 his character — he was so bad a boy, the fear of the agent and the driver — all were 
 forbidden to shelter him. He is brought back by some neighbours, in the night, to 
 Casey's, where his uncle and aunt lived. The said neighbours tried to force the sinking 
 child in upon his relations. There is a struggle at the door. The child was heard 
 asking some one to put him upright. In the morning there is blood upon the 
 threshold. The child is stiff dead — a corpse, with its arms tied ; around it every mark 
 of a last fearful struggle for shelter — food — the common rights of humanity. 
 
 "The Donoghues were tried at the late Kerry assizes. It was, morally, a clear 
 case of -murder ; but it was said, or believed, that these Donoghues acted not in 
 malice to the child, but under a sort of sense of self-preservation ; that they felt to 
 admit him was to become wanderers themselves. They were indicted for man 
 slaughter, and found guilty." 
 
 Those who know the superstitious charity with which the Irish people entertain 
 strangers, the warm and tender affection with which they cherish the feelings of 
 kindred, will understand the terrible coercion under which this poor boy was driven 
 from the doors. 
 
 Yet the estates of the Marquis of Lansdowne are considered among the best 
 managed in Ireland. It suggests very strange reflections to observe that several times 
 during the examination of witnesses before the committee of 1864, those who cross- 
 
WHO OWNS THE TENANT'S VOTE. 167 
 
 They are not so. They are the result of a determination, at all 
 hazards and by any means, to keep down the poor rate. To 
 prevent the possibility of the people multiplying, the occupiers 
 must be kept in a state of serfdom. 
 
 Statements of this nature suggest the reflection that in this, 
 perhaps, short-sighted view of their position, the Irish landlords are 
 interested in diminishing and getting rid of the population, as well 
 as in preventing its increase. But if the owners of the soil are 
 taught to believe that the country is over-peopled, and if they think 
 it their direct interest to prevent or diminish the presence of an 
 excessive population which one day or other may be a burden to 
 themselves, can we wonder that some how or other the people are 
 driven out? 
 
 The second objection is a political one : — 
 
 "There is also another objection. In the counties there is an 
 occupation franchise. In many the occupiers have swamped the 
 owners, and Members have been returned to Parliament unconnected by 
 property with the county." 
 
 This is the second objection to the granting of leases. Lord Rosse 
 appears to consider the right of choosing representatives to be vested 
 not in the occupiers but in the owners, and he regards persons con- 
 nected by property with the county as having an exclusive right to 
 its representation. This may be the theory of the British con- 
 stitution or it may not, but when it is assigned as an objection to 
 granting leases that the occupiers have presumed to " swamp the 
 owners " by choosing the persons whom they thought best fitted to 
 represent them, the meaning is, that the tenants must be kept in a 
 state of practical servitude lest they may exercise independently 
 their political rights? The landlord's "hands must be untied," in 
 order that if they vote against his wishes he may be able to turn 
 them out. 
 
 The third objection is one compounded of the other two — 
 Irish landlords hesitate to give leases or even to create a 
 tenantry on their estates because they apprehend that legislation 
 might possibly be adopted which would confer some rights upon 
 any person who should be a tenant at the time of its adoption, 
 and therefore, in the emphatic words of Lord Kosse, " Some people 
 ask themselves the question is it not much safer to farm the lands 
 ourselves ? " 
 
 examined the " tenant right " witnesses repeatedly put questions as to this very estate, 
 as if it were one with regard to which no one would dare to suggest the necessity of 
 legislative interference. 
 
 I believe that if the whole truth were known the "best managed" properties are 
 often those upon which the serfdom of the tenant is the most abject and complete. 
 
 Similar edicts are at this moment enforced upon hundreds of Irish estates. 
 
168 PAMPHLET OF LORD ROSSE. 
 
 This is exactly what was said last year when the late Govern- 
 ment proposed their measure of tenant compensation — Ministers 
 and Parliament were distinctly warned that if such a measure were 
 likely to pass, it would be a signal throughout Ireland for one 
 universal notice to quit. 
 
 Except for that which I regard as a calamity — the implied 
 approval which Lord Rosse expresses of the feelings and policy of 
 his class, T cannot find one word to object to in his statement. 
 That statement, unhappily, contains all the elements upon which 
 I relied on as making out the argument for legislative interference. 
 The Irish landowners are keeping the occupiers under their absolute 
 dominion. And this I traced to the operation of the poor law — 
 to the granting of the elective franchise to the occupier — to the 
 political antagonism which exists between landlord and tenant — 
 and to all the causes which have resulted in relations of hostility 
 and distrust. 
 
 But again I said that this state of things was of recent origin — 
 that in old times leases were granted. I quote again the testimony 
 of Lord Rosse, omitting the intervening sentences in which he 
 refers to the evil of the increase of population. That is a matter of 
 opinion. Here is his testimony as to facts : — 
 
 " I well recollect the glowing terms in which several old people in our 
 neighbourhood were wont to speak of the plenty in their younger days — 
 bread, meat, and the best ale being the ordinary peasant's fare." 
 
 " It was the practice then to do that which is now so much recommended — 
 to make long leases." 
 
 Lord Rosse is of opinion that these long leases enabled the 
 tenant to subdivide his holding, and that this has been the origin of 
 our evils. Even if this were true the natural inference would 
 seem to be this: — We should return to the system of long leases, 
 which produced the comfort, and prohibit the subdivision which 
 destroyed it. I have already offered some observations on this 
 subject of "middlemen" and subdivision. Lord Rosse's testimony 
 confirms what I have said ; but I am now only anxious to direct 
 attention to the remarkable testimony contained in this passage. 
 There was a time when, in Ireland, bread, meat, and the best 
 ale were the ordinary peasant's fare. We are distant only by 
 two links of tradition from that time.* This tradition of prosperity 
 
 * I may observe to Lord Dufferin that this must have been after all restrictions on 
 the woollen manufacture had been removed, and after all the mischief created by the 
 restrictions had been done. Lord Rosse is, most probably, preserving the traditions of 
 the period just before the Union, when Ireland had improved in commerce, in agriculture, 
 and in manufactures, faster than any nation upon earth. 
 
 There are strange traditions of the abundance experienced by some classes even in 
 olden times. Living was not dear in Kerry when salmon was bought for a penny a 
 pound, lobsters for one penny, rising to two-pence each, fat turkeys for nine-pence each, 
 
IEISH LETTINGS TO BE TRANSFORMED INTO ENGLISH. 169 
 
 is not inconsistent with the stories of wretchedness which written 
 accounts have shown. There was a class of that people whom that 
 prosperity did not reach. The " ordinary peasants," described by 
 Lord Rosse, were the higher class of tenants who lived in the farm 
 houses of the farms now occupied by the serfs. 
 
 Let me call attention to another passage in Lord Rosse's tract. 
 This is his prospect for the future : — 
 
 " The value of land, no doubt, will rise. It is not in the nature of 
 things that so great a disparity in this respect between England and 
 Ireland will long continue. As land becomes more valuable farm build- 
 ings will be provided everywhere. No farm unprovided with proper 
 buildings will then command a tenant, and there will be no want of 
 capital for the purpose, as is evident from the purchases in the Landed 
 Estates Court, and the large deposits in the banks (£17,000,000). The 
 tenant will say to the landlord, if you do not provide farm buildings as 
 good as the English tenant has I will not take the farm. I am willing 
 to pay a fair rent, and I am entitled to suitable buildings." 
 
 And Lord Rosse adds — 
 
 " I believe that time will soon come, unless progress be retarded by 
 injudicious legislation." 
 
 I earnestly wish that Lord Rosse had pointed out the process 
 by which such a state of things can be brought about in Ireland, 
 that land will be let in the same manner as in England, or in which 
 the landlord's farms will remain unlet unless he is prepared to 
 make the outlay required to put them into the same state as that 
 in which an English farm is let. I am unable to see how the 
 £17,000,000 deposited by the tenant farmers in the banks 
 will be available for such a purpose. That sum will only be 
 expended when you give the tenant security for his tenure. Lord 
 Rosse contemplates an expenditure by the landlords amounting to 
 very many millions on their estates. The only hint he gives us of 
 
 and mutton for two-pence a pound. Yet Arthur Young gives us this enumeration of 
 the prices of bis day, and tells us that in Limerick he knew a gentleman "keeping a 
 carriage, four horses, three men, three maids, a wife, three children, and a nurse, all 
 for £500 a year." — Vol. ii., p. 7. 
 
 Yet it was in Kerry — but a few years afterwards— that the misery of the 
 labouring classes provoked the first revolt of the Right Boys, and on an estate near 
 that very city of Limerick, were gathering and clustering on the richest soil in Europe 
 the most miserable population of cottiers upon earth. 
 Well might Bishop Berkely ask, some years before : — 
 
 " Whether we are not in fact the only people who may be said to starve in the midst 
 of plenty?" 
 
 It is strange how throughout all the eventful history of Ireland we find this admixture 
 of plenty and starvation, of happiness and misery, in the lot of a people dwelling on 
 the same soil, as if they had been so left side by side, the one to prove how God and 
 nature blessed the country, the other to show how it had been cursed by man. 
 
170 IRISH LETTINGS TO BE TRANSFORMED INTO ENGLISH. 
 
 the source from which this expediture is to be supplied is the 
 reference to the £25,000,000 expended in purchases in the 
 Landed Estates Court. Does this imply that landlords unable to 
 make the expenditure are to be sold out ? The reasoning of Lord 
 Rosse is that such a state of things will arise from a vastly increased 
 emigration. I describe this by saying that I am sure it never 
 could occur until the greater proportion of our people are extermi- 
 nated. I believe that it would be also indispensable to the process 
 that a large number of the landed proprietors should be sold out. In 
 other words, Irish prosperity is to commence when we have got rid 
 of the largest proportion of the Irish nation. The project is not 
 new. Sir W. Petty once proposed to carry over the Irish people 
 bodily to England, and turn the whole island into a dairy farm, 
 to be managed by 200,000 dairy maids and herds. 
 
 Lord Rosse's hope for Ireland is in the advent of a state of things 
 in which tenants would be so independent as to reject a farm unless 
 it is let to them with all farm buildings and in perfect working 
 order, and in which Irish landlords will be so full of money as at 
 once to meet the requisition. I wish that some person of judgment 
 and experience would now form an estimate of the sum which would 
 be required to put all the land of Ireland into the same condition as 
 English farms. It was one of the very first considerations which 
 suggested itself to the acute and business-like mind of Arthur 
 Young when he contrasted the English and the Irish mode of 
 letting. He estimated an expenditure of eighty-eight millions as 
 the very lowest sum which would fit Irish farms for English 
 farmers. He did not forget that when the farms were improved, 
 the farmer must have a capital of his own in addition to that 
 expended by the landlord — this he calculated at twenty millions 
 more.* In 1810, Mr. Wakefield, after carefully examining the 
 subject, and with Arthur Young's estimate before him, calculated 
 the sum requisite to put Irish farms into the same letting order as 
 the English, at one hundred and twenty millions. Mr. Fisher, 
 in one of his instructive publications, tells us that in a recent parlia- 
 mentary debate the sum requisite was calculated at one hundred 
 
 * " I have reason to believe that five pounds sterling per English acre, expended 
 over all Ireland, which amounts to £88,341,136, would not more than build, fence, 
 plant, drain, and improve that coimtry to be upon a par in those respects with 
 England. And farther, that if those 88 millions were so expended, it would take 
 much above 20 millions more (or above 20s. an acre) in the hands of the farmers in 
 stock of husbandry, to put them on an equal footing with those of her sister kingdom ; 
 nor is this calculation so vague as it might at first sight appear, since the expences of 
 improvements and stock are very easily estimated in both countries. This is the 
 resolution of that surprising inferiority in the rent of Ireland : the English farmer 
 pays a rent for his land in the state he finds it, which includes, not only the natural 
 fertility of the soil, but the immense expenditure which national wealth has in the 
 progress of time poured into it ; but the Irishman finds nothing he can afford to pay 
 rent for, but what the bounty of God has given, unaided by either wealth or industry." — 
 Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland, Vol. ii., part ii., p. 12. 
 
THE COUNTING OF THE COST. 171 
 
 and fifty millions, or ten pounds for each acre of cultivated land.* 
 A very moderate estimate suggests that taking one farm with 
 another, and supposing all Ireland at the disposal of some layer-out 
 of farms, no " contract company" could have a profit who would 
 undertake to level all the ditches, make new and proper fences, lay 
 down farm roads, thorough drain the soil, build suitable farm 
 houses and offices — in a word, divide all Ireland into large and 
 well-appointed English farms at a contract price of five pounds 
 for every acre of the cultivated land. If the landlords found the 
 seventy or eighty millions, the seventeen millions of tenants' money 
 in the savings' banks would scarcely supply them with the addi- 
 tional capital necessary for the cultivation of such farms. 
 
 I cannot help thinking that I answered, by anticipation, the 
 argument which is founded on the assumption that there is the 
 slightest rational prospect of such a result arising from the present 
 state of things. 
 
 "I know that there are persons who will say, 'We do not wish to 
 continue the existing state of things ; but that state of things is exactly 
 breaking up in the very emigration to which you point. The process is 
 going on by which Ireland will gradually become assimilated to the 
 agricultural districts of England and Scotland, and large farms and 
 capitalist farmers raise off the soil the largest amount of produce for 
 the sustenance of man.' 
 
 " The first answer to this is, that it involves the extermination of the 
 people. But we must think, apart from all other considerations, of the 
 long delays, the difficulties, and the dangers of the process. 
 
 " If, however, there be any one who thinks that Ireland would be a 
 happier and a richer country if we were to assimilate it to England in 
 its great agricultural forms — I ask him, first: whence is to come the 
 expenditure that is to fit the land for such a state of things ? Are Irish 
 landlords prepared at once to incur the expenditure which, in England, 
 has been the slow and gradual accumulation of a long series of years ? 
 But I ask him next : is he prepared for the process by which it must 
 be accomplished — the extermination of the people? In England the 
 
 * " A large outlay is necessary to increase the productiveness of the soil, and expand 
 the wealth of the people. As that outlay will not be made by the landlords, we must 
 consider upon what terms it should be done by the tenants, and whether the equivalent 
 of a lease for thirty-one years is a sufficient compensation. 
 
 "Under a lease the tenant contracts to maintain the improvements he may make, 
 and to give them up to the landlord at the expiration of the term — the landlord 
 becomes heir to the tenant's outlay. 
 
 " Will leases for thirty -one years induce the tenants to make the outlay which Ireland 
 requires ? 
 
 " One of the advocates of the Bill before Parliament estimated the necessary outlay 
 at one hundred and fifty millions sterling ; this is about ten pounds per acre on the 
 arable land of Ireland." — The Land Question, by Joseph Fisher. Dublin : M'Glashan 
 and Gill. 
 
 Mr. Fisher himself estimates, but apparently upon indefinite ground, that it is 
 absolutely necessary to spend fifteen millions upon improving Irish farms ; but this, it 
 is to be observed, is not a calculation of what would be required to bring them to the 
 English state. 
 
172 THE COUNTING OF THE COST. 
 
 consolidation of farms has also been slow and gradual. There has been 
 no violent dispossession of occupants : it has been the almost unnoticed 
 result of the operation of causes which caused no rude disturbance — of 
 the growth of manufactures — of the opening up of modes of employment 
 and enterprise, which gradually withdrew the people from the soil. The 
 process in Ireland would be one by which a whole population would 
 at once be driven from their land, their country, and their home. There 
 is a great difference between the adoption of a system by the growth of 
 circumstances and time, and the forcing of that system upon a country 
 in a manner which makes it a revolution. Whether such a change 
 would be desirable or not, it is one that involves the extermination of 
 the greater proportion of the present inhabitants."* 
 
 " Unwise, indeed, would be the policy of any British statesman who 
 would secretly acquiesce in the expatriation of that people, in the belief 
 that large farms and English and Scotch farmers might well replace the 
 small farms and Irish cottier tenants that are gradually swept away. Still 
 more desperate would such a policy be on the part of the Irish gentry. 
 The process is one which no interest in Ireland could survive. By the 
 time the land would be cleared of her people all classes would be 
 destroyed, and English proprietors as well as English tenants would be 
 called on to take the place of the present proprietors of the soil."t 
 
 Surely in contemplating the state of things described in the 
 passage I have quoted from his pamphlet, Lord Rosse never per- 
 mitted his mind to dwell upon the intermediate steps that must be 
 gone through before the country could arrive at it. Between us and 
 that state of things a great gulph is fixed — a gulph in which a large 
 proportion of our people, and many, very many, of our landowners 
 must be swallowed up. 
 
 I will venture to quote from this remarkable pamphlet one or 
 two passages entirely confirmatory of some other views I have 
 expressed — 
 
 " A great change has taken place in Ireland, Now when a farmer is 
 beginning to fail he puts together what he can, and emigrates. The 
 landlord, perhaps, loses two years' rent or more, but he is compensated in 
 the comfort and happiness resulting to all parties. The farm is annexed to 
 that of the adjoining tenant." 
 
 Is not this just the process which I described as " rapidly 
 
 COMPLETING THE EXTERMINATION OF THE OLD CELTIC 
 RACE." 
 
 Lord Rosse confirms my opinion that the emigration of late years 
 has assumed a new character. The farmer who now throws up 
 his farm is one that can " put together " something wherewith to 
 go. It is not the evicted tenant who now swells the tide of 
 emigration, but the farmer who has still something to take with 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 65. 
 + Land Tenure in Ireland, p. 92. 
 
THE ANNEXATION OF THE FARM. 173 
 
 him, one who — as Lord Rosse describes it — feels himself beginning 
 to fail ; as the Bishop of Cloyne tells us — who feels himself unable 
 to bear up against the fatal effects of insecurity of tenure which 
 leaves him no place for his industry. 
 
 If this be the character of the recent emigration, of what avail 
 are Lord Dufferin's statistics, cited for the purpose of proving that 
 emigrants consist generally of other persons than evicted tenants ? 
 
 But has the landlord nothing to do even with emigration like 
 this ? With what feelings does the landlord regard the removal of 
 that tenant ? He looks upon him as an incumbrance of which he is 
 delighted to be rid. Away with him from his native land ! He is 
 not fit to live upon the soil. Even for the loss of two years' rent 
 the landlord is amply compensated in seeing one more of his natural 
 enemies go. Is it likely that a landlord actuated by such feelings 
 will do anything to make that tenant stay? As surely as such 
 feelings influence the landowner so surely will they work the 
 tenant out. Lord Rosse too truly describes the feelings with which 
 the occupier is regarded by his lord. 
 
 " The farm is annexed to that of the adjoining tenant." In the 
 face of testimony like this, of what avail are land statistics which 
 show that in this exterminating process farms over fifteen, still 
 more those over thirty acres, are multiplied in number. Of course 
 they are so — because two or three smaller ones are " consolidated" 
 into one. 
 
 I say that this farmer fails, and emigrates, exactly because under 
 our present system of land tenure he has no fair play at home, and 
 no confidence that he will have any. Is it possible for him to 
 have it in a country in which it is avowed on the part of the 
 landlords that they will not give him any security of tenure; 
 because, in the battle for their rights they must have their hands 
 untied. Nay, he is further told that the opinion is gaining 
 ground that it is not quite safe to let him occupy even as a tenant 
 at will, and that landlords are asking themselves the question, 
 whether it would not be safer for them to cultivate the lands 
 themselves. 
 
 To many of the Irish peasantry these words will have a deep 
 significance. They are no idle threat. There are districts in 
 Ireland in which landlords have cultivated their estates themselves, 
 in which thousands of acres have been cleared of the old people. 
 The owner for a time, has farmed for himself, and after a few years 
 the land has been set in large farms, frequently to English or Scotch 
 tenants. 
 
 I admit that the present laws of property would permit of the 
 carrying out of this threat. It would be in the legal power of the 
 Irish landlords to turn off their tenantry and cultivate their estates 
 themselves. When the simultaneous extermination of a whole 
 people is spoken of — as a matter of serious contemplation — it is 
 
174 PAMPHLET OF LORD POSSE. 
 
 high time for legislation to interfere and protect the right of the 
 people to live upon their native soil. 
 
 A threat like this may help us to judge of the claims of proprie- 
 tary right put forward on behalf of the Irish landlords. It may help 
 us also to judge of the right of the Legislature to interfere. Suppose 
 an attempt were made to realize that threat ; suppose, upon a given 
 day, notices to quit were served upon every tenant in Ireland, and 
 that, with one consent, all Irish landlords were to set about 
 clearing their estates and cultivating the land themselves. Will it 
 be said that the Legislature ought to suifer this to be carried out? 
 Ought the Irish people submit to it if the Legislature did so suffer 
 it ? Is there, after all, such a very great difference if the very same 
 thing be done piecemeal which if attempted by one fell swoop would 
 demand legislative interference, and in its absence justify national 
 resistance? Caligula wished all the Roman people had but one 
 neck ; but it would have made very little difference to the Roman 
 people if, even with a multitude of necks to deal with, he had 
 succeeded in chopping off all their heads in detail. 
 
 And in a state of society in which the feeling between landowners 
 and occupiers is such that the landlord will not trust his tenant 
 with the ownership of the land for the shortest lease and under the 
 most stringent covenants — in which he must regard that tenant as a 
 robber in dealing with whom "he must keep his hands untied;" the 
 occupier is expected to be contented and happy in trusting to the 
 honour and the mercy of that landlord for the very means of exist- 
 ing in his native land, and for the enjoyment of the fruits of his 
 industry and toil ! 
 
 In my view of the land question Lord Rosse's pamphlet is a 
 most valuable contribution to the cause which is known as that 
 of " tenant right." It was impossible for Lord Rosse to write on 
 any subject except truthfully and with knowledge. Because he 
 has done both he has borne testimony to a state of things 
 which makes it impossible for Parliament any longer to leave the 
 relations between landlord and tenant to the uncontrolled opera- 
 tion not of economic laws, but of the evil passions which distract 
 and divide the proprietary and occupying classes in this country. 
 The real value and the real importance of the pamphlet consists 
 in this: we have a clear and frank, although most temperate, 
 account of the opinions and feelings which influence those who are 
 now absolute masters of the Irish soil. Do these opinions and 
 feelings qualify them to exercise absolute dominion over the Irish 
 people? It is no common or ordinary right of proprietorship 
 which the Irish landlords have assumed. They have departed 
 from the old established usages of the country, and insist that " their 
 hands shall be untied," to deal at any moment with the occupiers as 
 in their discretion they think fit. They claim to be "the managers" 
 of their own estates, to have everything controlled by their direction, 
 
" THE RULES OF THE ESTATE." 175 
 
 and subject to their rule. They take the place — not of proprietors 
 receiving their rents, and, so long as covenants are observed, leaving 
 their tenants to themselves — but of proprietors governing by their 
 authority every movement upon their estate; and in order that 
 they may so govern they are keeping the Irish natives as their 
 tenants at will. The Irish people are to be in a state of pupilage 
 under the mastership of the proprietors. 
 
 But among these proprietors we know and are assured that there 
 exists a very strong objection to the over-peopling of the country — 
 that there is a dread of the increase of human beings, and that most 
 of them believe, honestly and fairly believe, that to promote the 
 well-being of the country a large number, even of the existing 
 inhabitants, ought to go away. Is it difficult to see to what the 
 combination of such opinions and such powers must necessarily 
 lead ? In the case of landlords thus circumstanced these convictions 
 cannot remain as mere abstract opinions. Unconsciously it may be 
 to themselves, they must influence their conduct. 
 
 I have already instanced three most remarkable cases of rules 
 adopted upon estates, by which every tenant is prohibited from 
 receiving even a relative as an inmate on his estate. I believe that 
 we have a very imperfect idea of the extent to which such estate 
 legislation is in force. The " rules of estates" constitute local codes 
 of law, which regulate many acts of the tenant's life. There is 
 certainly one estate — there are, I believe, very many more — upon 
 which the rule is in force to which I have already adverted, the 
 rule which prohibits any marriage taking place among the tenantry 
 without the license of the agent. We have seen that upon another 
 estate a Roman Catholic dignitary was evicted from his farm because 
 he did not dismiss his curate who had made a speech improperly 
 ridiculing the proprietor in the excitement of an election. There 
 is, as in greater jurisprudence, the unwritten as well as the written 
 law ; the latter too often resides in the breast of the agent, or even 
 the inferior minister of the estate. This is not the tyranny of 
 middlemen, or of landowners of lower rank. " The rules of the 
 estate " are often the most arbitrary and the most sternly enforced 
 upon great estates, the property of men of the highest station, upon 
 which rents are moderate, and no harshness practised to the tenantry 
 who implicitly submit. Such rules are tyranny and feudalism the 
 moment they go beyond the mere conduct of the tenant in that 
 relation, and attempt to regulate his domestic relations and his 
 home. Every day these rules are extending further and further in 
 that regulation. What shall we say of that rule which is, perhaps, 
 the most general, that which forbids the harbouring of any except 
 the tenant's immediate family in his home. 
 
 Rules like these, I repeat, are not confined to tyrannical or bad 
 landlords; they are as general as the dread of over-peopling the 
 land. Is the tenant who is bound to observe such a rule, who fears 
 
176 THE STORY OF THE HOMELESS BOY. 
 
 to violate it even at the bidding of humanity, in a condition as high 
 as that of a serf? What romance that borrowed its " sensational " 
 descriptions from the grim tales of feudal tyranny has ever drawn 
 a darker picture than that of a peasant shutting his door against the 
 benighted traveller because the lord of the neighbouring castle 
 had forbidden strangers to be entertained? If English travellers 
 brought home such tales from Styria or the Tyrol, or even that 
 wilder region, 
 
 il Where the rude Carinthian boor 
 Against the houseless stranger shuts the door ;" 
 
 how would they speak of feudal serfdom as existing in the Austrian 
 dominions ! 
 
 I have already adverted in a note to a portion of the statement 
 made by " S. (x. O." of one striking instance of this nature. Let me 
 earnestly implore the attention of every right-minded man to the 
 words of the judge who passed sentence on the peasants who, in 
 the execution of one of these inhuman orders, had been accessary 
 to the death of the poor helpless victim of the barbarous policy 
 of a " well managed" estate. The Chief Baron, in passing that 
 sentence, thus addressed these miserable serfs : — 
 
 "The poor boy whose death you caused was between twelve and thirteen 
 years of age. His mother at one time held a little dwelling from which 
 she was expelled. His father was dead. His mother had left him, and 
 he was alone and unprotected. He found refuge with his grandmother, 
 who held a farm, from which she was removed in consequence of her 
 harbouring this poor boy, as the agent on the property had given public 
 notice to the tenantry that expulsion from their farms would be the 
 penalty inflicted on them if they harboured any persons having no 
 residence on the estate. This poor boy was then left without a house 
 to shelter him or a friend to assist him. He was an unhappy outcast. 
 He went to the house of a man named Coffey, whose wife 
 humanely gave him a little food, but she was afraid to shelter him in 
 her house, as the agent had given orders that distress for twelve months' 
 rent would be made on any tenant who should harbour persons not 
 resident on the estate, and that they would also be expelled from their 
 farms. He is turned adrift to the world, friendless and unprotected. 
 He came to Casey's house, where you, his uncle and aunt, resided. He 
 applied for relief, as he was in a state of destitution. Casey, with whom 
 you lodged, desired you to turn him from the house, as he was afraid 
 the orders of the agent would be enforced against him. . . . You 
 committed the offence, not with a desire to inflict death, but influenced 
 by fear that Casey would be expelled from his holding. The poor child 
 is turned out of doors; and the next proof was, that you, Judith, took a 
 pike-handle and beat him violently with it while lying on the ground. 
 . . . He implored of you to spare him, and he promised to leave the 
 place. He raised himself from the ground, and bound, as he was, went 
 tottering along from house to house, but there was no refuge for the 
 
THE STORY OF THE HOMELESS BOY. 177 
 
 wretched outcast. As a last resource he turned his steps to Coffey's 
 house, but some of the neighbours threatened to tell the agent if Coffey 
 harboured him. Coffey had, however, the humanity to take him to 
 Casey's house, where you resided. He fell twice from weakness and 
 the result of the injuries you inflicted on him. He is supported to the 
 house, and a scene ensued which I find difficult to describe. The door 
 was opened by you, Judith, and a struggle ensues. Coffey and another 
 man endeavoured to force the boy in — you keeping him out. He bleeds 
 profusely. The threshold is smeared with blood. You succeed in keeping 
 him out; and he, unable to walk, rolls himself along the ground, till he 
 gets to the wall, where he remains. Night passes over him, and on the 
 following morning he is found by the neighbours, cold, stiff, and dead. 
 . . . I do not think, however, that you inflicted the injuries with an 
 intention to cause death, it was through fear that the threat would be 
 carried out against Casey. Casey acted under the influence of the 
 threats of those in authority, but such is no justification for the offence. 
 It forms no defence, that such an order was given as that which 
 appeared in evidence on the trial. For an order from the execution of 
 which death ensues is not only not sanctioned by law, but is directly at 
 variance with it." 
 
 This is one of the revelations of the actual life of the people 
 which are sometimes made in courts of justice. These tenants 
 resided on an estate, the landlord of which was held up as the very 
 model of a kind, a just, and a liberal landlord. Could any descrip- 
 tion of human serfdom exceed the picture of abject terror in which 
 these tenants lived? We must argue from individual instances, 
 for it is only by individual instances we can form our judgment. 
 The words I have quoted are the staid and sober words of judicial 
 calmness. Let us see what was proved at this trial. 
 
 It was proved that on this estate an order was issued against 
 harbouring in a house any person not a resident upon it. 
 
 It was proved that this order was enforced by the sanction of the 
 dreaded penalty of eviction. The Chief Baron's words were : — 
 
 " The agent of the property had given public notice to the tenantry 
 that expulsion from their farms would be the penalty inflicted on them 
 if they harboured any one not resident on the estate." 
 
 That penalty was actually enforced against a widow for giving 
 food and shelter to a destitute grandson of twelve years' old : — 
 
 "The poor boy was between twelve or thirteen years of age. His 
 mother at one time held a little dwelling, from which she was expelled ; 
 his father was dead. He found a refuge with his grandmother, who 
 
 HELD A FARM, FROM WHICH SHE WAS REMOVED FOR HARBOURING THE 
 POOR BOY." 
 
 The peasant to whose door he comes implores of an inmate of 
 
 M 
 
178 THE STORY OF THE HOMELESS BOY. 
 
 his house " to turn him away, lest the penalty should be enforced 
 against him." 
 
 These miserable serfs, even under the shadow of darkness, feared 
 to do the stealthy charity of giving to the outcast child the shelter 
 of a roof When one more bold or more tender-hearted than the 
 others offered to receive him — the neighbours rose in terror, and 
 threatened to give information of the broken rule. The terrorism of 
 landlord dominion was complete ; and driven from every house, torn 
 by violence from the sacred threshold to which his despairing strug- 
 gles clung, the miserable child lay down to die, and morning dawned 
 upon his cold and stiffened corpse. This is no fiction. Could, I 
 ask again, any picture of abject — miserable — serfdom be more com- 
 plete ? In what land of slavery, in what clime of eastern oppression, 
 do human beings crouch down in abject terror, from the very in- 
 stincts of their nature, as these miserable Irish men and women 
 cowered down that night ? Is it right or fitting that man should 
 hold over his fellow the terrible dominion to which these poor 
 miserable people sacrificed that wretched child? 
 
 The accident of death resulting in this instance caused the 
 revelation of the rule, the penalty, and the terror. But for this 
 accident the deep and wretched slavery of these peasants would 
 have been unknown. How many Irish peasants are crouching and 
 cowering in secret under tyranny like this ? Upon how many Irish 
 estates is the order at this moment enforced which forbids a night's 
 lodging to a houseless wanderer, under that terrible penalty, the 
 dread of which froze up every warm gush of charity in the hearts of 
 these Irish and Christian men and women ? 
 
 Let those who blame me for calling the condition of the Irish 
 tenant serfdom realize if they can the scene of that poor child's 
 death. The terror which the bare thought of sheltering him 
 caused — the crowding of the terrified cottiers to prevent an act 
 that might end in their extermination — the fact, the miserable, the 
 damning fact, that there was not one who dared to violate the edict 
 to save a homeless child from perishing — and let them tell me by 
 what milder terms can such a state of abject submission be called. 
 
 Nothing is more vain and unprofitable than a controversy about 
 names. In this instance we see despotic dominion binding men's 
 souls and consciences by a law as absolute and exacting as that by 
 which the slave driver can bind his slave. I care not whether it 
 be called the tyranny of law, or the sacred right of property, or 
 feudal oppression. It is the condition in which Irish people are 
 living under English law. That condition is enforced by that law. 
 If any one of those cottiers had harboured the outcast on that 
 evening, the tribunals of justice would have awarded — if necessary 
 all the power of the executive would have enforced — the penalty of 
 eviction, which would have been inflicted as the punishment of his 
 crime. Had they given way to the instincts of humanity the very 
 
EXCEPTIONAL LEGISLATION. 179 
 
 same judge who pronounced the just sentence which punished their 
 obedience to an inhuman edict, might, in that very same court- 
 house, have been compelled to award the sentence of eviction, 
 which, disguised under the assertion of a civil right, would really 
 have been the adjudication of the landlord's sentence of punishment 
 for disobedience to his law. 
 
 It is impossible for law to be, either in the sight of God or man, 
 altogether irresponsible for the wrong and the tyranny to which it 
 is every day giving effect. 
 
 I ought not, perhaps, to pass from Lord Rosse's pamphlet 
 without noticing an objection which he makes to any measure 
 which involves what he regards as u exceptional legislation." I 
 understand by this any legislation which will deal with the 
 relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland — differently from the 
 laws which governs them in England. The assumption that this 
 is a decisive objection to any proposal runs through his entire 
 pamphlet. After stating the rather questionable propositions that 
 the interest of the tenant is to have new purchases made of Irish 
 property, which would give him " a wealthy proprietary, able and 
 anxious to assist him in getting forward," he adds, " the slightest 
 approach to exceptional legislation would be a warning to the 
 capitalist to keep off."* " It only remains," he says in another place, 
 "to inquire whether the relations of landlord and tenant could be 
 improved by any measure not open to the very grave objection of 
 being exceptional." \ Proposing to extend the Montgomery Act to 
 Ireland, he observes in the same page: — " As that Act is still law 
 in Scotland extending it to Ireland would not be exceptional legis- 
 lation.":]: Again, in another place, "no special pleading would 
 succeed in devising an excuse for treating property as one thing 
 in Ireland and another thing in England, Wales, and Scotland." § 
 
 With reference to the argument which tells the Irish tenant that 
 his true interest is to invite wealthy proprietors to invest capital in 
 land — it plainly points out to the " selling out" of a large number 
 of the present landowners. I am not sure that the experience of 
 many Irish tenants will confirm the assertion that they have found 
 themselves better off under " wealthy proprietors," who have been 
 invited "to invest capital in Irish land," than they were under the 
 old and "insolvent" proprietors.! The question is one involving 
 too many considerations to be incidentally discussed. 
 
 * Lord Rosse, page 24. + Lord Rosse, page 26. 
 
 X Lord Rosse, page 26. § Lord Rosse, page 23. 
 
 || Upon this point the evidence given before Mr. Maguire's Committee, especially the 
 evidence of Judge Longfield, gave us most valuable information. The purchases under 
 the Encumbered Estates Commission have been among the many concurring causes 
 which have been driving the Irish people from their homes. No illustration of this 
 can be stronger than the evidence to which I have already adverted — evidence in 
 which he tells us that he has been compelled to sell estates upon which the custom of 
 tenant right prevailed to a purchaser who bought them with the intention of robbing 
 
180 EXCEPTIONAL LEGISLATION. 
 
 I may, however, observe, that in reading arguments of this 
 nature by which those who use them believe that they show con- 
 clusively that it would be greatly for the interest of Ireland to re- 
 place by others all the existing class of proprietors and occu- 
 piers; it has sometimes occurred to me to ask myself, what is 
 the meaning of such a proposition. I have been accustomed to 
 understand by Ireland, not merely a country possessing certain 
 geographical features, but a country inhabited by a certain people 
 whom I know; I care nothing for the abstract prosperity of 
 mountains, and villages, and plains — I care a good deal for the 
 comfort and happiness of the people whom God has now placed 
 on them. I understand, in a word, by Ireland, the Irish people; 
 and when any man proposes to me a plan to create prosperity 
 in Ireland by substituting a new class of proprietors and 
 occupiers for the present, I am very much disposed to ask him 
 whether the present occupiers and proprietors do not in reality 
 constitute the Irish nation — whether any plan to benefit the 
 Irish nation must not be a plan to benefit them; and whether 
 a proposal which gravely proposes to create Irish prosperity by 
 putting capitalist landlords and capitalist tenant farmers in 
 place of our present ones be not a proposal to make Ireland a 
 great country by destroying the Irish nation, I am not capable 
 of understanding this singular survivorship, and I believe, with 
 Lord Abercorn, the true question for every statesman is to con- 
 sider how to make prosperous and happy those who, whether as 
 occupiers or as owners, are now living upon the Irish soil. 
 
 Passing from this, however, let me ask whether there be really 
 this conclusive objection to " exceptional legislation." I believe 
 that all legislation must be adapted to the circumstances with 
 which it deals, and more than this, to the feelings and wants of 
 the people Avhom it is to govern. If the circumstances of landed 
 property in England and Ireland be the same, if the feelings of the 
 English people and Irish people in respect to it be the same, then, 
 indeed, it follows that the same legislation on this subject is 
 applicable to both countries. If the circumstances be wholly 
 different, if the feelings be wholly dissimilar, no words can 
 express the folly as well as the wickedness of insisting on the same 
 legislation for both. The bed of Procrustes fails in supplying 
 us with an adequate illustration. The very same laws which 
 in one state of things are beneficent and wise, in another state of 
 things are inhuman and cruel. The accident of being incorporated 
 in the same empire does not necessarily alter or assimilate the 
 conditions of things. When sumptuary laws were in force I can 
 
 the tenants of that right, and just because they did so intend were enabled to outbid 
 competitors who would have respected it. 
 
 Could there be a stronger proof of the necessity and the justice of a measure which 
 would protect by law the Ulster custom of tenant right. 
 
EXCEPTIONAL LEGISLATION. 181 
 
 conceive a law regulating dress very proper in Ireland, which in 
 Canada would have comdemned people to be frozen to death. If 
 any man had insisted in those days against exceptional legislation 
 either for Canada or Ireland, supposing both to have been subject 
 to the dominion of the British Parliament, I do not believe the 
 absurdity would have been as great as that of insisting on treating 
 in the same way the relations of the capitalist farmer to the 
 capitalist landlord of England — and the relations of the Irish tenant 
 farmer, who has not the most remote conception of what capital 
 practically means, to a landlord who would denounce you as a 
 revolutionist, or, if possible, something worse, if you told him that 
 he was bound to let his farms with all proper farm buildings and 
 all proper appliances of cultivation. 
 
 When I read some of the proposals that have been made, it 
 seems to me that the great principle is forgotten that no legislation 
 is wise which is not so framed as to be adapted to the wants 
 and the habits of the people. You cannot apply to a country 
 of small holdings and poor tenants the principle which you borrow 
 from a country of great farms and capitalist farmers. Ireland is 
 a country of small holdings, with a great agricultural population 
 settled on the land. We must adapt all our legislation to this state 
 of things. If you tell me that all the condition of our social 
 system must be changed, that all our small farms are to be 
 consolidated into great ones, our poor tenants driven away and 
 capitalist cultivators put in their place, I answer that this is the 
 project of a social revolution — a revolution as great and, at least, as 
 cruel as that which would be accomplished by driving out all the 
 landlords and dividing the estates among a large number of peasant 
 proprietors. 
 
 Even this does not express all or nearly all that can be urged in 
 reply to such an argument. If England had been at the time of 
 the Revolution subjected to a confiscation which vested all the 
 property of the country in alien proprietors — if the memories of 
 that confiscation were still branded deep in the hearts of the 
 English people — if a Roman Catholic minority had seized on all 
 the land, all the political power, all the Church revenues, all the 
 social position of the English nation — if English proprietory rights 
 were enforced solely by foreign bayonets — then Irish landlords 
 might say that no rule should be applied to them which was not 
 applied to English property in land. 
 
 And if, more than this, it cotdd be shown that every English 
 proprietor held his land upon conditions which bound him not to 
 create a state of things which had now arisen — if it could be estab- 
 lished that his very title deeds involved a trust which had never 
 been fulfilled, and imposed conditions which up to this hour were 
 broken — if the result had been in England agrarian crime and 
 national beggary — if the whole English people were flying from 
 
182 EXCEPTIONAL LEGISLATION. 
 
 their native land to escape the pressure of English landlordism — 
 then, and then only, might Irish landlords object to exceptional 
 legislation. 
 
 The advocates of Irish tenant right are those who might justly 
 denounce exceptional legislation. There is exceptional legislation 
 for Ireland, because there is legislation which induces an exceptional 
 state of things. This is the only true test. Give us, on this land 
 question, equality of legislation. I do not mean in saying so to 
 refer to the differences between English and Irish law — all of 
 which, and they are many, are, as we shall see, against the Irish 
 tenant. Give us equality of law, tested, as law only can be tested, 
 by its practical result. The tenant in England practically enjoys 
 independence and security of tenure. Frame your law so as to 
 give to the Irish tenant the same. The identity of law, even if 
 it existed, which would not do this, would be only a mockery and 
 a cheat. The late Sir Eobert Peel truly expressed this when, in 
 promising identity of law between Ireland and England, he re- 
 minded the House of Commons it must be an identity not in 
 letter, but in spirit. " It is true," he said, " of political as of 
 higher things, the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 
 
 It has been true that in the application of the English land law 
 to Ireland, " the letter has killed" — killed ! literally killed ! con- 
 signed to death multitudes of the Irish people. The spirit of 
 English law even yet applied to our land question might give life 
 to the dying energies of the Irish nation. 
 
 The true test, if we really wish to establish identity of law 
 between Ireland and England, is to apply to any condition of 
 things existing in this country exactly the same legislation which 
 would be adopted if the same condition of things existed in Eng- 
 land. Would, I ask, the condition of serfdom which is now the lot 
 of the Irish tenant farmer, be tolerated in England for one year ? 
 Would the English tenant endure to be served with annual notices 
 to quit? would he endure notices served by "a driver" that he 
 must not dare to give a relative a night's lodging, or marry a 
 son or a daughter without a license from the officer of the estate ? 
 If a wholesale eviction like that of Glenveagh had occurred in one 
 of the central counties of England, does any man who knows the 
 English House of Commons, or the spirit of the English people, 
 believe that such an eviction would ever have taken place in 
 England again? The laws which, in the circumstances of Eng- 
 land, leave the tenants freemen, in the circumstances of Ireland, 
 make them slaves ; and therefore, upon the very principle of giving 
 Ireland English freedom, in Ireland they must be changed. 
 
 But am 1 to be seriously told that Irish landlords object to excep- 
 tional legislation for Ireland ? Since the Battle of theBoyne there has 
 been nothing but exceptional legislation for Ireland. The Irish land- 
 lords have maintained their power by legislation not merely excep- 
 
EXCEPTIONAL PENAL LAWS FOR IRELAND. 183 
 
 tional, but directly opposed to the letter of the statutes declaring the 
 British Constitution, and wholly abhorrent to the spirit of British 
 law. Let us take the history of Irish legislation since the Union ; 
 what is it but a miserable series of exceptional legislation, of legis- 
 lation specially applied to the coercion of Ireland ; of arms acts, 
 of insurrection acts, of all the devices and contrivances by which 
 English ministers and Parliaments have annulled or suspended the 
 British Constitution in this country. Every man in England is at 
 this moment entitled to bear arms. No man in Ireland can pos- 
 sess a pistol except with the permission of the police. One of 
 the very first measures for which Lord Rosse was called on to vote 
 when Parliament assembled, was an act suspending the opera- 
 tions of the Habeas Corpus Act in some of its most essential 
 provisions. Was he prepared to vote against such a proposal on 
 the ground that it was " exceptional legislation?" 
 
 The whole government of Ireland, from the Battle of the Boyne 
 to the present day, is one long-continued exception of Ireland, 
 not only from British law, but from the British Constitution. I 
 speak not of particular acts; I speak of the whole purport and 
 polity of our laws and our administration. All the statutes which 
 secured English liberty at the period of the revolution of 1688, were 
 framed with the avowed object, and for the express purpose of 
 making it impossible to govern England except with the assent of 
 the English people. There has not been a statute passed for 
 Ireland which has not been subordinate to the one great object of 
 enabling Irish government to be carried in defiance of the wishes 
 of the Irish people. 
 
