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I am far from presuming to fathom the true meaning or design of the statesman who is chiefly responsible for this legislation. In introducing the Bill of 1870, with its dangerous principle of compensation for disturbance, Mr. Gladstone had specially and repeatedly maintained that he was conferring a benefit upon the owners as well as the occupiers of the soil. He deplored the fact that the selling value of Irish land was much lower than that of British land, and predicted that the effects of his legislation would make it ‘not merely worth twenty or twenty-five years’ purchase, but would raise it altogether, or very nearly, to the value of English or Scotch land.’40 In 1881 he used similar language. When introducing a measure establishing fixity of tenure he was confronted with his own very plain words in 1870, which I have already quoted, about the confiscatory character of such a measure; but it was not difficult for so supreme a master of the art of evasion to extricate himself from his difficulty. He skilfully met the demands for compensation for property and legal rights that were clearly taken away by alleging that he was not injuring, but, on the contrary, benefiting the landowner. In many cases, he said, the probable effect of the Bill would be to raise rents; and although he would not say ‘whether the action of the court in fixing a judicial rent may not, on the whole, lower the rents rather than raise them in the first operation,’ he was convinced that the increased value of land derived from the greater solidity of the social state which he was bringing about would speedily ‘repay the landlord for any incidental mischief of the Act twofold or threefold.’41 As was his usual custom on such occasions, he pitched his tone very high, and appealed in noble language to the loftiest motives. ‘Justice, sir, is to be our guide; and as it has been said that love is stronger than death, even so justice is stronger than popular excitement, stronger than the passions of the moment, stronger even than the grudges, the resentments, and the sad traditions of the past. Walking in that light, we cannot err. Guided by that light—the Divine Light—we are safe.’
Probably no one who was present when, with uplifted eyes, and saintly aspect, and exquisitely modulated intonation, the great speaker poured out these sonorous sentences, predicted that in a few short years he would identify himself with the men whom he had truly described as preaching ‘the doctrine of public plunder;’ demoralising a people by ‘teaching them to make the property of their neighbour the objects of their covetous desire;’ attempting to substitute ‘an anarchical oppression’ for the authority of law; making rapine their first object; seeking ‘to march through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire;’ destroying the peace of life; aiming at ‘the servitude of good men, the impunity and supremacy of bad men.’ Few persons could have imagined that this virtuous statesman would soon be endeavouring to place the government of Ireland in the hands of those who were guilty of such things; that he would be employing all the resources of his matchless dialectic to attenuate their misdeeds; that he would denounce as coercion measures for the enforcement of the criminal law against the most merciless of oppressions, which were largely copied from his own legislation; that he would spend the evening of his long and brilliant public life in inflaming class animosities and reviving the almost extinct embers of provincial jealousies. It is perhaps somewhat less surprising that the Irish landlords continued to be attacked just as if the Acts of 1870 and 1881 had never been carried, and as if capricious evictions and rack-rents had not been rendered impossible.
The Act was, indeed, as far as possible from appeasing Ireland. Probably the worst period of the land agitation followed its enactment, and hopes of plunder were excited to the utmost, while falling prices and ever-deepening agricultural distress vastly aggravated the crisis. The stability which was supposed to have been given by the Act of 1881 had been represented as one of its great merits; but every year the cry for revising it acquired fresh force, and after the utter political demoralisation that followed the apostasy of 1886, when the main section of the Liberal party purchased the votes by adopting the policy of the National League, this cry became probably irresistible. Some of those who had consented to the Act of 1881 now looked with consternation at their work. ‘I would rather have cut off my hand,’ said Lord Selborne, ‘than been a party to the measure of 1881, giving the House the reasons and assurances which I then gave, if I had known that within five years after its passing it would have been thrown over by its authors, and that the course they had now taken would have been entered on.’42
The Land Act of 1887, however, which reopened the settlement, was carried by a Unionist Government, and it again lowered rents which only four or five years before had been judicially fixed. It was said that the State, having undertaken to regulate rents, could not remain passive when prices had so greatly fallen, and that the political condition of the country imperatively demanded its intervention. It is true that, under the Act of 1881, the State, while reducing the rents of the Irish landlords, had guaranteed those reduced rents for fifteen years.43 It was a distinct, formal promise, resting on the national faith and on the authority of the Imperial Parliament. The promise was broken, but it was asked whether this was in truth a very different thing from what had already been done in 1881, when parliamentary and hereditary titles had been torn into shreds. The existing leaseholders were at the same time brought, for the first time, within the provisions of the clause for reducing rents. Mr. Gladstone had refused to do this in 1881; but it was said that it was intolerable that the flower of the Irish tenantry should alone be excluded from benefits which all other tenants so abundantly enjoyed, and that there was little chance of conciliating the Irish farmers if their leading and most intelligent members were left embittered by an exceptional disability.
The force of this argument is incontestable, but the gravity of the step that was taken is not less so. One great object, as we have seen, of the Act of 1870 had been to induce landlords to grant leases by giving them an assurance that they would in this way place themselves beyond the many entanglements and penal clauses of the new legislation. No one could pretend either that the Irish leaseholders were a helpless class, incapable of making their own bargains, or that their position rested on any other foundation than a distinct written contract. They were the most substantial and intelligent farmers of Ireland. The lease which regulated their tenancies was a fully recognised legal document, bearing the Government stamp, carrying with it all the authority and protection that English law could give. Its first clause was, usually, that at the expiry of the assigned term the tenant should hand back the land to its owner. This provision had been already torn to pieces by the Act of 1881, which provided that in cases of all leases of less than sixty years the tenant, at the expiry of the lease, if resident on his farm, need not hand it back according to his contract, but should remain a ‘present tenant,’ with all the rights of permanent occupancy attaching to that position.44 The next clause stipulated in very explicit terms the rent in consideration of which the landlord had, in the exercise of his full legal rights, hired out his farm. This also was broken, and the leaseholder had now the right of bringing his landlord into a court where, as the result of proceedings which always brought with them heavy legal costs to the landlord, the rent was authoritatively and judicially reduced.
It will be observed that the State did not in this matter annul or dissolve a legal contract, leaving the two parties free to make fresh arrangements. It left one party wholly bound by the terms of the