 Is it only in matters of temporary — or at least, nominally tem- 
 porary — enactment that " exceptional legislation" has been applied 
 to Ireland ? Are our corporation laws the same ? Every insig- 
 nificant town in England has its mayor and its corporation. In all 
 Ireland eleven municipal bodies represent the most ancient element 
 of the British Constitution. Do even these eleven enjoy the pri- 
 vileges of English corporations? Is Lord Rosse prepared to vote 
 for a measure which will place the election of sheriffs in the hands 
 of the corporations of Cork and Limerick, and Dublin and Water- 
 ford ? It is " exceptional legislation" that vests it in the Crown ? Is 
 he prepared to abolish that " exceptional legislation" which entrusts, 
 in Ireland, the whole county taxation to twenty-three gentlemen 
 selected by the sheriff, an officer appointed by the Crown 9 In 
 every department of our affairs " exceptional legislation" meei^ us. 
 Uniformity of law or of administration is never thought of when 
 the object is, by exceptional legislation, to trample down and to 
 crush the Irish people. The cry for it is only heard when some 
 measure of justice — redressing some exceptional wrong — to the 
 oppressed and down-trodden Irish people is proposed. 
 
 Whenever, in relation to any subject, the circumstances existing 
 
184 EXCEPTIONAL PENAL LAWS FOR IRELAND. 
 
 in Ireland and England are the same, then I believe the same legis- 
 lation should be applied. Upon any subject in relation to which 
 the circumstances of the two countries differ, the very principle 
 of equality of laws compels us to vary our legislation with the 
 varying circumstances to which it is applied. 
 
 Lord Rosse, I perceive, includes Scotland in his area of uniform 
 legislation. Is he prepared to apply to Ireland the principle which 
 has been established in Scotland in relation to the most important of 
 all matters — that of the national religion. The example of Scot- 
 land prohibits him from saying that the Church of England is the 
 established Church of the United Kingdom. In England the 
 State establishes the Church of the majority of the people; in 
 Scotland the law establishes the Church of the majority of the 
 people. In Ireland — is Lord Rosse prepared to put an end to 
 exceptional legislation ? 
 
 Are the rights of personal liberty less sacred than of landed pro- 
 perty ? Is Lord Rosse quite sure that when the suspension of the 
 Habeas Corpus Act is next proposed, " special pleading will not 
 succeed in devising an excuse for treating" the right to personal 
 liberty " as one thing in Ireland and another thing in England, 
 Wales, and Scotland?" 
 
 A vote for that measure is justified by saying that the persons 
 entitled to personal liberty in Ireland use it in a different 
 manner from that in which it is used by the persons entitled to it in 
 England, Scotland, and Wales — and therefore the public safety 
 demands and justifies restrictions which are not needed in England, 
 Scotland, and Wales. Be it so. I say that the landowner in Ire- 
 land uses his right in a manner different from that in which it is 
 jased by the persons entitled to it in England, Scotland, and 
 Wales, and therefore the public safety demands and justifies re- 
 strictions which are not needed in England, Scotland, and Wales. 
 
 But if we wanted an illustration of the absurdity to which such an 
 argument leads has not Lord Rosse himself supplied the most striking 
 one? He advocates the extension of "the Montgomery Act" to 
 Ireland, on the ground that it would have " the advantage of not 
 being exceptional legislation." The Montgomery Act was an Act 
 passed some years ago for Scotland, founded on some peculiar 
 circumstances connected with the Scotch law of entail. This law is 
 not in force either in England or Ireland, and is, therefore, clearly 
 " open to the grave objection of being exceptional legislation." We 
 have never heard of any Scotchman objecting to legislation adapted 
 to the peculiar circumstances of his country upon such grounds. I 
 rather think Scotchmen have always insisted on " exceptional" 
 legislation — that is, in other words, legislation adapted to the 
 peculiar circumstances, the peculiar wants, and the peculiar wishes 
 of the country. But Lord Rosse, who objects to all exceptional 
 legislation, proposes to extend to Ireland this statute so excep- 
 
IRISH AND ENGLISH POOR LAWS. 185 
 
 tionally passed for Scotland. He will not have an act specially 
 framed to meet our own case. His objection is removed if it was 
 specially framed to meet the circumstances of a country wholly 
 different from Ireland. 
 
 The argument as to " exceptional legislation" is, in truth, a 
 delusion. The whole question resolves itself into this : — Are the 
 circumstances of Ireland and England in relation to landed property 
 so identical that whatever law works well in one country must 
 necessarily work well in the other. 
 
 I do not believe, when the question is stated in this broad and 
 plain way, there is any man in his sober senses who will say that 
 they are. 
 
 That to which Ireland is really entitled, in comparison with 
 England, is to have laws which will practically secure the same 
 result which English law secures to England, and emphatically to 
 the same rights and privileges for the Irish people which the English 
 people enjoy. Any other "uniformity of legislation" is a mockery 
 and a cheat. 
 
 But let us see if there has not been, if there is not now, an 
 exceptional state of law in Ireland upon questions directly relating 
 to property in land. 
 
 From the close of the 16th century, there has been a poor law in 
 force in England. In Ireland, up to the year 1839, there was none. 
 We must allow our minds to dwell upon this statement before we can 
 realize all that it conveys. In England, when the confiscation of 
 the church and monastic property deprived the poor of the provision 
 which had been made for them by the piety of olden times, a Jaw was 
 enacted which gave to the labouring peasant in each parish a first 
 charge on all the property in that parish for an amount of wages 
 sufficient to support himself and his family in at least a moderate 
 degree of comfort. English labourers were actually receiving this 
 out of a rate levied on all property during that dismal period in 
 which we have been tracing the condition of the Irish labourer, 
 compelled to work as a bondsman for a pittance barely sufficient 
 to sustain life. To the people living as labourers on the soil it is 
 impossible to conceive a wider or more complete variation between 
 the laws and institutions of the two countries. The Irish and the 
 English labourers were living under systems of government as 
 different as those of England and Russia. No illustration, no 
 language, can convey an adequate idea of the difference between 
 the position of an English labourer, entitled to demand from the 
 guardians as many loaves of good wheaten bread as he and his 
 children, however numerous, could eat — and that of the miserable 
 Kerry cottier described by Lord Clare. 
 
 In the position of the landowner — in his relations and his obligations 
 to the people around him, the difference was nearly as great. It is 
 plain that if the poor law of Queen Elizabeth had been extended to 
 
186 IRISH AND ENGLISH POOR LAWS. 
 
 Ireland, the state of things which we have been describing never 
 could have existed. If it had been introduced even at a much later 
 period, the clearances of estates and the extermination of the people 
 never would and never could have occurred. The English land- 
 lord was bound to support every man born on his estate. It is to 
 this very difference between the law of England and Ireland, main- 
 tained throughout a period of 250 years, that we may trace many 
 of the difficulties which now surround the question of land tenure 
 in this country. But that difference was the necessary result of 
 the policy of conquest — it was an indispensable condition of carry- 
 ing it out. It would have been inconsistent with that whole policy 
 to tax the conqueror for the benefit of the conquered race. 
 
 Exceptional legislation for Ireland began with the reign of 
 Henry VIII. Up to that period it had been the invariable practice 
 of the parliament of the pale periodically to revise the statute roll 
 of the English legislature, and extend to Ireland " all good and 
 wholesome statutes lately made in the realm of England concern- 
 ing the common weal." * It was thus that all the earlier statutes 
 which secured the liberty of Englishmen were incorporated in 
 Irish laws. The last of these revisions was effected in a memorable 
 parliament, convened at Drogheda by Sir Thomas Poyning, the 
 deputy of Henry VII. 
 
 From that day to the present no similar extension of good and 
 wholesome English statutes to Ireland has ever been enacted. 
 Unhappily the great charter of the English labouring man was 
 adopted after the last of these assimilations. 
 
 For 250 years Irish property in land was exempt from an obliga- 
 tion which constituted a heavy burden upon all English estates. 
 It might almost be said that the exemption bequeathed to the 
 modern owners of the estates the accumulated obligation with the 
 gathering pauperism of these 250 years. In the meantime the 
 hard toil of the Irish peasant was making rich the land, from which 
 law gave him no right to support. If pauperism was gathering and 
 obligations accumulating, so was capital in the improvements of 
 the soil — and rents were swelled by the unrequited labour of the 
 serf. The rental of Ireland represents to a large extent the result, 
 not of capital expended, as Lord Dufferin supposes, by any present 
 owner or by any one whom his ownership represents, but of toil and 
 labour vested in the lands by the occupying serfs and cottiers — 
 by the industry of bondsmen for whom their masters never incurred 
 the English obligation of supporting them. 
 
 * It is a common mistake to suppose that this was done once for all by the act 
 passed in the parliament of Poyning. This was only the last of a series of acts passed 
 at intervals for the same purpose. A similar statute had been passed not thirty years 
 before, in the reign of Edward IV. The real Poyning's law was the law enacted at 
 the same time, which prevented the Irish Parliament from originating any bill of which 
 the heads had not been sanctioned by the Irish Privy Council, and declared that no 
 acts should be valid until the Royal assent was given under the great seal of England. 
 
 The latter provision continued law until the Union. 
 
AN EXCEPTIONAL EJECTMENT CODE. 187 
 
 When at last the voice of indignant humanity compelled the 
 establishment of a legal provision for the poor, the English prece- 
 dent was not followed. The Irish poor law lacked the great 
 principles of that precedent. It contained no law of settlement, and 
 it gave no right of relief. This may have been right, or it may 
 have been wrong; but it was highly exceptional legislation. It 
 was exceptional legislation which enabled the Irish landowners to 
 evade the burden of the poor law. Every Irish landlord who has 
 cleared his estate has done so with impunity, by virtue of excep- 
 tional legislation. If that exceptional legislation were repealed 
 to-morrow — if the property from which starving tenants have been 
 "cleared" or "weeded," were now placed under the English law, 
 and made liable for the support of those that were driven out, there 
 are prosperous estates of which the whole rental would not pay the 
 poor rate. There are landowners in Ireland, the most ready to 
 insist on English proprietary rights, and join Lord Rosse in pro- 
 testing against " exceptional legislation," who could scarcely retain 
 an acre of their estates if they were not protected by " exceptional 
 legislation" from the obligation to which every English owner of 
 property is subject. 
 
 But let us throw over the law of settlement, and let me ask — 
 Is Lord Rosse ready in all other respects, to apply the English 
 poor law to Ireland? Is he willing to consent to an equally 
 liberal administration of out-door relief? If upon this all-important, 
 this vital question, which regulates the relation between landed 
 property and the people, men will not, even now, adopt the English 
 system — it is vain to tell us that any " special pleading 1 ' is requisite 
 to show that landed property is, and has been, " one thing in Ireland 
 and quite another thing in England and Wales." 
 
 But to come still more strictly to the very subject with which 
 we are concerned, I ask is Lord Rosse prepared to give up the 
 benefit of the Irish statutes which give to the Irish landlord 
 facilities for ejectment utterly unknown to the English law? 
 facilities but for which the wholesale evictions of the last twenty years 
 would never have been carried into effect ? 
 
 This is a part of the subject which has not received all the atten- 
 tion it deserves. The Irish landlord has by the law of Ireland 
 facilities for crushing a defaulting tenant which are unknown in 
 England. I will endeavour in a few words to explain this even to 
 those unacquainted with the forms of legal procedure. 
 
 There is no abstract principle of law which entitles a landlord to 
 recover possession of his land as soon as his tenant fails in the 
 obligation to pay his rent. The rent is a debt for which the land- 
 lord has the same remedies as any o l Iier creditor has against the 
 goods and person of his debtor. He has, furthermore, the extra- 
 ordinary remedy of distress which gives him an advantage over other 
 creditors of his tenant. But the common law does not regard a 
 
188 AN EXCEPTIONAL EJECTMENT CODE. 
 
 default in paying rent as creating any forfeiture of the interest which 
 a tenant may have in his land. 
 
 The right to recover possession in such a case rested, and 
 still rests, in England, upon provisions in the lease or instru- 
 ment creating the tenant's estate, provisions reserving to the lessor 
 a right to resume possession if certain prescribed covenants are 
 not observed. The principle applies to other covenants beside 
 that of payment of the rent. The ejectment for nonpayment of 
 rent is simply that which is called in law " an entry for condition 
 broken." It rests entirely on the contract embodied in the original 
 grant. In the generality of leases there was retained the right to 
 recover the land on breach of the covenant to pay rent as reserved — 
 either absolutely or in the event of no distress being found upon the 
 land. But in any lease in which this provision was omitted the 
 landlord, while of course he had his remedies for recovery of the rent, 
 had no power to treat the tenant as forfeiting the estate. Even 
 in cases in which the provision was made it not unfrequently 
 happened that in the devolution of the title to estates the person 
 receiving the rent had not the power of enforcing the forfeiture. 
 
 And lastly the enforcement of the right of forfeiture could only 
 be resorted to after the fulfilment of preliminary ceremonials which at 
 all events interposed some difficulties in the landlord's way. The 
 common law of England, and the tribunals which administered it, 
 discouraged the forfeitures of tenants interests, and when a landlord 
 came to enforce one he was held strictly to every requisite of the 
 law. Forfeitures were odious in all English courts. 
 
 Irish legislation has exactly reversed these principles. Commencing 
 in the reign of Queen Anne contemporaneously with the Popery 
 laws, a number of acts of Parliament have been passed constituting 
 what is known in Irish jurisprudence as " the ejectment code," a code 
 to which Chief-Justice Pennefather applied the memorable declara- 
 tion that it was a code of law made solely for the benefit of the 
 landlord and against the interest of the tenant, and that it was upon 
 this principle that judges must administer and interpret it. The 
 whole object of that code was to expedite and facilitate the eviction 
 of the tenant — to get rid of every formality and difficulty by which 
 the good old wisdom of the common law obstructed the forfeiture of a 
 tenant's estate, and lastly to extend that forfeiture to cases in which, 
 according to the common law, it did not exist. Statute after statute 
 was passed for those purposes. If defects were discovered in the 
 old penal law they were met by a new one. As some latent 
 principle of the common law protection was discovered undestroyed, 
 a new and more stringent enactment mowed it down — until, as I 
 said, the whole principle of the common law was reversed, and to 
 make forfeiture easy has been judicially declared to be the duty of 
 judges in administering this code. 
 
 And all this while the English landlord has been left to his 
 
AN EXCEPTIONAL EJECTMENT CODE. 189 
 
 common law remedies. Of all these voluminous ejectment statutes 
 just one, and that an unused one, has found its way into English 
 legislation. So little influence has this act upon the proceeding 
 that it is actually not noticed in some of the best commentaries on 
 the English laws of landlord and tenant. In our Irish commentaries, 
 of all subjects connected with that law, the ejectment statutes have 
 occupied the largest space and the most prominent position. 
 
 The result of the law in the two countries is this: — In England 
 the landlord who resorts to the process of ejecting a tenant who 
 has not paid his rent can only do it according to the forms and the 
 principles of the common law. 
 
 In Ireland, by statutes passed for the special benefit of landlords, 
 every difficulty which the requisitions of that common law inter- 
 posed in the way of such an ejectment is swept away. In England 
 it is the duty of Judges to administer the law so as in every doubtful 
 case to protect the tenant. In Ireland it has been judicially declared 
 to be their duty in every doubtful case to facilitate his eviction. 
 
 But this is not all. The landlord seeking to evict a tenant was 
 formerly obliged to proceed in one of the superior courts of law. 
 This proceeding is attended with expense and with delay. In 
 Ireland immediately after the peace, and just at the time when I 
 have pointed out* that the cessation of war prices made it difficult 
 for landlords to enforce the exorbitant rents at which land had been 
 previously let, a statute was passedf enabling the landlord to evict 
 for non-payment of rent in the civil bill or county courts. This 
 power was extended to every case in which rent was due upon a 
 lease, whether the landlord had a right by law to recover possession 
 or not. By the combined operations of the ejectment statutes and 
 the cheap tribunal — the landlord was saved all difficulty, all ex- 
 pense, and all delay. The process of eviction was reduced to the 
 very minimum of time, of trouble, and of cost. 
 
 From 1816 to the present day the Irish landlords possessed these 
 extraordinary facilities for evicting tenants for non-payment of rent. 
 Whether these facilities be right or wrong they were, and are, 
 peculiar to Ireland. In 1856 a jurisdiction in such cases was con- 
 ferred on the county courts in England, J but a jurisdiction very 
 different from that which has for fifty years been exercised by the 
 Irish local tribunals. All this was not enough. Even under the 
 Irish " ejectment code," the eviction for non-payment of rent 
 did not extend to tenancies not created by writing. It did 
 not include the general class of yearly tenants in Ireland. 
 The tenant who held from year to year was in a position 
 in which he might at any time be dispossessed by a notice to 
 qujt, but that notice must expire with the termination of the year 
 
 * A rite page 90. f 56th George III., c. 88. 
 
 X 19th and 20th Victoria, c. 108, section 52. Any one reading this section will see 
 how totally different it is from the similar enactments in Ireland. 
 
190 AN EXCEPTIONAL EJECTMENT CODE. 
 
 of his tenancy, and be given six months before. If a tenant held 
 his farm from November to November, after the landlord let the 
 first of May pass in any year, he had no power of recovering posses- 
 sion of the farm for 18 months, even though in the interim the tenant 
 fell into arrears of his rent. 
 
 Here was a new difficulty. The highly penal ejectment code had 
 been framed for a tenantry holding under leases. The landowners 
 had ceased to give leases. They had preferred to have a dependent 
 tenantry holding as yearly tenants. It had been forgotten that in 
 creating such a tenantry they had exempted them from all that 
 carefully drawn machinery of Irish statute law which enabled the 
 landlord to pounce upon the tenant the moment he fell into default. 
 As usual the difficulty was met by a new penal legislation. A few 
 lines — indeed a few words, dexterously inserted in a statute for 
 regulating the civil bill courts extended the ejectment for nonpay- 
 ment of rent to tenancies from year to year. 
 
 So that in Irelund tenants holding from year to year, constituting 
 now the immense majority of Irish tenants, are subject to ejectment 
 for non-payment of rent — a process which in England cannot be 
 used against such tenants. That process is enforced under a penal 
 code against the tenantry, which is unknown in English law, and 
 it is enforced in a local tribunal and in a summary and expeditious 
 manner, while in England, the landlord seeking to get rid of such 
 a tenant, must first serve him with notice to quit, and then proceed 
 to evict him by the costly and dilatory process of an action in the 
 superior courts. 
 
 The result is that in England a recourse to ejectment is a rare 
 and exceptional resort. In Ireland it is an ordinary occurrence — 
 actually a part of the routine management of some estates — em- 
 ployed upon others, as Lord Duffierin tells us, as a pressing mode 
 of demanding the rent. 
 
 With all these advantages specially created for him by Irish 
 legislation — with principles, tribunals, and procedure — all newly 
 invented for the very purpose of enabling him at once to crush out 
 his defaulting tenant — an Irish landlord can hardly be heard 
 objecting to " exceptional" legislation. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say how unwise and mischievous was 
 this policy of speedy enforcement of landlord rights. As O'Connell 
 long since pointed out it destroyed the value of character to the 
 tenant. The more summary the remedy of the landlord the less the 
 necessity for care in the selection of his tenant — the greater the 
 temptation to hazard the acceptance of an offer of high rent from a 
 tenant whom the landowner had completely in his power. It was 
 not possible to conceive a code of law more calculated to destroy all 
 true relation of trust between landlord and tenant. It treated the 
 tenant as a knave, and this was to adopt a very effective means of 
 making him one. The law that made ejectment easy invited the 
 
OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 191 
 
 landlord to be a tyrant and the tenant to be a cheat. The ejectment 
 statutes were the penal code which oppressed the peasant in his land 
 tenure — they had their origin with the penal laws which oppressed 
 him in his religion. They almost kept pace with them in absurdity 
 and mischief. 
 
 If the subject were less solemn, it would be inexpressibly 
 ludicrous, to hear those who have in their favour an ejectment code 
 like this, a code based upon the supposition that the tenant is not to be 
 trusted even for one year — gravely tell us that everything is to be 
 settled between landlord and tenant by mutual confidence and good 
 will. 
 
 I trust, my Lord, you will forgive me for using the opportunity 
 which your Lordship's letter afforded me, not only to reply to your 
 own objections, but also to notice the publications of Lord Dufferin 
 and Lord Rosse. I have not professed to give a formal and full reply 
 to all that has been written by either of these noblemen ; still less 
 to have met in these pages all the objections that have been urged 
 by others against the proposal I have made. 
 
 In one respect I have perhaps gained the object which I proposed 
 to myself in the publication of that proposal. Discussion has been 
 at least excited upon its nature, and I may even hope that in that 
 discussion some persons have been led to regard the question of 
 Irish land tenure in a point of view in which it had not been 
 presented to them before. Subjects have certainly been considered 
 in public journals and writings in connexion with the Irish land 
 question, which, when I published the Plea for the Celtic Race, 
 I felt had been entirely lost sight of. 
 
 It may perhaps be my obstinacy or my presumption, but after 
 weighing as best I can all the objections that have been made, I 
 adhere with unabated confidence to the opinion I expressed, that it 
 is vain to expect a settlement of that question except by a measure 
 which will give to the occupier of the soil a tenure for a certain 
 period, without any power in the proprietor to interfere with 
 or prevent it. Nay, I feel satisfied that whatever attempts may 
 be made to settle that question by measures short of this will prove 
 failures, either in their proposal or in their execution, and that in 
 the end the very necessities and nature of the subject will compel 
 men either to abandon the effort or to adopt the principle for which 
 I have contended. 
 
 It would indeed be presumption to say that I have devised the 
 best mode of carrying that principle into effect. The provisions I 
 sketched were intended mainly as suggestions to be moulded and 
 re-formed by the judgment and experience of others. The details 
 of any measure prepared entirely by one mind must of necessity be 
 imperfect. 
 
192 LONG LEASES — THE "SATURDAY REVIEW." 
 
 Many of the objections which have been made against that mea- 
 sure have been founded on a misunderstanding of its nature. It 
 has been urged that it would revive the mischiefs which are stated 
 to have existed in the case of the long leases of former days, 
 and pictures have been drawn of lands held under such tenures, 
 at low rents, yet covered with pauper tenants, with a wretched 
 people and an ill-cultivated soil. Such an argument could not for a 
 moment impose upon any man who had given attention to the 
 proposal I have made. 
 
 The tenures I propose do not bear the remotest analogy to those 
 leases. The leases I suggest would be given to the occupier, and 
 the occupier alone. The leases to the middleman did nothing for the 
 occupying tenant, who was still subject to the exactions or the caprice 
 of the middleman, the only landlord he knew. Security of tenure 
 to the middleman was far from being security to the tiller of the soil. 
 I propose that every tiller of the soil should have a secure tenure. 
 Under these old leases the occupiers paid exorbitant rents. I pro- 
 pose to secure to every occupier that he shall only pay a moderate 
 one. Lastly, those who say that I would overrun the country with 
 the small tenements of former days, have overlooked the fact that 
 / make subdivision impossible except with the landlord's consent.* 
 
 * While Irishmen ought to acknowledge the fairness and candour which have gene- 
 rally of late marked the discussions of the Irish land question in the English press, it 
 is impossible to observe without surprise the ignorance of Irish subjects which some- 
 times marks the mode in which they are treated even in the best of the English 
 journals. Of course the dogmatism and confidence of assertion are exactly pro- 
 portioned to the ignorance displayed. 
 
 To take a very humble illustration — humble at least in respect of one of the parties. 
 A writer in the Saturday Revieiv thus conclusively disposes of the proposal to give a 
 sixty years' lease to the occupiers : — 
 
 " At present, the peasant has no means of vindicating his title, except by an armed 
 iusurrection ; and of this there is no immediate prospect. But if he could only get the 
 stand-point of a sixty years' lease, made obligatory by act of Parliament, he would trust 
 his sons' wits and the wits of his grandsons to keep the landlord out of possession till 
 the longest day that time should see. People in England, when they hear of a sixty 
 years' lease, feed their innocent minds on the green pastures of improved cultivation 
 which the term suggests. The Irish agitator, when he makes a sixty years leasehold 
 tenure his platform cry, and defies the Government to reject his appeal, knows as well 
 as his shouting followers that it means a possession which, once obtained, the Irish 
 peasant and his children would clutch as an indefeasible inheritance, and only part with 
 at the cost of life. We know too — for the report of the Devon Commission was not 
 written in vain — what a state of things leases for lives once brought about, and how far 
 they contributed to the grim terrors of the great famine." 
 
 I have pointed out the error involved in supposing that any proposal has 
 been made to give a sixty years' lease to the occupier, which could possibly revive the 
 evils of the middleman's lease. I pass by the somewhat singular argument that the 
 Irish tenant ought not to get such a lease, because at the end of that term his grandson 
 may possibly endeavour to find means of denying possession to the landlord of 
 that day — an argument, I admit, about as wise as most of the ravings of the calum- 
 niators of the Irish people. I very respectfully take exception to the description of 
 "the Irish agitator," "making a sixty years' lease his platform cry — defying the 
 Government to reject his appeal," and all the while surrounded " by shouting 
 followers," who know as well as himself how the grandson of the Irish tenant will 
 behave at the end of sixty years. 
 
 It so happens that no person but myself has ever made the proposal of a compulsory 
 
FIXITY OF TENURE AND ECONOMIC LAWS. 193 
 
 I am not expressing an opinion one way or another upon the 
 expediency of preventing the subdivision of farms. I have already 
 shown that in past times it has been in Ulster, not inconsistent 
 with prosperity — in Munster it has been rather the result than the 
 cause of the wretchedness of the occupiers. But I am pointing out 
 that the proposal I have made does not give, or tend to give, the 
 slightest facility for such subdivision. On the contrary it prohibits 
 it, because it makes the covenant against it a universal one, and it 
 gives to the landlord increased facility for enforcing it. 
 
 Were my proposal adopted it would not even prevent the con- 
 solidation of farms, if it be true that this consolidation is the 
 necessary result of the laws which regulate our present progress ; 
 or if the creation of manufacturing industry made it more profitable 
 for a tenant to devote himself to the pursuits of that industry 
 than to cultivate a small farm. Whenever, from any cause, it 
 became advantageous for an occupier to part with his holding, he 
 would sell it with his lease of 63 years, exactly as the Ulster tenant 
 now sells his tenant right. If the tendency of progress leads to 
 large farms, that holding would be purchased up by his neighbour, 
 who would add it to his own. Economic laws would still have full 
 and perfect play. Mens interest or necessities would lead or force 
 them to conform to these laws. The only difference would be that 
 these laws would exercise their proper and natural influence 
 uninterrupted by a vicious and unnatural state of things. If an 
 occupier abandoned his farm it would be because he found he could 
 do better than devote himself to its cultivation ; not as it is now, 
 because our system of land tenure prevents him from cultivating it 
 at all. Under that system economic laws are marred and disturbed 
 in their operation. The " malignant human agency" is interposed 
 by a land law which declares that the tenant shall not have freedom 
 in the cultivation of his lands. 
 
 Neither would my proposal prohibit, or even interfere with, emi- 
 gration, if emigration is, from circumstances, the best thing for the 
 Irish people. It would only give each tenant the free choice 
 between cultivating his farm at home and seeking his fortune in 
 another land. 
 
 I only ask that before the Irish race are driven from Ireland 
 they should be given the opportunity of making the most of the 
 
 lease for sixty years. The only suggestion at all resembling it was one thrown out 
 before the House of Commons Committee in the evidence of the Roman Catholic Bishop 
 of Cloyne, and he did not propose to make it compulsory. I have never in my life 
 attended a tenant-right meeting — I have never made a speech on the subject of 
 tenant-right from a platform or anywhere except in the House of Commons. The 
 proposal of a sixty years' lease has never been even adverted to by any one in any 
 platform speech. 
 
 The " Irish agitator, " the " platform cry," and "the shouting followers," are all 
 pure and not very lively fiction, without even the smallest foundation in fact. 
 
 This is not the spirit in which Irish questions ought to be discussed, especially in 
 journals to which Irishmen naturally look for better things. 
 
 N 
 
 \ 
 
194 INDUSTRY OF THE IRISH PEASANT. 
 
 Irish soil ; of trying whether the industry of Irishmen cannot raise 
 from it enough to support us all in comfort. 
 
 If it be true, as Lord DufFerin states in one of his letters, that 
 the circumstances of modern farming have brought about " a 
 desire on the part of the owner and occupier to increase the size of 
 existing holdings," I quite agree with him that " when such a 
 feeling exists in the minds of the parties chiefly interested, the 
 tendency will not be averted by legislation" — assuming always that 
 the tendency is really the result of the laws of human progress, which 
 legislation is powerless to control. If the tendency is created by 
 some human influence, then legislation may remove that influence, 
 and leave the laws of progress to their unimpeded action. In 
 Ireland, I repeat, the laws which enable landlords to prohibit the 
 industry of the tenants prevent the free operation of these laws. 
 I surely propose nothing that is even an attempt to control that 
 operation. If Lord DufFerin be right, although every tenant in 
 Ireland held by a lease for 60 years, the peaceful operation of 
 economic laws would infallibly bring about the consolidation of 
 farms. At present that consolidation is to be traced, not to these 
 laws of progress, but to the vicious system which refuses to every 
 tenant farmer the opportunity of being industrious. 
 
 I have already quoted some passages from the evidence of 
 Bishop Keane to show how this want of security for improvements 
 is driving the people out of the country, and so directly forcing the 
 consolidation of farms. Let me quote one more to prove how 
 it operates in preventing improvements on the part of those who 
 remain : — 
 
 " I will mention," he said, " another case — that of a parishioner of my 
 own. He had a farm of about 120 acres, 90 acres of which were under 
 cultivation, and producing fair crops, considering the state of the country. 
 He had about 30 acres of cut out bog ; that is, waste. I said to him — 
 i Why do you not endeavour to improve your farm ? You could make it 
 valuable for yourself and your family.' . . . His answer was — ' If I 
 were sure that I could calculate on the fruits of my own industry I 
 would set about it at once ; but being uncertain whether I may not be 
 holding out an invitation to the landlord to turn me out, not only of that 
 portion of the farm, but also of the other portion, I will leave the farm as 
 it is.'"* 
 
 " The second case is the case of a man who took a farm of land on 
 condition of improving it. The landlord said — ' I will give you that side 
 of the hill on the condition that you improve it.' I pass by that place 
 four or six times every year regularly, and I see there crops where 
 formerly there was nothing but barrenness. The man got the farm on con- 
 dition of improving it. He was a poor man, with no capital except his strong 
 
 * Bishop Keane. Question 3,353. 
 
ARTHUR YOUNG AND IRISH INDUSTRY. 195 
 
 arms, stout heaji, and willing mind ; and the result is that he has beautiful 
 crops now where there was nothing bat barrenness and sterility before."* 
 
 Again he illustrates the question by an instance of four tenants, 
 who were able to obtain a lease from one of the abused middlemen 
 who held himself by a long tenure. These leases were taken in the 
 year 1837 — they were of land " on the skirt of the brown, barren 
 mountain, growing nothing but heath and coarse grass." Of one of 
 these tenants he tells us — 
 
 " The first two years you may suppose how valueless the land was, 
 when I tell you that for that period he was to pay no rent at all. There 
 was not a road within a mile of the place. He took lime by the high 
 road 10, 12, or 14 miles — he was obliged to take it then on his back, and on 
 the backs of his children for the remainder of the distance. On the slope 
 of 20 acres there was neither house, nor fence, nor green field . . in 
 the course of 26 years that man, to my certain knowledge, was able to 
 rear his family in comfort. He was able to convert that very slope of 
 20 acres into the state in which it now is, producing green crops, corn 
 crops, and anything he likes to put into the ground. He has fenced it, 
 he has built a house upon it ; he has gone to incredible labour in taking 
 out stones that were in his way ; and the result is, that it is. now quite a 
 pleasure to look at his farm."f 
 
 I cannot quote such evidence as this without remembering that 
 there is a strange sameness in the story of the hardworking industry 
 of the Irish peasant as there is in that of the discouragement and 
 oppression which has kept him down. Exactly one hundred years 
 have passed since an instance almost exactly similar came under the 
 notice of Arthur Young. Sir William Osborne was then the 
 owner of a property in Tipperary, residing within two or three 
 miles of Clonmel. At the time when the Levellers or White Boys 
 were rife, Sir William "met with a manly-looking fellow of forty, 
 followed by a wife and six children, who begged." In reply to 
 remonstrances upon the scandal of begging, he said he could get no 
 work. " Follow me," said the baronet, " and I will give you some." 
 " He gave him five acres of a heathy mountain, built him a cabin, 
 and lent him £4 to stock his ground." " The fellow flourished, he 
 went on gradually, repaid the £4, and presently became a happy 
 little cottar." Twelve years afterwards, when Young wrote, he 
 was able to say — " He has now twelve acres under cultivation, and a 
 stock in trade worth at least £80." 
 
 Twenty other persons made similar applications, and were settled 
 in the same way. " Their industry," writes this English traveller, 
 
 " HAS NO BOUNDS, NOR IS THE DAY LONG ENOUGH FOR THE 
 REVOLUTION OF THEIR INCESSANT LABOUR." 
 
 * Bishop Keane. Question 3,366. 
 T Bishop Keane. Question 3,354. 
 
196 SIR WILLIAM OSBORNE'S WHITEBOYS. 
 
 Yet these are the people of whom Lord Dufferin tell us that if 
 we give them leases for a long tenure and at a moderate rent, they 
 will not be able to hold them, if we only add the un- Irish 
 conditions, which would oblige them to pay their rents, and be 
 industrious upon their farms. 
 
 Sir William Osborne's tenants had been actually engaged in the 
 insurrectionary movements of that day. 
 
 Arthur Young continues : — 
 
 " It shows that the villainy of the greatest miscreants is all situation 
 and circumstance : employ, don't hang them. Let it not be in the 
 slavery of the cottar system, in which industry never meets its reward ; 
 
 but BY GIVING- PROPERTY TEACH THE VALUE OP IT ; BY GIVING THEM 
 THE FRUIT OF THEIR LABOUR TEACH THEM TO BE LABORIOUS. All this 
 
 Sir William Osborne has done, and done it with effect, and there 
 probably is not an hon ester set of families in the county than those which 
 he has formed from the refuse of the White Boys."* 
 
 This industry was not exceptional. Wherever Young found the 
 Irish peasant encouraged, there he found him toiling in an industry 
 which, he admits, accomplished results which no Englishman could 
 have produced. 
 
 " In the mountainous districts I saw instances of greater industry than 
 in any other parts of Ireland. Little occupiers who can get leases of a 
 mountain-side, make exertions in improvements which, though far enough 
 from being complete or accurate, yet prove clearly what effects encourage- 
 ment would have upon them." 
 
 It is not surprising that he should say of this class of Irish 
 tenants : — 
 
 " It is, from the whole of the evidence, plain that they are, in no 
 common degree, masters of the art of overcoming difficulties by patience 
 and contrivance. . . . Give the farmer of twenty acres in England 
 no more capital than his brother in Ireland, and I will venture to say he 
 will be much poorer, for he will be utterly unable to go on at all." 
 
 I return to the proofs of the same spirit of enterprise, and the 
 same industry existing in the peasants of our own day supplied to 
 us in the evidence of Dr. Keane. 
 
 The value of evidence like this is, as I have before observed, that 
 it does not consist of opinion or speculation, it is testimony as to 
 matter of fact. These instances, striking as they are, are but 
 samples and illustrations of the general conditions of Irisb life. I 
 will ask of any one to read over carefully these three brief narratives 
 of actual fact, and then ask himself the question — does our present 
 system of land tenure discourage and prevent improvements which 
 under a system that gave security would certainly be made ? 
 
 * Arthur Young's Tour t Yo\, ii., p. 173. 
 
THE SERFS ARE IDLE BECAUSE INSECURE. 197 
 
 Many and many a man, with the " capital of a willing mind, a 
 strong arm, and a stout heart," is pining hopelessly in the workhouse, 
 or wandering a reluctant exile from his home. There is many a 
 man who, rather than leave the old country, would carry the lime 
 upon his back up the weary hill-side to build himself and his chil- 
 dren a home — many a one who would gladly toil in cheerful 
 industry upon " the skirt of the brown and barren mountain," and 
 whose toil would cover the wild upland with luxurious crops. 
 
 There is the land lying waste — there is the labourer, the real 
 capitalist, driven from his country, or perishing in the pauper's 
 home. Cannot we see where is the malignant " human agency" 
 which blights our noble country with " perennial desolation." 
 
 But I use this evidence for one purpose, and for one only. 
 Is there a man in the enjoyment of his natural senses that 
 can doubt the fact, that insecurity of tenure prevents improvement 
 on the soil? 
 
 Of what is that insecurity of tenure the result ? Of no natural law 
 of human progress, but of the fact that territorial arrangements, 
 the effect of the confiscations of conquest, have vested in a small 
 number of proprietors the dominion over the Irish soil, and that this 
 dominion is so exercised — by a combination among these proprietors, 
 arising from the social and political antagonism of classes, and 
 creeds, and races — so as to deny to the occupier the security which 
 is the only condition on which he can improve. 
 
 Then, if the industry of the tenant be not free — if human agency 
 drives him from the waste he would reclaim, and human authority 
 tells him that on his own farm it is " irregular" to improve, it is 
 vain and trifling, it is " darkening counsel by words without know- 
 ledge" to talk of economic laws as applicable to a state of things in 
 which the freedom of human industry, which is the essential element 
 of these laws, is wanting. 
 
 Let no one call this " declamation." It is strict and stern rea- 
 soning. We have but one fact upon which we must make up our 
 mind. Does the present system of land tenure prevent the occupier 
 from expending his industry on the soil ? All that we know of 
 human nature tells us that it must. All the principles of economic 
 science — principles that are nothing more than formularies, gene- 
 ralizing the inferences to be drawn from the motives of industrial 
 and commercial action — teach us that it must. Evidence, clear, con- 
 clusive, and overwhelming, establishes that it has done, that at this 
 hour it is doing, so. All rude and untutored common sense — all 
 the educated common sense, which men call science — all the teach- 
 ings of books, all the lessons of the past, all observation of the 
 present, coucur in the testimony — that by maintaining precariousness 
 of tenure Ave are putting a check upon industry, and preventing 
 the occupiers from making improvements which, had they security 
 for their holdings, they would effect upon the soil. 
 
198 OBJECTIONS OF THE "EDINDURGH REVIEW." 
 
 If this cardinal fact in all reasoning on the Irish land question 
 be established, it meets us in all the varying circumstances under 
 which that question can be presented to our mind. 
 
 I have shown how it meets us in the attempt to attribute to the 
 natural laws of human progress those strange phenomena of our 
 social state which perplex every one who attempts to solve the 
 problem of that state by any application of these laws. 
 
 Are we to be told that Ireland is over peopled while we deliberately 
 maintain and enforce a system which prohibits the population from 
 raising all they can from the resources which a merciful Creator has 
 given us in the soil? 
 
 Can we listen to any argument which tells us that our poverty 
 is the inevitable result of our want of manufacturing industry while 
 we permit a vicious system of land tenure to deprive our people of 
 the opportunity of employing their industry upon their own land ? 
 
 Are we to turn in senseless resentment to rend England for 
 having put down our woollen manufacture a century ago, while 
 before our own eyes and in our own day — the great manufacturing 
 industry of the country — the industry that creates produce from 
 the soil, the industry that tills the ground, is blighted and blasted 
 by unwise and pernicious land laws ; and while those who ought 
 to live by that industry are brought to beggary and ruin? There 
 is no magic in words. Never did the suppression of the woollen 
 trade more directly throw out of employment the combers and 
 weavers of wool, than does the system of land tenure which 
 prohibits agricultural industry throw out of employment the farmer 
 and the agricultural labourer who depend upon that industry for 
 their support. 
 
 And lastly, this fact meets us in the great and vital question — Is 
 it just to drive away the Irish — to drive them away without giving 
 them a chance of making all they can on their own land ? Is it just 
 or right to drive away such men as the narratives of Bishop Keane 
 describe? to deny to them the privilege of toiling on the barren 
 mountain side, in order that proprietors may retain their influence 
 or dominion, and that the lands of Ireland may be preserved for 
 the holders of great consolidated farms, who are in " the good 
 time coming" — the millenial blessedness of landlords — to occupy the 
 places of the humble and industrious tenants that are remorselessly 
 to be swept away. 
 
 Anxious as I am to meet every fair objection to the proposal I 
 have made, no time at my command would enable me to reply to 
 all the criticisms I have received. There are some on which I would 
 wish to offer a few words of comment. 
 
 It has been said, and truly, that my proposal will not restore the 
 tenants who have been cruelly evicted within the last twenty years, 
 and that therefore I am inflicting a penalty upon the landlords who 
 have exercised their rights in a humane and forbearing spirit, while 
 
THE OWNERS RIGHT TO TILL HIS OWN LAND. 199 
 
 I would leave those who have acted harshly to enjoy a kind of pre- 
 mium in the comparative freedom which they would have in the 
 management of their estates.* No human legislation, it is true, can 
 undo the cruelty and the injustice which have been inflicted upon 
 the Irish people. But this surely forms no valid reason why we 
 are not to prevent them in future. Such an argument is a bar 
 against all improvement. The instances are rare in which we can 
 remedy the wrongs of the past. It is not always possible to de- 
 prive the perpetrators of the wrongs of the advantages they have 
 gained. But legislation must look only to the future. And after 
 all, if we be compelled to leave undisturbed the fruits of past, 
 while we prevent the possibility of future injustice, I am not sure 
 that we can very deeply sympathise with the complaint of the man 
 whose grievance is that he did not rob in time. 
 
 I am, however, far from admitting that such a measure as I sug- 
 gest is a penalty upon any landlord. I believe that were it passed 
 there is not a landlord in the country who in four years would not 
 be far better off than he is now. We must not be deterred from 
 this measure of good to all by the argument that the men who have 
 acted worst will profit most. That argument is not true. The man 
 who has evicted his tenants unless in the rare instances in which he 
 has kept his land unlet, would be subject to the law I propose 
 equally with the man who has permitted his tenants to remain 
 upon his estate. Even when he had his estate in his own hands he 
 would be bound not to let his land except upon the terms of the 
 new law. 
 
 A more specious objection, urged by the same authority, is that 
 I would deprive proprietors " of the first great right of an owner — 
 that of tilling his own land himself." 
 
 It is important in matters of this kind that we should be accurate 
 even in words. I do not propose to deprive any proprietor of " the 
 right of tilling his own land himself." That of which I do deprive 
 him is the right of arbitrarily evicting the present occupier for the 
 purpose of tilling the land himself. As to the latter right there are 
 cases in which it would be impossible to deny the power and even the 
 duty of interference. Suppose a combination of all the proprietors 
 to lay down their lands in grass and drive out the whole people — 
 no one, I apprehend, will say that against such a project of exter- 
 mination Government ought not to interfere ; or if Government 
 failed, that the people should not protect themselves. For such an 
 extermination the plea would in vain be urged that the landowner 
 were only exercising the first great right of an owner, that of 
 " farming his land himself." 
 
 In the criticism on which I am commenting even its able and 
 candid author falls into a fallacy which pervades almost all the 
 
 * Edinburgh Review, January, 1867. 
 
200 OBJECTIONS OF THE 
 
 reasoning of those who oppose legislation on the Irish land question . 
 He does not sufficiently attend to the distinction between acts which 
 are the isolated doings of individuals and acts which are the 
 habitual and general practises of large classes of men. The latter 
 may frequently be the proper subject of legislative interference 
 where the former would not. The distinction is that which per- 
 vades all jurisprudence, even that of our criminal law Acts which 
 are regarded as innocent, or at least not the object of punishment 
 when done by an individual acting singly, are high misdemeanours 
 when done in combination with others. Combination is power. 
 The combination of many individuals is, in effect, the enacting of a 
 law. And when a large class all pursue the same conduct because 
 they are guided by the same interest and the same passions, they are 
 acting in combination. Indeed, the refusal of each landowner to grant 
 leases can scarcely, in any instance, be said to be his own solitary 
 act. He often pursues that course in deference to the opinions and 
 prejudices of his order. In every instance he is supported by them. 
 Legislation, as well as jurisprudence must recognize the distinction. 
 Evil things that are only the isolated offences of individuals must 
 often be left to the correction of general opinion and individual 
 conscience. But when these evil things become the habits of whole 
 classes they are public mischiefs, and the legislative power must 
 interfere to put them down. These are principles of common appli- 
 cation, and they are the principles upon which legislation upon the 
 Irish land question must rest. One landowner might not be pre- 
 vented from turning his estate into a desert — all the landowners in 
 the country could not be indulged in a similar caprice. One land- 
 owner may refuse leases without justifying an Act of Parliament — 
 when all combine to refuse them the Legislature must interpose. 
 
 But can it really be said even of an owner of a district — of an estate, 
 suppose of 20,000 acres, in a thickly populated country — that he has 
 a right to pull down villages, to level all human habitations, and to 
 till or pasture that 20,000 acres himself ? Has anything like this 
 ever been done in England since the clearance of Hampshire for 
 the New Forest ? On a smaller scale it has been attempted, and it 
 has been punished. But the very assertion of such a right drives 
 us back to the origin of property in land. Fortunately, in Ireland, 
 that origin is not lost in the obscurity of remote and unknown days. 
 All proprietary right in Ireland can be traced to the time when 
 " waste and unreformed countries" became vested in the English 
 Crown. No Irish proprietor ever obtained from that Crown a right 
 to till the land himself. Such a right was distinctly and positively 
 withheld from him — as to all but a specified portion of his grant. 
 For the rest his only right was to receive rent from " estated" 
 tenants whom he was bound to place upon the land. 
 
 So far from admitting this to be "the first great right of an 
 owner," I would say that in the case of the monopoly of great 
 
SIR THOMAS MORE ON CLEARANCES. 201 
 
 tracts of country by one proprietor, he has not and he never had 
 such a right. In Ireland the very terms of every grant exclude it. 
 Even in England the condition of all grants was to have men ready 
 for the service of the lord when required. In no country in Europe 
 has the land been given to a few with a right to exclude the people. 
 And plausible, nay even true as this statement of an owner's rights 
 may be in individual cases, it is not true when it is applied to the 
 great mass of property throughout the kingdom. The owners of 
 land as a class have not the right to till their own land and sweep 
 from its surface the people. The question is entirely one of degree — 
 where interference with such privileges should commence? I 
 answer as before, whenever the claims of the owners to till their 
 own lands amounts to a public mischief and a public wrong. 
 
 I may observe, in passing, that the measure I have suggested was 
 framed with the most scrupulous care to preserve to the personal 
 occupation of the landlord every portion of his estate which had 
 been usually tilled by the owners of that estate. It is exactly in 
 conformity with the policy of James I. and Sir John Davies, to 
 which I have already referred. It leaves in his own hands all that 
 he has ever held as demesne land, and it confirms the tenants in 
 the possession of the rest. It takes away from him the power of 
 turning out people for the purpose of extending his demesne — of 
 " adding field to field" until for the peasantry " there should be 
 no place." This, so far from being an ancient right of property, is 
 made a crime by many old statutes. Acts against depopulation 
 were passed by the Parliaments of the Plantagenets and the 
 Tudors ; very " strong" ones are to be found on the statute book of 
 Henry VIII. 
 
 I cannot forbear from quoting from the works of Sir Thomas 
 More, a description of " a clearance," which would almost impress us 
 with the belief that he had an Irish eviction present, in prophecy, 
 to his mind — 
 
 " Therefore it is that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very 
 plague of his native country, may compass about and enclose many thou- 
 sand acres within one pale or hedge — the husbandmen he thrust out of 
 their own ; or else either by covin or fraud, or violent oppressions, they 
 be put beside it, or by wrongs and injuries they be compelled to sell all. 
 By one means, therefore, or other, either by hook or by crook, they 
 must needs depart away — poor, silly, wretched souls — men, women, 
 husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their 
 young babes, and the whole household — small in substance but rich in 
 numbers — as husbandry requires many hands. Away they trudge out 
 of their known and accustomed homes, finding no place to rest in. All 
 the household stuff, which is very little, worth nothing, it might well 
 abide the sale. Yet, being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to 
 sell it as a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad, 
 and that be spent, what can they do but go steal, and then justly perdue, 
 be hanged ; or else go about a-begging, and then also be cast into 
 
202 HOW DErOPULATORS FARED IN OLDEN TIMES. 
 
 prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not, whom no 
 man will set to work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves 
 thereto." 
 
 It was probably under the influence of such feelings that the 
 Chancellor of Henry VIII. drew up some of the statutes on the 
 subject of depopulation which were passed in the reign of that 
 King. 
 
 I have frequently thought it strange how readily the advocates 
 of the oppressions of power refer to the old principles of the law 
 and the constitution, never remembering how they protected and 
 vindicated popular right. No one who has read the statutes against 
 " depopulators" can doubt that if, under the Plantagenets the English 
 landowners had ventured on a third of the extermination of which 
 Irish landlords in our time have been guilty, the Parliament of that 
 day would not have scrupled much about such rights of property as 
 are now claimed, or hesitated to discover rather violent means of 
 reminding the " depopulators" of their duty to their country and 
 their king. The remedy of some of the earlier statutes was a very 
 simple one. The landowners who had cleared their estates and 
 pulled down villages were compelled, by a very summary process, 
 to rebuild the villages and replace in them the people they had 
 turned out. 
 
 With the enactment of the poor law of Queen Elizabeth the 
 English clearances came to an end. Singular is the fatality which 
 seems to attend all legislation for this country. In England the 
 institution of a legal provision for the poor was the most effectual 
 means of stopping extermination. In Ireland it led to the driving 
 of thousands and tens of thousands from their homes. 
 
 The same high authority upon which I have been commenting, 
 suggests another objection. Speaking of the evictions, the writer 
 in the last number of the Edinburgh Review, asks : — 
 
 "Is it equally certain that any alteration of the land laws, even 
 one giving fixity of tenure at a reserved rent, would have kept all these 
 people at home ? The returns of evictions lately moved for by the Earl 
 of Belmore, show, that in the last six years, there have been in all 
 Ireland, 37,164 ejectments. Of these two-thirds were for non-payment 
 of rent. Now, as payment of rent is included amongst the obligations 
 to which, under Mr. Butt's scheme, a tenant would be subjected, it is 
 not clear that fixity of tenure on those terms would have saved those 
 25,000 poor ruined people from eviction." 
 
 Even to raise the question, we ought to know how many of these 
 evictions were for exorbitant rents. 
 
 But I must observe, in the first place, that by far the greater num- 
 ber of these ejectments were brought against yearly tenants. Nearly 
 
IRISH EJECTMENTS FOR NON-PAYMENT OF RENT. 203 
 
 all the ejectments for non-payment of rent are so. I have already 
 pointed out that such an ejectment is wholly unknown in England, 
 and is a novelty even in Irish law.* An ejectment for non-payment 
 of rent is adopted as the quickest mode of getting rid of a yearly 
 tenant instead of waiting for the slow process of notice to quit. 
 Every tenant who is thus evicted must, it is true, owe a year's 
 rent ; but it does not at all follow that he might not find means of 
 paying the rent, and so stopping the ejectment, if he had any 
 interest which it was worth his while to retain. Once his landlord 
 had determined to get rid of him, paying up his rent would only 
 put off the evil day. Any inferences drawn from ejectments for 
 non-payment of rent against yearly tenants are liable to many ele- 
 ments of uncertainty. So far as they rest on any analogy with 
 English ejectments, they are only calculated to mislead. It does 
 not at all follow in case of any one of these evicted tenants that he 
 was not in a position to protect his interest by paying up his rent, 
 if he had any interest to protect. 
 
 But apart from this, and even if we could suppose that these eject- 
 ments represent the evictions of tenants who were hopeless defaul- 
 ters, this passage involves, I must say, the very same fallacy into 
 which Lord Dufferin has fallen. It assumes that those who have 
 been unable to pay their rent under the present system would 
 be equally unable to pay it under a system which, by conferring on 
 them fixity of tenure would give them security for the application 
 of their industry to their farms. But if the argument for fixity of 
 tenure be worth anything, it is this — that it would encourage and 
 stimulate the industry of the tenant — that he would, under its 
 encouragement create, by improvements, a property in his farm. 
 It is impossible to argue from the default of the miserable 
 serf, who has no field for his industry, that the same default would 
 occur when you had elevated him to the condition of an inde- 
 pendent and therefore industrious tenant. Punctuality in his rent 
 would become his habit when you had given him a property which 
 that punctuality would preserve. Every perch of ground he 
 reclaimed would be an additional security for the regular payment 
 of his rent. To assert that evictions for non-payment of rent 
 would be as frequent with fixity of tenure as they are now is only 
 to say, in other words, that fixity of tenure would have no effect 
 in improving the condition, elevating the habits, or stimulating the 
 industry of the occupier of the soil. 
 
 This brings me at once to Lord Dufferin's letter in The Times of 
 the 1st of February — a letter in which he distinctly criticises the plan 
 
 * Ante page 189. 
 
204 LORD DUFFERIN ON THE "PLEA FOR THE CELTIC RACE." 
 
 I have proposed. Before I saw this letter the greater portion of 
 these pages were actually in print. 
 
 Lord Dufferin classes that plan among proposals which " involve 
 the transfer of a large amount of proprietary rights from the land- 
 lord to the tenant." 
 
 " I do not deny," he says, " the right of the State to deal in a very 
 peremptory manner with private property of all kinds, and especially with 
 landed property ; but, in assuming this right, it must be made clear that 
 its exercise will be of indisputable benefit to the community at large, and 
 the individual to whose prejudice it is enforced must be compensated 
 at the public expense to the full amount of the injury he sustains. 
 The safety of a nation may depend upon the security of an arsenal, and 
 that of the arsenal on the conversion of a hovel into a redoubt ; yet the 
 engineer in command dare no more remove a brick from the obnoxious 
 premises without the sanction of an Act of Parliament, and an elaborate 
 valuation, than he dare blow up St. Paul's. But considerations such 
 as these the authors of the various schemes 'for dealing vigorously 
 with the Irish landlords' deem beneath their notice. The most notable 
 plan is one lately promulgated by Mr. Butt." 
 
 I certainly have not deemed considerations like these beneath 
 my notice. I venture to say that any one who has read the tract 
 on Land Tenure will find them very fully discussed. I can only 
 say, that whether successfully or not, I at least elaborately attempted 
 to show that all established principles of jurisprudence justified 
 the interference I proposed. The arguments by which I attempted 
 to prove this may be weak or they may be foolish, but I scarcely 
 think they are answered by an assertion that I deemed the consi- 
 derations arising out of the rights of property beneath my notice. 
 
 The argument of Lord Dufferin — if it be intended as one — has the 
 disadvantage of leaving us in doubt as to which of two grounds it 
 takes. It may mean that the passing of such a measure as I propose 
 would entitle the landlord to receive compensation for the depreciated 
 value of his estate; or it may mean that the same principles of 
 respect for private right which in other cases compel us to give 
 compensation when we take away property, ought in this instance 
 to prevent us interfering at all. 
 
 In either view I do not admit the argument to be well founded. 
 I have already stated that if proprietary rights in Ireland really 
 interposed any obstacle to giving fixity of tenure, the cheapest ex- 
 penditure of money which England ever made would be that which 
 would purchase them all up.* But let us just suppose a landlord 
 making a claim for compensation because he had been compelled 
 by law to give his tenants leases at the fair letting value of then- 
 farms. Of what pecuniary benefit is he deprived? What injury 
 inflicted on him are a jury to estimate ? What right is 
 
 * Land Tenure, pp. 75, 76. 
 
CLAIM FOR COMPENSATION. 205 
 
 taken away from him, the value of which they are to ap- 
 praise ? In what honest way can any landowner make money of 
 the dependence and the serfdom of his tenants ? Is he to claim 
 compensation for the loss of the power of appropriating the fruits of 
 their industry ? — of exacting extortionate rents ? — of driving out his 
 tenants while they are punctual and industrious? Could a jury be 
 empannelled in any county in Ireland which would award to any 
 landlord one shilling compensation for the loss of these rights ? 
 
 The admitted right of the public is to take away or injure any 
 man's property when public good demands, paying him such com- 
 pensation or purchase as the verdict of a jury would award. 
 
 If Lord Dufferin's property were taken for a railway to-morrow 
 what compensation is he entitled to receive? Exactly the selling 
 value of his land. If it had been taken for public purposes, under 
 any of these acts which at various times authorized the taking of 
 property for a term of years at a fixed rent, what would he receive ? — 
 a rent fixed by the letting value of the land at the time that it was 
 taken. If public purposes require it the State has a right to take 
 his property, paying his present selling value. If public interests 
 demand it, the State has a right to take his property on a lease for 
 a term of years, fixing the rent at that which any one would now 
 contract to pay in such a lease. Does not a compulsory sale at 
 the present price of the property deprive the landlord of any ad- 
 vantage to be derived from the future contingent increase in the 
 value or the prices of the soil ? Is a compulsory lease at a given 
 rent a greater interference with the rights of property than a com- 
 pulsory sale at a given price ? 
 
 It is, of course, another and a different question, whether this 
 principle can be fairly applicable to a measure such as I propose. 
 I admit at once that it is one thing to force a lease for a barrack or 
 a gaol and another thing to force a lease for an occupying tenant. 
 But Lord Dufferin it is who points out the analogy. If the principle 
 be an accurate one, I do all that ever the Legislature feels itself 
 bound to do in such cases. 
 
 I might therefore content myself with denying that any compensa- 
 tion is required for the Irish landlord. But the measure which I 
 propose so far from injuring would benefit him. Were such an 
 act to pass there is not a proprietor in Ireland whose estate would 
 not be increased in value. 
 
 I might ask if any one has ever yet heard of compensation being 
 given to men for a legislation which prohibited men using their 
 property in such a manner as to work public mischief and wrong. 
 In such cases the question is not one of taking property; it 
 is one of regulating its use. The principles which govern com- 
 pensation have no relation to the subject. The fallacy lies in 
 supposing that when you control the exercise of proprietary 
 rights in land you more or less take the land from its owner. 
 
206 LORD DUFFERIN OX THE " PLEA FOR THE CELTIC RACE. 
 
 Such a fallacy never could exist for a moment undetected if 
 it were not that real property is something tangible and im- 
 movable. But you no more take away land from the landlord 
 when you prohibit him letting it at extortionate rents or on pre- 
 carious tenures, than the usury laws took away the money of the 
 banker when they restricted him in the terms of his loan. It is 
 needless to refer to the numerous instances of regulation in which 
 property embarked in various pursuits — in factories, in passenger 
 ships, in furnaces, in many other employments — has been subjected 
 to laws imposing conditions, sometimes very onerous ones, upon 
 its use. To cases like these the principles which regulate com- 
 pensation have no application. 
 
 And once more I ask are we to overlook the fact that Irish 
 estates were granted subject to the express condition of placing on 
 them " estated tenants ?" — that every precarious tenure that 
 exists on an Irish, at all events on an Ulster estate is a violation 
 of the compact still subsisting, by which the owner of that estate 
 is bound to the nation and the Crown? 
 
 I content myself by repeating, that as a question of political 
 jurisprudence, no clearer case was ever made out than that which 
 justifies, by all the principles of the social compact, the regulation 
 of Irish property which I suggest. 
 
 The next objection made by Lord Dufferin is founded on a 
 state of things actually existing on his own estate. 
 
 He instances a case in which he is the owner of a strip of land 
 adjoining Belfast Lough — a strip suitable for villas, " which may 
 eventually become a favourite resort of the inhabitants of Belfast."' 
 It is now in the hands of tenants holding by beneficial leases, but 
 about soon to expire : — 
 
 " "We will suppose that Mr. Butt's Bill passes ; the accidental occupants 
 of this property become tenants for an additional term of 63 years ; I am 
 unexpectedly precluded from adding some thousands to my rent-roll, and 
 a project which would have diffused the wealth of a rich community over 
 a large agricultural area is indefinitely postponed — unless, indeed, I 
 choose to buy back my own property, at a price, probably, not much 
 lower than the original value of the fee simple, from tenants who have 
 neither legal nor equitable claims against me." 
 
 It appears to me that precisely the same curtailment of the land- 
 lord's right exists wherever the Ulster custom of tenant right is 
 recognized. 
 
 I do not admit that the adoption of my measure would preclude 
 Lord Dufferin from adding to his rental. He appears to assume 
 that the new rent to be paid would be the same as the old. In 
 fixing the rent to be paid for the term of 63 years, the letting value 
 to be reserved on such a lease must obviously include the advan- 
 tages of site and position which would raise the letting price in the 
 
LORD DUFFERIN'S VILLA SITES. 207 
 
 market. If they are such as would not do this they are mere 
 speculative advantages, incapable of appreciation. 
 
 What would become of them if the very same property were 
 taken for a railway, in which an arbitrator would be sworn to give 
 the proprietor the fair selling value of the land, and no more ? 
 
 In a lease to be granted under the measure I propose, I actually 
 reserved to the landlord the benefit of a rise in the value of the 
 land at a future time from such incidental and extrinsic causes. 
 I have admitted that the details I suggest may be imperfect, and 
 even faulty. I meant to secure this — that when his land was 
 demised for 63 years, there should be reserved to the landlord the 
 fair rent which ought to be paid for the land on such a lease, 
 taking into account all its advantages, whether of fertility or 
 situation ; and I meant further, if unforeseen circumstances made 
 that situation a more valuable one, to secure to the landlord, as far as 
 it could be possibly accomplished, a proportionally increased rent. 
 
 If the land were to be subdivided in building plots, I left to the 
 landlord the full power of insisting on a share in the increased 
 value. I proposed to prohibit subdivision without his consent. 
 
 But supposing even that, in instances like this — some scheme of 
 improvement of an enterprising landlord might be impeded — the 
 question is whether we are to leave in the hands of the landlords 
 an arbitrary power of eviction, in a thousand instances working 
 injustice and wrong, for the sake of one case in which it may 
 facilitate improvements? Are we to keep the whole population 
 serfs, and encounter all the terrible evils of that serfdom, for the 
 sake of Lord Dufferin' s projected villas on the shores of the Belfast 
 Lough ? 
 
 There is in the paragraph I have quoted a strange fallacy, tacitly 
 assumed, which runs through all the reasonings, both of Lord 
 Dufferin and all the advocates of the extreme views of proprietary 
 rights — the assumption that all improvements must be effected by 
 the landlords, or at least under landlord supervision and control. 
 The project which would diffuse the wealth of a rich community 
 over a large agricultural area is indefinitely postponed, if tenants 
 acquire any permanent interest in the land. I believe that 
 if the site be the best adapted for villas, and villas are wanted 
 by the rich community of Belfast, villas would be built there, even 
 though there be tenants on it holding by leases for 60 years. Such 
 leases, indeed, are not usually considered a hindrance to building 
 speculations. On the contrary, wherever there is property entailed 
 by marriage settlement, containing land suited for building pur- 
 poses, a power is, in all well-drawn settlements, reserved as to that 
 portion of the estate, of granting leases for a still longer period 
 than 60 years. 
 
 Lord Dufferin asks why I have chosen the exact number of 63 
 years. I answer, because it was necessary to choose some exact 
 
208 LORD DUFFERIN'S "IMMOBILITY." 
 
 number — because 63 is a multiple of 21, and because I came 
 to the conclusion that a lease of a duration of somewhat about 
 that term is the very shortest which would offer, in the circum- 
 stances of Ireland, sufficient inducement to the people to remain 
 in the country, and to improve. I freely admit there is no magic 
 in the precise number of 63. I would myself very much prefer 99. 
 
 When Lord DufFerin apprehends that leases for 63 years will doom 
 land suited for building purposes to continue unimproved, I may re- 
 mind him that, in the opinion of many of the persons best qualified 
 to judge, Belfast owes no little of its rapid increase to the very fact 
 that many years ago long leases, and, in many instances, perpe- 
 tuities were granted at low rents upon the vast Chichester estate. 
 It is no disparagement to the present representatives of a great 
 family to say that there would not be so many villas around Belfast 
 if there had been no leases for 60 years, and if all building improve- 
 ments had been left to the enterprise of the successive owners of 
 the Donegal estates. 
 
 Lord DufFerin assumes, in his own instance, that all improve- 
 ments of this nature can only be effected by himself. To give 
 long leases to the tenants is indefinitely to postpone them. It is 
 very curious how this supposition, never plainly stated but always 
 tacitly assumed, runs through all arguments like his. In another 
 passage of this letter Lord DufFerin says : — 
 
 "Mr. Butt, like the malevolent fairy in the tale of The Sleeping 
 Beauty, would curse us with the doom of rigid immobility for the greater 
 portion of a century, without the prospect of that magic ' after-glow' of 
 renewed life and vigour which completes the story." 
 
 In this passage, brief as it is, there are condensed the elements of a 
 great question, the principles of two rival systems. All of us desire 
 to see Ireland rise from her present low condition. No man could 
 describe our country as Lord Dufferin has done who did not feel his 
 heart stirred by the hopes for her that have so often been the dream 
 of the patriot. There are those who believe that if ever the country 
 is to rise from her misery it will be by the emancipated energies of 
 her people. There are those who think that it is only in her upper 
 classes that the elements of her regeneration are to be found. 
 
 And, accordingly, when I propose to elevate into independent 
 leaseholders 500,000 tenant farmers who are now but tenants at the 
 will of the landlord — to give to each and every one of them the 
 opportunity of improving his fields and creating a property for him- 
 self — to call out whatever energy he may possess, and bring into 
 action whatever motive for industry may lurk within his breast — 
 Lord Dufferin tells me that I would curse the country with the 
 doom of a rigid immobility for the better part of a century I All 
 progress and improvement would be stayed during all the period 
 in which the Irish peasant could hold any property in the soil ! 
 
"LORD DUFFERIN'S IMMOBILITY." 209 
 
 National progress depends upon leaving" to the landowner free 
 and uncontrolled dominion over the land and its occupiers. Accord- 
 ing to this policy we will better promote national industry and 
 improvement by making 10,000 landlords absolute than by making 
 500,000 occupiers independent. According to this policy the more 
 we destroy all freedom in the occupier, the more iudustrious he 
 will be. 
 
 The statement as to " immobility" rests solely on the assumption 
 that the tenantry will not improve. There is frequently a difficulty 
 in answering a writer like Lord Dufferin who constantly exhibits 
 a marvellous facility of unconsciously condensing into one com- 
 pendious error a contradiction of the whole history and the whole 
 experience of the nation.* I had thought it one of the admitted 
 facts of our social history that such improvements as have been made 
 either in or upon the soil of Ireland have been generally made by 
 the occupiers of the soil. Are we to go back upon the proof — to 
 collect together all the testimonies from all the books that ever 
 have been published — from all the speeches that ever have been 
 made — from all the evidence that has ever been given on the 
 subject of the occupation of Irish land — to establish this universally 
 conceded fact, that while in England and Scotland there has been 
 a large outlay on the part of proprietors in bringing the soil of the 
 country to its present state — in Ireland almost all that expenditure 
 has been made by the occupiers of our soil. 
 
 It is easy to show that of late years there has been much more 
 activity and improvement among the landowners. There has been 
 a stimulated energy from the circumstances in which the country is 
 placed. Men who purchased under the Incumbered Estates' Com- 
 mission have expended money in improving their purchases. 
 Landowners have been driven in many instances by the necessities 
 of their position to devote themselves to making the most of their 
 lands. Large works of drainage have been executed by money 
 borrowed by the landowners. All this nobody denies; but all this 
 has no appreciable effect upon the general result of the character of 
 Irish progress. That progress has, on the whole, been effected at 
 the cost and by the labour of the tenants. 
 
 It is not meant by assertions of this nature that there were no 
 improving landlords in old times. I believe there were more then 
 than are now. The improvements effected by Chief Baron Foster 
 at Cullen, so graphically described by Arthur Young, were greater 
 than those of which any landlord of our own day can boast, at all 
 events they were calculated to benefit a larger number of people. 
 At that period there were many, very many, landlords in Ireland 
 who deserved equal praise. I am disposed to think that improving 
 
 * Truth is to be sought only by slow and painful process. Error is in its nature 
 flippant and compendious ; it hops with airy and fastidious levity over proofs and argu- 
 ments, and perches upon assertions which it calls conclusions." — Curran. 
 
 O 
 
210 IMPROVEMENTS BY THE IRISH TENANTS. 
 
 landlords ceased very much at the Union, and that in the early years 
 of this century the tenants were the only improvers. But be this as 
 it may, when we assert that all improvements in Ireland have been 
 effected by the occupiers what we mean is this. The Irish soil has 
 been cultivated, improved, and raised in value by the industry of 
 man. Fences have been made, houses have been built, stones have 
 been removed, rushes dug out, water drained off, and waste and 
 barren land brought under the dominion of the plough or the 
 spade. Since the beginning of the last century the value of the 
 agricultural holdings of Ireland has increased by many millions. 
 This increased value represents many millions worth of labour 
 expended in or on the soil. By far the greater portion of this 
 expenditure has been made by the occupiers. From the days of the 
 " settlement" to the present day the custom of the country has been 
 that the owner in letting his land made no expenditure in putting it 
 into order. He demised nothing to the tenant but the bare power of 
 the soil with whatever improvements previous occupiers had made. 
 Tenants so long as they had any security of tenure improved their 
 farms. Landlords improved their demesnes. The improvement on 
 the demesne was on a large scale — it was striking, and it was well 
 executed. The improvemnts on the farm were small, unnoticed, and 
 most probably ill-done. Yet the sum of many small things far 
 exceeds the amount of a few great, and the aggregate of the 
 occupiers' expenditure represents a proportion, so great as to be 
 almost the entire, of the value added by human industry to the Irish 
 soil. 
 
 Let us reflect for a moment upon what has been done by the 
 despised and condemned Irish occupiers before we acquiesce in the 
 conclusion that to entrust them with an interest in the soil is to 
 curse us during the period of that interest with " immobility." I 
 presume I am correct in supposing that this means a condition 
 stationary in respect of improvement. Let us see what they have done. 
 Let us remember the rents they have paid — that they have tilled our 
 soil under every circumstance of difficulty. Without capital and 
 
 * I have not thought it necessary to enter on any estimate or calculation of the 
 value thus added by the labour or capital of the occupiers to the Irish land. I am 
 quite safe in saying it must be very many millions. Arthur Young calculates the 
 rental of Ireland at five millions ; the Poor Law Valuation amounts to twelve millions. 
 
 Bishop Keane, on data that appear correct, has estimated that between the date of 
 Young's work and 1840, the impi-ovements on the Irish soil equalled in value upon 
 each acre those made in England in the same time. — Evidence, 1864. 
 
 All such estimates must be but remote approximations to the truth. There is 
 nothing more difficult than to arrive at any tests by which we can accurately compare 
 the condition of a country, at one time with its condition at another. It may be 
 assumed as certain, that since the Revolution there has been an immense expenditure, 
 which has permanently added to the value of the land. If some miracle could throw 
 the land of Ireland into the state in which it was the day of the Battle of the Boyne, an 
 expenditure of very many millions would not be sufficient to place it in the state in 
 which it is now. Is it an over estimate to say that the expenditure of one hundred 
 millions would not suffice ? 
 
WHAT THE IRISH TEOrLE HAVE DONE. 211 
 
 without encouragement — reclaiming their twenty acres of wild 
 mountain where an English traveller tells us Englishmen would 
 have starved — all the while oppressed by cruel laws — treated with 
 contumely and insult — without any of the outward incentives which 
 stimulate selfishness to industry, and cheered in their toil only by 
 those domestic affections which have been to the Irish people the 
 redeeming spirit that has gone with them through the furnace. 
 Take as an example the poor cottiers of Sir Wm. Osborne or the 
 reclaimers of the mountain heather described by Bishop Keane. It 
 is unjust to compare what the Irish occupiers have done for Ireland's 
 improvement with the progress of any country in which liberty has 
 been known, and in which industry has had its reward. The proper 
 comparison would be with some of the eastern territories in which 
 oppression has laid waste the energies of the people. But let them 
 be compared with any country we will — let us make allowance for 
 all the difficulties of their position, and measure their industry by 
 the improvements actually made upon the Irish land, and I venture 
 to say the history of mankind supplies no such instance of patient, 
 enduring and ill requited labour as that which during that period is 
 furnished by the maligned and persecuted Irish race. 
 
 Why are we to contradict all our history — and disregard all ex- 
 perience by assuming that if we give such people an interest in our 
 soil all improvement is to stop ? For two centuries the " immobility" 
 has been on the side of the landlords who left it to this very people 
 to effect all that has been effected to break in upon the desolation of 
 our uncultivated resources. All that has been placed upon the soil 
 by the industry of that people the landowners now claim as their 
 own, and tell us that property in land represents the accumulated 
 capital of many generations which they or their predecessors have 
 expended on that land. To this an enemy might reply, that this 
 is to rest the moral as well as legal right of Irish property upon 
 confiscation. It is a legalized wrong which has vested in the land- 
 owners all the improvements which the toils of many generations of 
 occupiers have effected. But while landowners are actually enjoying 
 the benefit and the ownership of millions of property invested by the 
 people in the soil — millions to which they themselves have 
 added little or nothing — it is too much now to tell that people 
 they cannot remain upon the land because their doing so is to con- 
 demn the country to the curse of immobility. 
 
 Of course it is possible that the existence of a lease may stand in 
 the way of some supposed or some real improvement. I have not a 
 doubt that Naboth's vineyard was a real obstacle in the way of a 
 real improvement. But a tenant's lease is not the only ownership 
 that may be such an obstacle. The life estate of many an owner 
 stands at this moment between sites very suitable for building and 
 the erection of the buildings. The ownership in fee of many a 
 great proprietor's estate in England and Ireland is the positive 
 
212 IMMOBILITY FROM TERRITORIAL RIGHTS. 
 
 obstruction to many projects that would diffuse wealth and employ- 
 ment through an entire district. How many railways have been 
 sent far from a town by an extorted reverence for the sacred 
 precincts of the great man's demesne? How many places suited 
 to be great seats of trade and commerce are kept back by the 
 whims or the caprice of the territorial lord? It is the influence of 
 great estates that really curses whole districts with " immobility." 
 If the argument of "immobility" is to have weight, it is a strong 
 one for breaking up large properties. Lord Mansfield, I think it 
 was, who said " the strong bent of the Saxon mind has ever been 
 that land should be free." It was this strong bent that employed 
 in courts of law judicial fictions to defeat the statutes by which 
 feudalism endeavoured to prevent the free transfer of estates. It 
 is not by long leases of small portions of land to tenants, but by 
 the accumulation of great properties in individual hands that im- 
 mobility is inflicted upon nations. But these are matters which we 
 need not discuss. The real question is by what means are we most 
 likely to get the whole soil of the country improved. All experience 
 tells us that which common sense points out — give to the Irish 
 people an interest in it, and over the whole extent of Ireland im- 
 proved cultivation and gladdened industry will work, in one twelve 
 months, throughout all the cornfields and meadow lands of Ireland, 
 improvements compared with the value of which all the villa 
 residences which all the landlords of Ireland could build in twenty 
 years would sink into insignificance and contempt. 
 
 I believe that it is from the 500,000 occupiers, and not from the 
 10,000 landowners, that the national improvement must spring. 
 That while the latter are kept in serfdom, and deprived of the 
 rewards, and therefore destitute of the incentives of industry, it is 
 vain to expect true national improvement from any amount of 
 energy and exertion of the former. Unless indeed we mean the 
 improvement which consists in driving the people out. There is 
 one "immobility" with which I would wish to see us "cursed," and 
 that would be — if I may use the expression — the " immobility" of 
 the people from their native land. There is one progress I could 
 wish to stay, and that is the progress of the emigration that is 
 draining away our strength. 
 
 Of all real improvement of Ireland we must lay the foundation 
 by elevating the character and condition of the people. This we 
 never can do while we keep them serfs — while they are so, we will 
 indeed be cursed by the " immobility" of which we have had the 
 experience long enough — the "perennial desolation" which has 
 never yet known a change. 
 
 I have observed that this assumption runs through all the argu- 
 ments made for the continuance of the absolute dominion of the land- 
 lord — the assumption that no improvement can be effected except 
 by the immediate agency of the landlord, or under his superin- 
 
THE WEEDING OF ESTATES. 213 
 
 tendence, or control — that we are to trust nothing to the energy or 
 the enterprise of the tenant — and that it is impossible for any but 
 the landlords in Ireland to be the real improvers of the soil. It 
 might shake our faith in the soundness of such an opinion to reflect 
 that it is contradicted by all experience — that the only improve- 
 ments that ever have been effected have been so where the occupier 
 has been protected either by a lease or by the custom of tenant 
 right. Experience only confirms that which we might infer before- 
 hand from the circumstances of the country. The occupiers hold 
 the keys of the improvement of the soil. 
 
 Lord Dufferin is constantly arguing on this assumption — that 
 none but landlords can improve. 
 
 In another letter he actually claims for the landlord the right of 
 turning off his tenants exactly as he would his farm servants when- 
 ever he chooses to consider them deficient in energy or skill : — 
 
 " It is a mistake to imagine that non-payment of rent is the only cir- 
 cumstance which can justify evictions. Any one acquainted with the 
 management of land is aware that an unskilful farmer, even though he 
 pay his rent, may do his landlord's property more harm than an indus- 
 trious tenant who is occasionally in arrear. Few things are more liable 
 to deterioration than land, and the value of a field may be as completely 
 annihilated for a certain number of years as that of a house off which 
 you have taken the roof. Now, one of the landlord's most important 
 duties is that of insuring the consummate cultivation of his estate, and 
 to hold him up to obloquy because he makes a point of weeding his pro- 
 perty of men whose want of energy \ or skill, or capital renders them incapable 
 of doing their duty by their farms, and replacing them by more suitable 
 tenants, is hardly reasonable." 
 
 According to this theory, the tenant is, in fact, to be a species 
 of bailiff or deputy of the landlord ; the landlord's chief duty being 
 not to benefit his tenants, but to ensure " the consummate cultiva- 
 tion of his farm," and for this purpose to " weed OUT " the tenants 
 when they fail in the energy, the skill, or the capital that is neces- 
 sary for that purpose. If this be not an approach to the "metayer" 
 system it certainly makes the landlord the superintendent of the 
 cultivation. But I protest I think this is very like an open avowal 
 of a policy of extermination ; it is so if extermination be necessary 
 for the discharge of the chief duty of the landlord, the ensuring of 
 " the consummate cultivation of his farm." 
 
 Surely, if Lord Dufferin intended to point out the odious nature 
 of the power which he claims, he could not have devised a phrase 
 better calculated to accomplish it than this very one of " weeding." 
 One of the most important duties of a landlord is to cast out his 
 tenants whom he may think deficient in energy, or skill, or capital ; 
 to pluck them up like noxious " weeds," and fling them over the 
 bounds of the estate to wither and to die. And this, be it observed, 
 
214 THE WEEDING OF ESTATES. 
 
 in the case of tenants who pay their rent. The whole of this 
 singular but deeply instructive passage is an expansion of the 
 statement with which it commences that "it is a mistake to suppose 
 that it is only non-payment of rent that can justify ejectment." If 
 anything were wanting to justify " strong and vigorous dealing" 
 with the Irish land question, it will be found in such candid 
 avowals of what is passing in the minds of the proprietary class. 
 
 I pray the earnest attention of every reader to the real character 
 and extent of this process of " weeding." 
 
 Lord DufFerin leaves us in no doubt upon these points. I put 
 two sentences of his letter together, and I prove to demonstration 
 that whether he means it or not, his theories of landlord right 
 and duty involve the extermination of the greater proportion of the 
 present occupiers of the soil. In one passage, he writes : — 
 
 " Bad husbandry and non-payment of rent constitute, even according 
 to Mr. Butt, just occasions of eviction. By the inflexible application of 
 these principles there is no property in Ireland which would not be 
 cleared of a large proportion of its occupants in ten years, and the imme- 
 diate effect of his beneficent efforts would be universal discontent and 
 an enormous stimulus to emigration, counterbalanced perhaps by a rapid 
 improvement in cultivation, and a brevet promotion for some hundreds 
 of thousands of agricultural labourers at the expense of a corresponding 
 number of tenant farmers." 
 
 That is, if even in leases for 63 years, at a moderate rent, 
 conditions be inserted that tenants must pay their rents and pro- 
 perly cultivate their farms, with all the stimulus which leases at fair 
 rents would give to industry and improvement — these conditions 
 in ten years would drive the greater proportion of the occupants 
 from their farms. 
 
 Why ? There can be but one reason — because the great majority 
 of the occupants, even were they granted a fair lease, would not pay 
 their rent, and would not properly cultivate their farms. Here, then, 
 is a clear, distinct, and most positive statement of the character of 
 the present occupants of the farms. They cannot hold their farms 
 if landlords insist on the conditions of payment of rent and proper 
 cultivation of their farms. 
 
 But how are landlords to deal with these very same tenants, 
 holding within the next ten years as tenants from year to year — 
 tenants, be it remembered, incapable of holding on the condition 
 of payment of rent and proper cultivation ? I quote Lord DufFerin 
 again : — 
 
 "Non-payment of rent is not the only thing which can justify eject- 
 ment. . . . One of the most important duties is that of insuring the 
 consummate cultivation of the farm; to hold him to public obloquy 
 because he makes a point of weeding his property of men whose want 
 of energy, or skill, or capital, makes them incapable of doing their duty 
 by their farms." 
 
THE WEEDING OF ESTATES. 215 
 
 I ask of any rational man to read these sentences — dismal and 
 unhappy sentences — and say if they do not mean ? 
 
 The present occupants cannot hold their lands if payment of rent 
 and proper cultivation be insisted on. 
 
 No landlord will let a tenant remain who will not pay his rent. 
 
 It is the actual duty of a landlord to weed out those who cannot 
 or will not do their duty to their farms by " consummate cultivation." 
 
 Is not the inference inevitable? 
 
 Therefore, the present occupants must be driven away, or to use 
 that which, I suppose, is the proper, or at least the newest phrase, 
 " weeded out." It is a happy variation of the old term of " clearance." 
 Estates were "cleared" of Irishmen as Indian plains are cleared 
 of jungle and wild beasts. Lord Dufferin, more delicately, " weeds" 
 out the occupiers as men weed out the hemlock and the thistle from 
 their fields. 
 
 It is impossible for Lord Dufferin to write half a dozen sentences 
 without impressing on them the leading idea that has unhappily 
 taken possession of his mind. 
 
 " One of the greatest benefits to Ireland has resulted from the legal 
 machinery invented to transfer the estates of incumbered proprietors to 
 the hands of persons with sufficient capital to improve them. Surely the 
 same policy ought to be pursued in facilitating the transference of farms 
 from the impoverished agriculturist to the man of energy and capital." 
 
 That is — exactly as the Incumbered Estates Commission sold out 
 the old proprietors, a process of " weeding " must be applied to get 
 rid of the present occupiers of the soil. 
 
 I do earnestly pray the attention of every reader to this clear and 
 distinct declaration. The true policy for Ireland is : — 
 
 " To FACILITATE THE TRANSFERENCE OF FARMS FROM THE IMPOVERISHED 
 
 Not, be it observed, to help the impoverished agriculturist — not 
 to seek out and, if possible, to remove the causes of his distress — but 
 to transfer his farm to the man of energy and capital. Surely this 
 describes a policy of getting rid of the present occupiers of the soil, 
 in order to replace them by "men of capital." 
 
 Whenever the County of Down is "weeded" of all occupiers 
 holding less than fifteen acres, and when all who hold over fifteen 
 acres, but have not energy and capital, are replaced by men who 
 have, I venture to believe that it will not be the happy and 
 prosperous county that it is now. 
 
 I must add that if we wanted proof of the state of thraldom in 
 which the occupiers are kept by insecurity of tenure — nothing 
 could be more suggestive of it than Lord Dufferin's statement, that 
 even on an estate, which we must presume to be well and liberally 
 
216 CAN IRISHMEN BE GOOD TENANTS? 
 
 managed, an ejectment is served as an ordinary mode of quickening 
 the tenant in the payment of his rent. 
 
 " To serve an ejectment is frequently the only way of inducing a 
 dilatory tenant to pay up an arrear of rent, in which case it bears the 
 same relation to an eviction as a lawyer's letter does to an action at law. 
 On my own estates, dozens of ejectments have been served for one 
 eviction that has taken place, and the more indulgent the landlord, 
 the more disposed will some of his tenants be to wait for this proof of his 
 patience being exhausted." 
 
 The service of an ejectment, even in the inferior court, is rather 
 an expensive attorney's letter. But is it possible for tenants living 
 under such a system to be really independent? Will they ever be 
 secure in their tenure, or can they have any assurance that the 
 ejectment may not turn out a reality ? Between landlord and tenant 
 ejectments are dangerous playthings. Could such a thing occur 
 upon any English estate? Or can there be confidence between a 
 landlord and his tenants in a state of society in which the proprietor 
 finds, or thinks it necessary to adopt such a mode of stirring up a 
 lagging tenant to pay his rent ? 
 
 I do not stop to point out many inconsistencies which present 
 themselves in this commentary of Lord DufFerin. The Act for the 
 sale of incumbered estates contained provisions annulling contracts, 
 and interfered with rights of property far more violently than any 
 regulation I propose as to tenants leases. It ruined many a pro- 
 prietor and many a creditor who, if the sale of estates had been left 
 to the operation of old laws, might and would have preserved their 
 properties. Its advocates justified it because it was necessary for 
 public purposes to obtain a solvent proprietary. Its operations were 
 carried out in disregard of the ruin and misery which, in individual 
 cases, it entailed. Lord Dufferin praises that Act, but he will not 
 tolerate a measure which would give a solvent and contented 
 tenantry to Ireland, because it might interfere with contingent 
 rights of property in projected villas near Belfast Lough. 
 
 In one sentence I am told that I am condemning Ireland to 
 " immobility" for 60 years; in the next, that my plan would lead 
 to a sweeping revolution in the occupation of Irish farms, to a 
 great improvement in agriculture, and to a " brevet promotion" of 
 agricultural labourers to be tenant farmers. 
 
 And this very process, which is made an objection to my bill, is 
 the very process to which Lord DufFerin points as the only one 
 that is to remedy the present state of things. 
 
 Let me deal at once with this most singular objection, that I still 
 leave the tenant open to eviction, because I insist as the condition 
 of his holding upon the payment of a moderate rent and on the 
 proper cultivation of his farm. I have taken especial care to frame 
 the latter condition so as to prevent it ever being used as an 
 instrument of oppression. It can only apply to cases in which the 
 
CAPABILITIES OF IRISH TENANTS. 217 
 
 tenant is really destroying, the property in the farm. But I deny 
 that if they were granted leases of long tenure and at fair rents, 
 the Irish occupiers would not observe these conditions. To assert 
 the contrary is to adopt that system of depreciation, not to say 
 slander, of the Irish people which has been too often the resource 
 of those who have desired to deprive them of their political and 
 social rights. Why should we assume that if an Irishman is given 
 a farm at a fair rent and with a reasonably framed covenant against 
 waste by improper cultivation, he will not be able to retain it. 
 What is there in the character or history of our people which jus- 
 tifies this? Is it proved by the industry, the energy, and the 
 enterprise they exhibit in every country except their own ? Is it 
 proved by what they have done, in spite of every discouragement, in 
 their own? Is it consistent with the eulogium — Lord Dufferin's 
 own eulogium — on that people ? Will any man believe it who reads 
 the instances I have selected from those proved before the 
 Parliamentary Committee of 1864? No one can have read Lord 
 Dufferin's letters without seeing that he is constantly assuming pro- 
 positions, from which, when they are plainly put to him, he shrinks. 
 Never was there a writer who so successfully used the sophisms of 
 the Enthymeme to impose upon himself. The suppressed proposi- 
 tion of his syllogism upon this point is, that an Irish occupier is 
 incapable of being a punctual and improving tenant. I have traced 
 that proposition to its inevitable conclusions, according to his own 
 words. I am quite sure he will not abide by it when it is removed 
 from the haze of his own imaginative logic, and plainly put before 
 him, with all its necessary consequences, in print. 
 
 If the Irish peasant is capable of being a punctual and improving 
 tenant, surely he will be able to retain the interest conferred on 
 him by the measure I propose. That measure, at all events, offers 
 him all the inducements possible to habits of punctuality and im- 
 provement. If he be capable of acquiring these habits, and if we 
 place him in the position in which he has the strongest motives to 
 adopt them — if experience can tell us anything of human nature, 
 he will be very likely to be both punctual and improving. 
 
 If it were really true that it is not possible, under any modifica- 
 tion of our present system of land tenure, for the Irish people to 
 keep their ground in their native country, then the reflection 
 would suggest itself that this system must be wholly unsuited to 
 the country, and that it must be altogether changed. 
 
 I do not need to resort to this argument. Lord Dufferin tells 
 me that even if the people obtained the leases I ask for them they 
 still must go, I only say, let us try to give them at least the last 
 chance of living in their own land, and before we drive them to 
 exile let us offer them the opportunity of making out life at home 
 by securing them a tenure of their holding such as will give them 
 the opportunity of being industrious if they will. 
 
218 ALLEGIANCE AND PROTECTION. 
 
 Is this too much to ask for the old people of any land? Is it too 
 much to ask for a people such as Lord Dufferin describes ? 
 
 Are we, my Lord, without an effort to help them, to let that 
 people go? 
 
 Will any man living deliberately tell me that we discharge our 
 obligations to the millions of human beings now located on this 
 Irish soil when we say to them — go to another land — without 
 caring for their condition — without troubling ourselves to inquire 
 what becomes of them when they do go — without even providing 
 them with the means of going ? 
 
 Has anything like this ever been done by any civilized or un- 
 civilized government upon earth ? 
 
 I have really thought it very strange that, in all the writings I 
 have read upon this subject, no one appeared to think that the 
 people now living in Ireland have any claim of any kind either upon 
 the Government which claims their allegiance or the country in 
 which they have been born. I have already pointed out that if an 
 Irish evicted tenant emigrates to America he cannot, by that act, 
 escape the duties of his allegiance to the Queen. At home he has 
 no means of living. The troops of his Sovereign have been em- 
 ployed in guarding the servants of the landlord who have pulled 
 down his house. He has been turned adrift upon the road, it may 
 be from fields that his own hard toil, or the hard roil of his father, 
 has made fruitful. He emigrates. By the valley of the Mississippi 
 or the Ohio he finds, under American law, the opportunity of 
 industry which is denied him at home. Prosperity, and even 
 affluence, reward his industry in his new abode A war breaks 
 out between the country that has thrust him out and the country 
 that has given him protection. If British troops invaded the 
 country of his adoption — I ought to say the country to which 
 British law has flung him — and if he took up arms in defence of his 
 home, British law would inflict on him the penalties of treason, and 
 were he seized in arms, like Wolfe Tone, that law would visit him 
 with a traitor's doom. 
 
 If allegiance and protection be reciprocal it is impossible to say that 
 we have nothing to do with the two or three millions of our people 
 who are doomed to emigration but to thrust them out, with hot haste, 
 as quickly as we can, that when they are gone the estates of the land- 
 lords may become more productive of fat cattle and of rent. I say, 
 on the contrary, that all the conditions of the social compact, all the 
 principles of civilized and Christian jurisprudence, oblige the states- 
 man who deals with Ireland's social condition to think of these two 
 millions of Irishmen and to provide for them a place and a liveli- 
 hood at home. 
 
 ^ Every man," says Edmund Burke, " has a right to all that 
 society, with all its combinations of skill and capital, can do in his 
 favour/' It was by maxims like these that this greatest of political 
 
THE THRUSTING OUT IN HASTE. 219 
 
 philosophers stayed the spread in England of the principles of 
 revolutionary France. What answer could we give to the Irish 
 emigrant who, sorrowful and reluctant, embarks at Queenstown to 
 leave for ever his native land because his landlord denies him the 
 tenure which would enable him to exercise his industry at home — 
 what answer, I say, could we give him if he were to ask us : — " Is 
 this all that British society, with all his combination of skill and 
 capital, can do in my favour?" 
 
 Emigrate ! emigrate ! emigrate ! Is America to take the place 
 of Connaught in the ribald cry of a new war of extermination 
 against the Irish race. Many parallels have been drawn between 
 the servitude of the Irish and that of the Israelites in Egypt. Is 
 the resemblance to be complete, even in the last scene? After 
 centuries of oppression of the Irish race do their oppressors 
 " hasten" at last " to thrust them out ?"* 
 
 I have adverted at, perhaps, unreasonable length to the state- 
 ments which have been given to the public by your Lordship, 
 Lord Dufferin, and Lord Rosse. Upon this question these 
 writings are not merely arguments, they are facts. They are 
 revelations of what is passing in the minds of Irish proprietors. 
 I am not about to cavil at words, or rest an argument on isolated 
 phrases. But no man can attentively read the publications of 
 Lord Dufferin and Lord Rosse, or even your Lordship's own letter 
 to me, without feeling that in their general purport they express, 
 on the part of the proprietors, a distrust of the occupiers, which 
 makes them determined not to give those occupiers an interest in 
 the soil. This is the leading idea, if I may use the expression, 
 which pervades and guides all the reasoning of these publications. 
 It finds its expression in Lord Rosse's avowal that the landowners 
 are resolved to fight the battle with their hands untied ; in Lord 
 Dufferin's argument, that it is the duty of the landlord to weed his 
 estate of tenants who have not the skill or the capacity to do their 
 duty in consummate cultivation of their farms ; and in your own 
 denunciation of my proposal of compulsory leases as one calculated 
 to deprive the Protestant proprietors of all influence with the 
 people and of all control in the management of their estates. 
 
 The result of all is that Irish proprietors generally think it 
 expedient to keep the tenants entirely under their control, and 
 this feeling is influenced, to some extent, by religious — to some 
 
 * " The Egyptians -were urgent with the people that they might send them out of the 
 land in haste." — Exodus, xii. 33. 
 
220 PROJECTED LEGISLATION. 
 
 extent by political, motives, and also by the belief that, to ensure 
 a proper cultivation of the farms, it is necessary that the tenant 
 should be under the supervision and direction of the owner of the 
 estate. I am not now discussing the reasonableness or unreasonable- 
 ness of these feelings. I only state, as a matter of fact, that these 
 feelings are entertained. The view taken of the position of Ireland 
 by those who represent the opinions of the proprietors is that, from 
 one cause or other, it is necessary to have a dependent tenantry, 
 acting under the control and subject to the power of the proprietors 
 of the soil. 
 
 It is of the utmost importance that we should bear these things 
 in mind when we come to consider the measures of practical legisla- 
 tion which have been proposed. There are now two proposals of 
 this kind before Parliament and the country — one the proposal of 
 the late Ministry, embodied in the bill brought in by Mr. Fortescue ; 
 the other that of the present Ministers, contained in the measure 
 offered to us by Lord Naas. 
 
 In all that I have written on this subject I have endeavoured to 
 avoid canvassing the merits or demerits of any proposal that has 
 been made. I have contented myself with stating my own views 
 of the indispensable requisites of any measure that will really relieve 
 Ireland of the disgrace and misery of our present system of land 
 tenure. But strongly as I hold these views, I am far from wishing 
 to discourage any effort which is made by any person in office or out 
 of office to settle the land question of Ireland, even upon conditions 
 which I believe to be inadequate to attain that result. It is scarcely 
 possible to legislate upon the subject without recognizing some of 
 the principles upon which true legislation must be based. There 
 is something gained when we induce the British Parliament " to 
 touch, even with the tip of their finger," the heavy burden that 
 English rule has laid upon the Irish nation in the system of land 
 tenure which it maintains. 
 
 I regard either the measure of Mr. Fortescue or that of Lord 
 Naas as a last attempt to remedy the most flagrant evils of the 
 insecurity of tenure without interfering with the landlord's absolute 
 dominion. In the state of feeling which exists between classes in 
 this country, I believe the problem to be an impossible one. It may 
 be well, however, that the experiment should be tried. Is it possible 
 so to legislate as generally to encourage improvements and give the 
 tenant security for his industry while you leave to the landlord the 
 power of arbitrary eviction, and the uncontrolled right to do what 
 he will with his own ? These were really the conditions of the 
 problem which both Lord Naas and Mr. Fortescue had to solve. 
 
 Accepting these conditions, the bill of Mr. Fortescue was framed 
 with great care and with great liberality. It was drawn with the 
 most scrupulous care to avoid the slightest interference with what 
 are termed the rights of property. It left every existing contract 
 
LAND BILLS OF MR. FORTESCUE AND LORD NAAS. 221 
 
 perfectly untouched. It permitted every landlord in future to let 
 his land upon whatever terms and on whatever terms he pleased. But 
 it did all which could be done by any legislation, restricted within 
 such principles, to enable the tenant to acquire by his improvements 
 a property in his farm. 
 
 This will be apparent to any one carefully examining its provi- 
 sions — they are, indeed, few, and easily understood. It permitted 
 the tenant to make certain specified improvements* on his farm with 
 or without his landlord's consent. Upon the termination of his 
 interest he was to be paid a sum equivalent to the value of the 
 increase which these improvements caused in the letting value of 
 the farm. A possession of 41 years was to be considered as a suffi- 
 cient compensation for the improvements ; and if the landlord chose 
 to grant or offer a lease for 31 years at the old rent no further claim 
 could be made against him. 
 
 Then followed a clause absolutely necessary on the principles 
 upon which the bill was framed. Tenants were prevented from 
 obtaining any compensation for improvements which any written 
 agreement prohibited them from making. 
 
 And finally, a still more important limitation — exempted from the 
 
 * In all the observations I make upon either of these measures I do not mean to 
 express an approval of the restrictions they both contain as to the classes of improve- 
 ments for which compensation is to be made. I am sure that it would be possible for 
 an occupier very greatly to enrich his farm, while his improvements could not be 
 specifically brought under any of the descriptions given in either bill. Fully to apply 
 the principle of compensation it would be necessary to adopt the rule of saying that if 
 the tenant gave up his holding in such an improved condition that it would let for a 
 higher rent than it would bring in the condition in which he got it, the value he had 
 so created should belong to himself. Of course there would be great difficulty in 
 applying such a rule, it might be, after an interval of years — the very difficulty which 
 Lord Dufferin points out in the working of Mr. Fortescue's bill. These difficulties 
 are not insuperable — and the rule is the only way in which the principle of compen- 
 sation can be fully carried out. 
 
 In Mr. Fortescue's bill the improvements for which a tenant can claim compensation 
 are — 
 
 1. The thorough drainage or main drainage of land. 
 
 2. Reclaiming of land from tidal or other waters. 
 
 3. Protection of land by embankment from tidal or other waters. 
 
 4. Reclaiming bog land, or reclaiming or enclosing waste land. 
 
 5. Making roads or fences. 
 
 6. Erection of farm buildings, houses for stewards, labourers, or other persons 
 employed in superintending the cultivation of, or in cultivating, land, and of other 
 buildings for farm purposes. 
 
 Under the bill of Lord Naas it is proposed to compensate the tenants for improve- 
 ments of any of the following classes — 
 
 1. The thorough drainage or main drainage of land. 
 
 2. The reclaiming of bog land, or reclaiming or inclosing of waste land, or clearing 
 land of rocks or stones. 
 
 3. The removal of useless fences. 
 
 4. The making of fences. 
 
 5. The making of farm roads. 
 
 6. The erecting of a farmhouse or other buildings solely for agricultural purposes 
 suitable to the holding, or the rebuilding or enlarging the same. 
 
 The three first may be made and charged for ever against the will of the landlord. 
 The three last require his assent. 
 
222 PROJECTED LEGISLATION. 
 
 operation of the Act all tenants holding under leases made before its 
 passing. 
 
 This Act, therefore, dealt only with tenants holding as tenants 
 from year to year to year and with tenancies to be created by future 
 leases. 
 
 I pass by altogether the provisions intended for the ascertainment 
 of the compensation payable. These are matters of detail which do 
 not affect in the least the principle of the measure. The proposal 
 may be open to the criticism of Lord Dufferin, that it might be 
 very difficult to ascertain exactly the value added to the farm by 
 the improvements after the lapse of an interval of some years. 
 There would, however, be far greater difficulty and inconvenience 
 in enforcing any provision which would require the tenant to value 
 and register his improvements at the time when they are made. 
 Apart from every other objection, it would be at once inviting, with 
 his landlord, an occasion of quarrel and dispute. Such a provision 
 would destroy even the slender chance that there is of the measure 
 in any case being of use. 
 
 What Mr. Fortescue's measure really effected is this : — It incor- 
 porated with all future lettings of land a contract that the tenant 
 shall be at liberty to make improvements, and be paid for them 
 in all cases in which the agreement for letting is silent on the subject. 
 But by permitting the landlord to make his own terms it still left all 
 contracts perfectly free. The landlord still could do what he liked 
 with his own. The bill simply proposed to apply to contracts of 
 tenancy a principle much more rational than that which now regu- 
 lates them. In the absence of any express contract every such 
 tenancy would in future imply an agreement that the tenant, when 
 giving up his holding should be paid for any addition he may have 
 made by his industry or his expenditure to the value of the land. 
 
 I am far, very far from undervaluing the establishment of such 
 wise and rational principles. It would be an immense improvement 
 in our jurisprudence. Even in a country like Ireland it would, 
 probably, in the course of years, effect an alteration in the habits 
 and customs connected with the letting of land. It is very difficult 
 to see upon what rational grounds such a measure was resisted. It 
 would have left every landlord in Ireland with just the same power 
 and the same privileges as he has now. 
 
 The bill introduced by Lord Naas deals somewhat differently with 
 the question. He also proposes to permit a certain class of improve- 
 ments to be made with or without the landlord's assent. But he 
 requires notice to be given to the landlord, and plans to be sub- 
 mitted to an officer of the Board of Works; if approved of by him 
 the improvements may be carried on in defiance of the landlord's 
 dissent. And this measure holds out to the tenant a further in- 
 ducement to improve, hy offering him a loan from Government to 
 be a charge upon the farm, both in his own hands and in that of the 
 
LAND BILLS OF MR. FORTESCUE AND LORD NAAS. 223 
 
 landlord after the reversion of the tenant's interest has fallen into 
 his hands. Unlike the bill of Mr. Fortescue, that of Lord Naas 
 does apply to existing leases, and it enables the tenants who hold 
 under such leases to make improvements and acquire a right to 
 compensation even against the dissent of their landlords. 
 
 Whatever opinion may be formed of the value of either of these 
 measures, it is of vital importance that their actual operation should 
 be understood — that no false hopes should be excited — and that the 
 Irish people should not suppose that they accomplish purposes 
 which neither of them profess even to touch. 
 
 In the first place, both of them deal only with a limited class of 
 improvements. Lord Naas's bill still further limits them by making 
 it necessary to submit them beforehand to an officer of the Board 
 of Works ; this would, in truth, be prohibitory of the small improve- 
 ments which Ireland most needs. Mr. Fortescue's encumbers the 
 right of the tenant to make improvements with no vexatious restric- 
 tions ; it harasses him with no preliminary impediments or condi- 
 tions ; it leaves him perfectly free to improve, so long as his landlord 
 does not interpose to take that liberty away. On the other hand, 
 it leaves it perfectly optional with the landlord whether the measure 
 shall have application to a single tenant on his estate. Lord Naas's 
 has just the same effect as to all the yearly tenants on the estate. 
 Its provisions apply to every tenant holding by lease in spite of the 
 landlord's dissent or even his strenuous opposition. 
 
 In considering measures of this nature we must always re- 
 member that we have to estimate its effect upon two different 
 classes of tenants — upon those holding by lease and those who are 
 tenants from year to year, or, in other words, virtually tenants at 
 will. The latter class include the vast majority of the Irish 
 tenantry. 
 
 As to tenants holding under existing leases, Mr. Fortescue's 
 Bill would have no effect whatever. They are expressly excluded 
 from its operation. 
 
 As to future leases, no one can doubt that every such lease in 
 the rare instances in which it will be granted would contain a 
 special agreement superseding the provisions of the Act. It is 
 quite vain to say that this would be discreditable to the landlord — 
 that it would be an evasion of an Act of Parliament. It would be 
 neither one or the other. If Parliament means to take away the 
 discretion of the landlord, nothing is easier than for Parliament to 
 say it. If the discretion is left to him it is plainly intended he 
 should exercise it. It is only where the lease is silent that the 
 statute steps in. The effect might possibly be to encourage 
 arrangements in future leases upon the subject. But the landlord 
 who really believes it essential for him to retain the management of 
 his property in his own hands will always in granting new leases 
 
224 PROJECTED LEGISLATION. 
 
 make stipulations which will leave the question of improvements 
 entirely under his own control. 
 
 But let us see how either measure — that of Lord Naas or of Mr. 
 Fortescue — will practically act in the case of the great mass of the 
 Irish tenantry, those holding- from year to year. Under Mr. 
 Fortescue's Bill the very humblest tenant may make improvements 
 himself, and, if his landlord does not interfere, he will, no doubt, 
 acquire a property in his land. Under Lord Naas's Bill the small 
 farmer will never be in a position to take the preliminary step — as to 
 him the Bill will be completely a dead letter. The yearly tenant who 
 is rich enough, and contemplates improvements considerable enough, 
 to bear the expense of an application to the Board of Works, can 
 acquire a property, or subject his farm to a Government loan, but 
 upon the very same condition that his landlord does not interfere. 
 In every case of a tenant from year to year, the landowner holds the 
 power in his own hands. The notice to quit puts an end to the 
 arrangement. The landlord must be an acquiescing party to the 
 improvements, whether they are made by the industry of the tenant 
 or carried into effect by the cumbrous and costly process of a 
 Government loan from the Board of Works. 
 
 I admit at once that under Mr. Fortescue's Bill the occupier of 
 a small farm might possibly, in some instances, succeed in 
 effecting improvements without provoking the interference of an 
 indolent or careless proprietor. At all events, this Bill would 
 accomplish that in which Lord Naas's entirely fails — it would make 
 it impossible that acts of robbery should be committed as to future 
 improvements. If a landlord, whether from carelessness or design, 
 permitted his tenant hereafter to expend his industry upon improve- 
 ments, he never could seize on the fruits of that industry for himself. 
 He must interfere to warn the tenant, or he must leave him the 
 value of the improvements he makes. 
 
 I believe, however, the instances would be rare in which the in- 
 dustry of the tenant would thus steal a march on the dominion of 
 the landlord. It never would happen on estates that are called well 
 managed, one of those estates on which notices to quit are a part 
 of its ordinary management, or on which scenes like those which 
 were described in the trial for murder at the Kerry assizes, could 
 occur. 
 
 On the other hand, Lord Naas's Bill would apply to a case which 
 Mr. Fortescue left wholly untouched, and it is the only instance^in 
 which either measure would be really effective. A tenant holding by 
 lease a farm of considerable value may desire to make large im- 
 provements upon that farm. It may be worth his while to incur 
 the expense and trouble of an application to the Board of Works, 
 and the improvements may be of such a character that this machinery 
 may be applicable. In this instance Lord Naas's measure enables 
 such a tenant to effect them, even in defiance of his landlord's 
 
PROJECTED LEGISLATION. 225 
 
 dissent, if the public officer determines that the improvements are 
 such as ought to be made. 
 
 I do not undervalue such a provision, especially in the prin- 
 ciples it establishes. But it is one that will affect very few. It 
 will do nothing for the great mass of the Irish tenantry, who do 
 not hold by lease, and who, if they did hold by lease, have not 
 the means of defraying the cost of an inquiry by a public officer, 
 and cannot effect improvements upon the scale which alone could 
 justify such an inquiry. 
 
 I am not incorrect in saying that the practical effect of either Bill 
 would be this. Lord Naas's Bill would enable the substantial 
 farmer, who holds under a lease, to make improvements on his 
 farm, even against his landlord's will, provided he obtained the 
 sanction of the Board of Works. Under Mr. Fortescue's Hill the 
 poor but industrious farmer might acquire, from a careless or in- 
 attentive owner, some little property by the expenditure of his 
 industry on his farm. In every other instance, under either Bill, 
 the permission of improvements would be just as it is now, a matter 
 in which the tenant is dependent solely on the good will and 
 pleasure of his lord. 
 
 Mr. Fortescue's measure would be an admirable one if all the 
 lands in Ireland were held from year to year, and all landlords were 
 willing that their tenants should acquire a property by improve- 
 ments in their farms. Lord Naas's would be still more useful if all 
 tenants held by lease, and were rich enough to make improvements 
 which would bear the expense of a survey by the Board of Works. 
 Unhappily the circumstances of Ireland are not exactly those for 
 which the provisions of either bill would appear to be framed. 
 
 But let us see how far either Bill may go in recognizing prin- 
 ciples which lay down useful guides in legislation on this subject 
 
 Mr. Fortescue's Bill generally recognizes the principle that in 
 future when land is once entrusted to a tenant's care the landlord 
 who does not interfere to prevent him from making improvements 
 shall never be permitted to seize on these improvements, Is it 
 going much further to carry back that very same principle to the 
 past — to adopt the "retrospective clause of Lord Derby's Bill of 
 1852," and to give some real protection to the occupiers of the 
 Irish soil? This would be accomplished by carrying the very 
 clause which was framed by Lord Naas, approved of by the Con- 
 servative Cabinet of that day — adopted by the Cabinets both of Lord 
 Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston — sanctioned by statesmen of all 
 parties, and carried by decisive majorities through the House of 
 Commons. 
 
 But in the very case in which the measure of Lord Naas will be 
 effective is there not a complete recognition of the principles for 
 which I contend ? In the case of a tenant holding under a lease it 
 permits him to effect improvements against his landlord's will. It 
 
 p 
 
226 BILLS OF MR. FORTESCTJE AND LORD NAAS. 
 
 allows him to charge these improvements upon the land— I care 
 not whether by a direct charge in his own favour or by the 
 machinery of a loan from the Board of Works. What then 
 becomes of the inviolability of contracts? 
 
 "It is not so written in the bond." 
 
 The provisions of the lease are distinctly set aside. Its covenants 
 bind the tenant to surrender the land to the landlord at the ex- 
 piration of the term, free of all charge, and " with all improvements 
 made thereon." You make these covenants absolutely waste paper. 
 You hinder the landlord who has parted with his property on the 
 very faith of these covenants from enforcing them, and you enable 
 the tenant, who got possession of the property by entering into a 
 solemn contract to observe the covenants — to charge permanently 
 the land which was so entrusted to his care. 
 
 Is there anything in what I propose more subversive of property ? 
 more inconsistent with that which is called proprietary right? 
 
 If all tenants held under leases, and had farms large enough to 
 bear the expense of the inquiry this very clause would accomplish 
 almost all that is needed. If once you permit the tenant, against 
 the will of his landlord, to acquire an interest beyond the letter 
 of his bargain, no reason can be assigned why your legislation 
 should not be so framed as to extend that privilege to those 
 who hold from year to year. If you are prepared to interfere 
 with the contracts and the rights of property — that is, if you 
 prevent the landlord from exacting his "pound of flesh," why 
 is this to be done only for the rich and prosperous tenant, whilst 
 you do nothing for the poor and the humble man — the man 
 who most needs your protection? In Lord Naas's Bill, it is 
 literally the old story, one law for the rich tenant and another 
 for the poor. Nay, more, there is one law for the good landlord 
 and another for the bad. The only landlord whom it coerces 
 is the man who has given leases on his estate. As to the land- 
 lord who has kept his tenants in his power it leaves him " with 
 his hands untied." 
 
 But I do earnestly pray the attention to this of all persons really 
 anxious to solve the difficulties of the Irish land question. Here 
 we have two measures — each prepared by an Irish gentleman of 
 practical acquaintance with the subject with which he deals — both 
 of them prepared with very great skill ; one of them with great and 
 even generous liberality. Both these measures are designed and 
 framed for the very purpose of securing to the tenant compensation 
 for the bona fide, improvements he may effect — of giving him, in 
 fact, the long coveted opportunity of expending his industry upon 
 his farm. Up to a certain point the arrangements of both seem 
 excellent, if not quite perfect. At that point each of them breaks 
 down. It is just the point where the notice to quit intervenes. 
 
POINT IN WHICH THESE MEASURES FAIL. 227 
 
 Both measures fail in the objects at which they aim. They fail, 
 not for want of skill or of inclination on the part of their framers, 
 but because they were dealing with occupiers who are completely 
 under the dominion of their landlords, and upon whom, so long as 
 you leave them so, you can confer no rights. It is vain to attempt 
 to attach the privilege of improvement to a tenure that perishes in 
 the very creation of the privilege. No human legislation can 
 enable a tenant to improve his farm without his landlord's consent 
 while he is left in a position in which he ceases to be tenant at the 
 pleasure of that lord. 
 
 Does this legislation really amount to more than this ? — Every 
 tenant in Ireland may improve, and be paid for his improvements, 
 provided always that his landlord does not exercise his power of 
 declaring that he shall not be so ? 
 
 Of what avail is this to meet the state of serfdom and subjection 
 in which the occupiers of the soil are held ? You ask the Irish land- 
 lords to make their tenants independent by permitting them to 
 acquire a property in their farms. Surely, if the Irish landowners 
 desire so to make their tenants independent, they may do so now. Are 
 we to forget the systematic refusal of leases for the express purpose 
 of keeping the tenants under their dominion, or the management of 
 t)ieir estates in their own hands? The whole tendency of the 
 management of landed property has been every day more and more 
 to reduce the tenant to the condition of a servant of his lord, to 
 impose upon him restrictions more and more coercive and vexatious. 
 The great principle of Irish landlords, of late years, is that " the land- 
 lords hands must be untied," — that the improvement of the country 
 depends upon the landlord having the management of his property — 
 that the political and social elevation of Ireland can only be effected 
 by means of their mastery over the people. Is all this to be changed 
 by the magic of a few lines? Are all these cherished principles of 
 action at once to be abandoned ? Can we expect the very men, who 
 now refuse to give their tenants the shortest lease, to be found 
 cheerfully to assent to their acquiring something like a permanent 
 interest by the improvement of their farms ? 
 
 Are the Irish serfs to be emancipated by the declaration that 
 they are to be independent of their landlord's will whenever it is the 
 will of their landlord that they shall be so independent? 
 
 Nothing can be further from my thought than to discourage 
 the efforts which any person may think it right to make in support 
 of the measure of Mr. Fortescue, or to blame those who expect 
 good to follow from that of Lord Naas. No one will more sin- 
 cerely rejoice than myself if in either shape the experiment shall 
 succeed, if it be found that either of these measures place on 
 Irish estates an independent tenantry acquiring a property for 
 themselves, and enriching the country by the application of their 
 industry to the soil. If the experiment fails its failure may prepare 
 
228 COERCIVE AGREEMENTS. 
 
 men's minds for bolder and more effectual legislation. Another 
 " conspicuous failure" may perhaps convince all men that no skill, 
 and no industry can unravel the intricate involvement in which 
 two centuries of mismanagement have tangled the relations of our 
 land tenure. The Gordian knot must for ever remain knotted or it 
 must be cut. But surely I am justified in saying that even since 
 last year the question is changed by the revelations of the feelings 
 of the landowners which have been elicited in the course of this 
 discussion. Whatever hopes may have been entertained last year 
 that the landowners of Ireland would not interpose their veto 
 against the application to their estates of a measure like that pro- 
 posed by Mr. Fortescue, he will be very sanguine who will read 
 over Lord Rosse's most instructive pamphlet and really entertain 
 that expectation now. 
 
 The effect of every legislative measure must be calculated by 
 the prejudices, and even the passions of those by whom it must be 
 carried into effect. This legislation is to act on a state of things in 
 which the tenantry have no greater tenure than that of a yearly 
 tenancy, and in many instances not even so great, in which leases are 
 almost unknown, and in which the greater number of landlords 
 regard it as their interest, or their duty, or it may be as both their 
 interest and duty to keep their tenantry in a state of subjection to 
 themselves. Applied to this state of things the measure, either of 
 Lord Naas or Mr. Fortescue may in some few and exceptional 
 instances be the means of accomplishing good. In the generality of 
 Irish estates the landlords will exercise the power which in either 
 bill is left them of preventing its operation. They can do so by 
 the very simple process of intimating through the bailiff their desire 
 that no tenant shall make the improvements which Lord Rosse calls 
 irregular without some special sanction and agreement. In the case 
 of properties on which the system of government is not so perfect in 
 its arrangements it will be done by the more clumsy process of ten- 
 dering new agreements which every tenant must sign under the penalty 
 of the notice to quit. The landlord will retain the very same power 
 which he now has of prohibiting or assenting to improvements at 
 his own absolute discretion, and when he does assent to them of 
 dictating whatever terms he thinks fit. 
 
 The extent to which the system of coercive agreements is already 
 resorted to is much greater than is generally supposed. I have 
 already mentioned an instance in which notices to quit were served 
 on the whole tenantry of an estate, and in which they were left the 
 option of remaining only on the condition of signing agreements 
 which bound them to consult the agent of the property in the 
 minutest points of the cultivation of their farms, and in which I was 
 compelled to advise them that they had no choice but to submit. I 
 have been assured by respectable authority that agreements of this 
 nature are not uncommon. There are written agreements upon 
 
COERCIVE AGREEMENTS. 229 
 
 Irish estates which bind the tenant not to give more than one 
 night's lodging to any one not a resident on the estate, and not to 
 permit any of his family to marry without the agent's consent. 
 
 Among the petitions presented to the House of Commons in the 
 Session of 1866 was one from some tenants on an Irish estate. In 
 the printed copy of the petition published by the House of Commons 
 the name of both the estate and the landlord were suppressed. But 
 the facts stated are that a number of tenants who had long been in 
 possession of their farms, who had expended money upon them, 
 were served with notice to quit, and as the condition of its abandon- 
 ment were asked to sign a new agreement which bound them to give 
 up possession if demanded on the 7th of November in each year. If 
 they held over after this demand, or violated any of the rules laid 
 down in the agreement, they bound themselves for each month they 
 did so to pay a ruinous penal rent. No one can say that this agree- 
 ment was not binding in law. 
 
 Conditions of this nature are not uncommon in Irish tenures, even 
 those supposed to be leasehold. 1 have heard of an estate on which 
 most of the tenants hold leases for lives, but every one of the leases 
 contains a covenant that it is to he surrendered on demand, and that 
 it is to be void if the surrender be not made. 
 
 Both the measures on which I am commenting are open to the 
 observation that they fall far short of doing to the tenant the 
 justice which was effected by the provisions of the measure intro- 
 duced by Lord Naas himself in 1852. In the tract on land tenure 
 I have already pointed out all that is involved in the Cabinet and 
 Parliamentary sanction which was so solemnly given to the •* retro- 
 spective clause" which that measure contained.* It is sufficient to 
 say now that neither of the measures at present offered to Parlia- 
 ment contain it. 
 
 Both of them, again, are open to the observations which I have 
 made, as to all measures intended to deal with the Irish land 
 question.! Neither of them places the occupiers of the rest of 
 Ireland in as good a position as the Ulster tenant is placed by the 
 custom of tenant right. "It fails, therefore, in one of the essential 
 objects of doing equal justice to all; and more than this, it incurs 
 a danger surely not to be despised — that of supplying a plausible 
 pretext for reducing the Ulster custom to the privileges conferred 
 by the Act."f 
 
 When Lord Dufferin proposes to engraft on Mr. Fortescue's 
 measure a loan from the Government to enable landlords to buy 
 up the improvements of their tenants, it is plain that in Ulster 
 such a loan would be sought, and sought for the purpose of buying 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland, page 78 to 89. I know of nothing more instructive in 
 connexion with the land question than a study of the Parliamentary history of that 
 celebrated " retrospective clause." It is sketched in the pages to which I refet. 
 
 f Ante, page 18. 
 
230 THE PROPERTY IN ULSTER TENANT RIGHT. 
 
 out tenant right. This would, of course, be the extinction of the 
 custom. No landlord who had once bought up the tenant right 
 of a farm would ever on that farm permit the custom to be re- 
 newed. 
 
 I have, in a former page, quoted Lord Dufferin's inadequate, and 
 worse than inadequate, definition of the Ulster custom * Tenant 
 right, is something very different from a custom " that the land- 
 lord will allow the outgoing tenant such a sum as will remunerate 
 him for improvements upon the soil." It has been rightly pointed 
 out, that to identify the tenant right of Ulster with the claim to 
 compensation for improvements, is to confound two wholly different 
 things.-)- The tenant right does not depend upon the fact of 
 improvements having been made. It is not measured by the value 
 of those improvements. The purchase of the tenant right of an 
 outgoing tenant is the purchase of a right of occupancy in a farm, 
 and that right of occupancy is treated as a property, although it 
 is invested with no legal protection, and rests wholly on a provincial 
 or local custom, enforced by sanctions very different from those of 
 law. % 
 
 This property, though clothed with no legal form, has been the 
 subject of repeated transmissions by purchase and by descent. It 
 has been left by will, and been regarded as the provision for families. 
 In some instances it has been the subject of marriage settlements ; 
 in instances innumerable marriages have been contracted on the 
 faith of its possession. There is not an estate on which it prevails, 
 on which it has not been repeatedly recognized by the owner. 
 Scarcely one in which he has not pocketed the arrears of a defaulting 
 tenant out of the purchase money of the incoming one — none in 
 which he has not been frequently called on to approve of and accept 
 the purchaser as the new tenant of the farm 
 
 This right of property, whatever be its origin, is something 
 wholly distinct from the claims of a tenant to be compensated for 
 improvements effected on his farm. When this property began to 
 be made the subject of inquiry, it was natural that its holders should 
 be anxious to invest it with the moral sanction of the argument that 
 it is now in reality the value of the accumulated result of the capital 
 and labour of successive occupiers, whom the present owners repre- 
 sent^ But just in the same way the owners in fee endeavour to 
 
 * Ante, page 108. 
 
 f Q. " You are aware that the sums paid for tenant right represents a sum paid for 
 occupancy and not a sum paid for compensation ? 
 
 A. "Yes; certainly so. 
 
 Q. " Whenever you introduce the custom of Ulster tenant right, and bring it into 
 the consideration of questions of compensation you are mixing totally different things ? 
 
 A. "They are totally different things." — (Evidence of Judge Longfield, Land 
 Tenure Committee, Questions 325-326). 
 
 X See evidence collected, ante, pp. 78-79. 
 
 § Lord Dufferin's evidence before Land Tenure Committee, question 966. 
 
THE TRUE DEFINITION OP ULSTER TENANT RIGHT. 231 
 
 surround their rights with the very same sanction, by the statement 
 that all property in land is really now the result of expenditure by 
 past generations ; but in neither instance is this the foundation of 
 the right. The property exists wholly independent of this expen- 
 diture. That expenditure constitutes a very strong reason, in justice 
 and in good conscience, why the property should never be disturbed. 
 Neither is it correct to define tenant right as a custom under which 
 an outgoing tenant is permitted to obtain a sum of money from the 
 succeeding tenant for giving up to him possession of the farm. 
 This definition is deficient in not recognizing any interest in the 
 seller, and not describing what that interest is. It is the right to 
 hold at the old accustomed rent, with the understanding that this 
 rent will only be varied when circumstances exist which entitle the 
 landlord to increase it without disturbance of the property really 
 represented by the tenant right. In the admirable report of Mr. 
 O'Connell to the Repeal Association, to which I have already 
 referred,* this element, perfectly essential to any definition of the 
 true custom, is very well expressed. The custom is thus stated : — 
 
 " According to the practice of this right no person can get into occu- 
 pation of a farm without paying the previous occupier the price of his 
 occupation or good will, whether the land be held by lease or by will." 
 
 It is quite obvious that such a custom would mean nothing if the 
 price of the good will were not calculated on the rent which the 
 out-going tenant is paying. The landlord is, therefore, made a 
 party to the purchase by the new tenant of a good will which is 
 estimated at the old rent. Equity precludes him from ever after 
 insisting on its arbitrary variation. The custom, in the language of 
 the Report, precludes the landlord of a farm 
 
 "FROM SETTING IT AT SUCH AN INCREASE OF RENT AS TO DIS- 
 PLACE TENANT RIGHT." 
 
 This is really the essential part of the custom, and it is upon 
 the observance of this that the twenty-four millions of property,! 
 which is the value of the Ulster tenant's property in their farms, 
 depends. The Ulster custom of tenant right is one that entitles 
 every tenant to fixity of tenure at his accustomed rent, except some 
 circumstances entitle the landlord to increase that rent without 
 taking into account the improvements the tenant may have effected 
 on his farm. There is, of course, a sense in which " compensation 
 for improvements " forms a part of the price of all interests in land. 
 Every purchaser of that interest, whether it be the fee-simple or the 
 leasehold, will give more for the land when it is improved, and 
 in the increased price every seller receives compensation for his 
 
 * Report of Parliamentary Committee of Repeal Association. Vol. ii., p. 289, ante, 
 page 107. 
 f Mr. Heron calculates that property as worth twenty-four millions. Ante, page 79. 
 
232 FALSE DEFINITION OF ULSTER TENANT EIGHT. 
 
 expenditure in the improvement of the soil. In this sense, and in 
 this sense only, does " compensation for improvements" enter as an 
 element into the sale of the outgoing occupier's tenant right. 
 
 When pressed before the Land Tenure Committee, Lord Dufferin 
 virtually admitted this : — 
 
 " Then if I understand you aright, the tenant right of the North is 
 a kind of user or custom that has sprung up, and is allowed by the 
 landlords, that a dealing shall take place for the goodwill of a farm, and 
 a sum be paid for it by an incoming to an outgoing tenant, that sum con- 
 sisting in part occasionally of compensation for any improvements that 
 may be upon the farm, and in part for the privilege of coming into the 
 enjoyment of the land? — Yes ; I think that is so. 
 
 " I PRESUME THAT THE SAME RENT IS PAID, AS FAR AS THE LAND IS 
 CONCERNED, AS THE OLD TENANT PAID ? YeS. 
 
 " Is it not the fact that although that sum paid for tenant right is 
 occasionally compounded of those two sums for the compensation for 
 improvements, and for the value, if it can be called so, of the outgoing 
 tenant's interest in the farm, it is very frequently paid for the latter of 
 those two things alone ? — Certainly. 
 
 " Entirely irrespective of any compensation for improvements on the 
 farm ? — Yes. 
 
 " Which may or may not exist, or have been made by the outgoing 
 tenant ? — Certainly." * 
 
 I believe it is not possible for any one to read over the extracts 
 I have made from Pynnar's Survey^ to entertain a doubt that this 
 right of occupancy in the tenant originated in the evasion by the 
 grantees of Ulster property of the conditions imposed upon them to 
 place an estated tenantry upon their lands. But whatever be its 
 origin the custom has now existed for a period which in fact, if not in 
 law, is " time immemorial ;" for time " whereof the memory of man 
 runneth not to the contrary." I have already pointed out that in 
 England copyhold tenures in reality originated in a similar custom. \ 
 All considerations of justice and equity make it imperative that if 
 necessary this immemorial custom should be declared to be the law. 
 Precedent is not wanting in the statute by which Irish landowners 
 in the Irish Parliament, protected their estates, which they held 
 by " a custom of the country unrecognized by law."§ In spite of all 
 the objections that are made to the custom, the prosperity of Ulster 
 is the decisive proof of its value. W'isdom as well as justice tells us 
 that it should be maintained. And I earnestly hope, as I confidently 
 believe that the day will never come when the British Parliament 
 will lend money from the Imperial Treasury to Ulster landlords to 
 enable them, under the guise of paying their tenants for improve- 
 ments, in reality to buy out the Ulster custom of tenant right. 
 
 * Lord Dufferin's evidence before Land Tenure Committee, Questions 1126-1130. 
 
 t Ante, note to page 37. 
 
 X Plea for the Celtic Race, p. 49. 
 
 § Post, page 281. 
 
THE PROTESTANTS OF ULSTER. 233 
 
 I have been able to do little more than glance at this portion 
 of the subject — I mean the present position of the Ulster custom 
 of tenant right. Is the continuance of that custom secure? I 
 have adverted to some of the warnings which indicate its extinction 
 at no distant day, unless legislative protection be given to the 
 tenure of all the occupiers of the Irish soil. It is not possible too 
 often to refer to the evidence given by Judge Longfield, that land 
 jobbers in the Landed Estates Court were every day purchasing up 
 Ulster properties with the very intention of making money by con- 
 fiscating the property which the custom secured to the tenant in 
 his farm.* He earnestly pressed upon Parliament the absolute 
 necessity of protecting the interest of the tenant holding under such a 
 custom in cases of sales in the Landed Estates Court. His proposal 
 was, in all such cases, to enable the court to give the tenant a lease 
 in order to protect the tenant in an interest which " had been 
 recognized from time immemorial;" an interest which no good 
 landlord would disturb, but by disturbing which an unscrupulous 
 man received a bonus on his purchase. "Land jobbers," he told the 
 committee, "were buying those estates with the intention of squeez- 
 ing the tenants out of the estate." This is the testimony of the 
 judicial personage who actually is obliged by law to sign the con- 
 veyance, which is the authority to the purchaser to commit this 
 great robbery and wrong. 
 
 It is plain that any principle which would justify the compelling 
 of a lease in the case of a sale under the Landed Estates Court 
 would justify it in any case in which the custom of tenant right 
 exists, and in which it is likely to be disturbed. " The custom 
 of the country " is, in many instances, law. It ought always 
 to be so. I shall presently show that when the interests of the 
 gentry were concerned the landowners of Ireland made no scruple 
 of violating the legal rights of property by doing substantial justice 
 in making the custom of the country law.j But I now refer to 
 this evidence for the purpose of showing that the property of the 
 Ulster tenants now vested in tenant right requires the protection 
 of law. 
 
 This is a matter of no light moment. It is of the gravest 
 moment to every one who appreciates the value for Ireland of that 
 strange and wayward, but, after all, that noble race who constitute 
 the Protestant population of Ulster. They have their faults, their 
 great faults of ancestral intolerance ; but with that intolerance they 
 have inherited from their covenanting or Puritan ancestors, from 
 whom many of them are descended, some of the stern, but still 
 sterling, qualities which make a people great. What lover of Ire- 
 land would wish our country to lose that bold and manly freedom, 
 that proud, albeit it may be, that harsh spirit of independence — 
 
 * Evidence Land Tenure Committee, Questions 135, 136, 620, 638, 652, 697. 
 t Post page 241. 
 
234 COMPENSATION FOR IMPROVEMENTS AND FIXITY OF TENURE. 
 
 that prudent, even it be sometimes cold and ungainly, thrift — that 
 patient yet unconquerable energy, which are the qualities that in 
 their combination have made Ulster what it is ? Take tenant right 
 away, and the Protestant people of Ulster — as we know and pride 
 ourselves on that people — will not long survive its loss. Unless 
 fixity of tenure be secured by law the Ulster custom of tenant 
 right is doomed.* 
 
 But upon the general question let me say, once for all, with- 
 out meaning to undervalue the vast importance of a measure 
 which would secure to the tenant the right to make improvements 
 and be paid for them — even such a measure would never com- 
 pensate for the absence of some security for tenure. Men are 
 influenced in expending industry upon their farms, not by 
 the hope of being paid for it, but by the hope of enjoying its 
 fruits. The incentive to this industry is weakened, if it be not 
 gone, when you tell the tenant he may be turned out to-morrow ; 
 but if he is that his landlord must pay him for what he is doing. 
 In many cases the payment might, in very many it would, fall 
 far short of the worth of labour that is expended. Men give 
 their labour and their strength to ornament and improve that 
 which is their own. They expend industry upon neatness, 
 upon appearance, in the pride of ownership. This pride it is 
 that cherishes the very feelings and habits in which our people 
 are deficient. Slovenliness and want of order will be the charac- 
 teristics of the man who improves under the liability of eviction: 
 even though you tell him he will be paid. On our Irish 
 farms and farmhouses the industry which it is most desirable to 
 encourage is exactly that which will not bear to be reduced to 
 measure and rule. When men plant trees the thought that 
 rises to their minds is that they and their children will walk under 
 their shade If the cottier spends his leisure hours in adorning 
 his home, or in adding to it another room, the motive present to 
 his mind is that of living on in the place which he is making 
 neat or convenient If, year after year, he carries earth to enrich 
 the still ungrateful soil, he is cheered in his labour by the belief 
 that, a year or two more, and he will reap the crop of corn 
 from that field. You will never get from human occupiers all the 
 energy of improvement of which they are capable unless you give 
 them a tenure long enough to enable them to feel that their im- 
 provements are their own. 
 
 And this is just the industry and the improvement which Ireland 
 wants. In the county in Ireland in which, I still think, above all 
 others, the land, in proportion to its natural resources, is made the 
 most of, you will not see, as a rule, great improvements carried on 
 under the superintendence of the Board of Works. What you 
 
 * See this question discussed more fully in the tract on Land Tenure, pages 45-52. 
 
LORD LIFFORD ON THE IRISH CHURCH. 235 
 
 will see is a number of small holdings, upon each of which great 
 and constant industry has made small improvements — upon which 
 cultivation has been gradually carried to the hill top, and by the 
 patient care of many a year the cut out bog has been trained to 
 grow waving corn or luxuriant grass — holdings in the midst of 
 which the whitewashed cottage, with its neatly trimmed thatch, 
 is ornamented with its little garden of flowers and fruit trees 
 before its door. These are improvements and this is industry 
 incapable of being submitted to the approval of a landlord. They 
 cannot be mapped and measured by any officer of the Board of 
 Works. You can only attain them when you give security of tenure 
 to the occupier of the soil. 
 
 It is, perhaps, necessary my Lord, that before I proceed to offer 
 a few closing observations on the general effect of all that I have 
 written, I should advert in a very few words to some other topics 
 to which your Lordship has referred. It is due to your Lordship 
 that I should do so, especially to the views you express on the 
 subject of the Church Establishment. I need scarcely say that in 
 attaching the importance which I have done to this subject of our 
 land tenure, I have never meant to say that there are not other 
 questions which are of great moment to the Irish nation. But I 
 believe that the land question is above and before them all, exactly 
 as the life of a nation or an individual is before and above any 
 question relating to the condition of that life. The policy of 
 conquest pervades our whole system ; but it rests, as its basis, on 
 the serfdom of the occupiers of the soil. It is there — in our system 
 of land tenure — that it presses on the nation's life. I might almost 
 say that we must elevate the great mass of our countrymen to the 
 rank of freemen before we can determine upon any subject under 
 what laws it is fit for freemen to live. 
 
 Upon the question of our ecclesiastical establishment your pro- 
 posal is that a portion of the revenues now belonging to the 
 Established Church should be applied to the purposes of general 
 education, and that in lieu of the charge from which the Exchequer 
 would thus be free, the nation should provide for each Roman 
 Catholic priest in Ireland an estate — it is scarcely right to call it a 
 glebe — of the average value of £200 a-year. 
 
236 LORD LIEFORD AND THE PRIESTS. 
 
 May I ask your attention to the fact, that of all the writers 
 in the Conservative Press who have heaped their praises upon your 
 Lordship for your resistance to fixity of tenure, there is not one 
 who has even mentioned your proposal in relation to the Church. 
 You thus state the plan by which you propose to remedy the 
 grievance involved in the appropriation to the Church of a small 
 minority of the revenues devoted and intended for providing 
 religious ordinances for the people at large : — 
 
 " I conceive, then, that a large portion of the revenues of the Esta- 
 blished Church might be legitimately applied to national education. 
 This would save to the State a considerable sum, now applied to 
 education, and the State could, therefore, better afford to use a large sum 
 for a purpose, which would go far to remove the stigma of an anomaly 
 from the Reformed Church, would be a great pecuniary boon to the 
 poorest class, and would do much to secure, to the side of order, the most 
 politically powerful class of men in Ireland — I mean the providing glebes 
 for the Roman Catholic clergy, subject to a payment to their bishops. 
 Justice is seldom done to the Roman Catholic clergy by those opposed to 
 them. They are judged of in England by a few noisy members of their 
 body, who make themselves conspicuous in elections ; but little is known 
 about the great body of the Irish priests — their genial kindness, and 
 their influence over their flocks for good. When I recollect that they 
 are sprung from the people ; that in their earliest years they imbibed the 
 thoughts and opinions of the people — dangerous, and grounded on false 
 notions of history, and of their rights, as I have stated those opinions 
 to be ; that they associate invariably with the people, and, though often 
 men of refinement of mind, induced by a superior education, seldom with 
 the higher classes, my wonder is, not that they are sometimes coarse and 
 unscrupulous agitators, but that they are so generally charitable and 
 self-denying parish priests, the strenuous advocates and enforcers of 
 morality, order, and submission to the law. Be that as it may, in every 
 case of attempted or contemplated rebellion against the Queen's Govern- 
 ment for the last half century, the Roman Catholic clergy, in conformity 
 with the laws of their Church, and from their knowledge of what is the 
 best interest of their flocks, have used their powerful influence on the 
 side of loyalty. 
 
 " Now, is it just, is it politic, to leave these men under no reciprocal 
 obligations to the State ? They are educated men, and are aware of 
 what goes on abroad, and they know the folly of the political fancies of 
 a most impulsive and deluded people. Is it wise to leave them dependent 
 for their support on the poorest and most ignorant class, even though 
 there is no danger of that support failing? It is not a question of 
 religion. Religion never was promoted by endowments, nor checked by 
 persecution. It is a pure question of justice and of wise policy, except 
 so far as it greatly affects the power of defending the Established Church, 
 by making its position less anomalous. 
 
 " There are about 1,050 parish priests in Ireland. Supposing a power 
 were given by Parliament to purchase a glebe for each, of the average 
 value, some more some less, of £200 a-year, this, at 4^ per cent., would 
 
RELIGIOUS EQUALITY. 237 
 
 take a sum of about five millions ; a sum about the cost of the new 
 drains in London, the annual interest being about the price of one iron- 
 clad. Of the £200 a-year coming to each parish priest, £30 a-year 
 would be made payable to his bishop, which would give to each Roman 
 Catholic bishop, after expenses were paid, an average income of about 
 £1,000 a-year. Religious equality and its consequence (spoliation apart), 
 the payment by the State of the Roman Catholic clergy, were part of the 
 old and far-sighted policy of Mr. Pitt. So was Reform of Parliament. 
 So was Free Trade. The temporary repudiation of two of these great 
 principles of their greatest leader has, with short exceptions, deprived 
 the Tory Party of office for more than thirty years. These principles 
 might have been a tower of strength to the Tory Party ; the two last 
 have proved tremendous weapons against it. In the present loosening of 
 party ties, it remains to be seen who will take up the first in its integrity, 
 not for mere party purposes, but in the spirit and power of Pitt ; and 
 thus preserving the property of the Established Church to its original 
 uses, remove the last trace of religious ascendancy, and give a boon to 
 the Irish people patent in every parish in Ireland."* 
 
 I will not be drawn, even by these passages, into a discussion of 
 the question to which they refer — a question, beside, although not 
 altogether foreign to, the subject which I have undertaken to 
 discuss. I will only say that I am sure that, to give permanent or 
 real contentment to Ireland, we must abandon the policy of conquest 
 upon all questions of religion, as well as on those relating to the 
 tenure of land; we must banish from every part of our legislation, 
 from every nook and corner of our administrative system, every 
 vestige of the policy which would treat the religion of the vast 
 majority of Irishmen as a proscribed or inferior faith. We must 
 banish it from all our arrangements of national education, whether 
 for the higher, the lower, or the middle class. We must banish it 
 from all our laws which dispose of the property which the piety of 
 past generations has consecrated to the service of religion. In each 
 and every of these questions — in every department of Irish 
 government — we must, once and for all, and with an honest and 
 unfaltering purpose, dismiss and destroy for ever any lurking 
 notion that we can subject the religion of the immense majority of 
 Irishmen — that which is the faith of the old nation — to any brand 
 of degradation or inferiority on the Irish soil. 
 
 I am bound to state these convictions lest I might seem to 
 dissent from the opinion which your Lordship so clearly expresses 
 as to the absolute necessity of establishing " religious equality " in 
 Ireland. I express no opinion upon the particular measure which 
 your Lordship recommends. It is only justice to say that it is very 
 different from a proposal to make the Catholic clergy stipendiaries 
 of the State — a proposal to which they have told us they will 
 never give their assent. I forbear further to pursue a subject 
 which, as I have said, is beside the question on which I write. 
 
 * Lord Lifford's Letter to Mr. Butt, pp. 17, 18, 19. 
 
238 THE PRIESTS AND THE GOVERNMENT. 
 
 But, my Lord, it is not beside that to point out that the hope is 
 vain that any endowment, or any establishment, even of the fullest 
 religious equality, will detach the Roman Catholic clergy from the 
 cause of the people. You can win over the priesthood of Ireland 
 by doing justice to the people. I am not sure that I would say 
 with you that the influence of the Catholic priesthood has been 
 used on the side of " loyalty," if you mean by loyalty that 
 attachment to existing institutions which can only result from 
 contentment under them ; but with some little knowledge of the 
 two attempts that have been made in our generation to excite 
 insurrection in Ireland, I can and must say that I believe the 
 influence of the priesthood — an influence quietly and unostenta- 
 tiously exerted, which sought no favour from Government, and 
 made no parade of loyalty before England — has been in both instances 
 used to dissuade the people from joining in the projected revolt. 
 
 But it is another and a very different thing to expect that the 
 Catholic priesthood will inculcate on their flocks contentment with 
 the system of land tenure which is keeping their people in misery 
 and serfdom. I do not believe all the gold in the British Treasury 
 could buy them to this ; and if it could they would fail. If you 
 could ally the Catholic clergy with " landlordism," you would only 
 destroy their influence with the people ; and in severing the peasant 
 from his pastor you would snap the last link that binds him to 
 order and to patient endurance of his wrongs. 
 
 But I cannot refrain from reminding you that there is a subject 
 upon which the Roman Catholic clergy have made a request — a 
 plain and a simple one^and it has not been complied with. They 
 have not asked for the glebes which you offer them. They have 
 asked that in the administration of the funds which the nation 
 votes for Irish education — the teaching of those who adhere to the 
 faith, which is the faith of the Irish people — should be free. They 
 ask that in the national schools of Ireland the Irish Catholic priest 
 and the Irish Catholic bishop should have the same liberty of 
 teaching which in the English national schools is allowed, not only 
 to the Catholic priest, but to the Jewish rabbi. The answer to 
 that request by our rulers is the maintenance of a system of Irish 
 national education opposed to the whole wishes and feelings of the 
 Irish nation — a system which would not be freely adopted by a 
 vote of any parish in Ireland, and which I do not believe would be 
 forced upon this island if we were a distinct and independent 
 colony, without the advantage or disadvantage of having one single 
 representation in the Imperial Parliament 
 
 Again: — That clergy have asked for a Royal sanction to a 
 University founded on principles in accordance with those of the 
 Church to which the great majority of the Irish people belong, 
 and — would it be possible in any other country upon earth ?■ — that 
 sanction is refused. 
 
THE SECRET OF IRISH GOVERNMENT. 239 
 
 There are other matters as well as the land question upon which 
 the spirit that enacted the penal laws is not extinct. 
 
 And surely I may venture to say that even in the views you 
 have expressed upon the Church question, there is a proof that 
 there is no prejudice so strong that in honest and upright minds 
 it will not yield to the " irresistible logic of events " to the force 
 of reason and truth. Am I wrong in saying that there was a time 
 when you yourself would have regarded as revolutionary a proposal 
 to appropriate the Church revenues in the manner you now suggest? 
 I am sure that it will be read with approval, or at least acquiescence, 
 by many who would a short time ago have so denounced it. I 
 think I can see in that very proposal the struggle between honest 
 and high-minded prejudices and the conviction forcing itself, in 
 spite of them, that an unjust ecclesiastical ascendancy, cannot and 
 ought not to be maintained. Even on the land question I do not 
 despair of seeing similar prejudices give way. 
 
 There is but one secret in governing Ireland as there is in 
 governing any country. Let it be governed for the good of the 
 whole people. Let us abandon the policy of maintaining any 
 English interest, or any Protestant interest, or any class interest, 
 or any interest but that of the Irish people. When every measure 
 of government and every institution of the country are moulded and 
 adapted to meet the wants, the wishes, and the capabilities of that 
 people — when, in a word, Irish legislation is influenced as ex- 
 clusively by reference to the wants and wishes of Ireland as English 
 legislation is by a reference to those of England, then, and then 
 only, will Ireland be governed as a free country. 
 
 Let me turn again to the great question with which I have been 
 attempting to deal. It is more than time that this letter should 
 draw to a close. 
 
 u Immensum spatiis confecimus aequor." 
 
 Before I make an effort, at its conclusion, to condense into a brief 
 space some few of the conclusions which seem to follow from all 
 that we have reviewed, I must ask your Lordship's forgiveness for 
 having permitted myself to be led on far, far, beyond the limits of a 
 
240 APOLOGY TO LORD LIFFORD. 
 
 reply to the letter which you did me the honour to address to me. 
 I feel, my Lord, how many apologies I owe to you for having 
 introduced into this letter the discussion of many topics connected 
 with this question with which I had, perhaps, no right to associate 
 your Lordship's name. When I began to write I had no inten- 
 tion of doing so. Nearly four months have passed since I com- 
 menced this letter. When I commenced it I intended to write a 
 short tract — I have been insensibly led on to write a large book. 
 Each day brought me some new statement to be answered, or 
 opened up some new view to be discussed, and the result is that there 
 are many things in these pages which do not properly belong to a 
 mere reply to your Lordship's letter. But 1 confess I was not 
 sorry in a discussion in which I must of necessity say hard things, 
 or those which may seem to be hard things, of a class — to feel 
 myself constantly under the restraint of addressing a member of 
 that class. Nothing could more forcibly remind me of the distinc- 
 tion which every just man must draw between individuals and a 
 system ; or more effectually prevent me from forgetting that against 
 the opinions I am expressing a great deal of worth and of virtue 
 may be arrayed. Combating opinions entertained by your Lordship, 
 I never could forget that no matter how wrong or mistaken, or even 
 mischievous, I might regard them, individuals hold them who are 
 entitled to all respect. Neither did I regret throughout this letter 
 to feel myself in the position of reasoning not against but with an 
 Irish landowner, one whose mind can I know do full justice to my 
 argument, and one of whom I believe that, if I did convince his 
 judgment, neither class interest nor class prejudice or any view of 
 private interest would prevent his acting on the dictates of his 
 reason and his conscience. 
 
 In this spirit, my Lord, at the close of this long letter, with all 
 the light that discussion has thrown upon this question, I appeal to 
 you to reconsider your judgment upon my proposal — to say whether 
 it is really communistic and revolutionary — or whether it be not in 
 truth an assertion of just claims that have been too long neglected — 
 an eminently conservative adjustment of differences, the very 
 existence of which is a state of chronic revolution — and the staying 
 of the progress of a violent social change which is now driving the 
 Irish people from their homes. 
 
 The principle of that which I propose is this. The occupier of 
 the soil ought to be secured in its possession by a lease. We ought 
 not to base our land system on short and uncertain tenures 
 
 Is this proposal a new one ? Have I not shown it to be incor- 
 porated in the very foundation of all Irish proprietary right — inter- 
 woven, if I may so speak, with the very texture of the title deeds 
 of every Irish estate. Up to our own day it was recognized by a 
 custom stronger than law I am only asking of Irish proprietors 
 to return to a custom which our grandfathers and great grand- 
 
LORD CHANCELLOR LIFFORD AND THE TENANTRY ACT. 241 
 
 fathers followed. This may be unwise or impolitic ; but surely it 
 is scarcely revolutionary even to enforce the old custom of the 
 country by law. 
 
 In fact, my Lord, it is by virtue of an enactment not dissimilar 
 in principle that a very large portion of the property in Ireland 
 is now enjoyed by its present owners. Your Lordship's 
 ancestor presided in the Irish Court of Chancery, and over 
 the Irish Peers, when the English House of Lords, the supreme 
 tribunal of appeal, pronounced a decision which actually vested in the 
 chief lords the greater portion of the interests which were held 
 under " leases for lives renewable for ever." That decision 
 declared the law — the law common both to England and Ireland — 
 How did the Irish Parliament of landowners deal with it ? They 
 passed a statute, recognizing what was rightly termed the old 
 custom and the old equity of the country, and by that statute they 
 vested in one set of proprietors a large amount of property which 
 was actually ascertained to be the legal property of another. That 
 precedent, my Lord, would exactly and precisely justify legislators 
 in giving legal protection to the Ulster custom of tenant right. 
 There was not an argument advanced in favour of the " Tenantry 
 Act" of 1779, which would not justify such a measure. That Act 
 was passed to protect property which legally belonged to one person, 
 but which " the old custom" and " the old equity" of the country 
 had always considered as morally and equitably vested in another. 
 When the harsh application of legal principles attempted to confiscate 
 that property, the Irish Parliament interposed, by legislation, to do 
 justice, even at the expense of legal rights ; and under an Act so 
 passed, a very considerable portion of Irish property is now enjoyed 
 by its present owners. " The old custom" and the old equity of 
 the country might be pleaded with even more truth and justice on 
 behalf of the property acquired and enjoyed under the Ulster 
 custom of tenant right. 
 
 Writing to your Lordship I could scarcely omit this illustration, 
 but I do not need it. 
 
 It may be said that I go further than compelling the landlord to 
 give a lease — I compel him to give it at a fixed rent. I do so, 
 because without this it is utterly impossible to carry out the first 
 object. A law which would compel a landlord to give a lease, but 
 permit him to insert in it any reservation of rent he pleased, would 
 be in the circumstances of Ireland so nugatory as to be absurd. 
 If it be necessary to enforce by law a return to the once universal 
 custom of leases, the second proposition is involved in this — not 
 that we should fix the rent, but that we should fix its maximum, 
 and fix that maximum at the highest amount which any tenant 
 can reasonably pay. Considering the hopeless state of depen- 
 dence in which the great majority of Irish tenants are placed, the 
 prohibition of a bargain for an extortionate rent is, in itself, 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE "OLD CUSTOM" OF LEASES. 
 
 nothing more than an application to the case of landlord and tenant 
 of some of the most established principles of jurisprudence. 
 
 I admit also that I compel the landlord to give that which I may- 
 call the right of preemption to the tenant occupying the farm. This 
 is also but a necessary conseqence of the enforcement of a lease. 
 The proposal could not be carried out in any other way without 
 exposing all existing tenants to eviction. Unless we are to permit 
 the landlord to defeat the whole measure, by taking the land into 
 his own hands, somebody must get the preference. The occupying 
 tenant is the person entitled to it. He is thereby the landlord's act 
 and choice. I give to the landlord the power of getting rid of him 
 unless he proves himself a good tenant — good both in payment of rent 
 and in the proper cultivation of his farm. Ought any landlord object 
 to keep a tenant who is both punctual in his payments and careful 
 in his cultivation of the land? I remind you again that even in so 
 forbidding the landlord to take into his own hands lands usually let, 
 I am following out old precedent and adhering to the spirit and 
 even to the letter of the conditions upon which the greater portion 
 of Irish property was vested in its present class of owners.* 
 
 If any one is prepared to concede the principle that landowners 
 ought to be compelled to observe the ancient custom of letting land. 
 I do not believe it possible to carry out that principle by any mea- 
 sure which will interfere with their dominion less than does the 
 measure I propose. 
 
 If there be difficulty or inconvenience in making this the subject 
 of legislation it is caused by the landowners who have in truth 
 created a social revolution by adopting the determination of insisting 
 on the totally new principle of universal tenancies-at-will. 
 
 This is a matter of recent origin. Let me earnestly implore the 
 attention of those who may be disposed to condemn novel proposals, 
 to this fact, that the state of things with which we are deal- 
 ing is one absolutely and entirely new. The general in- 
 security of tenure which arises from a general and combined refusal 
 of the landowners to grant leases is entirely the creation of the last 
 few years. For the first time in the history of Ireland the people 
 occupy their native country at the mercy and by the sufferance of 
 the comparatively few persons who have acquired the ownership or 
 lordship of the soil. 
 
 Is not this in itself an answer to a great deal that has been said 
 against measures such as I propose ? It is quite true that tenant 
 right and fixity of tenure are but recently pressed as popular demands. 
 The necessity for them has only recently arisen. O'Connell, to- 
 wards the close of his life, perceived the growing evil, and did con- 
 template fixity of tenure. But it may be that this question of land 
 tenure was even in old days of more importance than was supposed. 
 
 * Sir John Davies, ante page ii. 
 
THE NEW TENURE OF TENANCY AT WILL. 243 
 
 It may be that a law against extortionate rents would, at any time, 
 have been a wise measure for Ireland. I am far from saying that it 
 would or it would not ; but this is not the question now. That of 
 fixity of tenure is forced on us by a state of things such as never 
 existed in the country before. It requires a mental effort to realize 
 all that is involved in the condition of land tenure in which the 
 landowners of a great country generally insist on holding all its 
 cultivators as tenants-at-will. It requires a greater effort still to 
 accustom our mind to think of the measures by which an evil so 
 novel and so gigantic must be met. 
 
 This great change in our customs was not that which grew up in 
 the gradual moulding of habits to the altered circumstances of time. 
 It is a sudden and violent revolution brought about by the strife of 
 classes — the determination on the part of the landowners to use 
 their dominion over the soil to keep the people in their power. 
 This is not matter of conjecture. It is explicitly avowed. Leases 
 are refused because the landowners think it necessary to retain a 
 dominion which is really that of vassalage over those on whom they 
 confer the privilege of being tillers of the soil. It is useless to 
 inquire to whose fault we are to trace this state of things. I know 
 all the answers that would be given to that question by bigotry, 
 by passion, or by prejudice, on one side and the other. It is enough 
 to know that the claim is asserted, and most effectually enforced, 
 and that in our generation there is not the slightest prospect of the 
 passing away of the circumstances or the motives which have caused 
 it. We must work a moral miracle, and wholly change the nature 
 and the feelings, possibly even the religion, either of the Irish land- 
 owners or the Irish peasantry before those circumstances or those 
 motives pass away. 
 
 The people refuse to remain as tenants-at-will to the landowners, 
 and they are going away. 
 
 Surely I am justified in saying that this is a national condition 
 altogether different from the ordinary social difficulties which, in 
 civilized countries, statesmen are called upon to solve. And surely 
 the statesmen who are not prepared boldly and effectually to deal 
 with it, are really letting Ireland drift either to ruin or to revolution, 
 or to both. I say boldly—for never was there a subject which more 
 required and justified bold and decisive expedients — it is not one 
 that is to be dealt with by palliatives that bring, in the end, no 
 alleviation, or mild remedies that effect really no redress. Never 
 was there a question of which it might more truthfully be said — 
 
 " The foolish cant — ' He went too far' — despise, 
 And know that to be brave is to be wise." 
 
 Unless we go far enough to meet the mischief, we will act at 
 least as wisely by not interfering at all. The real evil is the uni- 
 versal insecurity of tenure preserved by the general determination 
 
244 THE NEW TENURE — A SOCIAL REVOLUTION. 
 
 of landowners to let no one occupy the soil of Ireland except 
 as a tenant-at-will. This is a claim on their part, founded, I admit, 
 on the legal exercise of proprietary rights, to keep the people in 
 their power. The real question is, shall the nation acquiesce in 
 that claim. It is impossible long to evade the decision of that 
 question ; and all legislation that postpones it is only tampering 
 with a subject upon which every statesman who deals with Ire- 
 land, unless he is wholly unfit for his position, must very soon, one 
 way or other, make up his mind. If the resolution be come to to 
 acquiesce in that claim, nothing remains but to uphold extreme 
 proprietary rights, and warn the people that they have nothing 
 to expect ; and the more clearly and distinctly this is done the 
 better will we discharge the only obligation to that people, and to 
 humanity, which it will remain for us to fulfil. If we are not to 
 acquiesce in that claim, let us devise the measure which, with the 
 least disturbance of the present condition of property, may yet 
 adequately meet the evils of this novel and unheard of state of things. 
 
 I say " novel and unheard of!" Could there, I ask, be a greater 
 social revolution than that which, in a country like Ireland, volun- 
 tarily altered the whole tenures of the country from leases to 
 tenancies-at-will ? Compare one of these estates like that which 
 Arthur Young describes, on which every Protestant tenant held by 
 a lease for three lives, every Roman Catholic tenant by a lease for 31 
 years, with the same estate as it is in the present, with no tenure 
 on it beyond a tenancy from year to year — very likely reduced to 
 an actual tenancy-at-will, by the contrivance of an annual notice to 
 quit, or by an agreement binding the tenant under a heavy penalty 
 to give up possession whenever he is asked. The change is not 
 a mere formal one as it might be in England. The lease is 
 refused for the express purpose of enabling the landlord to evict 
 the tenant whenever he pleases. Let us dwell on all the effects 
 of such a change in the case of one tenant — then in the case of 
 an entire estate. Let us enlarge our view to all the estates in the 
 island — suppose the same change upon each of them, and then we 
 may fairly estimate the extent of the social revolution through 
 which Ireland is past. The edicts of Stein and Hardenberg scarcely 
 effected a greater practical change in the land system of Prussia 
 than that which, has been effected in Ireland by the edict of the 
 landowners, which has degraded the tenantry from freeholders into 
 " villeins" — an edict by which the lords of the soil are to be the lords 
 of the people, not by any penal enactment — not by any law of feudal 
 privilege — but by a combined exercise of proprietary rights. 
 
 But not only is it new in Ireland. It is new in history. I re- 
 member no instance in history in which such a combination has 
 taken place. In what country supposed to possess free institutions 
 and a free government has such an attempt ever been made ? The 
 landowners of the country with one consent agree that no one shall 
 
THE LANDOWNERS* NEW LAW OF TENURE. 245 
 
 cultivate the Irish soil unless he places himself in a state of vassalage, 
 and they leave to the people the alternative of submitting or going 
 away. No passage in history supplies us with any guide — no 
 lesson of political philosophy ever contemplated such a social condi- 
 tion. There is but one country on earth in which it could happen. 
 Such a state of things could only exist in that unhappy land in 
 which alien proprietors have held its soil for two centuries without 
 either subduing or conciliating its people — in which the sins of the 
 fathers are literally visited on the children, not unto three, but unto 
 seven generations — in which even as the seventh generation is pass- 
 ing to its grave, the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered 
 still stand aloof from each other in angry distrust, and in which, 
 under the semblance and forms of civil society, the relations of 
 owner and occupier are still guided by the maxims and agitated by 
 the passions of civil war. Time that heals the wounds of other dis- 
 sensions, but rips open the scars of ours, and makes them bleed 
 afresh. The evil deeds of former days still follow us remorselessly 
 with their curse, as though some old guilt unexpiated and unpar- 
 doned still rested on our soil, as evil spirits are said to haunt the 
 places where great crimes have been committed, and the stains of 
 human blood remain indelible upon the stones into which they have 
 once eaten, reappearing after a lapse of years, during which it 
 might have been thought that the rains and winds had long since 
 washed and worn them away. 
 
 Was there ever a chain of evidence more complete than that by 
 which, even in the imperfect tracing of those pages, our present inse- 
 curity of tenure is connected in " unbroken links of causation" with 
 the policy and the passions of our confiscations? Up to the time of 
 the Union we find an English colony settled in an enemy's country 
 which had been " reduced by the sword to a sullen and refractory 
 allegiance" — proprietors whose " common title was confiscation — 
 hemmed in on every side by the old inhabitants of the island brood- 
 ing over their discontents in sullen indignation." " The people of 
 the country divided into two distinct and separate castes, one 
 possessed of the whole property and power of the country, the other 
 expelled from both."* We find penal laws enacted to crush down 
 the conquered enemies, statutes to prevent them acquiring long 
 interests in the land — every relaxation of these laws opposed upon 
 the ground that it might weaken the titles acquired by confiscation — 
 even the acts of mercy by which British sovereigns proposed to 
 remove unjust attainders defeated upon the same ground/)" We 
 
 * Lord Clare. 
 
 "T " Among the few occurrences which disturbed the Duke of Devonshire's long 
 administration, which passed with unusual tranquillity, was the alarm given to the 
 possessors of confiscated estates, by an application of the Earl of Clancarty to the king 
 for the restitution of bis estates, which had been forfeited in the Rebellion (!!) of 1688 ; 
 and were supposed to be worth £60,000 annually at the time when he applied. The 
 Earl had obtained the consent of the British Cabinet that a Bill should be brought 
 
246 LANDLORDISM AND ITS NEW PENAL LAW. 
 
 have proprietors to this day " persuaded that every change of policy 
 or isolated disturbance threatens" their titles — " a gentry who think 
 they only garrison their estates, and look upon the native occupants 
 as persons merely to eject them on a favourable opportunity ;"* and 
 we have that gentry now refusing to give any security to these 
 occupants with the very object that the occupants may have no 
 hold whatever on the soil, and that when the landlords u fight the 
 battle for their rights, they may do so with their hands untied." f 
 
 I have endeavoured, as nearly as possible, to condense this 
 evidence in the words of others. Was I wrong in saying that 
 while the arbitrary power of eviction lasts, the sword of Oliver 
 Cromwell is suspended over every peasant's door? Until you give 
 that peasant security of tenure, so far as he is concerned the penal 
 laws are unrepealed. 
 
 In old times a penal law prohibited the " Papists" from acquiring 
 a freehold interest in land, or even a long or beneficial term of 
 years. This law and the corresponding law denying them the fran- 
 chise, { were justified upon precisely the same grounds upon which 
 Lord Rosse rests the present refusal of the landowners to give leases. 
 It was said that if these concessions were made to them, farms would 
 become divided into a number of small holdings — that the " Popish" 
 tenantry would return men unconnected with the county by pro- 
 perty, and that measures would be passed in Parliament dangerous 
 to the influence, the rights, and even the title of the landowners. 
 All the reasons which, we are assured, influence now the land- 
 lords to refuse leases, influenced their ancestors to pass the penal 
 laws. It was even said that those who cried " down with land- 
 lordism, also cried down with the British Crown." Over and over 
 again it was pointed out that the title of the House of Hanover to 
 the throne, and the title of the Irish landowners to their estates, 
 both rested on the exclusion of the old possessors — and loyalty 
 and self-interest, and the rights of property, were all alike invoked 
 as a justification of the policy which deprived the Irish people of all 
 freedom or independence upon the soil of their native land. 
 
 To protect the titles, the influence, and the position of the landed 
 proprietors, was the policy and the object of the penal laws. The 
 
 into the Irish Parliament for the reversal of his attainder ; but the measure was re- 
 linquished, in consequence of the vigorous resolutions of the Irish Commons, who had 
 addressed his majesty for that purpose in 1728 and 1735 ; and again, in the session of 
 1739, voted, that any attempt to disturb the Protestant purchasers of estates forfeited 
 by rebellion, would be of dangerous consequence to his majesty's person and govern- 
 ment." — Gordon's History of Ireland, Vol. ii., page 217. 
 
 * Mr. Otway's Report, ante page 67. 
 
 + Lord Rosse, ante page 165. 
 
 X It was said in the Irish Parliament, by the advocates of the Catholics, that up to 
 the first year of the reign of George the Second there was no legal exclusion of Roman 
 Catholics as such from the elective franchise. It was insisted by their opponents that 
 they had been excluded at a period much nearer the Revolution. The point was not 
 of much importance then. It is of none now. 
 
LANDLORDISM AND ITS NEW PENAL LAW. 247 
 
 same policy prompted the worse administrative oppressions by which 
 the people were crushed down. The excuse was then as it is now, 
 that it would be unsafe for the landowners to trust the people with 
 the privileges of freemen and freeholders on their estates. To keep 
 them down from that position was the object of the penal code. 
 The same distrust prevails now. The laws proscribing religion have 
 been repealed. Civil and religious disabilities have been removed. 
 The right of the elective franchise, and that of holding long leases 
 have been conferred. But the very policy of the penal code is 
 carried out by a mode more suited to that which we are pleased to 
 call the liberality of this generation, at all events more adapted to the 
 prejudices of the commercial spirit of the age. Driven from penal 
 laws and legal disabilities the policy of conquest has resorted to a 
 far more coercive power, that resulting from the legal ownership of 
 the soil. The landowners have discovered the force of the tremen- 
 dous weapon which, in that ownership, the law has placed in their 
 hands. In old times they chained the arm of the occupier ; they 
 have now found out that it is enough if in the use of that terrible 
 weapon, their own hands are left untied. But all this is but the 
 continuation under novel forms of the one undying conflict. The 
 refusal of leases is only a new strategy of the old civil war. 
 
 And now the Irish peasant is plainly told that he is perfectly free — 
 that he enjoys the protection of the best laws and the privileges of 
 the freest Constitution in the world, but that as he is a dangerous 
 person to his landlord's rights, if he remains in his country, he must 
 do so as a tenant-at-will — that is, in a state of servitude in which 
 he has not one hour's security, and in which he cannot call his in- 
 dustry, or even his home his own. He must submit to be his 
 landlord's bailiff in all that concerns the cultivation of his farm* — 
 a mere farm servant retained only until it may suit his landlord's 
 convenience that he should goj — his landlord's serf even in the 
 domestic arrangements of his hornet — his landlord's vassal in the 
 exercise of the franchise which the law has nominally given to 
 himself § — a bondsman in all respects but one. His master retains 
 the power of turning him adrift upon the world when he will. 
 
 The Irish peasant knows law, not by what is written in the 
 statute book, but by that which comes home to his roof-tree and his 
 fireside. Can any man say that as to him the practical operation 
 of the old penal laws is gone ? 
 
 Must not every right-minded man ask himself whether the 
 position of a tenant at will upon an Irish estate is one in which 
 any man ought to be contented to remain ? In any case he must 
 be content to banish all real sense of independence from his heart. 
 Every man must do so who agrees to live dependent upon the will 
 
 * Lord Dufferin, ante, page 213. t Lord Rosse, ante, page 170. 
 
 % Ante, page 178. § Lord Rosse, ante, page 172. 
 
248 TIIE TENANT-AT-WILL 
 
 of another for his very means of life. He must submit to whatever 
 " rules of the estate," the folly, the caprice, or the tyranny of his 
 master may enact ; he must be ready at the bidding of ' the driver ' 
 to turn away his nearest relative from his door. Even if he is an 
 educated clergyman, a dignitary of the church of the people, he 
 must see that all his curates measure their language or he will not 
 be suffered to live upon the estate. No matter how vexatious may 
 be the petty persecutions of the rules, he must submit — and all the 
 while he is shut out from the real exercise of the only industry he 
 can employ. Round the humble home of the peasant lie stony 
 fields and thorny brakes, and banks of heather upon which he would 
 be glad to labour until " the live long day would prove too short 
 for his untiring toil."* But if he toils he has no assurance that 
 ever the fruits of his industry will be his own. He looks out from 
 his door in listless but angry inaction, and broods over a sullen but 
 surely not unnatural discontent. Even of the continuance of such a 
 life he has no security. Very probably the annual notice to quit 
 reminds him that he is only " a pilgrim and a stranger " in his native 
 country, and that he knows not the hour when some " improve- 
 ment" may require him to leave his home and give up his bit of 
 ground. 
 
 You ask me, my Lord — " How would an Irishman like to be 
 obliged to obtain leave from the police to marry, and to be refused 
 leave if the police officer thought he did not possess a sufficiently 
 large farm?"f 
 
 There are many " well managed estates" in Ireland on which he 
 must obtain the same leave from an "agency" between which 
 and him their exists far less sympathy than there is between the 
 Bavarian peasant and the police. There is, at all events, this 
 difference — the refusal of the Irish agent is one against which he 
 has no appeal. 
 
 Let us try and realize to ourselves, if we can, the daily life of a 
 man who passes it in such a position as this — a man, it may be, with 
 feelings as proud and as sensitive as our own — a man with the 
 consciousness that his Creator has implanted in his bosom thoughts 
 and faculties that were not given him to fret and pine away in an 
 existence like this. While men are kept in this position have we 
 any right to be surprised at Irish discontent ? In the estrangement 
 of classes, those of the higher order know but little of the thoughts 
 and feelings that control the people's inner life. Occasionally some 
 glimpse reveals them. We know, from evidence taken before a 
 Parliamantary Committee, that in Ireland that unerring sign of an 
 oppressed people, the actual hiding and hoarding of money, still 
 prevails — guineas are still hid in the thatch, concealed in the old 
 
 * Arthur Young, 
 f Lord Lifford's Letter, p. 12. 
 
THE TENANT'S DAILY FEAR. 249 
 
 stocking, or buried in the earth. A dread of their landlord pervades 
 many of the peasantry, as unreasoning it may be as the fear with 
 which "the rising" of the people is regarded in that landlord's 
 home. There are districts of Ireland in which actually the tenants 
 fear to show any sign of comfort, or to permit the females of their 
 families to go well dressed to Mass. Some undefined sense of 
 insecurity pursues them in all they do; a vague sense of some 
 coming mischief, if not from the landlord from some one who has 
 access to his ear. Timorous apprehensions of a rent to be raised, of 
 fields to be taken from him — of the great man displeased — disquiet 
 with forebodings of ill the life of many an Irish occupier of the soil. 
 On many an evening the shadow of " the malignant human 
 agency " darkens his hearth. 
 
 Is not this, the old serfdom, continued to this day? Where, or 
 when, has it been changed since the day when confiscation placed 
 alien proprietors over the old people? I have endeavoured, in 
 a laborious, and, I fear, too minute and tedious enquiry, to trace 
 back the stream of oppression to that source. Let us carry back 
 our views over the oppressions of two centuries, and rest upon the 
 point where they commence — the day upon which the soldier of 
 fortune, the follower of Ireton, of Cromwell, or of William, was 
 placed in possession of his Irish land. Upon that land had dwelt 
 a number of the people from the conquest of whom his title was 
 derived. He came with all the haughty passions, all the cruel 
 fears, of the conqueror in his breast. He did not come, as is often 
 the case of a seizure by conquest, to take the place of the former 
 owner in the arrangements of the country and of the estate, a 
 seizure in which — except in the presence of a new proprietor — all 
 things go on as they did before. The old people were driven out 
 as well as the old lord. The new owner was sent — not to conciliate 
 that people — but to crush them. He would have been false to his 
 principles, and false to his comrades, if he had permitted them to 
 occupy on his estate any position but that of slaves. They were 
 tolerated, but not pardoned rebels — men whose enmity was to be 
 kept down, and every privilege conceded to them was a danger 
 to the dominion of their lords. 
 
 Before time could soften these relations — law embodied, in penal 
 enactments, the angry passions and the jealous fears that might have 
 been forgiven in the first heat of conquest. The religion of the 
 old people was proscribed by persecuting laws. The physical resist- 
 ance of that people was rendered powerless by enactments depriving 
 them of arms. Their political influence was destroyed by the law 
 that excluded them from the franchise and from juries. Their moral 
 and social importance was put an end to by the laws which prohibited 
 education and excluded them from the learned professions and all 
 corporate privileges — while precaution was taken against the chance 
 liberality of any of the conquerors, by the enactment which 
 
250 FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER. 
 
 prevented the granting to any of them of a lease beneficial either 
 in interest or in tenure. 
 
 Can we wonder, in such a state of things, that upon each of the 
 estates I have described, successive generations of owners and 
 occupiers passed away without any change in the first relations of 
 passion, and resentment, and distrust? The law had written its 
 commandments of hatred and disunion in tables as enduring as those 
 of stone. The representatives of the new proprietor and of the old 
 occupiers lived nominally, as landlord and tenant under the same 
 law. Nevertheless, they belonged to two separate nations. They 
 could scarcely be said to belong to the same country. In the Ireland 
 of the old people the master of the estate was an intruder and a 
 stranger — and that master knew and felt it. Their people were not 
 his people, their religion was not his religion, and their country was 
 not his. Generation after generation we can trace the unchanged 
 position of both — in the testimony of Arthur Young in 1777, of Sir 
 Laurence Parsons in 1793, of Lord Clare in 1800, of Edward Wake- 
 field in 1810, of Lord Rosse in 1867. At the end of two centuries 
 the occupier and the owner are as estranged as were their ancestors 
 on the day when the new proprietor came to his estate. We are 
 still in the presence of the passions, we are face to face with the 
 difficulties, of that day. The representative of the crushed and con- 
 quered occupier has never yet been raised to the dignity of a free 
 and independent tenant. It is not thought safe by the landowners 
 that he should be so. He is an enemy with whom, at any time, his 
 landlord may be called on " to do battle for his rights." 
 
 This history of the country has been represented on a small 
 scale upon many an Irish estate. 
 
 But even this sketch would be incomplete if we did not remember 
 that a dominion originating in conquest has been ever since 
 maintained by that which for this purpose we must call foreign 
 military force. If English arms created, English arms maintained 
 the proprietary right. We must cast our eye back over the history 
 of those agrarian crimes in which individual cases of oppression were 
 too often avenged — the roll of those organized conspiracies and 
 insurrectionary movements which Mr. Grant so vividly described in 
 the speech which I have quoted.* We must remember and weigh 
 the fact which in that speech is so forcibly pointed out, that all these 
 insurrections had been put down by the overwhelming strength 
 of English military force while not a single attempt had been made 
 to redress, or scarcely any to discover, the grievances which caused 
 them.| 
 
 * Ante, page 81. 
 
 t At the period at which Mr. Grant spoke, the Edinburgh Review thus described the 
 military occupation of Ireland. 
 
 " They," the Irish people, " hate the English Government from historical recollection, 
 actual suffering, and disappointed hope ; and, till they are better treated, they will 
 continue to hate it. At this moment, in a period of the most profound peace, there are 
 
LANDLORDISM BACKED BY ENGLISH MILITARY FORCE. 251 
 
 From the accession of George the IV. to the present day, frequent 
 disturbances have been in the same way put down by force. How 
 often have we known the Irish executive, congratulated on its 
 vigour and its success when an insurrection act has crushed down 
 the violence of crime in a district ? or a special commission by its 
 fearful, although necessary examples of retributive justice has 
 terrified agrarian turbulence into temporary quiet ? Congratulations 
 of this nature have been actually spoken from the throne as if Irish 
 government — no one dreams of Irish statesmanship — could set 
 before it no other object or contemplate no higher duty than that 
 of trampling down all resistance. This has been our whole policy — 
 to bring the great power of England to put down every Irish effort 
 at revolt — and the only foresight in which that policy ever made 
 provision for the future, was to make such a display of power as to 
 convince the people of the hopelessness of every attempt to resist. 
 
 Let any one seriously reflect upon all that is involved in this 
 state of things. The result is that all the force of the English 
 Government is exerted to maintain the extreme proprietary rights 
 of landowners, no matter with what cruelty they are exercised — and 
 to crush the resistance of the peasantry, no matter by what oppres- 
 sion it is provoked. Can any system of government be more fatal 
 to national improvement, more destructive of every hope of that 
 adjustment of differences by mutual forbearance and concession 
 which in all other nations has reconciled the angry war of classes ? 
 I know of no greater curse to a country than to have its local 
 oppressions maintained by the force of another nation. If real 
 grievances be at the bottom of all these agrarian disturbances, 
 every time that English power tramples down an insurrection- 
 ary movement, it is only widening the breach between classes — it is 
 adding to the haughtiness of the oppressor — it is deepening the 
 hatred that rankles in the bosom of the oppressed. This is the 
 system of government which has identified "landlordism" and the 
 authority of the British Crown.* On all orders of men, from the 
 highest to the lowest, its evil influence has been felt. It has lowered 
 
 twenty-five thousand of the best disciplined and best appointed troops in the world in 
 Ireland, with bayonets fixed, presented arms, and in the attitude of present war : nor 
 is there a man too much — nor would Ireland be tenable without them." "When it was 
 necessary last year (or thought necessary) to put down the demand for Reform, we were 
 forced to make a levy of fresh troops in this country — not a man could be spared from 
 Ireland." 
 
 At this moment, including 11,000 constabulary who are in truth a trained, a 
 disciplined, and efficient military force — a standing army without the annual consent 
 of Parliament — Ireland is at this moment (April, 1867), held by thirty thousand 
 armed men. 
 
 "Ireland" continued the writer in the Edinburgh Review, "till her wrongs are 
 redressed, and a more liberal policy is adopted towards her, will always be a cause of 
 anxiety and suspicion to this country ; and in some moment of our weakness and 
 
 DEPRESSION, WILL FORCIBLY EXTORT WHAT SHE WOULD NOW RECEIVE WITH GRATITUDE 
 AND EXULTATION." 
 
 * Lord Lifford's Letter. 
 
252 LANDLORDISM BACKED BY ENGLISH MILITARY FORCE. 
 
 our gentry as much as it crushed the people. It has inflamed the 
 oppression of agrarian tyrants — it has degraded even that oppression 
 by giving it a demoralizing and cowardly confidence in external sup- 
 port. It has armed the resistance of the oppressed with the energy 
 and fierceness of desperation, while it has imparted to agrarian 
 crime all the guilt, and something of the dignity of national 
 revolt. It has arrayed against proprietary rights those instincts of 
 nationality which are strong in the Irish heart, while it has set 
 against the authority of government the angry feelings which 
 individual oppression kindles in each breast. Converting British 
 authority in Ireland into military rule, it has too often debased 
 Irish loyalty into a selfish and a cruel passion. No part of our 
 social system has escaped the mischief. In the eyes of the Irish 
 people and of Europe it has brought the authority and even the 
 name of the British Sovereign into unmerited odium and disgrace. 
 
 After all this miserable experience, may we not ask — Is there a 
 prospect of this wretched and humiliating condition ever terminat- 
 ing unless by the extermination of the old inhabitants, or by some 
 great and wise measure of conciliation which will destroy the policy 
 as well as the letter of the penal laws, and place the irish people 
 as freemen on the irish land ? 
 
 If these things be so, I ask of your Lordship — I ask of every 
 calm thinking and intelligent Irish landowner — can these things 
 last? Can they be tolerated in the boasted enlightenment and 
 freedom of this nineteenth century ? Is the spirit of feudal oppres- 
 sion driven from every other country in Europe to find a refuge and 
 to inflict its last wrong and mischief upon mankind here ? * 
 
 * In the above rapid sketch I have not stopped to notice a peculiarity connected 
 with Irish property — a peculiarity often remarked, and which I am persuaded has 
 had no little influence in creating the present mischievous relations of the owner and 
 occupier of the soil. 
 
 It has been often said — perhaps it cannot be too often repeated — that in the letting 
 of Irish land the landlord never makes, and never has made, the expenditure which 
 both parties to an English letting would consider it indispensable the owner should 
 make. "The English farmer pays a rent for his land in the state he finds it, which 
 includes, not only the natural fertility of the soil, but the immense expenditure which 
 national wealth has in the progress of time poured into it ; but the Irishman finds 
 nothing he can afford to pay rent for, but what the bounty of God has given, unaided 
 by either wealth or industry." — Arthur Young. 
 
 It is not altogether easy satisfactorily to account for this great difference in the 
 arrangements of the rural economy of the two countries. 
 
 In lands let to the occupants who constituted the class whom I designate as serfs, 
 it is very easily understood that setting the farm into tenantable order was a process 
 wholly inapplicable to such lettings. 
 
 But all the lettings of land were not of this character. There were many, very 
 many, farms in Ireland let to tenants just as independent and as substantial as any 
 English farmer. 
 
 It would be very well worth inquiring how lands were formerly let in the old and 
 long settled districts of Leinster — those, for instance, included in the old English Pale 
 districts, which, just because they were long settled, differ in many very material 
 respects from the rest of Ireland. 
 
 Something, of course, must be attributed to the character of the persons who 
 generally received the grants of confiscation. They were not those in whom we would 
 
WHAT ELSE IS TO BE DONE? 253 
 
 Shall I be forgiven if I address a few words of respectful but 
 earnest remonstrance to a numerous class of critics — may I venture to 
 place your Lordship among them ? — those who admit the evils which 
 I point out — admit that they ought to be remedied by legislative 
 enactment, but still object to the measure I propose ? In this class 
 I certainly may reckon a gentleman who has written upon this 
 question with great ability and great knowledge, and who is 
 pleased to say, " that, though Mr. Butt's remedy for Ireland is 
 visionary in the extreme, and would cause more ills than it would 
 cure, yet few have equalled him in the diagnosis of the disease ;" 
 and adds that my " scheme is never likely to become law, or even 
 to gain a serious hearing in the House of Commons, at least in our 
 day."* 
 
 To a gentleman so well informed and liberal-minded as the writer 
 whose criticism I quote, I need not suggest that there are many 
 schemes "visionary in the extreme" when propounded, which yet have 
 become law even in the day of those who proposed them. Every 
 man is a visionary who is a little, even a very little, in advance of 
 the prejudices which surround him. Every man is more or less a 
 visionary who foresees that the power of truth and the irresistible 
 march of events must yet break down the prejudices of class. But 
 let me earnestly — and I will say it, solemnly — ask of all that thus 
 criticise me, can they suggest any measure falling short of the prin- 
 ciples of mine which will really remedy the evils that exist ? 
 
 " Si quid novisti rectius istis. 
 Candidus imperti, si non his utere mecum." 
 
 I will only ask them to remember the evil with which we have 
 to deal. It is one that affects the very life of a nation, the right of 
 the Celtic race to live in their own land — it is one that approaches 
 the very foundation of society and proprietary rights. Let us not 
 disguise from ourselves its importance — it is one that touches the 
 deepest susceptibilities of a noble but passionate people — it is one 
 
 expect either the means or the inclination to put their estates into perfect order by the 
 expenditure of large sums of money. 
 
 More, perhaps, is due to the unsettled state of the country. There were periods at 
 which no one seemed to regard himself as having any permanent interest in Irish 
 property. The business of every one appeared to be to make what he could of it for 
 the time. When a change took place in this respect the custom of letting it the other 
 way had become inveterate, and custom has, upon matters of this nature, an influence 
 that is all-powerful. 
 
 The general rule in Ireland has certainly been, as stated by Arthur Young, that 
 the landlord lets his farms without making any expenditure upon them, and this fact 
 has exercised upon the whole system of Irish land tenure an influence far greater than 
 we might at first suppose. Contrasted with English landlords the Irish landowners 
 who gave the tenant nothing but the bare produce of the soil were not lettors of 
 "farms" but exactors of rents. "The farm ' which the English landlord let was a 
 thing wholly different from anything for which an Irish tenant paid rent. 
 
 This subject, in all its bearings, is well worth a more extended and minute investi- 
 gation than I can bestow upon it. 
 
 * Irish Peers on Irish Peasants. By G. T. Dalton, Esq. 
 
254 " SOMETHING MUST BE DONE." 
 
 with which we must not and we dare not trifle. If we propose any 
 remedy at all, it must be one of which we can honestly say, before 
 God and our country, that it will give redress. 
 
 If we are to approach the question in this spirit — the only spirit 
 in which Irishmen ought to approach it — then, I ask, if I have 
 correctly described the evil, can the wit or ingenuity of man devise 
 any remedy for it that must not involve, of necessity, the very 
 principle I suggest? 
 
 I know but of one safe mode of legislation. Nations drift to ruin 
 by the statesmanship which has no higher wisdom than the cunning 
 which suggests that "something must be done." No wise or great 
 measure ever yet originated in the mere desire to produce something 
 that will meet a demand for the manufacture of laws. We must 
 first clearly and distinctly ascertain the evil that requires a remedy, 
 and then, according to our resources, endeavour to apply it. If I 
 am to adopt the medical metaphor of my critic, we must act upon 
 " the diagnosis." " ' Occidit qui non servat' was the tremendous 
 sentence passed by the great physician of the Augustan age upon 
 negligence or incompetency in his own profession."* The surgeon 
 would justly subject himself to this condemnation who gave cough 
 mixtures, or even contented himself with putting on a straight waist- 
 coat, when a fatal tumour requiring amputation was swelling on some 
 limb. In politics, as in medicine, the first step is to see clearly the 
 mischief, the next is to see the remedy by which it is to be removed. 
 " Occidit qui non servavit " is the sentence which history will pro- 
 nounce upon the statesman who looks on with folded arms while an 
 evil system of land law is hurrying on the extinction in Ireland of 
 the Irish race. With a more certain and a deeper condemnation 
 will it be pronounced on those who attempt to deal with the evil 
 that is crushing them out by palliatives, that cannot arrest the 
 mischief that is destroying a nation's life. We must remember, 
 in every question relating to Irish land tenure, that we have to 
 deal with a class of proprietors among whom the impression is 
 prevalent that either their religious, or their political, or their 
 pecuniary interests are involved in keeping their tenantry in a 
 state of dependence. In many, perhaps in most, instances the im- 
 pression has reference to these three interests combined. All this 
 may be — it is, perhaps, the natural and necessary result of the 
 circumstances in which Irish proprietors are placed. It may be 
 even producd by acts on the part of the tenantry themselves. But 
 no matter how it may be accounted for or explained, or justified, 
 the fact remains a real actual fact in Ireland's social state. 
 
 What then is the evil in our present condition of Ireland ? It is 
 the general insecurity of tenure, produced by a general determination 
 of the landowners to refuse leases. Turn the question as we will 
 
 * Sir Philip Crampton. 
 
THE ISSUE PLAINLY STATED. 255 
 
 devise expedients as we may, wrap it up in all the disguises that we 
 can — the point comes simply in the end to this. We have bat one 
 remedy to meet that refusal, and that is to compel them.* It is a 
 simple but it is an efficacious one. It is just as simple and just as 
 
 * There cannot, to my mind, be a more instructive proof of the rabid obstinacy 
 with which some landowners — I hope they are not many — cling to the obsolete tradi- 
 tions of proprietary right than is to be found in the denunciations which have been 
 uttered against the very innocuous measure proposed by Sir Colman O'Loghlen and 
 Mr. Gregory. That measure proposed that in all future lettinys, if no term is mentioned, 
 the letting should be assumed to be for 21 years. 
 
 This measure, exactly like Mr. Fortescue's, did nothing more than alter, in the 
 case of future lettings, the implication which the law now draws from the silence of 
 contracting parties upon certain points. Where parties let and take land without 
 saying anything of the terms, the law supposes them to mean that they contract for a 
 tenancy to be determined by a six months notice to quit, and to continue for ever, unless 
 either party give that notice. It also supposes that as to improvements, they mean 
 that they shall belong to the landlord. 
 
 These implied contracts are solely and entirely the creation of law. They arise only 
 in the absence of express provisions. If parties choose to let, the law make their con- 
 tract for them, they do so with their eyes open. A measure alteiing the implication 
 in no way interferes with the freedom of contracts. It leaves the landlord perfectly 
 free to let his land upon whatever terms he pleases, and for whatever period he thinks 
 fit. It only tells him that if he chooses to do certain things the law will put upon his 
 act a certain meaning. Mr. Fortescue's bill told the landlord, " If you do not mean 
 your tenant to have the benefit of improvements, say so — or you will be supposed to 
 mean that he shall have it. 
 
 Sir Colman O'Loghlen's bill "tells him — if, when you let your land, you do not say that 
 your tenant shall not have a tenure of 21 years, the law will suppose that you intend he 
 should have it. A pamphlet, written under the name of an " Irish Peer," describes 
 this measure as "useful as showing the utter disregard of right and reason shown by 
 some of the party," as only second, and scarcely second, in enormity to the measure 
 proposed by myself, and excuses Mr. Gregory's support of it on the ground that he 
 knew it could not pass — just as the "Irish Peer" goes on to say that "no man can 
 better than myself appreciate the ludicrous and preposterous inequality, in operation 
 as well as in justice, of such a bill" as that which I have proposed. 
 
 I would scarcely think it necessary to advert to such a matter if it were not that I 
 am anxious to call attention to a very remarkable passage in the letter, in which Mr. 
 Gregory thought it necessary to vindicate himself against the imputation conveyed in 
 the excuse made for him: — 
 
 " The origin of the bill is this : — Sir Colman O'Loghlen and myself, and many men 
 of experience and large property in Ireland, some of them members of your house, have 
 long felt that the real cause of discontent among the Irish peasantry has arisen, not 
 from occasional cases of hardship proceeding from the tenant being deprived of the 
 value conferred on land by his improvements, but by season of the uncertain 
 
 TENURE WHICH PREVAILS IN IRELAND. We CANNOT FIND SUCH A TENURE TO BE THE 
 
 rule in ant civilized country in the world. We have endeavoured by this bill to 
 arrest that evil." 
 
 Thus clearly and distinctly stating the mischief, the insecurity of tenure which 
 prevails in Ireland, but is unknown in any other civilized country ; can the framers of 
 this bill upon reading such a letter as Lord Kosse's expect upon full reflection that 
 such a measure will "arrest the evil?" Can this great mischief be arrested by a 
 measure which only enacts that in future every tenant must sign a paper saying he is 
 tenant from year to year — or if not that he will be a tenant for 21 years. 
 
 The effect would, of course, be that whenever the landlord did not intend him to 
 hold for 21 years he would be asked to sign such a paper. The result most likely 
 would follow, that the paper would contain stringent conditions of which, but for the 
 necessity of having a wiitten paper, the landlord would not have thought. 
 
 I have already pointed out in, commenting on Mr. Fortescue's bill, that the result of 
 enactments altering the nature of the implications arising from silence in future 
 contracts will simply be, in some instances, to surprise careless or inattentive landlords 
 
256 COMPENSATION FOR IMPROVEMENTS. 
 
 effectual as the masterly manoeuvre by which the evil spirit of 
 " landlordism" has defeated all the long course of legislation by 
 ■which an attempt has been made to elevate the Irish peasant to the 
 rank of a free man. It is not matter of inference or of speculation, 
 it is demonstration, that influenced by the passions and the fears of 
 the old feud, landowners can use, and have used, and are using, nay 
 more, that they intend, and will continue to use the proprietary 
 rights which the law attaches to the ownership of the soil, so as to 
 give to the occupier the choice of leaving Ireland or remaining in 
 it as a serf. There is one way, and but one, of meeting this. We 
 must submit, or we must pass a law enacting that proprietary rights 
 shall not be so used. To this plain and simple issue the question 
 must at last be brought. 
 
 I ask those of them who are not willing to submit, but who 
 object to my proposal, to tell me by what other conceivable means, 
 except a measure based on the principles of that proposal, is 
 an absolute and unconditional submission to be avoided. To my 
 mind no mathematical demonstration was ever plainer than the 
 reasoning which asserts that if it be necessary to "arrest" in 
 Ireland " the evil of insecurity of tenure," this can only be done by 
 a measure which will compel the landlord to give security of tenure. 
 The evil proceeds, and proceeds solely, from the determination of 
 the landlords that the occupiers shall not have any fixed or secure 
 interest in the soil. In the name of common sense how are we to 
 overcome this by any measure which professes to give security to 
 the tenant, but still leaves it to the landowners to determine 
 whether the occupiers shall have that security or not ? 
 
 I have already pointed out the great difficulty that meets us in 
 every measure intended to secure compensation for future improve- 
 ments, and so permit the industrious tenant to acquire a property in 
 his farm. We have to deal with occupiers who are tenants at will, 
 and owners who have avowed their determination that they never 
 shall be more. While we leave the occupier in that position, the 
 working of the most skilful, even the most liberally-framed measure 
 of compensation must really be dependent upon the landlord's 
 will. 
 
 A measure securing compensation for past improvements would, 
 of course, give a certain fixity of tenure to every tenant who has 
 improved. Such a measure was more than " entertained" by Parlia- 
 ment, it was sanctioned by three successive Cabinets. It passed 
 the House of Commons by majorities great in number, but greater 
 
 into concessions to their tenants which they did not intend. They cannot, within the 
 range of human possibility, have the slightest influence upon those landlords who in 
 dealing with their tenants are determined to keep their hands untied. 
 
 Let us endeavour to evade it as we will, no human intellect or human ingenuity can 
 escape the " mathematical demonstration " mentioned in the text. 
 
 Nothing can be more full than Mr. Gregory's admission of the evil, and of the 
 necessity of " arresting" it. 
 
RETROSPECTIVE CLAUSE. 257 
 
 in the character and influence of those who composed them.* If it 
 had not been for a change of ministry it would probably have 
 become law. 
 
 Fourteen years ago the " retrospective clause " was carried 
 through the House of Commons. The intervening period has, no 
 doubt, far diminished its value. Much of the property it would 
 have protected has been seized. Defective as that clause may have 
 been, if it had become law as it passed the Commons, it would have 
 saved us many an eviction since ; and at the cost of creating much 
 and perhaps angry dispute and litigation between landlord and 
 tenant, it would in many instances have left the tenant in peaceable 
 possession of his farm — in all it would have embarrassed and 
 impeded the proceeding of the landlord to turn him out. 
 
 The more we reflect upon the subject, the greater will appear 
 the difficulty of dealing with that which is the real question — are 
 we to submit to the claims made, openly made, upon the part of the 
 landowners, such as I have described? I think I have proposed a 
 measure by which we can escape that submission without in the 
 slightest degree countenancing any interference with the true rights 
 of property. In the fearful timidity which always attends the 
 possessors of Irish property they talk of such proposals as sanction- 
 ing the doctrines of men who say the tenantry should hold the 
 lands without paying rent. It is not too much to say that if such 
 measures are entertained the measure I propose if adopted would for 
 ever crush them. It would make punctuality in payment of rent the 
 condition of holding the farm ; but it would tell the occupier that so 
 long as he paid a fair and moderate rent he might defy the landlord, the 
 bailiff, and the notice to quit. Who that knows the real feelings 
 of the Irish tenantry does not know what would be the effect of 
 such a legislative declaration ? The more he dreaded and disliked 
 his landlord the more earnest would be his efforts to be ready with 
 his rent. The very feelings which now make him lawless and 
 violent would prompt him to industry and thrift. He would defy 
 eviction, not by the threatening notice of the ribbonman, but by the 
 labour, of which he would know the fruits would be his own. Were 
 such a measure accepted by the tenant farmers of Ireland, as a final 
 settlement of the question, it would give, in the minds of the 
 people, a new and a national title to proprietary rights ; were it 
 offered by the landowners it would conciliate to those rights the 
 good will and the conscience of a people who now regard them with 
 dislike. 
 
 I do not believe that the Irish tenant farmer is influenced by the 
 desire imputed to him, of holding his land without paying rent. He is 
 influenced by the strongest, the most passionate wish to have secure 
 possession of the land he cultivates, and of the home in which he 
 
 * Land Tenure in Ireland, 3rd edition, p. 85. 
 
 R 
 
258 THE LAND AGENT'S DEMURRER. 
 
 dwells. Give him this on fair terms and he will be content. 
 Designs, no doubt, have been entertained against all rights of 
 landed property ; and the people sympathise with, even when they 
 have not taken part in, such designs. But both the designs and the 
 sympathy originate in the conviction that proprietary rights are 
 used so as to be inconsistent with the right of the people to live 
 and prosper in their own land. It is not the rent but the insecurity 
 and the serfdom which the Irish occupier hates. Give him security 
 and freedom, and I do not believe you will find a people on earth 
 more ready, loyally, and in good faith, to recognize all the existing 
 arrangements of ownership, or more ready to toil honestly and 
 laboriously to fulfil all the obligations which that ownership has a 
 right to exact. 
 
 But it has been actually said that such a measure tends to dis- 
 turb the title to Irish estates ! that my arguments if they were 
 valid ought to be followed out by a proposal for the repeal of the 
 Act of Settlement and the restoration of the forfeited estates ! ! ! * 
 
 * I have, I confess, seen with some surprise an objection of this nature even 
 suggested (although perhaps only in a passing jest) in a very well written, and in many 
 respects very sensible, tract, entitled, A Demurrer to Mr. Butt's Plea, by an Irish 
 Land Agent. 
 
 This tract has reached me just as I have been closing this letter, or I would gladly 
 have noticed some of the passages contained in it. I have not the remotest idea who 
 the writer may be, but his tract bears internal evidence both of knowledge and truth- 
 fulness. This makes me the more regret that I cannot now notice some statements 
 which are, I am sure, worthy of great consideration, but from which I draw inferences 
 very different from his. Many, indeed, of the facts included in his statements I have 
 already commented on in my observations on the publications of Lord Dufferin and 
 Lord Rosse. 
 
 I was, of course, prepared for the usual statement that no one has any right to give 
 an opinion upon such subjects except a landlord or a land agent, or, mayhap, in some 
 rare cases, a tenant farmer. But I scarcely expected, within a few pages of this claim for 
 exclusive knowledge on tbe part of "practical men," to find the following passage : — 
 
 "No doubt," he says, "they" — that is, the occupiers — "are all in favour of owning 
 their farms, or of long leases and low rents, but it does not follow that a man is always 
 the best judge of what is good for himself, and an Irish tenant's opinion on many points 
 is not exactly infallible." 
 
 Is it treason to ask whether an Irish landlord's, or even an Irish agent's, is? 
 Practical men, we have seen, sometimes fall into strange mistakes, even on a matter 
 so simple as the rate of wages. 
 
 The Irish Land Agent has, however, completely answered his own statement — that 
 "the complaints of the present system of land tenure do not come from the sufferers." 
 
 I might also suggest to him that if he correctly describes the feelings of the occupiers 
 in the passage I have quoted, he scarcely offers an adequate explanation of the fact he 
 mentions — that he has not found them very anxious to accept the leases which he has 
 known them offered. 
 
 Considering the class of men who are aggrieved by the present system of land 
 tenure, there is something very comical — I can use no other word — in this demand of 
 landlords and land agents that the discussion of this question should be left to the 
 parties themselves. It would certainly be a most admirable arrangement if it could 
 only be contrived that the only person entitled to reply to Lord Dufferin would be a 
 landlord or one of the evicted tenants. 
 
 I remember an instance of a very similar demand. I have read in some memoirs of 
 Wilberforce, of a West India planter convulsing the House of Commons by saying that 
 no complaints of the cruelties of the slave trade had come from any of the kidnapped 
 negroes, and adding, in phrases more vehement than polished, that in the absence of 
 
THE FEAKS OF LANDOWNERS. 259 
 
 We might have expected this miserable cry by this time to 
 have died away. It has been the excuse or the pretence for all 
 the oppression and misgovernment of Ireland. It was the origin of 
 the penal laws. It was used to resist the granting of electoral 
 privileges to Roman Catholics. It constituted no small part of the 
 arguments against emancipation. It was employed to terrify the 
 landlords into supporting the tithe system. To attack tithes was to 
 assail rents. It has been used to frighten them against yielding to 
 any concession on the subject of the Church — " Think you no spark 
 will fall upon your evil deeds when the muniments of the Church 
 are blazing," has been the language in which they have been 
 addressed in many a powerful and eloquent appeal. Surely it is 
 time that the right to landed property may rest in Ireland, as it 
 does in all other countries — upon its own strength. Surely Irish 
 landowners are wise enough to see that to use such language is to 
 imply a weakness in their title in which nobody except themselves 
 believes. The territorial rights that can only be guarded by out- 
 works of oppression are far from being secure. 
 
 The measure I propose would put an end for ever to these 
 miserable fears. It would take from proprietary rights in Ireland 
 everything that still identifies them with confiscation and conquest. 
 It would repair the fatal error — it matters not whether in the design or 
 the execution — of that which was called the settlement of Ireland — 
 that of trusting to the jealousies and the passionsof the new proprietors, 
 the condition of the old Irish people on their native soil. Were 
 such a measure passed, in ten years after its becoming law, no cause 
 of anxiety would exist in the relations of landlord and tenant in 
 Ireland. Both the owners and the occupiers would feel themselves 
 at home in their native land. 
 
 And may it not, my Lord, even on lower grounds that con- 
 siderations of national peace and prosperity, may it not be the 
 interest of Irish landowners that such a settlement should take 
 place ? I need not remind your Lordship that measures absolutely 
 scouted as "revolutionary" and "impracticable " have yet passed — 
 and passed in the end without the safeguards and restrictions by 
 which an early concession would have been accompanied. 
 
 I ask, once more, is it possible for our present condition of land 
 tenure to last ? Is it possible for a few landed proprietors, like 
 
 such complaints "it was great presumption in honourable gentlemen, who knew 
 nothing of West Indian property, to interfere between him and his slaves." 
 
 Is it not something of the same feeling which resents any discussion on the Irish 
 land question by any one outside the privileged circle, even by the press ? All others 
 must be " persons seeking political, capital, profit, or notoriety ; or to a certain class of 
 newspapers, who find an increase to their circulation by the introduction of high- 
 seasoned articles." 
 
 Is there in Ireland a landlord or land agent who can believe that his cause can 
 be served by nonsense like this. Far better to blurt it out with the honest blunt- 
 
 ness of the old West Indian slave driver — "It is great presumption in them 
 
 fellows to interfere between me and my slaves." 
 
260 EUROPEAN OPINION ON IRISH LAND TENURE. 
 
 those of Ireland, really to maintain their claim to hold the Irish 
 people as serfs? Is it possible for them really to enforce a decree 
 of expatriation against the Irish race ? We read history in vain 
 if we are not able to discern the great lessons which teach us the 
 vanity of such a thought. I do not believe it possible for a people 
 like the Irish thus to be driven from their native land. I believe 
 implicitly in the emancipation of that people from serfdom, because I 
 have implicit faith in the power of principles which must control in 
 the end the destiny of nations. 
 
 " There is a Providence doth shape our ends, 
 Rough hew them as we will." 
 
 Have you marked," my Lord, that the whole intelligence of 
 Europe is against you ? No traveller from any continental country 
 has ever written his impressions of his visit to Ireland without 
 pointing to " landlordism" as the cruel origin of Ireland's misery 
 and discontent. In what French or German publication are Irish 
 affairs ever discussed without a condemnation of our system of land 
 tenure, far more sweeping and severe than any I have ventured to 
 pronounce? The voice of Christendom is raised against you. Do 
 not believe that there is no power in that voice. 
 
 Can you say that you have the intellect of England, or even the 
 active and thoughtful intelligence of your own country, on your 
 side ? Where do you take up any intelligent treatise on Irish 
 affairs, written by an impartial person, without a discussion more 
 or less favourable to a system of peasant proprietors ?* How many 
 reflecting men have urged this ? Where will you find a man who 
 
 * I need scarcely say that the creation of peasant proprietors, as far as it goes, is 
 a displacement of the landed gentry. 
 
 I would see with great satisfaction a return to a state of things which formerly 
 prevailed to a large extent in England, and to some, although not to so great an 
 extent, in Ireland — that of an independent yeomanry, cultivating their own fee 
 simple estates The tendency in both countries has been to absorb such properties 
 into those of the great landowners I have been told that this has occurred even 
 in that peculiar district of Wexford known as the barony of Forth, a district still 
 peopled by the descendants of a colony from Pembroke, who landed with Strong- 
 bow. I believe that before the Union there were in this district many small farmers 
 who were owners of their farms. I am afraid that many, if not all, of them have sold 
 their fee simple, and pay a rent for what was once their own estate. 
 
 I speak naturally with some distrust of my own opinion, but I must say that I 
 do not believe there is generally the slightest ambition on the part of the Irish 
 farmer to become an owner in fee. There is an intense desire for fixity of tenure, 
 but this desire is perfectly satisfied by a secure tenure, under a good landlord, at a 
 moderate rent. I believe that the majority of tenants so circumstanced have not 
 the slightest desire to be possessors of the fee, and that most of them would decline 
 to purchase it if it was offered at a fair price. This peculiarity in their character 
 may be accounted for by the old traditions of the country, possibly by traditions 
 descending through the character of the people from the old Irish tenures. Very 
 probably they are not yet trained to those feelings of independence which would 
 enable them to appreciate an ownership in fee. 
 
 It has been said that "every man in Ireland desires to be a landlord." There is 
 
IRISH OPINION — MR. D. C HERON. 261 
 
 is not a landlord to say that he is satisfied with the present condi- 
 tion of the occupiers of the soil ? 
 
 Let me ask your attention to the language in which Irish pro- 
 prietary rights are spoken of both in England and Ireland. I am 
 not about to weary, perhaps offend, your Lordship, by extracts 
 from the writings of men who exercise no small influence upon the 
 educated opinion of the nation. In every place, even in the 
 English Universities, wherever in speech or in writing Ireland is 
 made the subject of intellectual discussion, there Irish landlordism 
 is arraigned, and tried, and condemned. I will not even quote the 
 language of Mr. Bright, which Lord Dufferin places at the head of 
 his letters ; yet, my Lord, you must not forget that upon this, as 
 upon other subjects, Mr. Bright represents the feelings and senti- 
 ments of great masses of his countrymen. I will ask your attention 
 to the language of one distinguished among our own countrymen — 
 of one who has vindicated the promise held out even in the high 
 honours and distinctions of his University career. I quote from a 
 paper read at a meeting of the Irish Statistical Society, in May, 
 1864, by Mr. Heron:— 
 
 " Under the present laws no Irish peasant able to read and write ought 
 to remain in Ireland. If Ireland were an independent country, in the 
 present state of things there would be a bloody insurrection in every 
 county, and the peasantry would ultimately obtain the property in land 
 as they have obtained it in Switzerland and in France." 
 
 This is not the language of a revolutionist or a communist, it was 
 written by a man subject to the responsibilities which I admit belong 
 to the position of " one of Her Majesty's Council learned in the 
 law." He had filled the office of professor in one of the Queen's 
 Colleges. He is a distinguished writer upon jurisprudence. In 
 little more than twelve months after he had written and publicly 
 read this passage his professional character and position forced 
 him into the service of the Government. These words were not 
 spoken at any excited popular meeting, carrying away the speaker 
 
 a sense and an extent in which and to which this is, unhappily, too true. But it 
 means a landlord having a tenant under him, not an owner in fee cultivating his own 
 little bit of ground. 
 
 I am bound to say that, so far as my opportunities of judging of the feelings of 
 the peasantry extend, while they have an actual passion for fixity of tenure, I do 
 not think it has taken the form of a desire to be absolute owners of the land they 
 till. 
 
 If we grant them fixity of tenure we give to the industrious and improving 
 tenant an opportunity of acquiring an interest which would make him a part pro- 
 prietor, and carry with it perhaps most of the advantages of an entire ownership. 
 Upon this point I am quite willing to accept Lord Rosse's description of "the 
 cunningly devised act," it would "give the tenant, without purchase, some of the 
 privileges of ownership," it would do so without taking anything from the landlord. 
 It would vest in the tenant the ownership of a new property which his industry would 
 create. It would probably give him the desire to acquire that ownership, ar.d wocia 
 fit him for doing os whenever the opportunity arose. 
 
262 ENGLISH OPINION — MR. J. S. MILL. 
 
 by the passions of a crowd. They were read at a meeting of a 
 scientific body, a body presided over by grave and eminent per- 
 sonages, enrolling in its list of members many who rank among 
 our foremost men, and in the transactions of that society they first 
 were submitted to the light of publication.* 
 
 As to Irish opinions, I content myself with this one quotation. 
 I could have cited many others from men in somewhat similar, 
 although less distinguished positions, to show you how far the 
 educated opinion of your own country is arrayed against you. 
 
 Let us turn to the evidence of English opinion. I do not speak 
 of popular opinion, nor even of the high class of that which is 
 generally termed so. Of this it were easy to collect evidence. I 
 might even recall the memory of the fierce and scornful invectives 
 with which but a few years ago Irish proprietors were visited in 
 the columns of that great journal, which upon this, as upon many 
 other subjects, too faithfully represents the passions and the pre- 
 judices of England. I am speaking of a different and more for- 
 midable condemnation, the condemnation of our Irish system of 
 land tenure, which has been pronounced in the calm and tranquil 
 judgment of those who are, after all, the guides and the instructors 
 of rational thought. Let us see how Mr John Stuart Mill speaks of 
 that system, not in any political discussion, but in a treatise from 
 which many educated Englishmen will learn the principles of social 
 Science — "The land" of" Ireland," says this great thinker: — 
 
 " The land of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people 
 of that country. The individuals called landowners have no right, in 
 morality or justice, to anything but the rent or compensation for its 
 saleable value. . . . When the inhabitants of a country quit the country 
 en masse because its government will not make it a place fit for them to 
 
 * Since writing the above I have seen a suggestion from Bishop Keane, in a letter 
 to the National Association, that a measure securing future compensation should be 
 accompanied by a clause providing that the power of arbitrary eviction should be sus- 
 pended until the tenant should have time to improve : — 
 
 " In order that improvement may be sure and quick, that, unless in the case of non- 
 payment of rent, no tenant be liable to eviction for such a number of years as good 
 landlords and intelligent farmers, thoroughly acquainted with the present state of 
 things, may think necessary, that the tenant may have time to make improvements." 
 
 Without some provision of this nature it would be plainly impossible that any 
 measure securing compensation for future improvements would be effectual. 
 
 I have often thought of suggesting, as I propose in a future page, that, with a view 
 of keeping the people at home, a short measure should be passed, suspending the power 
 of eviction for two years, and empowering, in the mean time, a Royal Commission to 
 collect evidence, so as to ascertain the real condition of the Irish occupiers, and after 
 ascertaining the views both of landlords and tenants, recommend some measure which 
 might adjust the relations of landlord and tenant in such a way as to secure the 
 landlord his rights, and yet give to the occupier the power of applying his industry on 
 the soil. 
 
 Had such a measure been announced in the Royal Speech it would, indeed, have 
 been a message of peace to Ireland. It would have stayed insurrection more effectually 
 than all the flying columns that traverse the country, and all the iron clads and gun 
 boats that blockade our coasts. 
 
MR. DISRAELI — LORD KIMBERLEY. 263 
 
 live in, the government is judged and condemned. It is the duty of 
 Parliament to reform the landed tenure of Ireland." 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " Nothing can be done for Ireland without transforming the cottier 
 tenantry into something else. But into what ? Those who know neither 
 Ireland nor any foreign country propose the transformation into hired 
 labourers ; I contend that the object should be their transformation, as 
 far as circumstances permit, into landed proprietors." * 
 
 And even among British statesmen, by cold, cautious, and reserved 
 British statesmanship, in the high places of British council, what 
 language has been held ? 
 
 How has " the Irish question" been described in the House of 
 Commons by a statesman who surely could have no motive for 
 using this language except a deep conviction of its truth ? When 
 on a former occasion ministers appealed to Parliament to suspend 
 the protection which the Constitution gives for personal liberty, 
 Mr Disraeli said : — 
 
 " He wished to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish 
 question was. Let them consider Ireland as they would any other country 
 similarly circumstanced. They had a starving population, an absentee 
 aristocracy, an alien church, and in addition, the weakest Executive in 
 the world. This was the Irish question. What would gentlemen say 
 on reading of a country in such a position ? They would say at once in 
 such case, the remedy is Revolution — not the suspension of the Habeas 
 Corpus Act. But the connexion with England prevented it — therefore 
 England was logically in the active position of being the cause of all the 
 misery of Ireland. What then was the duty of an English minister ? 
 To effect by his policy all the changes which a Revolution would do by 
 force." f 
 
 It is impossible not to feel that these are the words of deep 
 thought as well as deep conviction. They are the words of the 
 statesman to whose guidance the Conservative party are now trust- 
 ing in the unprecedented perils and difficulties which surround them. 
 
 And yet men tell me it is vain to hope that ever English states- 
 men will yield the just demands of the Irish people — and Irish land- 
 lords tell us they may safely defy the opinions and the resentments 
 of their own countrymen, because they are sure of the perpetual 
 support of England's overwhelming power. 
 
 Has no warning voice been heard in the chamber where your 
 Lordship sits, in the assembly where the rights of property are 
 supposed to be held peculiarly sacred ? The warning came from no 
 ordinary source. It came from a nobleman who had but a short 
 
 * John Stuart Mill. 
 
 t Mr. Disraeli — Parliamentary Debates. 1848. 
 
264 THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL. 
 
 time ceased to represent his Sovereign in this country — and who 
 must have spoken under the sense of the deep responsibility which 
 that position imposed upon him. These were the words of Lord 
 Kimberley, spoken in the House of Lords : — 
 
 " It was impossible for England to perform its duties to Ireland so 
 long as no attempt was made to deal with the important question of the 
 tenure of land. He implored the Irish landed proprietors not to pass it 
 by. The landed proprietors were supported by the force of the United 
 Kingdom in maintaining themselves in a position which, he was convinced, 
 if Ireland stood alone, they could not possibly maintain, and this country 
 was strictly responsible for seeing that its military force was not applied 
 in perpetuity to save the landowners from measures which they have 
 neglected to provide, and which might otherwise be forced on them."* 
 
 Surely, my Lord, for those who can read it, " the handwriting 
 is on the wall." It needs no Daniel to interpret a portion. The 
 " landlordism" which after two centuries of mastery can do nothing 
 better for the Irish people than drive them from their native land 
 is a system that cannot be maintained Of a system proved and 
 condemned as this has been we may truly say, "it has been 
 weighed in the balance and found wanting." Let us remember that 
 the dominion of which such words as 1 have quoted have been 
 spoken and written, is one that could not last a year if English 
 troops did not garrison our island to support it. Let us weigh 
 these words of British statesmen, let us estimate the weight of 
 opinion by which our land tenure is condemned. When all these 
 things are put together — and when we add to them all the deep 
 and burning hatred of the Irish people to the system, the voice 
 of condemnation that has been uttered from all Europe, the in- 
 dignant murmur of the exiled Irish that comes over the ocean from 
 the other side of the Atlantic — the weary and the shame to England 
 of Ireland's perennial desolation and perpetual discontent, it needs no 
 deep political sagacity to see that the system which has all these 
 elements of power arrayed against it cannot last. 
 
 * Lord Kimberley 's Speech, August, 1864. 
 
 I have been accused of being a Revolutionist for giving expression to the very same 
 sentiments. 
 
 " I have already ventured to advert to one feature connected with Irish land tenure. 
 It is upheld against the will of the people by the power of England. If Ireland were 
 an independent kingdom in the middle of the Atlantic, the present arrangements of 
 landed property would not continue unmodified for one year. If British power forces 
 the present system upon Ireland, it is not only the right, but the duty, of that power 
 to examine and control the exercise of the rights which it enforces. Irish proprietary 
 right depends upon the support of England, then English statesmen and the English 
 nation are bound to see that their power is not exerted to perpetuate grievances which 
 in any ordinary course of national movements would long since have been redressed. 
 The nation that is called on to uphold proprietary rights for one class in another 
 country is certainly justified in looking narrowly to the mode in which these rights 
 are exercised." — Land Tenure in Ireland, pages 72, 73. 
 
SIGNS OP THE TIMES. 265 
 
 And yet Irish landowners dream of maintaining their high and 
 arbitrary views of proprietary right — they tell us of the necessity of 
 " keeping their hands untied" — of the power and duty of " weeding" 
 unsatisfactory tenants from their estates. Those who do so refuse 
 " to discern the signs of the times. " The Irish people are flying 
 from the Irish soil. It is impossible for British statesmen much longer 
 to look on as mere spectators of that flight. It is trifling with a 
 great question to shut our eyes to the fact that it is the old, the never 
 decided struggle, between the Irish landowners and the Irish people. 
 The Irish difficulty is now to reconcile proprietary rights with the con- 
 tinued dwelling of that people in their own land. Can we really suppose 
 that this question must not be adjusted, that England will not call 
 on the landowners whose power her military force maintains " to set 
 their house in order," so that they and the Irish nation may live in 
 one house. It will not do to answer that appeal by saying " we have 
 got the land, we are satisfied, and if the people do not like our 
 arrangements they may go." The part of the porcupine in the fable 
 may not always be successful, and every year tfiat a final and 
 complete adjustment of the land question is postponed the less 
 favourable will the final adjustment be to proprietary rights. 
 
 Let no man misunderstand, or pretend to misunderstand me, 
 when I speak of the conflict between proprietary rights, and the 
 dwelling of the Irish people in their own land. I mean this — I 
 believe that no one can patiently and carefully give his attention to 
 all the evidence that throws light upon the emigration of the people 
 without coming to the conclusion that it is impossible to keep the 
 people at home unless we can give them security or fixity of tenure, I 
 care not by what name you call it — and that there is not the slightest 
 prospect of their obtaining this, while we leave our land tenure 
 to be regulated by the uncontrolled exercise of proprietary rights. 
 
 The statesmen and legislators are fortunate who have only to 
 deal with a state of society like that of England — a state in 
 which no man can say there is any conflict between the 
 right of every proprietor to do what he likes with his own 
 and the right of every Englishman to live in his native land. 
 Unhappily — most unhappily — every man who approaches an Irish 
 social question meets this conflict encountering him at the very 
 threshold of his enquiries. If that conflict existed in England, no 
 one doubts for a moment how it would be solved. The conditions 
 of property would be moulded to the wants and necessities of the 
 people. If Ireland were an independent country no one can doubt 
 that the solution of the problem would be exactly the same. If such 
 a measure as I propose be necessary to protect the right of the Irish 
 people to live upon the Irish soil, it ought to be passed just as 
 surely as any measure would be passed which were necessary to 
 ensure the right of the English people to live upon the English 
 soil. 
 
266 IRISH LAND TENURE STANDS ALONE. 
 
 If, in any other country in Europe, a state of things existed, such 
 as now exists in Ireland, would there be an hour's hesitation on the 
 part of its government in adopting a remedy far more peremptory 
 and decisive than that which I have proposed. I care not what 
 may be the form of that government, from the absolute despotism 
 of the Czar to the free democracy of the Cantons of the Alps, there 
 is not a government in Europe that would not interfere in such a 
 case between the landowners and the people, and protect the people 
 in the occupation of the soil. The English Government is the only 
 civilized government on earth that would look on and see a whole 
 people driven from their homes. 
 
 And surely if this state of things were to come at once upon the 
 English Government and people — if it had not grown up, as it 
 were, day by day before their eyes — it would not by either of them 
 be tolerated for an hour. If we could suppose that at the time of 
 the Union all communication from Ireland to England had been shut 
 out — that while England still sent her troops to keep Ireland in 
 subjection, no accounts had ever reached her of what was going on — 
 and that now, at the end of sixty-seven years, a commissioner was 
 sent over to examine, for the first time, into what had been doing 
 for those sixty -seven years — and that commissioner reported what is 
 going on around us, that the whole nation was flying away because 
 landowners refused the security of tenure to the occupiers of the 
 soil — that the result was national misery and universal discontent — 
 will any man believe that one year would pass over before fixity 
 of tenure would be throughout Ireland established as the law ? 
 
 Let us suppose that the question related, not to Ireland, but to 
 some remote dependence of the British empire, to some conquered 
 province of India, or even one of the " Crown colonies" in some West 
 Indian island. The statement laid before an English minister is 
 this : — There is a country subject to the British Crown, and under 
 the control of the British Legislature, in which the cultivators of the 
 soil are subject to the dominion of a few persons claiming proprietary 
 rights ; these men — it matters not whether they call themselves 
 zemindars, or slave-owners, or chiefs, or feudal nobles, claim the 
 right of enforcing from the peasant an arbitrary tribute — of imposing 
 on him any rules and conditions they think fit — of seizing on any 
 little property he may have created by industry in improving his 
 small plot of ground, and of turning him out of his home and his 
 farm whenever they think proper. These powers are sometimes 
 exercised with cruelty and under circumstances of great hardship — 
 they everywhere create in the minds of the occupier's dissatisfaction 
 and discontent. 
 
 Is there a man who reads this who doubts what the remedy would 
 be. The British minister who had to deal with such a case would 
 say at once: — Commute the arbitrary exaction into a fixed rent 
 proportioned to the real value of the holding — settle the conditions 
 
" ZEMINDARS " AND " RYOTS." 2G7 
 
 upon which he is to hold, and give him such a tenure as will protect 
 him against arbitrary eviction by the zemindar, the slave-owner, or 
 the feudal noble. 
 
 Is not this exactly the state of things which exists in Ireland ? and 
 is not this precisely the remedy I propose ? 
 
 Let us suppose, in addition to this, that this occurred in a country 
 in which the property had been taken away from the native pro- 
 prietors and conferred upon English settlers, placed in it for the 
 express purpose of conciliating the people to English rule, and most 
 strictly enjoined to forbear uncertain exactions and precarious tenures. 
 Let it be a conquered province of India. Complaints come home 
 that these proprietors have recently changed all the customary 
 lettings of the country, that the ryots — we must not call them 
 tenants — dissatisfied with the condition to which they are reduced, 
 are committing frequent outrages — that they are flying from the 
 country in immense numbers, while those who remain are engaging 
 in plans of revolt. Let me suppose your Lordship were sent as a 
 Commissioner by your Sovereign with plenary powers to settle the 
 differences that distracted such a province. On calling all classes 
 together you find that the poor "ryots" would be peaceable and 
 contented if you assured them of their holdings at a moderate 
 rent, and on a tenure of 60 years. I believe, my Lord, that after 
 settling such a measure you would return with pride to your 
 Sovereign, and tell her that you had executed her commission 
 with an ease and a satisfaction which surprised you. 
 
 And if to such a moderate request the English zemindars — I 
 must not call them landlords — refused their assent ; if you had the 
 power you would give the people what they asked in spite of the 
 zemindars. If you had not that power you would, I think, tell the 
 u zemindars" that they would dissent at their peril, and that if they 
 refused to settle their difference with the "ryots" upon such 
 moderate and equitable terms, they must not expect that the troops 
 of the British Sovereign would any longer support them in enforcing 
 rights which were really oppression and wrong.* 
 
 * This very question of the right of a landlord to the protection and for the aid of the 
 executive in committing acts which endanger the peace of the whole counti-y, gave rise 
 to rather a curious correspondence with the Government of Lord Carlisle, when the 
 Sheriff of Donegal sent a requisition for a military force to accompany him in 
 carrying out the evictions at Glenveagh. The entire of the correspondence which 
 ensued between all parties was published in a parliamentry paper, and may be read a 
 with great advantage by those who desire to know the extent of the claims of Irish 
 proprietary right. 
 
 It seems strange that a landlord who may clear a whole country-side of its inhabitants 
 to the imminent peril of the peace, it may be of half a province, has the absolute right of 
 commanding, if necessary, all the military in the county to aid him in the execution of 
 his cruelty. Yet such is the law. The sheriff is bound to obey the Queen's writ, and 
 if force be necessary to execute it ; he is entitled, and indeed bound to call to his aid, 
 as part of the posse comitatus, all the military force that may be in the county. 
 Soldiers are not exempt any more than civilians from the obligations which the law 
 imposes on every one to aid the sheriff. The practical result is that a landlord has 
 
268 "CORBES" AND KERNES." 
 
 And this is not done in the case in Ireland, just because we have 
 the fiction of an identity with England. The owner of the soil is a 
 " landlord," not a " zemindar" — the occupier is a " tenant," and not a 
 " ryot." I believe in my conscience, that if we had Irish or Gaelic 
 names to express the relation, if the owner were a " corbe" 
 and the occupier a " kerne," an English Parliament would not for 
 one session tolerate the continuance of the wrong. Our misfortune 
 is, that English phrases are applied to relations that bear no resem- 
 blance to the things which the words describe in the English tongue. 
 Ireland is denied the real benefit of English justice by the fiction 
 that we are one country with England; and that " landed property 
 is the same thing in Ireland as it is in England, or Scotland, or 
 Wales." The fiction is as unreal as that by which Henry VIII. 
 was declared king of all Ireland, when, in whole districts of 
 the island, English authority was unrecognized and English law 
 unknown ; when " those who dwelt west of the Barrow dwelt west 
 of the law." Our law books tell us that legal fictions never work 
 wrong. Lord Clare has pointed out that the earlier fiction con- 
 verted wars into rebellions, and confiscated estates that ought to 
 
 actually a right to order the military to drive out his tenants. And this right was 
 in fact exercised at two of the evictions to which I have so frequently referred, those 
 of Glenveagh and Rathcore. 
 
 This employment of the power of the executive to aid in the extermination of the 
 people occurs, and has occurred frequently enough to identify, in the minds of the 
 people, English power with their oppression. It has excited the indignation of many 
 conservatives. Michael Thomas Sadler might be termed a bigot in his attachment to the 
 principles of Toryism. Yet he thus wrote upon this subject, when Irish evictions were 
 neither as frequent nor as cruel as they have been since. Writing in 1829 of "the 
 notable scheme," even then propounded, " of thinning Ireland by emigration and 
 monopoly, the object of which, however disguised, was to obtain for the proprietors a 
 greater surplus produce." He continues : — 
 
 " In closing my remarks I would put one or two plain questions. Is a system which 
 can only be supported by brute force, and is kept up by constant blood-shedding, to be 
 perpetuated for ever ? Are we still to garrison a defenceless country in behalf of those 
 whose property was, generally speaking, originally conferred on the special condition of 
 residence, but whose desertion occasions all the evils under which she has groaned for 
 centuries ?— property so treated, that it would not be worth a day's purchase were the 
 proprietors its sole protectors. But they are aware that their absence is balanced by the 
 presence of a body of military and police, which enables them to conduct themselves 
 with as little apprehension as remorse. The possessions of the entire empire would be 
 lost to their owners, were such conduct general ; and are these so meritorious a class, 
 that their utmost demands are to be extorted from a distant and suffering country, and 
 themselves protected in the open neglect, or rather audacious outrage, of all those duties, 
 on the due and reciprocal discharge of which the whole frame of the social system is 
 founded ? If they persist in this course, let them do so, but let it be at their proper 
 peril ! Let them urge their own claims, and defend their own outrages : the British soldier, 
 who is ready to bleed in the battle in which his country's interest or honour is at stake, is 
 too noble a being, methinks, to be degraded virtually into the exactor of the enormous 
 rents of the absentee, which his desertion often incapacitates the wretched tenants from 
 discharging, or to ' clear ' his estates of human beings, when it may please him to utter 
 the fiat from afar. I say 1 wouid leave them to settle this as they could, only that it 
 would be practically difficult to sever their case from such as have fair claims upon 
 public protection." — Ireland and its Evils. Pages 161, 162. 
 
 Michael Thomas Sadler believed that the only Irish landlords who were guilty of 
 clearances were the absentees. 
 
edmund spenser's prophecy. 269 
 
 have been protected. The later fiction has been as mischievous as 
 the earlier. Neither, indeed, was ever invoked except for the 
 purposes of oppression and wrong. The native Irish were not 
 given the protection of subjects, though they suffered the penalties 
 of treason. We never hear of our identity with England when a 
 difference is to be made to our loss. And on this land question the 
 result of our incorporation with the freest and most liberal nation in 
 Europe is this. A state of things exists in Ireland which would not 
 be endured in England for one year. If Ireland were an indepen- 
 dent country it would long since have been set right. If we were 
 a dependent colony, or a mere subject dependence of the British 
 Crown, justice would be done to us. If we were the subjects 
 of any other civilized government protection would be given to 
 the occupiers of the Irish soil. But just because we are advanced 
 to the benefit and dignity of a partnership with the British nation 
 a system of land tenure is maintained entirely unsuited to our 
 condition, and which no other conceivable form of government 
 would condemn us to endure. 
 
 And now, my Lord, I ask again, is it really to be expected 
 that such a state of things can last for ever ? Is it not very possible 
 that British statesmen, in their duty to their Sovereign, in their 
 duty to that " great and antient monarchy," in which they serve, 
 may deem it the interest of England to enfranchise and conciliate 
 the occupiers of the Irish soil? It is impossible for them not to 
 turn wistful and serious thoughts upon this island, which ought to 
 be, which might be, the pride and strength of that monarchy, but 
 which is now its weakness and disgrace. Perhaps they think of those 
 strange words of Spenser that seem like inspired prophecy — genius 
 has its inspiration : — 
 
 " Marry there have been divers good plots devised and wise counsels 
 cast about for the reformation of that realm ; but they say it is the fatal 
 destiny of that land that no purposes whatever which are meant for her 
 good, will prosper or take good effect, which — whether it proceed from the 
 very genius of the soyle or influence of the starres, or that Almighty God 
 hath not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that he reserveth 
 her in this unquiet state still, for some secret scourge which shall by her 
 come unto England it is hard to be known, but yet more to be feared."* 
 
 May not the ministers of England think that the days are come 
 in which the question is to be decided — which are either to be the 
 time of Ireland's " reformation" or those in which if Ireland is any 
 longer kept " in this unquiet state," some "secret scourge shall come 
 by her to England." If ever English ministers feel that this is their 
 choice — the claims of Irish landlords will not have much weight in 
 the decision. 
 
 There are many to whom words like this will appear wild — but 
 
 * Edmund Spenser, 1596 
 
270 A THOUGHT FOR THE FUTURE. 
 
 surely the calm and thoughtful may foresee at least the possibility 
 of events in which England could ill-afford to keep a discontented 
 Irish nation by her side. May not English statesmen be wise 
 enough to foresee this too? Surely, my Lord, these are matters 
 for the serious consideration of your order. Secure as they think 
 themselves in " the overwhelming power of England," the Irish 
 landlords may refuse these concessions by which, if they had been 
 left to themselves, they would long since have conciliated the good- 
 will of the Irish people. They may contemptuously turn from 
 proposals such as mine with a self-satisfied notion that the British 
 Parliament will never sanction such a plan as this. Are you so 
 sure of this ? Has such a reliance been never disappointed before ? 
 In 1782 the whole policy of England to this country was absolutely 
 reversed in the few hours which elapsed between the arrival of the 
 Irish mail and the assembling of the House of Commons. We have 
 seen events in Europe press on with startling rapidity to results which 
 any man would have been deemed insane for predicting but one 
 short year before. Who will guarantee us that British statesmen, 
 even those who compose the present Cabinet, will always maintain 
 the present treatment of the Irish occupiers at the expense of 
 weakening the British power and disgracing the British name? 
 What assurance have we that a crisis may not arise in which the 
 most Conservative minister might feel it his duty to his Sovereign 
 to purchase the loyalty of the Irish nation by concessions of which 
 the most sanguine nationalist may not now dream ? These things 
 at least are just as possible as the humiliation of Austria in a week. 
 Be assured, my Lord, Irish landlords have no exemption from 
 vicissitudes which shake dynasties and thrones. 
 
 Might it not be prudent to contemplate the possibility of such 
 things ? the prospect of a time when the Irish land question might be 
 settled by a hurried concession to popular demands, in which the safe- 
 guards might be omitted which could protect all real proprietary 
 right? Am I wrong in saying that one day or other this land 
 question must be settled? If it must be so are there any persons 
 more interested than the landowners in having it settled soon ? 
 
 If we ourselves were free from the prejudices which a familiarity 
 with this state of things has produced — if we could see it for the 
 first time in some foreign country, would we say that it could be, 
 or that it ought to be, upheld ? 
 
 I have frequently been struck by perceiving the impressions made 
 upon the minds of Irishmen when a consideration of what they see 
 in other countries elevates their views of such questions to a point 
 from which the mists and fogs of local prejudices are overlooked. 
 Let me quote a passage supplying a striking instance of this from 
 the writings of a gentleman whose authority your Lordship will not 
 altogether despise. The writer is now in a position aloof from all 
 political discussions, but I am sure he never will be in any position 
 
THE CHIEF JUSTICE AND TUSCANY. 271 
 
 in which he will forget his love for his country, the character of 
 which he has done so much to sustain. I quote the words of the 
 present Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. They will, at least, tell us 
 how an Irishman and a man of genius feels when he is compelled to 
 contrast the condition of other countries with that of his own. 
 
 In Tuscany — Tuscany which Englishmen despised as submitting 
 to the yoke of despotism — in Tuscany over the downfall of whose 
 government Englishmen rejoiced — in oppressed and enslaved 
 Tuscany the Irish traveller saw the homes of the peasant proprietors 
 that spangle with comfort and industry the heights that overlook 
 the valley of the Arno. He saw the terraced gardens to which 
 earth has been borne up the steep by the toil of the peasant who 
 knew that the fruits of his industry were his own. He saw what 
 fixity of tenure had done there. He thought of the miserable Irish 
 serfs at home — which of us have not thought of them when we saw 
 comfort, and contentment, and happy cottages in other lands ? — and 
 emancipated from the poor prejudices that press upon us in Ireland, 
 he wrote: — 
 
 " It is proved that the tenants holding by leases are prosperous ; the 
 occupiers of patches at a rent, miserable ; while it must be carefully 
 remembered that the small farmers referred to as successful and productive 
 in their industry, are proprietors, not rack-rent tenants. 
 
 " It is not creditable to the collective wisdom of England to attempt 
 nothing on a bold and comprehensive scale for the social improvement of 
 Ireland. And as the evils under which she groans, or many of them, 
 spring from the mode in which the land is held, and miserably or not at 
 all cultivated, or suffered to lie waste, the attention of the legislature 
 should be directed to the means calculated to remove and abate these 
 deplorable evils. 
 
 " If the existence of what is called tenant right be productive of good 
 in Ulster, the principle should he fearlessly applied to the other provinces.'''' * 
 
 Let me cite one testimony more. A similar effect is produced on 
 the minds of Englishmen when the contrast is forced on them between 
 Ireland and other countries in which there is a reformed land tenure. 
 The quotation I am about to make will illustrate the statement I 
 have made as to the opinion prevalent even in the venerable seats of 
 English learning. In some of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, 
 fellowships have been endowed for the express purpose of enabling 
 their holders to travel, that they may bring back to their society 
 whatever wisdom or experience they can gather in their observa- 
 tion of foreign countries. A gentleman filling this position, actually 
 travelling and observing in discharge of a collegiate duty, has left 
 on record his impression of this contrast : — 
 
 * Whiteside's Italy. 
 
272 MR. KAY ON IRISH LAND TENURE. 
 
 "The Irish, who make such good colonists when they emigrate, 
 would, with a system of free-trade in land, make equally good citizens at 
 home. The enormous tracts of waste lands would soon be brought into 
 cultivation, as the mountain sides of Saxony and Switzerland, as the sunny 
 plains of Prussia, and as the low lands of Holland have been under the 
 same invigorating system. ... If Stein and Hardenberg had been 
 ministers of England, depend upon it they would have endeavoured long 
 ago to introduce into Ireland, at least, that system which has raised the 
 Prussian, Saxon, and Swiss peasantry from a social condition analogous 
 to that of the Irish poor, to one which renders them worthy of being 
 regarded as examples for the consideration of the world." 
 
 " Where the Irishman can make himself, by industry, a proprietor of 
 land, and where he is not shackled by middle-age legislation, he becomes, 
 immediately the most energetic and conservative of colonists. He there 
 acquires faster than anyone else ; he effects more in a day than anyone 
 else ; and he forces his rulers to write home to England — as the Governor of 
 South Australia did some years ago — that the Irish are the most enterprising, 
 orderly, and successful of all the colonists of those distant lands.* 
 Were we to enable the Irish tenant to make himself a proprietor, we 
 should in twenty years alter the character of Ireland. The peasant 
 would become conservative, orderly, and industrious ; the moor and waste 
 land would disappear ; cultivation would spread its green carpet over the 
 bogs and mountains ; and the now unhappy island would become a 
 
 powerful arm of Great Britain The Irish farmers, who 
 
 now send over their savings to the English Savings' Banks, or hide them 
 among the rafters of their barns, would soon buy land ; and Ireland, so 
 fertile, so admirably situated to carry on an immense trade with America, 
 would soon become one of the most productive and prosperous islands of 
 the sea. This is no fanciful picture. No country has yet changed 
 tenants- at-will for small proprietors, without being vastly benefited, and 
 benefited, too, as surely Ireland would be."f 
 
 " Is there any country in Europe, either kingdom or republic, 
 depending or independent, free or enslaved, which may not afford 
 us a useful lesson?" % 
 
 France has long since taught the world the terrible lesson of the 
 ills to which feudal oppression of the occupiers of the soil may lead. 
 She is teaching it now the noble lesson of the power that resides in a 
 people who own and occupy their own soil. Belgium points out 
 to us how a great population of small farmers who are owners in fee 
 can live in comfort on a soil not blessed by nature as our own. No 
 traveller can pass through its garden fields so rapidly as not to see 
 what the ownership of the land, by the people, has done, even in 
 inferior soil. In Germany we remember Prussia, and the great 
 and noble measures which, more than 50 years ago, made those who 
 had been serfs the owners of the soil. It was the emancipation of 
 
 * Is not more than verified by the testimonies I have cited from Bishop Keane and 
 Arthur Young (ante, pages 194, 195, and 196). 
 t Kay's Social Condition of the European People, 
 t Bishop Berkeley's Querist. 
 
EXAMPLE OF ALL EUROPE. 273 
 
 her peasant occupiers that nerved the arm of Prussia to keep " the 
 free, the German Rhine," when Blucher led the " landwehr" against 
 the might of Napoleon's power. Had Prussian statesmen been slaves 
 to the " right divine of landlords," the Prussian monarch would not 
 now be the chief of the Fatherland. The edicts of Stein and 
 Hardenberg, and not the needle-gun, won the battle of Sadowa. 
 Even from Russia we hear, in the decree that has emancipated the 
 serfs, the voice that tells us that the days are gone by when in any 
 country the rights of property can mean the slavery of man. 
 In the Alpine vallies, in every Swiss defile, we see in the bold and 
 hardy freemen whom we meet, how happy may be the peasants who 
 have won their land by the sword, and divided it among themselves. 
 In Tuscany — enslaved, benighted Tuscany — as our presumption 
 dares to call it — Irishmen look with surprise, and — when they think 
 of home — with grief and shame, upon the luxuriant evidences of the 
 wise legislation of Leopold the Reformer, and wish that some ruler 
 as despotic and as enlightened had given to Ireland that fixity of 
 tenure which has carried cultivation far out on the swamps of the 
 Maremma, and has made cottages and gardens, and corn fields, and 
 vineyards cover the hill side. There is not a country in Europe 
 from which we may not learn. All forms of government reproach 
 the miserable illiberality of our land legislation. All forms of religion 
 join in the rebuke of our wretched bigotry. Every community in 
 Europe, " either kingdom or republic, depending or independent, 
 free or enslaved," Catholic, or Lutheran, or Protestant, or Greek, 
 can point to the Irish Catholic peasant, kept as a serf in his own 
 land, denied the right of tilling the soil for himself — to the Irish 
 exiles, driven " sorrowing and reluctant" from their native land, and 
 can upbraid us with these victims of that landlordism which in 
 every other country in Christendom has given way to the claims of 
 justice and civilization. 
 
 I will ask once more of your Lordship is it possible for any man 
 to believe that this Irish land question must not be adjusted one 
 day or other upon principles which will give to the occupier some 
 property in the land? Is it possible for it so to be adjusted on 
 terms more favourable to the proprietors than that which I have 
 proposed ? 
 
 I pray you to observe the almost universal opinion in favour of 
 peasant proprietors. Remember that the phrase " peasant pro- 
 prietors," involves a system which means that we shall have no 
 great landed estates — that the class of landed gentry, as we now 
 understand it, shall no longer exist. A compulsory sale of the 
 landed property of the country, in some form or other, is the only 
 mode by which such a plan could be carried out. Do not despise the 
 opinion which has grown and is growing in favour of such a plan. 
 Do not believe anything impossible which shall be found essential 
 to put an end to " Ireland's desolation." I am not now appealing 
 
 s 
 
274 PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP AND PEASANT PROPERTY. 
 
 to any selfish interest. Some of the Irish landlords have said they 
 are willing, on certain terms, to assent to a compulsory sale of their 
 estates for the purposes of parcelling them among such proprietors. 
 Full justice is not always done to the old proprietors in such trans- 
 actions ; and very probably if Irish landlords were unwise enough 
 to allow the opinion against them to acquire the strength that 
 would carry such a measure, they might find as little considera- 
 tion shown to secure them the full value of the estates as was 
 manifested in the act which public opinion sanctioned for the sale 
 of incumbered properties. But, I say again, I am not appealing to 
 considerations of self-interest. I am addressing my argument to 
 those who, even though they might be willing to sell their own 
 estates, might yet desire to see a landed gentry in Ireland retain 
 their position in the country. 
 
 I propose to give to the occupier the most essential of the 
 advantages of peasant proprietorship, without the slightest inter- 
 ference with the position of the landowners as they now are. In 
 doing so I answer all the arguments, and they are powerful ones, 
 of those who urge the necessity of making the occupier the actual 
 owner of the soil. Give to every Irish tenant a lease for sixty-three 
 years at a fair rent, and the arguments that are carrying conviction 
 to many thoughtful minds of the necessity of a peasant proprietorship 
 lose more than half their force. 
 
 Let me say, my Lord, that it is impossible to deny the great 
 power of those arguments. If the advantages that are pointed out 
 as following from a peasant proprietorship can only be obtained by 
 parcelling out large properties into small fee simple estates, 
 they are unanswerable. I believe I have suggested a mode by 
 which we can obtain most of the advantages of " peasant pro- 
 prietorship," without destroying the influence of the landed gentry 
 of the country. If such a measure were passed that gentry would 
 still exist, and would still exercise all the legitimate influence which 
 station, and property, and education will always possess among the 
 Irish people. The advantages of peasant proprietorship are, that 
 you give to the occupier confidence, security, and the pride of owner- 
 ship. But the mere payment of a rent is not necessarily inconsistent 
 with all this. All that we must do is to give the occupier a tenure 
 long enough to make him feel that he has a real and substantial 
 property in the soil, and at a rent so moderate that he will feel sure 
 of being able to pay it. If we accomplish this he really becomes a 
 "peasant proprietor," although he has a landlord and pays a rent. 
 I have already pointed out that there is reason to think such a pro- 
 prietorship is the one most adapted to the habits, and even best 
 suited to the wishes, of the Irish occupier of the soil.* 
 
 I propose, in truth, a compromise between that system of tenancy 
 
 * Ante note to page 257. 
 
PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP AND PEASANT PROPERTY. 275 
 
 at will, which at present exists in Ireland — a system which all the 
 intellect and thought of Ireland and of England, and of civilized 
 Europe, has condemned, and that system of " peasant proprietor- 
 ship" which has been advocated by the men best calculated to guide 
 and influence public opinion, and which to many persons appears 
 the only escape from the admitted and the intolerable evils of our 
 present system. 
 
 This proposal of compromise the advocates of territorial rights in 
 Ireland indignantly and scornfully reject. Might not their enemy 
 exult and say — " Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat." 
 
 I may, perhaps, with more chance of attention, submit these very 
 same observations to those who urge the institution of a peasant 
 proprietorship as the only remedy for the grievance which is destroy- 
 ing Ireland. I ask of them, to consider whether that grievance 
 would not be substantially redressed by a measure which would 
 give to the occupier a long and a secure interest in the soil ; and 
 whether it is wise to press any further proposal in the face of the 
 difficulties that surround it. 
 
 I take up the words I have quoted from Mr. Mill.* There must 
 be a " transformation" of the Irish tenants at will. Into what are 
 they to be transformed? Mr. Mill answers — "they must be trans- 
 formed into landed proprietors, as far as circumstances permit." I 
 propose a species of proprietorship which can be created without any 
 violent interference with the existing rights of property, and without 
 removing the class of landed gentry from their place in the social 
 system. This modified proprietorship would, I believe, secure most 
 of the advantages which would result from giving to the occupier 
 an absolute estate in fee simple, while it would avoid the difficulties 
 and the objections by which the latter proposal is encountered. 
 Perhaps I may even say that this is to effect the transformation "as 
 far as circumstances admit." 
 
 It is quite true that the value of " a peasant property " — 
 I use the word in distinction from " peasant proprietorship" — would 
 depend upon the difference between the rent the occupier paid and the 
 real value of his farm. At present I propose to make none. But the 
 industrious tenant would soon make that difference a great one. In a 
 few years the rent would bear a comparatively small proportion to 
 the property which would have been created in his farm. I adopt 
 the words of Lord Rosse. I propose to give him at once one of the 
 "privileges" of proprietorship, that of creating a property in the soil. 
 By giving the occupier that privilege I take nothing from the 
 landlord except the power of prohibiting improvement on his land. 
 
 But I am now addressing your Lordship as representing the 
 landlord interest in Ireland. I ask you to reflect on all that has 
 been said, or all that can be said, in favour of a measure that would 
 
 * Ante page 260. 
 
276 FALSE CONFIDENCE. 
 
 boldly establish peasant proprietorship in Ireland, and then I ask 
 you to remember that I have not proposed for the tenant an 
 interest beyond that which is commonly granted on many of the best 
 regulated properties. Long leases are universal both in England 
 and in Ireland, of all lands on which the tenant is expected to 
 improve. Even villa sites will be let on the most strictly entailed 
 estates for a lease at least of sixty-three years. I might say that 
 this very principle justifies the granting of such a lease to every 
 Irish farmer. We are one hundred millions behind England in the 
 improvement of the soil. The nation has a right to expect that sum 
 to be laid out upon the land. But I am not now arguing this, I 
 am calling your attention to this — I have proposed a term for the 
 tenant, by no means extravagant or unusual. There are many 
 proprietors living, whose sons would come into the reversion of the 
 leases which I propose to grant. Remember that the only suggestion 
 made for an arrangement like this, was one that contemplated a 
 perpetuity to the tenant with a fee-farm rent. Perhaps, my Lord, 
 if the question is ever to be adjusted, it was no desire to trench on 
 landlord privileges that made me fix on the number of sixty-three. 
 
 I know that there are those to whom all this will seem almost like 
 raving. There are landowners who will say, "no one will ever dare 
 meddle with my absolute rights ; it is not a question of compromise." 
 Men in all ages and countries have talked so, and generally they 
 have " talked the loudest and the fiercest" at the very time when 
 changes were at hand. Believe me, we might as well think of 
 re-enacting the penal laws as of maintaining permanently our present 
 system of land tenure in Ireland, or of averting legislation which 
 will give to the Irish occupiers a property in the soil. 
 
 I will be told that such a measure is impracticable. So it may. 
 But nevertheless it will most assuredly be realized, as numbers of 
 impracticable things have been. With Grattan I recognize no real 
 " impracticability" in politics, especially in relation to the affairs of 
 the island in which we live.* The establishment of an actual 
 
 * " We are apt to conceive public cases impracticable — everything bold and radical 
 in the shape of public redress is considered impracticable." 
 
 "I remember when a declaration of right was thought impracticable; when the 
 independence of the Irish Parliament was thought impracticable ; when the establish- 
 ment of a free trade was thought impracticable ; when the restoration of the judicature 
 of our peers was thought impracticable ; when an exclusion of the legislative power of 
 the English Privy Council was thought impracticable ; when a limited mutiny bill, with 
 Irish articles of war in the body of it, and a declaration of rights in its front, was 
 thought impracticable ; when the formation of a tenantry bill, securing to the tenantry 
 of Ireland their leasehold interests, was thought impracticable ; and yet these things 
 have not only come to pass, but form the bases on which we stand. Never was there 
 a country to which the argument of impracticability was less applicable than Ireland." — 
 Speech in the Irish House of Commons, September 2nd, 1785. 
 
 The measure of which Grattan thus vindicated the practicability was — the commuta- 
 tion of tithes ! ! 
 
 The personal recollection of many of us could supply a catalogue as long as Grattan 's 
 of " impracticable measures which have not only come to pass, but which form the 
 basis upon which we now stand." 
 
IMPRACTICABLE MEASURES 277 
 
 system of peasant proprietors in Ireland is not as impracticable 
 as the obtaining of the elective franchise by Roman Catholics was 
 the year before it was granted ; as the abolition of close boroughs 
 was in the eyes of the Duke of Wellington in 1830; free trade 
 in corn in the eyes of Lord Melbourne in 1840 ; or even as household 
 suffrage was in the eyes of most Conservative politicians last year. 
 
 I ask of landowners who will not rest on this blind and un- 
 reasoning confidence that no change is possible — whether the 
 change I propose be not the very least which could be proposed 
 really to remove the evils which have made the condition of our 
 Irish land tenure the scandal and disgrace of England throughout 
 Europe. If we do not effectually remove these evils we are as far 
 from settling the question as ever. Such a measure as I suggest 
 would remove them. Your Lordship, indeed, appears to think 
 that I give very little to the tenant when I do nothing more for 
 him than to entitle him to a lease of 63 years at the fair value of his 
 farm. It does, I admit, seem strange that a remedy so slight, an 
 interference with the landlord so inconsiderable, should redress 
 mischiefs so terrible, wrongs so mighty as those which I describe. 
 
 Yet such a measure would do all the occupier asks. It would 
 give him security for his industry and his home. What a world of 
 human misery and human happiness is compressed into the view 
 suggested by these latter words ! 
 
 There is a sense in which it would do nothing for him — it would 
 take no portion of the property — of the landlord's property — to 
 confer it upon him. He must still pay the landlord the full value 
 of his fields. It would deprive the landlord of nothing from which 
 he can honestly derive a pecuniary benefit — it would only take 
 away that odious power of oppression 
 
 " Which nought enriches him, 
 But makes the tenant poor indeed." 
 
 It would give that tenant — I have adopted LordRosse's words — 
 the great " privilege of proprietorship," that of improving the soil, 
 with an assurance that the fruits of his industry would be his own. 
 But this privilege would be in his hands but the means of creating a 
 wealth which otherwise would not exist at all. If I may borrow 
 Lord Dufferin's graceful imagery, it would be the fairy wand by 
 which new wealth would spring into existence. The property 
 which would enrich the tenant would not be taken from the owner. 
 It would actually and literally be a new creation of wealth. The 
 improvements effected by the tenant's industry woidd be an 
 addition to the territorial resources of Ireland as completely and 
 absolutely as if new acres had risen from the sea. 
 
 All that the Irish tenant asks is to be allowed to create that 
 wealth — that you will place in his hand the " privilege," by the use 
 of which he will at once enrich the country, the landlord, and him- 
 
278 INDUSTRY LET LOOSE UPON THE FIELDS. 
 
 self. We would do much for the Irish occupier when we gave him 
 an opportunity of creating and gaining a property in the soil of his 
 native land — when we offered him at home that field for his industry 
 which he is now driven to seek in far off lands, beyond the western 
 main. We would call into existence a new Ireland for the industry 
 of the Irish people. We would call into cheerful and industrious 
 action those human energies which over the wide surface of Ireland 
 are now fretting and wasting in idleness and discontent. It is by 
 the exercise of such energies that God has willed that his earth 
 should be made fit for the habitation of civilized man. All glories 
 of human civilization, all grandeur of human greatness owe their 
 origin to labour and to industry far humbler than that of the Irish 
 peasant in his fields. And therefore it is that all history bears 
 witness to the almost inconceivable results which have followed 
 from social changes, apparently trivial, but which were in reality 
 mighty movements because they emancipated the industry of man. 
 
 The knot that binds the arm of a giant may be a knot which the 
 hand of a woman could untie. A pivot that a child may move may 
 stop the machinery that lifts enormous weights. The statute that 
 would give a lease to every Irish occupier may seem but a little 
 one. Yet who can calculate the results that would follow from 
 assuring the millions of the Irish people that when they worked in 
 their fields the fruits of their industry should be their own. 
 
 I deny, then, my Lord, that even in its immediate and material 
 effects the measure I suggest would do nothing. I ask you to turn 
 back to the pages in which I have quoted the descriptions of what 
 the industry of Irishmen, when encouraged, has done. Read the 
 accounts of the reclaimation of the wild mountain given us by 
 Bishop Keane* — read that of Sir William Osborne's Whiteboys, 
 so vividly detailed in the pages of Arthur Youngt — and then tell 
 me what would be done in Ireland if industry like this were let 
 loose upon her fields. 
 
 But above, far above, all these immediate material advantages I 
 place the great moral, and social, and political good. Above all, 
 the measure would elevate the Irish occupier to be a freeman from 
 a serf. It would do so when it would give him security for his 
 industry and his home. 
 
 " The hour that makes a man a slave, 
 Takes half his worth away." 
 
 Even this gives but a faint idea of all we could do for the Irish 
 occupier when we would make him independent. I have written 
 in vain if the thoughts of this do not suggest themselves to the 
 mind of every reader. 
 
 * Ante, page 154. 
 f Ante, page 155. 
 
THE ENFRANCHISEMENT OF THE MEN. 279 
 
 I have no wish to repeat or dwell upon the proofs which incon- 
 testably establish that which indeed inevitably follows from the very 
 statement — that the condition of the Irish tenant at will is one of 
 serfdom. I have not cared to give more of the individual instances 
 of oppression than were necessary to realize to the mind the actual 
 life of those who are thus placed. To multiply instances is only to 
 kindle passions which I would much rather allay. If there be any 
 one who hesitates to believe in the abjectness of that slavery, I will 
 ask him to read over once more the dismal story I have extracted 
 from the records of a court of justice, of the death of Denis Shea, 
 the poor homeless boy* — to read it as it is told in the calm and un- 
 impassioned language of a judicial sentence — to remember the estate 
 on which this occurred — and to form from this one example his own 
 judgment of the extent to which the occupier of the soil is held in 
 thraldom by his master. 
 
 But the fact of his serfdom is not denied. So far from being 
 denied, it is avowed in all the publications in which the present 
 state of proprietary rights has been defended as something so holy 
 and inviolable, that not even for the most pressing national exigency 
 must it be touched. It is written legibly and plainly in all our Irish 
 statute law of landlord and tenant — in that ejectment code which 
 as I have shown Irish landlords have framed specially for them- 
 selves.! This penal code was never fitted, it was never intended, to 
 regulate any civilized relation of landlord and tenant. It is a series 
 of ukases harshly enforcing the rights of the lord against the serf. 
 
 Let me say, my Lord, that which I ought, perhaps, to have said 
 before, that you cannot measure the effects of this serfdom upon 
 national wealth, even by its discouragement of permanent improve- 
 ments upon the soil. His insecurity of tenure, in many instances, 
 actually creates in the mind of the tenant a terror of appearing to 
 be comfortable lest any indication of this nature should invite a 
 raising of the rent. Where this feeling exists, it is needless to point 
 out it discourages even the industry of which the tenant is permitted 
 to enjoy the fruits, that which would realize its return within the 
 year. Insecurity of tenure prohibits improvements, but it grievously 
 discourages even the annual cultivation of the farm. 
 
 Is it possible, my Lord, to say that the mere security of tenure, 
 the assurance that no matter what show of comfort, or even wealth 
 he made, no one could ask him for an increased rent, would not do 
 much directly to improve the physical condition of the Irish occupier 
 of the soil ? 
 
 This serfdom is one from which it is impossible to raise the 
 occupier so long as his landlord has the uncontrolled and arbitrary 
 power of driving him from his country and his home. No matter 
 what rights or privileges you confer upon the tenant, so long as this 
 
 * Ante, page 176. 
 t Ante, page 187. 
 
280 SERFDOM POISONS THE NATION. 
 
 continues he is a slave. " A slave," to use the words of Arthur 
 Young, "in the bosom of written liberty."* That slavery is not 
 the result of any positive or written law. If it were it would be 
 more endurable. It springs from insecurity of tenure ; and under 
 our present law insecurity of tenure must exist wherever the land- 
 lord pleases. Our law does not, like the old feudal laws, make the 
 occupier a serf. But it gives the landlord the power of making him 
 one at his will. The landlords boldly, and openly, and fairly tell 
 us that they are determined to exercise the power. 
 
 Let us lay aside for a moment all consideration of direct material 
 advantages, and calculate, if we can, the moral good that would 
 result to the owner, the occupier, and to all classes of the community, 
 from putting an end for ever to the serfdom in which the mass of 
 the people are held. To how many heartburnings, and hatreds, 
 and slowly-consuming enmities would we put an end. I believe it 
 impossible to over-estimate the influence which such a measure 
 would exercise upon the character of the whole nation. No country 
 can escape the evil effects of holding the mass of the people in 
 slavery. Ireland has felt in all ranks of her society, in all her social 
 system, the mischief which inevitably results from the presence of 
 slavery in the land. Rank exhalations rise and poison the moral 
 atmosphere of the nation which has within its borders such a 
 curse. Upon those more immediately concerned the effects are 
 disastrous. We do our best by such a system to foster in the tenant 
 all the vices of servility, of cunning, and of treachery and revenge — 
 the servility in which even manly spirits are compelled by hard 
 necessity to cringe to power — the cunning by which our nature 
 teaches weakness to evade and cheat the oppression in which might 
 tramples upon right — the treachery and violence by which outraged 
 humanity often vindicates itself in " the wild justice," or, it may be, 
 injustice, " of revenge." These are the lessons which we teach the 
 occupier when we make slavery the condition of his occupation. 
 Of the landowners I will only say that never yet have the masters 
 of slaves been found fitted to discharge the duties which are 
 imposed upon the higher classes of a free state. But the evil does 
 not end here, great as it would be even if it did. The public 
 opinion which has learned to tolerate the presence of serfdom, loses 
 its purity, its energy, and its power. The opinion that defends it 
 becomes demoralized. Familiarity with unresisted and unpunished 
 oppression blunts those instincts in the breasts of nations which 
 ought to be quick to detect, and sensitive to resent, the most minute 
 approach to national or individual wrong. There can be no free 
 nor honest public opinion in a country in which the great mass of 
 the people are not free. 
 
 I forbear to pursue a subject which would admit of a far more 
 
 * Arthur Young, ante, page 66. 
 
FIVE YEARS HENCE. 281 
 
 extended illustration. But even in a moral point of view the 
 measure would do much not only for the Irish occupier but for the 
 Irish nation — which would elevate the tenant from serfdom, and 
 bring to his home at last the only emancipation which can make 
 the slightest difference in his lot. 
 
 I cannot admit, therefore, that my proposal does little for the 
 tenant, although it takes nothing from the landlord. It is just 
 because it does so much for the tenant, and so much for the 
 nation, at so little cost to the landlord that I believe it to be an 
 adjustment of the land question which it would be the interest of 
 the Irish landowners to make. 
 
 Let me say, my Lord, you offer me one compliment which truth 
 forbids me to accept. You are pleased to say that when you read 
 what I had to say against the landlords " you knew the worst." 
 But surely, my Lord, you must feel that this i3 not so. How 
 many topics of disquietude have I carefully avoided, or lightly 
 touched? Do you expect that others will have the same forbear- 
 ance? If the discussion of this question passes from the limits 
 of calm enquiry within which I have endeavoured to confine it, do 
 you think that others will not use the subjects of exasperation which 
 I have avoided? Are there no opportunities for strong appeals to 
 violent popular feeling in many of the scenes of the last twenty 
 years ? Can we expect that they will not be used ? Or is there 
 any rational ground for supposing that if popular agitation on this 
 subject acquired intensity and strength, popular feeling would be 
 satisfied by a measure such as I propose ? Believe me, my Lord, if 
 the landed proprietors are unwise enough to leave open for the next 
 five years the question between them and the Irish people, the bill 
 that will settle it will be drawn by very different hands from mine. 
 
 I have no mystery in these words. Any one who looks round 
 on what is passing in the world can judge as well as I can. I 
 believe it impossible, in the present condition of human affairs and 
 human opinions, long to maintain a system of land tenure in defiance 
 of the wishes of the Irish people for a change ; and believing so, I 
 am sure that the sooner that change is made the more likely is it to 
 be a just and a careful one. Within the next few years — we know 
 not how soon — events may happen which will force on English 
 statesmen a settlement of this question, and a settlement which 
 will be framed to satisfy the supposed wishes of the Irish people. 
 
 But if I am wrong in this — if no change is to be made in our land 
 laws — if the old system of territorial ascendancy shall obtain a 
 renewal of its lease of Ireland's " perennial desolation" — then, I am 
 quite sure, we will have an emigration from Ireland, in the view of 
 which all that has already been will seem trifling. Vague hopes of 
 redress, they know not from what quarter, are now floating in the 
 minds of the people. Undefined imaginings of a coming deliver- 
 ance are agitating in secret the heart of many an Irish occupier of 
 
282 WHAT WILL BE IN THE END THEREOF. 
 
 the soil. If these hopes be once more doomed to disappointment ; 
 if nothing is done to protect the right of the people to live 
 at home — if there is no future for Ireland but a continuance of 
 the same system of government which has now for two centuries 
 kept our people serfs — the Irish race will desert their country with 
 almost one consent, and there will be an outpouring of that people 
 from their homes, so vast and so appalling, as to startle the most 
 careless into the conviction that it is not safe to play or trifle with 
 a subject which really involves a nation's life. 
 
 " What will be the end thereof" no mortal man can tell; but 
 most assuredly he is a man more bold than wise who looks out upon 
 the darkening clouds, and sees no cause of anxiety in the present 
 state of the Irish land question. 
 
 Yet, I believe there never was a question of such magnitude 
 that could be so easily adjusted. Many influences — of which the 
 higher wisdom of statesmanship would make use — dispose the Irish 
 people, if not to loyalty to peace. Assure them of justice on this land 
 question and you will do more to crush disaffection than you can 
 by all the troops you can pour into the country. But let no man 
 persuade you that ever you will detach that people from any and 
 every cause that is only hostile to British authority, until you can 
 secure to them the means of living in comfort and freedom in their 
 own land. 
 
 Would to God ! — I say it, my Lord, earnestly and solemnly — 
 Would to God ! that I could see the rights of Irish property and 
 the Irish people reconciled — the old feud for ever at an end — and 
 the gentry no longer feeling themselves, as too many feel, as aliens 
 dwelling in an unfriendly land. Is it vain to hope that something 
 may be done to effect this ? 
 
 I have already said that " time is everything in the adjustment 
 of this question, althongh it be one that has convulsed Ireland 
 for 200 years. The concessions which this year would be grate- 
 fully received as a measure of conciliation, in four years hence may 
 be scornfully regarded as the offers of weakness and fear."* It 
 may be that we have not even the four years to adjust this 
 question with dignity and self-respect. I do not allude to any 
 supposed danger from treasonable movements in Ireland — move- 
 ments which, so long as we are isolated from the rest of the world, 
 England is strong enough to crushf — I hope not unwise enough to 
 
 * Land Tenure, p. 104. 
 
 *f* I have already, on a former occasion, adverted, as far as I thought I ought to do, 
 to that strange confederation which for two years so strangely agitated and alarmed 
 the country {Land Tenure, pages 9, 10 ; preface to 3rd edition, pages 13-20). Even 
 if the time were come when I could write upon this subject without reserve, this 
 would not be the occasion for doing so. I am quite sure that a most instructive lesson 
 could be drawn from a sketch which would fairly and impai-tially trace the progress — 
 so far as it has been revealed — of that marvellous conspiracy, and the means, so far as 
 we know them, by which, in spite of the most powerful counteracting influences, it made 
 its way among the Irish people. 
 
THE FENIANS. 283 
 
 treat with contempt. It is useless for us to inquire whether the 
 conspiracy against which the Government made such great prepara- 
 tions be really crushed. You do not destroy disaffection when you 
 
 Truth obliges me to say that such a sketch would give a very different impression 
 both of the nature of that organization, and the motives and character of its leaders, 
 from that supplied by the representations which have been coloured by the passions 
 and the fears of the upper classes of this country. 
 
 It is of importance that those who are intrusted with the government of Ireland 
 should form a correct estimate of this element which does unquestionably exist, and 
 which is beyond all doubt a danger in the social state of Ireland. The most important 
 lesson we can learn from it is the facility with which the hatred of the Irish exiles 
 to British authority can be brought to aid and encourage the designs of those who plot 
 against British authority at home. It was in the combination which was effected for 
 the first time between the disaffected population in the United States and home dis- 
 content that both the power and the danger of Fenianism consisted. It was a 
 combination that might easily have been foreseen. Nevertheless its actual realization 
 is a fact of the full importance of which I fear a very inadequate conception is enter- 
 tained. It is scarcely too much to say that at this moment the great mass of the 
 Irish race, in whatever country they are scattered, or wherever chance has fixed their 
 habitations, are united in one vast league against English power. 
 
 It is mere childishness to affect not to see this. It is the most monstrous of 
 absurdities to despise it. Far wiser would be the statesmanship which would see in 
 this something like the preparation of that " secret scourge" which Spencer prophesied 
 that Ireland, if not "reformed," would one day inflict on England. 
 
 As to the strength of this confederacy in Ireland I have already pointed out that 
 we have no means of forming any estimate of its numbers. But when the public are 
 assured that it is contemptible, we must judge of the worth of such assurances by 
 the preparations for resistance which Government thought it necessary to make. 
 That there did exist in Ireland a formidable confederation it is impossible for any 
 one who has observed the course of events for the last two years to doubt. It is, of 
 course, a totally different thing to say that any confederation in Ireland could 
 cope with the power that could instantly be brought to crush any attempt at open 
 revolt. I only say that, whatever be their madness, or whatever be their secret plans, 
 there is in Ireland a rebellious confederation strong enough to be formidable, or at 
 least to give just cause for anxiety and alarm. 
 
 I am equally sure, that we will be entirely misled if we give credit to those statements 
 which represent the conspiracy as entirely confined to the lowest class ; as including 
 no one even on a level with the substantial tenant farmers of the country. The 
 confederation is, perhaps, only the more formidable because it is not headed by men 
 taken, like Mr. Smith O'Brien and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, from the gentry and the 
 aristocracy of the country. To a treasonable movement in Ireland such leaders give 
 no real strength, they often were its weakness. But the confidence would be an utterly 
 false one which would suppose that the Fenian confederacy has enrolled in its ranks 
 none but the lower orders of society. 
 
 Still more false and dangerous would be the reliance on the assertion that there is no 
 honesty or sincerity of purpose in those who have originated this movement. The stories 
 which at first represented the Fenian organization as a mere banditti, bound together 
 for pillage and massacre, now find credence with no sane man. Those who formed it 
 incurred, no doubt, the guilt — it may be, the tremendous guilt — of planning an armed 
 revolution. They contemplated the destruction, not merely of English Government, 
 but also the destruction of all those territorial rights which English power has 
 maintained. Wicked and wild as men may deem these projects, there have been 
 those in all ages and in all countries who have engaged in similar designs with unselfish 
 motives, and who have been formidable exactly as they have been sincere. Whatever 
 is to be said or thought of those who in Ireland engage in such projects — let us not 
 deceive ourselves. We have to deal with men thoroughly in earnest — men who have 
 persuaded themselves that in entertaining such projects they are acting the part of 
 true patriotism. 
 
 I know that it is regarded as " disloyalty " to suppose it possible that any but the 
 base-minded can be drawn into an attempt to subvert the existing order of things. Yet 
 in Ireland such an attempt has never yet been crushed without the discovery being soon 
 
284 THE FENIAN CONVICTS. 
 
 put down treason. You do not destroy treason when you put 
 down an organization. The conspirators remain even when the con- 
 spiracy is crushed. You have still in Ireland members of the old 
 
 made that there were engaged in it self-sacrificing devotion and chivalry — which attract 
 even admiration and respect. No man now speaks of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, of 
 Robert Emmett, or of Smith O'Brien, as the fierce passion of loyalty described 
 them at the time when they joined in treasonable designs. The worst crime of mis- 
 government is that it drives into these guilty projects many, very many, of the high 
 and generous spirits who are the most ready to revolt at oppression. " Curse on the 
 laws which deprived me of such subjects," was the bitter exclamation of an English 
 monarch who saw how Irish " traitors" fought against him. Far deeper might be the 
 curse pronounced upon the system which has made " traitors" of many of those who 
 have suffered the inevitable doom with which every government visit those who plot in 
 vain against its power. There are men now suffering the most degrading penalties of 
 convict prisons, gifted with all the qualities which, in a happier country, would have 
 made them valuable citizens and servants of the state ; and who, even in the course 
 that brought them to that doom, risked all that was dear to them in life for a cause 
 which they believed to be that of their country. I watched the demeanour of these 
 men as they received the sentence which condemned them to a penalty almost as ter- 
 rible as that of death. It was not possible to observe it without the persuasion that 
 these men had confidence both in the justice and in the reality of the cause for which 
 they suffered. I do not know that the annals of defeated treason can supply examples 
 of men submitting to their fate with more of the resolution of martyrs — sustained under 
 sentences which seemed to kill all hope in life by a stern and wild fanaticism, which 
 no one but themselves could understand. 
 
 I write these sentences with no reference to those who are now enduring those 
 sentences, but only because I am sure that it is of vital importance that we should 
 estimate fully all the strength that is arrayed against our present system of govern- 
 ment. We have to deal with a disaffection which has engaged in its cause self- 
 sacrifice and devotion, and political fanaticism which will induce men to risk and to 
 dare much. We may denounce their projects as those of robbery and plunder — we 
 maybrand that which they call patriotism as a sanguinary and heinous crime. All this 
 will not alter the fact, or remove from the cause of disaffection those moral quabtiea 
 which our unfortunate misgovernraent has allowed to be enlisted on its side. 
 
 I am sure that one of the elements which every one ought to consider in dealing 
 with Ireland is the existence of a treasonable organization, considerable even in its own 
 strength ; formidable in its alliance with the universal disaffection of the Irish race ; 
 attracting to its cause many of the sympathies which exist in the human heart for those 
 who are supposed to rebel against wrong ; and numbering in its ranks many, very 
 many men actuated by an earnest, a sincere, and a self-sacrificing devotion to the cause 
 which they believe to be the cause of their country's freedom. 
 
 I am quite sure also, that in writing these sentences, disclosing that which I believe 
 to be the real danger, I am far better and more truly discharging my duty to the 
 sovereign and the country, than if by denying the possibility of honesty, sincerity, or 
 love of country among those who have engaged in the cause of revolt — I were in 
 reality to contribute to deceiving those who guide our national affairs, and I am 
 perfectly persuaded that to disparage "Fenianism" as the mere scheme of pillage, or 
 denounce it as a mere device of swindlers, is to practise on those whose duty it is to 
 deal with the condition of Ireland a great and a mischievous deception. The more you 
 condemn both the projects and the means by which they were to be effected, the 
 stronger is the argument -against the system of government which engages in such 
 projects men with the qualities of earnestness and sincerity which fit them for higher 
 and better things. 
 
 It would be foreign to the subject of this note to allude to statements which have 
 been made of the treatment which these political prisoners are receiving in the carry- 
 ing out of their sentence. Yet every one who cares for the honour of the country 
 must hope that some authoritative contradiction will be given to statements which 
 have excited the indignation of many of the most resolute in their detestation of 
 treason. The comments which have appeared, on this subject, in Saunders's News 
 
WHILE YET THERE IS TIME. 285 
 
 organization, waiting anxiously for another and better opportunity — 
 men easily collected whenever that opportunity comes. You have 
 scattered throughout the country the disbanded militia of revolt. 
 It is in " some moment of England's weakness and depression," in 
 the words I have already quoted, that concessions may be extorted 
 far more extensive than those which would now " be received 
 with gratitude and exultation."* But when I point to changes 
 that are possible, even within the next few years, I am not speaking 
 of any rising of the Irish peasantry against the disciplined troops 
 with which England now holds our country. I am speaking 
 of world-wide complications, which may at any moment arise — 
 complications which, when they do arise, will most assuredly place 
 England in a different position to the Irish people and to the Irish 
 land question from that in which she stands now. 
 
 It is vain to hope that in the present session of Parliment any 
 real settlement of this great question can be attained. And yet, 
 my Lord, I write with a deep conviction — I might almost add, 
 with a dark foreboding — when I say that English statesmen of all 
 politics will act unwisely if Parliament separate without some real 
 honest attempt to reconcile the Irish people to the cause of England. 
 Is it possible, even yet, to offer them a pledge of earnestness, of a 
 sincere desire to redress those wrongs, which might be accepted by 
 a generous and confiding people as a promise, on the fulfilment of 
 which they were ready to depend ? 
 
 Let a royal commission be issued, directed to men in whom all 
 classes of the Irish nation may have confidence — let its proceedings 
 be framed upon the precedent of that which inquired into the con- 
 dition of the Irish poor in 1834. It should not confine itself to 
 
 Letter, the oldest, and certainly not the least influential, of the Irish Conservative 
 journals, express feelings which are entertained by many whose opinions in politics 
 that journal represents. 
 
 In The Plea for the Celtic Race I quoted the following passage from the Spectator : — 
 "We ask any decent Englishman who has carefully read Mr. Luby's speech, whether 
 that is the sort of character that could not live under constitutional law ? Whether 
 that same man, born and bred in England, would not have been a respectable citizen ? 
 Whether in the United States he might not have been as loyal as Sheridan, or in 
 Canada as D'Arcy McGhee 1 Then why not in Ireland ? Simply because the English 
 liberals, who day by day harmonize English legislation to the wants of English life, 
 . . . . refuse, or rather neglect, to bring Irish legislation into accord with Irish 
 wants." 
 
 I added — " This would, I venture to say, be realised by any generous man who 
 would read the poems and ballads in which Charles Kickham, one of the prisoners 
 now undergoing his sentence of penal servitude, has given expression to a sympathy 
 with all that is beautiful in nature, and all that is gentle and true in humanity. The 
 writer of these poems had qualities of heart and intellect which surely deserved another 
 fate."— 3rd edition, p. 100. 
 
 The writer of these ballads is now, if the statements made be true, undergoing 
 unutterable degradation. Do all Englishmen forget the indignation which the nar- 
 rative of Silvio Pellico kindled in the heart of the English nation ? Well would it 
 be for Charles Kickham and his associates if they could be transferred to the fortress 
 of Spielberg, and suffer only what Silvio Pellico endured. 
 
 * Edinburgh Review, ante page 251. 
 
286 A MESSAGE OF PEACE. 
 
 collecting the opinions of landlords and agents in a room in Dublin 
 Castle. Trusty delegates of that Commission should visit each 
 locality in Ireland, and invite the poorest tenants to come and speak 
 for themselves. It is only by enquiries from the people themselves 
 that ever you will know the whole truth. Honest efforts ought to 
 be made to ascertain what is really passing in the minds of the 
 population — to collect all the facts connected with emigration and 
 evictions, and the tenure of land. If such a commission were now 
 issued. If it were placed in honest and efficient hands — before the 
 next session of Parliament, a body of evidence and information 
 would be collected, which would supply grounds for legislation, 
 which no one could gainsay or resist. 
 
 In the mean time, let a short act be passed, staying all arbi- 
 trary evictions for one year. If such measures were adopted now, 
 and adopted in such a manner as to convince the Irish people, that 
 they came from the purpose of a good and honest heart to do them 
 justice — all that enquiry might show to be justice — even after all 
 the failures and all the disappointments they have endured — they 
 might still trust and wait before they finally abandoned all hope of 
 redress from the British Parliament and the British Crown. 
 
 Is not the occasion worthy of such an interference? Never 
 could our Sovereign do an act more worthy of her own Ma- 
 jesty — never one more calculated to strengthen the foundations 
 of her throne, and conciliate to her government the Irish people, 
 than that of sending to Parliament a message, announcing the 
 issuing of such a commission, and recommending the enactment I 
 have described. 
 
 This would indeed be the message of peace to Ireland. Time 
 and history may yet reckon and record the sum of all the mischiefs 
 and miseries it might avert. 
 
 With these sentences, my Lord, I might close this letter — at 
 least with the addition of a few words acknowledging, as I do most 
 cordially and sincerely, the kind (I must add, considering the view 
 you take of my proposal), the generous manner in which you 
 are good enough to speak of myself. That kindness would, in 
 itself, almost encourage me to add a very few words upon a subject, 
 the last to which I would wish to advert, that of my own motives 
 in writing as I have done. A discussion in which my name was 
 mentioned in an illustrious assembly, makes it, perhaps, fitting that 
 
THE HOUSE OF LORDS — " PLEA FOR THE CELTIC RACE." 287 
 
 T should do so. I should certainly regret if I had marred even my 
 imperfect advocacy of a great cause by indiscretions of language 
 which would fairly expose me to rebuke. 
 
 There is a fiction which supposes that I can know nothing of 
 what passes in the chamber in which your Lordship and your 
 brother Peers deliberate upon national affairs This is one of the 
 venerable fictions which injure no one, and in which I would, 
 under any circumstances, be ready to believe. In the present in- 
 stance I really know nothing, except certain comments attributed to 
 a noble lord in the public newspapers, and on those publications in 
 the newspapers I offer a very few remarks. 
 
 Sentences have been quoted from one of my tracts, as if they 
 contained something peculiarly improper. I believe I cannot better 
 reply to such criticism than by quoting the entire of the passage 
 upon which, I cannot help saying, some " excellent indignation" 
 has been thrown away. Surely what I have written has been 
 strangely misunderstood. No one interested in the peace and 
 tranquillity of Ireland ought to blame me for telling the people 
 that they had the means in their own hands of obtaining redress 
 from the British Parliament. In the few words of introduction, 
 in which I offered to the consideration of the public the actual 
 provisions of the measure which I suggested, I wrote : — 
 
 " I believe that if such a measure as I propose were once fairly and 
 honestly adopted, by those who represent the landlord interest, it would 
 be gladly accepted by the whole tenantry of Ireland as the final settle- 
 ment of a question which has for generations torn and distracted Ireland — 
 a question which, while it remains unsettled, makes the life of every 
 Irishman less happy than it ought to be. 
 
 " But I do not hesitate also to avow my perfect and unfaltering belief 
 that a measure such as this is within the reach of the Irish people them- 
 selves. I am not one of those who have much faith in the achievement 
 of any great good for Ireland by that which is termed Parliamentary 
 action. I have great faith in the power of truth and justice ; and, when 
 it has truth and justice on its side, in the ultimate triumph of the popular 
 will. I cannot help entertaining a clear conviction, that if, throwing 
 over all subterfuge and compromise, the Irish people were deliberately, 
 distincly, and energetically to declare their resolute determination in 
 favour of fixity of tenure for the occupiers of the soil, three years would 
 not pass until, in the Imperial Parliament, a measure embodying the 
 principles of that which I suggest would become law. 
 
 " If it could be carried by a mutual agreement among all classes in- 
 terested in the land of Ireland, it would most assuredly be the great 
 charter of Ireland's prosperity and peace."* 
 
 I prefaced these observations by a statement which I have already 
 in this letter repeated and endeavoured to enforce. "If popular 
 
 * Fixity of Tenure, p. 11 — Lord Dunsany's Speech.— Times, Feb. 5th, 1867. 
 
288 KING CANUTE AND THE IRISH PEERS. 
 
 feeling be thoroughly aroused on the subject, it may be that the 
 landowners of Ireland will never again see a measure proposed for| 
 popular acceptance with such a jealous respect for their rights." 
 
 I repeat every word of this. I do not expect the great mea-' 
 sure which will secure fixity of tenure to the Irish people to be 
 carried or even advanced by any action in the English Parliament 
 on the part of Irish representatives. Apart from all other reasons, j| 
 it never can be carried by debates in a listless and a reluctant^ 
 assembly — an assembly indisposed to all Irish discussions except i 
 those which affect the interests or engage the passions of English 
 parties. Before " Fixity of Tenure" can do this it must become a 
 power in the State. The influences which will compel the settle- 
 ment of this question are influences far above the tactics of 
 Parliamentary warfare — influences which neither ministers nor 
 Parliaments can control. Thoughtful men who have watched over 
 English history have seen that the days are gone by when Parlia- 
 ment controlled the opinion or the sentiment of the nation. Its 
 function is every day becoming more and more that of registering 
 national decisions already pronounced outside its walls. 
 
 But if I do not believe that parliamentary discussion can do 
 much even to aid the advent of justice on the land question to the 
 Irish people, I am quite sure that it is not possible for any number 
 of vehement declarations on the part of any number of Irish 
 landowners, who have seats in either House of Parliament, to 
 do anything to prevent it. Surely, my Lord, he knows nothing 
 of the elements that are involved in the struggle of a people for 
 the right to live in their own land who can gravely express a hope 
 that a few words from a Prime Minister, in reply to an appeal from 
 an Irish Peer, will put an end to the demand for tenant right, or 
 even extinguish my poor Plea for the Celtic Race. 
 
 " Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta, 
 Pulveris exigui jactu, compressa quiescent." 
 
 I have, my Lord, a very sincere respect for both prime ministers 
 and peers, but such language makes me wish that a scene for one 
 of the frescoes of the new palace had been taken from the reign of 
 the Danish conquerors of England. The illustration is an old one, 
 but there may be, it seems, some new wisdom to be learned even 
 from the lesson that Canute's courtiers had too much sense to wait, 
 without changing their position, to be overwhelmed by the waves. 
 
 But, my Lord, I said more. I said : — 
 
 " I cannot help entertaining a clear conviction, that if, throwing over 
 all subterfuge and compromise, the Irish people were deliberately, clearly, 
 and energetically to declare their resolute determination in favour of fixity 
 of tenure for the occupiers of the soil, three years would not pass until a 
 measure embodying the principles of that which I suggest would become 
 law." 
 
AN IRISFI TENANT LEAGUE. 289 
 
 I did not go on to fill up the details, because I did not wish to 
 suggest or to offer advice when it was not my province to do either. 
 But surely no one could misunderstand what I meant. 
 
 The example of the English Corn Law League is before the 
 Irish people. By earnestness and singleness of purpose that organi- 
 zation won the repeal of the corn laws from the proudest and most 
 powerful aristocracy in the world. If the Irish people were to 
 imitate that example. If those who have their confidence were to 
 combine the tenant farmers of Ireland into one great " tenant league ;" 
 ?if such an association were to use all rightful means of influencing 
 public opinion, both in Ireland and England, to collect and authen- 
 ticate all the instances which prove the need of protection for the 
 occupier of the soil — to do, in a word, all that such an association 
 might lawfully and honourably do to press on the British Parlia- 
 ment and nation the claim of the Celtic race to live in their own 
 land — I do not believe that in the presence of the moral power of 
 such an association our present system of land tenure could last 
 three years. 
 
 I know that there is but little prospect of such a combination of 
 popular power. The causes which would prevent it are many. 
 Foremost, perhaps, among them is the persuasion that has taken 
 hold largely of the popular mind that constitutional efforts to obtain 
 redress are useless. I advert to the subject because I have been 
 challenged to explain the sentences I have quoted. I will only say 
 that I do not believe that it is a good or wholesome sign for the 
 country when subjects that have a strong hold upon the popular 
 heart yet seem to cause no visible excitement — when no voice gives 
 utterance to feelings that are not the less deep because they are 
 suppressed.* 
 
 I do not know that an allusion to the remote possibility of such a 
 combination was a very serious offence. 
 
 Hard words against myself, in whatever assembly they are 
 uttered, I can very cheerfully pass by.. In angry criticism upon my 
 proposal I only see the prejudices which, upon the subject, I 
 expected everywhere to meet. I recognize, indeed, those which 
 
 * I see, with some surprise, the views I have expressed confirmed in a quarter from 
 which I scarcely expected it. In a publication generally attributed to a very influen- 
 tial Conservative — one of the first selected for office by the present Government — I 
 meet the following passage: — 
 
 "Nearly half a century has elapsed since the cry of 'Justice to Ireland' was a 
 watchword through the land, and the voices of many who then uttered it are silent for 
 ever, but still it ascends like a wail above their graves ! Then it was for equal rights 
 and liberty, now the Irish nation only asks the bare permission to exist. Nothing indicates 
 more plainly the miserable condition of Ireland than the utter apathy with which the 
 recent attempt to get up a Reform agitation was received. Public spirit is dead, and 
 those who are not looking for a revolution from beyond the Atlantic, sit down in hope- 
 less .apathy, despairing of any good result from attempting to reform or move that 
 British Parliament which has so often disappointed the country's expectations, and 
 turned a deaf ear to her reiterated appeals for justice." — Ireland; Her Present Condition, 
 its Causes and its Remedies. 
 
 T 
 
290 PERSONAL IMPUTATIONS. 
 
 once I entertained myself. I am even content to have motives 
 imputed to me the most foreign from those which influence my 
 thoughts. I am not sure whether I am by one writer included 
 among those who, in meddling with this question, " seek political 
 capital, or profit, or notoriety ;"* or by another among " clever and 
 briefless barristers, knowing and probably caring nothing about 
 rural affairs, or the real relations of landlords and tenants, but seized 
 with a sudden zeal for tenant right and a seat in parliament;"! 
 but I do know that by the latter writer, one who assumes — and, I 
 doubt not, truly — the honours of the Irish Peerage, I have been told 
 that I have proposed a measure "of which I appreciate the ludicrous 
 and preposterous inequality in operation as well as in justice." I have 
 observed with some curiosity that scarcely any one can write on 
 the side of our present system of land tenure without assuming that 
 every one who says a word against landlord dominion must be 
 influenced by some personal or unworthy motive. It is the old 
 story of our poor human nature. It has been truly said that 
 "tyranny contracts the mind." The same effect appears to attend its 
 advocacy, as if there were in the very fact of defending class injus- 
 tice something that unconsciously warps even better natures towards 
 that which is rancorous and mean. Certain it is, that those who 
 undertake the task very generally fall into that peculiar style of 
 argument which has only one reasoning and one perception — that 
 of being positive that every opponent must be base — a singular 
 phase of human thought which has been well described as " the 
 offspring of a union, not uncommon, though unnatural, between 
 interest and spite." t 
 
 No man worthy to approach this great question ought even to be 
 ruffled by criticisms like these. But I do not therefore the less 
 appreciate the generous testimony borne by your Lordship when 
 you say that much as you condemn what I have written, you firmly 
 believe that " I have written disinterestedly." You do me only 
 justice in this belief. I may have something to lose — I certainly 
 have nothing to gain by setting against me prejudices that are all- 
 powerful in the influential classes of Irish society ; and if Ave cannot 
 pass through this discussion without these miserable imputations 
 of personal motives, I think I may appeal to those who will judge 
 me as you have, by that which I have written, whether anything 
 I have published on this question bears any of the marks by which 
 such motives are sure to be betrayed. 
 
 If I had not some confidence, not merely in the justice but in 
 the reality of my proposals, I would scarcely have devoted to the 
 subject the time and labour that I have did. No person, I think, 
 will charge me with having written to meet the views or suit the 
 convenience of any political party. I do not think I am open to the 
 
 * Demurrer to Mr. Butt's Plea. By a Land Agent. 
 
 f The Irish Difficulty. By an Irish Peer. $ Lord Brougham. 
 
A VINDICATION. 2\)\ 
 
 accusation of having appealed to popular prejudice or passions. 
 Patient and laborious investigation of documents and proofs — 
 careful verification of statements, by a reference to the chronicles 
 in which information is to be found — these are not the usual 
 resources of those who write merely to win popular applause. This 
 is the course of one who desires to make his appeal to reason and 
 to thought. The task which aims at no higher end than that of 
 stirring the passions or winning the favour of the multitude is 
 surely a less labourious one than this. And those who will remem- 
 ber that I have been compelled to travel over exciting topics, will 
 be, I think, the most ready to admit that I have endeavoured to 
 temper and moderate the language in which I must, of necessity, 
 express strong feeling, and state occasionally facts calculated to 
 excite. I felt when I began to write, as well as I do now, that the 
 subject is " one upon which there is litttle temptation to any one 
 who entertains the views which I do to write." I was perfectly 
 prepared to "be harshly judged by prejudices which are now all- 
 powerful." " I knew that by many the suggestions I made would 
 be denounced as invasions of the sacred rights of property." That 
 by many more they would be branded as "impracticable and wild."* 
 I would not have been willing to encounter all this if I had not 
 a strong faith in my own convictions. Least of all would I have 
 been willing to place myself in the position of standing alone as 
 the advocate of " impracticable and visionary schemes. If there be 
 any character from which any man of common sense would shrink, 
 it is this. Believe me, my Lord, I was not insensible to the 
 warning a great man has given those who " hazard schemes of 
 government, except from the seat of authority." However mistaken 
 or mischievous men may think the views I have expressed, no fair 
 man who judges me by that which I have written will believe that 
 anything but a deep conviction of their truth has prompted me to 
 write as I have done. 
 
 Let me say once for all how I came to write. Two years ago I 
 had formed views of the land question, as, I suppose, most persons 
 in my position have. I was satisfied of that which lies on the very 
 surface, that insecurity of tenure is a great evil. I was convinced 
 that compensation for tenants' improvements was just and right ; 
 but when I saw the people flying in masses from their homes I felt 
 that really to understand the question we must go deeper than 
 all this — that there must be some mischief deeply rooted in our 
 social system, which in a country blessed with advantages like ours 
 produced results so strangely contrary to everything which the laws 
 which regulate the history of nations, or the conduct of classes or 
 individuals might lead us to expect. 
 
 An accident turned my thoughts more intensely in this direction. 
 Travelling on a southern railway I witnessed one of those scenes 
 
 * Land Tenure, p. 95. 
 
292 HOW I CAME TO WRITE. 
 
 too common in our country, but which, I believe, no familiarity 
 can make any person of feeling witness without emotion. The 
 station was crowded with emigrants, and their friends who came 
 to see them off. There was nothing unusual in the occurrence — 
 nothing that is not often to be seen. Old men walked slowly, and 
 almost hesitatingly, to the carriages that were to take them away 
 from the country to which they were never to return. Railway 
 porters placed in the train strange boxes and chests of every shape and 
 size, sometimes even small articles of furniture, which told that the 
 owners were taking with them their little all. In the midst of them 
 a brother and a sister bade each other their last farewell — a mother 
 clasped passionately to her breast the son whom she must never 
 see again. Women carried or led to their places in the carriages 
 little children, who looked round as if they knew not what all 
 this meant, but wept because they saw their mothers weeping. 
 Strong men turned aside to dash from their eye the not unmanly 
 tear. As the train began to move there w T as the uncontrollable 
 rush, the desperate clinging to the carriages of relatives crowding 
 down to give the last shake hands. The railway servants pushed 
 them back — we moved on more rapidly — and then rose from the 
 group we left behind a strange mingled cry of wild farewells, and 
 prayers, and blessings, and that melancholy wail of Irish sorrow 
 which no one who has heard will ever forget — and we rushed on 
 with our freight of sorrowing and reluctant exiles across a plain of 
 fertility, unsurpassed, perhaps, in any European soil. It was a 
 light matter, but still it was something in that picture — close to us 
 rose the picturesque ruins, which seemed to tell us from the past 
 that there were days when an Irish race had lived, and not lived 
 in poverty, upon that very plain. 
 
 These are scenes which surely no Irishman should see without 
 emotion. The transient feeling they may excite is but of little use 
 except as it may be suggestive of thought. It was impossible not 
 to ask why were these people thus flying from their homes, desert- 
 ing that rich soil. I could not but feel that no satisfactory solution 
 of the question had yet been given. I asked myself if it was not 
 a reproach to those among us whom God had raised a little above 
 that people by the advantages of intellect and education if we gave no 
 real earnest thought to such an enquiry ; and I formed a purpose — I 
 almost made to myself a vow that I would employ, as far as I could, 
 whatever little power I had acquired in investigating facts in 
 endeavouring to trace the strange mystery to its origin. 
 
 The purpose may have been an unwise one, but I followed it 
 out. I endeavoured to recal to memory all that I had ever read, or 
 learned, or observed, that could throw light upon the subject. I 
 noted down all that I saw or heard that revealed what was really 
 passing in the various grades of Irish society. It is strange how 
 many little things that might pass unheeded, will, to a mind bent 
 
HOW I CAME TO WHITE. 2 ( J3 
 
 upon one subject, suggest information. I carefully studied all the 
 materials for forming a judgment which industry and observation 
 could collect. I took many an hour from sleep to write down what 
 I had thought or seen. While I was thus engaged, accident gave 
 me an opportunity of becoming acquainted with some of the move- 
 ments and the origin of that strange confederacy which — it is 
 useless to deny it — has proved the depth and the intensity of Irish 
 popular disaffection. I had the opportunity of reading the docu- 
 ments seized by the authorities, in which the confidential corres- 
 pondence of the planners of that movement had been preserved. 
 I was even obliged to study and understand the nature of the 
 appeals which had such a wonderful effect upon the popular mind. 
 I gained some further insight into the depths of Irish disaffection. 
 I did believe that in reading the history of the past and observing 
 the feelings of the present I had obtained, a view, even a 
 clear view, of the causes which were driving the Irish people from 
 Ireland. I even thought I could see a remedy. It is for others 
 to judge how far I have been right in either; but, believing as I 
 did, I think I would have been wrong if I had not given to the 
 discussion of this great question, imperfectly as I was able to do it, 
 a contribution which I had brought myself to think might be of 
 use. 
 
 I had no temptation to modify my views to meet those of any 
 party. I took counsel with no one. I represented and I represent 
 no opinions but my own. No person is responsible for anything I 
 have written but myself. I had, perhaps, a temptation to yield to 
 some cherished prejudices in my own mind with which I was more 
 and more forced to believe truth was inconsistent. I had a 
 temptation to avoid or suppress conclusions by which I felt I must 
 forfeit the good opinions of many whose good opinion and friend- 
 ship I would have wished to keep. I wrote what I had thought 
 out for myself. I did so with no intention of taking part in any 
 political controversy, except so far as this might be involved in 
 an essay on that which is, after all, a social more than a political 
 purpose. I found that my proposal attracted the unfriendly criti- 
 cism of many, whose even angry criticism I must respect. I could 
 scarcely avoid, explaining and defending it; and, as very often 
 happens, I have been drawn into a discussion far beyond any limits 
 of which I had ever thought. 
 
 I do not regret this. It is no loss to any Irishman to be 
 compelled to go slowly and minutely over the history of the past. 
 Even as a study in political or social science, there are few subjects 
 better worth investigation than those connected with the condition 
 of the Irish people for the last 200 years. Ireland in that period 
 has but little history to those who know history only as the record 
 of the events which affect dynasties, and sovereigns, and govern- 
 ments. There is much for those who place the real value of history 
 
294 LESSONS OF THE TAST. 
 
 in the tracing of the things which make up the every-day life of a 
 people. In this sense I know of no stranger or more instructive 
 passage in the life of mankind than the story of Ireland, from the 
 day when strange proprietors were set over her confiscated soil. 
 Her story- — not in camps, or courts, or senates — but her story in 
 her villages, her farms, her farm-houses, and her hovels, in all the 
 changes of her peasant life — in the relations between those who 
 owned and those who occupied her soil — in the serfdom, and misery, 
 and the oppression of the old race — in the effects which all this 
 produced upon national industry and prosperity — upon the character 
 and condition of all classes. When we can bring all this in one 
 view before our mind we have a great historic picture, in the scenes 
 of which we see something very different from the mere images of 
 beggary and crime — we see vividly pourtrayed before us the work- 
 ings of all the elements and passions which create national happiness 
 and misery — scenes which impress upon us the most striking illustra- 
 tion of political and economic laws. May I stop to say, that surely 
 we may perceive in that view those higher moral lessons which history 
 teaches us, that sometimes, at least in national affairs, oppression 
 and wrong are blunders as well as crimes. Who has profited by 
 the grievous oppression of the Irish people? What cause has 
 prospered which that oppression was designed to secure ? The old 
 people were crushed down to protect the English interest, the Pro- 
 testant interest, and the new proprietors. Has the English interest 
 been really upheld? If the most malignant and wily enemy of 
 Enland had devised the policy by which Ireland was to be reserved 
 to be her "secret scourge" in some future day, could his aim have 
 been more effectually worked out than it has been by the result of 
 the very system of government which was justified by the plea that 
 the interests of England must be upheld ? 
 
 Has the Protestant interest been strengthened? Ask the ques- 
 tion in what sense we will, the answer is the same. In the higher 
 sense it must be, that the religion of Protestants has now less hold 
 upon the inhabitants of Ireland than it had upon the day when men 
 professed to protect and advance it by surrounding it with the 
 odious prerogative of oppression and wrong. Even in the lower 
 sense, there is no thoughtful man who will say that the Protestants 
 of Ireland, with all their advantages of property and education, and 
 social position, occupy the place in their own country which they 
 must do if no unjust ascendency had ever been attempted for them, 
 and if no oppression had ever crushed down the people for their 
 supposed benefit and in their name. 
 
 Have the Irish landowners profited ? This is the strangest 
 chapter of this strange history. No country on earth has had the 
 same opportunity which Ireland had of acquiring agricultural wealth. 
 For seventy years before the repeal of the corn laws she enjoyed 
 almost a practical monoply of the richest market for agricultural 
 
THE IRISH LANDED INTEREST. 295 
 
 produce in the world. The rapidity with which our exports of grain 
 and animals increased within that period seems now almost incredible. 
 A stranger who watched the progress of that trade would have said 
 that the owners and cultivators of the soil in Ireland must be realiz- 
 ing enormous gains. The manufacturing population of England 
 were actually paying the cultivators of Ireland a tribute each year 
 of many millions for the food they sent them. Of that enormous 
 tribute the landowners received an immense proportion. The export 
 was of the raw produce of the farms ; there was no deduction for the 
 profits of the trader or the wages of the artizan. The Irish landowner, 
 unlike the English, laid out nothing on the soil. His lands were im- 
 proved and tilled entirely at the cost of the tenants, who gave him as 
 rent the value of the entire produce over a miserable subsistence for 
 themselves. He was exempt from the tax for the poor which fell 
 so heavily upon his English fellow. All circumstances seemed to 
 concur to place him in affluence. At the close of this, which should 
 have been the golden period of Irish agriculture — when landowners at 
 least might have been expected to have heaped up riches — we had 
 a starving peasantry, ruined tenant farmers, and an incumbered 
 proprietory. Ruin seemed to stare the Irish landowners in the 
 face ; a special tribunal was instituted to sell them out. Many, 
 very many, of them were cruelly sold out. Many of the old terri- 
 torial families were stripped of their estates. Many owners who 
 manage to retain their ancestral properties are struggling with the 
 difficulties which appear, we might almost say by some mysterious 
 destiny, to depress the Irish landed interest below that of England. 
 
 Is it too late for all of us to lay these lessons to our hearts ? For 
 English statesmen to learn that there is but one way of maintaining 
 an English interest in Ireland, and that is by letting all Irish 
 affairs be managed with a single view to the interest of Ireland 
 itself ? For those who have a zeal for Protestantism to see that its 
 cause can never be served by unjust ascendency, by unchristian 
 intolerance and wrong? For us all to be assured that it is " vain to 
 form schemes for the welfare of this nation which do not take in 
 all the inhabitants, and a vain attempt to project the flourishing of 
 our Protestant gentry exclusive of the bulk of the natives."* For 
 our landowners to see that no class can have a real prosperity 
 distinct from that of the nation — and that those who lay the founda- 
 tion of their wealth or their power in the misery and discontent of 
 the people are but building for a downfall, the ruin of which will 
 be great in proportion to the massiveness and grandeur of the 
 structure which they raise ? 
 
 I do not regret that I have been compelled to go back upon the 
 retrospect of Irish affairs which brings to us such lessons as these. 
 For myself I have found in these enquiries an interest which far 
 
 * Bishop Berkeley, ante page 93. 
 
29(> ENMITIES PROVOKED. 
 
 more than repays me for all the labour they have cost. It may be 
 that in the investigation of these details of our past history I have 
 found something to convince a candid and impartial mind that when 
 I pointed back to the policy of confiscation and conquest as the 
 origin and source of our evils, I only spoke the words of soberness and 
 truth. I know still " how hard it is to induce men to give to the 
 social condition of Ireland the calm, the patient, the laborious, 
 investigation by which alone the difficulies of that problem may be 
 understood."* Nevertheless, my Lord, this vindication of my former 
 treatise, which I have addressed to your Lordship, I offer to the con- 
 sideration of all classes of my countrymen. The subject is one that 
 deeply concerns us all. If I am right it is not possible to exaggerate 
 its importance. In the earnest conviction that I have truth and reason 
 on my side, I ask of those who are most strongly prejudiced against 
 the slightest interference with proprietary rights, to weigh and 
 judge of the reasons I have advanced. I know the strength of those 
 prejudices. I know even the enmity which any one who encounters 
 them provokes. I feel perfectly persuaded that there are men, 
 good and honest men, who will regard with a personal resentment 
 any man who has written as I have. Every man who attacks 
 the prejudices that encircle wealth and power must be prepared for 
 this. In one sense, therefore, I do not regard it. But I am far, 
 very far, from being indifferent to the existence of such feelings. 
 I feel pain at the thought that any of my countrymen should, how- 
 ever unjustly, regard me as the assailant of their property and their 
 rights. But I would not, to escape ten thousand times that enmity, 
 wish the "Plea" I have offered for the "Celtic Race" to be unwritten. 
 The time had come when it was fitting that all the truth of our social 
 condition should be unsparingly told That Plea may be ineffectual 
 to avert the mischief which a perseverance in our present system 
 must bring upon us all. I could only give the warning ; I have no 
 power to assure that it shall be heeded. But whatever is to be 
 the future of Ireland, I shall ever feel a pride in the recollection that 
 if I have taken a part in the discussion, the issue of which may 
 decide her destiny, I have not taken the side of the great, the 
 wealthy, or the powerful. I have advocated the cause of the poor 
 and oppressed, and raised an earnest, although, it may be, a feeble, 
 voice for a people whom high-handed oppression is driving from 
 their home. 
 
 May I add that I have now fulfilled every task and every duty 
 which I set before myself. I almost feel as if I were unconsciously 
 permitting myself to be drawn back into that thankless and, I fear, 
 for Ireland, useless turmoil of political strife from which I had 
 escaped. May I earnestly hope, that with this letter I may be 
 permitted to close my share in the discussion. Deeply, vitally 
 
 * Land Tenure, p. 93. 
 
CONCLUSION. 297 
 
 important as I believe this question to be — convinced as I am 
 that there is no sacrifice from which any Irishman ought to shrink 
 who thinks he can aid in its settlement ; yet, perhaps, I may safely 
 say that I have done my part. I cannot always withdraw myself 
 from those which are the ordinary engagements of my life, and none 
 but one who has tried it knows the harassing toil of writing on a 
 subject like this while the livelong day is devoted to occupations 
 sufficient in themselves to tax the energies of the mind — Liberavi 
 animam meam. I see nothing more than I can do ; and I may 
 turn with a safe conscience to pursuits in which I will feel some 
 little satisfaction in the consciousness that I can follow them without 
 wounding the fierce prejudices that everywhere raise their hissing 
 crest in Irish society, and without incurring the enmity of those 
 from whom it may be my interest and certainly is my inclination to 
 conciliate good-will. 
 
 And yet most assuredly I have written in no spirit of hostility to 
 your Lordship's order. I must, of course, be judged by what I 
 have written ; but writing to your Lordship I cannot help thinking 
 that from the windows of your mansion you can look on scenes 
 Avhich may tell you that all my early recollections are associated 
 with feelings not unfriendly to Protestantism or proprietary right. 
 I would not part with those recollections for a great deal. But the 
 more I cherish them, the more grieved I feel that in the mind of a 
 great, a generous, and noble people, both Protestantism and pro- 
 prietary right are associated with oppression and wrong. But in 
 that which I have written, and that which I have proposed, I am 
 content to be judged by time. I still believe that "he is the truest 
 and best friend of proprietary rights in Ireland who aims at recon- 
 ciling them with the right of the people to live in their own land." 
 I have shown how by a very little concession a huge mischief may 
 be redressed, and a great feud reconciled. If the legislation I 
 framed was " cunningly devised," the whole device consisted in an 
 effort to retain nearly all of proprietary right, and yet make the 
 people free. I still think that when agitation on this question really 
 arises "no measure will ever be offered for popular acceptance which 
 will so scrupulously respect the rights of landowners" as does the 
 proposal I have made. And when the day of settlement — of the 
 settlement of this land question — does come, it may be that calm 
 and thoughtful men will look back upon these pages, and know 
 not whether to wonder most at the moderation of the proposal or 
 at the want of foresight of those who omitted to settle the quarrel 
 of centuries upon such terms. 
 
 That day of settlement, my Lord, must come. It were the 
 wildest dream of the arrogance of power to imagine it possible, in 
 the present state of the world and of the opinion of mankind, to 
 carry out to its completion the banishment of the Irish race. The 
 system of land tenure which is inconsistent with their remaining 
 
298 CONCLUSION. 
 
 in their country cannot be maintained. There are great principles 
 which, by an irresistible influence, control the events which decide 
 the fate of nations. There are, in all human transactions, elements 
 of power, the precise action of which we cannot calculate, although 
 we can with certainty foresee the result. All these elements forbid 
 the exile of the old people. The great conscience of humanity 
 would condemn that mighty wrong, no matter how many centuries 
 had watched the progress of the injustice of which it would be the 
 completion. And as surely as the thoughts, the feelings, the passions, 
 and the conscience of multitudes have power over human affairs, 
 so surely, some way or other, will the means be found by which 
 the Irish people may dwell upon the Irish land. 
 
 I have the honour to be, my Lord, 
 
 Your Lordship's very faithful Servant, 
 
 Isaac Butt. 
 
 Dublin, April 20th, 1867. 
 
 DUBLIN: JOHN FALCONER PRINTER, 53, UPPER SACKYILLE-STREET. 
 
Mr. BUTT'S TRACTS 
 
 ON THE 
 
 IRISH LAND QUESTION. 
 
 DUBLIN : J. FALCONER, 53, UPPER SACKVILLE-STREET. 
 London: W. Ridgway, Piccadilly. 
 
 I. 
 
 3rd Edition, tvith a Preface commenting on some objections that have been made. 
 Price Is. — by Post, Is. 2d. 
 
 LAND TENURE IN IRELAND; 
 
 A PLEA FOR THE CELTIC RACE. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " Throughout this very ably written pamphlet a great deal of illustrative matter is 
 introduced, and an accurate and eloquent history is given of the various causes which 
 have led to the present state of affairs in Ireland. ..... 
 
 Such are the deliberate opinions on Fenianism of the very able advocate who, from 
 being professionally engaged to defend the leaders of that unfortunate conspiracy, 
 may be expected to have a more perfect knowledge than almost any one not actually 
 a member of the brotherhood, of the motives and objects of its chiefs. Recommending 
 this pamphlet to the attention of those who take an interest in the subject of which it 
 
 treats Fully admitting the ability as well as the general 
 
 accuracy and moderation of tone which, except in a few instances, distinguish the 
 Plea for the Celtic Race." — Edinburgh Review. 
 
 " Mr. Butt, in a vigorous and eloquent Plea for the Celtic Race, concentrates all his 
 strength on the recommendation of fixity of tenure." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " Mr. Butt's former pamphlet, entitled Land Tenure in Ireland : a Plea for the 
 Celtic Race, dealt with this question in a very energetic and luminous manner. Now 
 and then, indeed, we might see in it certain errors of taste, and some questionable 
 assertions ; but as a whole it was an able appeal to justice and humanity in the cause 
 of an oppressed peasantry, besides affording a collection of facts and some valuable 
 suggestions for the statesman and the legislator." — Northern Whig. 
 
 "Mr. Butt would establish tenant right by law throughout Ireland, and he has, 
 with great ingenuity and skill, worked out a plan for that purpose. Mr. Butt writes 
 with a knowledge of the subject, and with a certain amount of local information, 
 and with a caution which imparts to his views considerable force and importance." — 
 London Review. 
 
 "A statement, the result of much research, and it contains much information. 
 I heartily wish it may be read by every landlord in Ireland. But its severity is great, 
 and its effect may be mischievous." — Lord Lifford. 
 
 " Mr. Butt's pamphlet is well worth all the attention it has excited ; for though his 
 remedy for Ireland is visionary in the extreme, and would cause more ills than it 
 would cure, few have equalled him in the diagnosis of her disease. — Irish Peers on 
 Irish Peasants. By G. T. Dalton, Esq. 
 
 11 We shall, we think, be doing a very material service to all who feel anxiety w T ith 
 regard to the political and social future of Ireland by recommending to them this 
 
 small but very able work An admirable sketch of the history of Irish 
 
 tenures .... The manner in which the present settlement of Ireland originated, 
 and the consequences of land settlement — the inveterate internecine war between the 
 proprietors and the peasants — the baneful effects in the present century of the growing 
 insecurity of the tenant have seldom been more forcibly illustrated." — Morning Star. 
 
11 MR. BUTT S TRACTS ON THE IRISH LAND QUESTION. 
 
 ' ' A third edition of Mr. Butt's famous Plea for the Celtic Race is, we are happy 
 to say, now being issued from the press. Its value is immensely enhanced by a 
 magnificent essay on the condition of the country, which the gifted author adds as a 
 preface. Rising far above the average level of thought on this important subject, he 
 treats of it in the spirit of a statesman and a patriot ; and, in language inspired by true 
 genius, he speaks to the Government and the ruling classes of this country a lesson 
 which, if they be wise, they will lay to heart." — Nation. 
 
 " Three editions of Mr. Butt's now celebrated pamphlet on the land question have 
 issued in rapid succession from the press, and the avidity with which the public has 
 received this important work shows how deep and sincere is the hold that the subject 
 with which it deals has on the public mind. . . . Those who are most opposed to 
 Mr. Butt's views are forced to confess that he has maintained them by arguments 
 which, if not irrefragable, are, at least, so difficult to answer, that no answer has been 
 attempted ; and he is, therefore, in the position of a teacher whose doctrines are 
 unpalatable to those vested with the power of accepting or rejecting them, at the 
 same time that their justice and expediency cannot be denied. . . . Mr. Butt has 
 gone straight to the root of the question with which he deals, and, without any con- 
 sideration for the proprieties of concealments or compromises, has laid bare the 
 nation's wounds, and proposed the right remedies for their cure." — Ulster Observer, 
 December 18th. 
 
 "The ablest epitome of the wrongs of Ireland perhaps ever published." — Report of 
 Committee of National Association. 
 
 " Mr. Butt's Plea for the Celtic Race, has been admired and reprobated. To many 
 it is a powerful argument against a system which, under the double form of mis- 
 government and spoliation, has produced class antagonism and dislike to British rule. 
 To others the Plea is an ad captandum appeal to popular passions. It excites hopes 
 which never can be realised, and fosters delusions which, if realised, would only aggra- 
 vate existing disorders. To the Plea landlords have filed demurrers without end. — 
 Freeman's Journal. 
 
 "The subject of land tenure, and the causes which necessitate its settlement, are 
 matters with which Mr. Butt has grappled as no one has grappled since the agitation 
 of the question." — Irishman, December 15th 
 
 II. 
 
 Second Edition, Price 6d. — by Post, 7d. 
 
 FIXITY OF TENURE; 
 
 HEADS OF A SUGGESTED LEGISLATIVE ENACTMENT; 
 
 WITH AN 
 
 INTRODUCTION AND NOTES. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 "Any suggestions from the writer's pen are well worthy the careful attention of the 
 public. In a previous publication, to which we recently referred in another part of 
 our paper, he insisted with great force and eloquence upon the evils of the present 
 system, and upon the absolute necessity of giving the Irish tenant farmers greater 
 security for their holdings, as the only means of promoting the prosperity of the sister 
 country, and of strengthening and consolidating the empire. He now follows up this 
 general statement of his views by the draft of a bill which he thinks calculated to 
 effect his object." — London Review. 
 
MR. BUTTS TRACTS ON THE IRISH LAND QUESTION. Ill 
 
 " Whatever its defects or its demerits, whatever the disadvantages under which it 
 may labour, one thing is certain, it is the most complete measure which has yet been 
 launched upon this distracting topic, always excepting that of Mr. Bright, which, how- 
 ever, is not strictly a tenant right measure, for it looks beyond this to the better 
 settlement of Stein and Hardenberg — a small proprietary." — Irishman. 
 
 " Mr. Butt's proposal has at least the merit of simplicity." — Edinburgh Review. 
 
 " A cunningly devised Act of Parliament which would give to the tenant, without 
 purchase, many of the privileges of proprietorship." — Earl of Rosse. 
 
 ** Mr. Batt deserves credit for having attempted earnestly to grapple with the great 
 political and social problems which may be fairly considered as the Irish question. 
 On the vexed question of landlord and tenant, in which so much bitterness has been 
 introduced, Mr. Butt adopts no extreme views, but may be generally considered impar- 
 tial, and appai'ently anxious to serve both parties, and all who are anxious for the pros- 
 perity of the country. He is certainly justified in declaring that his proposals are con- 
 ceived in no spirit of hostility to the landlords. There are evidences of honesty, fairness, 
 and a real desire to conciliate the two classes, on the face of the measure ; and we re- 
 commend it to the careful consideration of those who desire to see the measure 
 manfully faced and equitably settled." — Northern Whig. 
 
 "One of the ablest and most extensive tenant farmers in Scotland, a prince of 
 agriculture, has written to us, expressing his approbation of a scheme by which, he 
 declares, Mr. Butt has really solved the great Irish problem. This is no slight praise 
 from a man who is himself so essentially practical, and whose experience is not sur- 
 passed." — Northern Whig. 
 
 " We believe that the measure stated by Mr. Butt, if passed into law, would most 
 largely contribute to make the people of Ireland prosperous and loyal, and add to the 
 happiness and well-being of their landlords. We cannot, however, honestly say to our 
 countrymen that we entertain much hope that a British Parliament, as now consti- 
 tuted, will pass such a measure ; and we have no desire to see our countrymen look 
 for its attainment by other means than those that are legitimate and sanctioned by 
 the laws of God." — "Report of Committee of National Association." — Freeman's 
 Journal, 28th March. 
 
 " Mr. Butt has so conclusively established his views that one is rather surprised at 
 the moderation of his proposal." — Ulster Observer. 
 
 III. 
 
 Price Qd.—by Post, Id. 
 
 THE IRISH QUERIST: 
 
 A SERIES OF QUESTIONS PROPOSED FOR THE CONSIDERATION OF 
 ALL WHO DESIRE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF 
 
 IRELAND'S SOCIAL CONDITION. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 "Never, perhaps, was so much solid matter condensed into so small a space. 
 Mr. Butt's Queries are 328 in number, and they range over every topic that at present 
 agitates the mind of the country." — Ulster Observer. 
 
 "A series of questions more exquisitely conceived or more happily expressed is not 
 to be found. The telling wit of Curran, the cutting satire of Swift, the pertinent 
 by-ways of O'Connell, are interwoven with a bundle of self-evident truths in such a 
 way as to leave us most in doubt whether we should admire the ingenuity of the 
 author's mind or the force of the truths which he advances." — Irishman. 
 
WORKS 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 JOHN FALCONER, 
 
 53, UPPER SACKVILLE-STREET, DUBLIN. 
 
 rpHE LIBERTY OF TEACHING VINDICATED ; 
 
 JL KEFLECTIONS AND PROPOSALS ON THE SUBJECT OF IRISH 
 
 NATIONAL EDUCATION. With an Introductory Letter to the Right Hon. 
 W. E. Gladstone. By Isaac Butt, Esq., Q.C. Price 2s. 6d. W. B. Kelly, Dublin. 
 
 TLLUSTRATED RECORD and DESCRIPTIVE CATA- 
 
 1 LOGUE OF INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF DUBLIN, 1865. 
 Handsomely bound in scarlet cloth, gilt edges. Price, 21s. 
 
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 GLENDALLOCH and other POEMS, by the late 
 Dr. DRENNAN. 
 
 FACTS OR FICTIONS? Seven Letters on the " Facts Con- 
 cerning the Irish Church." Published by the Church Institution. By W. 
 Maziere Brady, D.D. Price Is. 
 
 IRELAND ; her Present Condition, its Causes, and its Remedies. 
 Price Is.— by Post, Is. 2d. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY ; 
 Address delivered 14th November, 1866, by the Auditor, R. O. B. Lane, Esq., 
 A.B., Sch., with the Speeches of Professor Webb, F.T.C.D., LL.D. ; Lord Chief 
 Justice Whiteside ; and the Right Hon. Justice Keogh. Price 6d. — by Post, 7d. 
 
 ARE THE PRIESTS LOYAL? By an Irish Priest. In 
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 Sold by all Booksellers, Stationers, and at the Railway Stations. 
 
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