peasants; they "sweep out," in fact, all this population
of starvelings who are only in their way, and put oxen
and sheep in the place of human beings. Ubi solitudinem
faciunt pacem appellant. All the better land is turned
into pasture; and, on what remains of the soil, the
remnant of the peasants are allowed to huddle together.
In a few months whole counties, such as Meath, or
Tipperary, are depopulated, and changed into prairies
like those of America. The latifundia extend farther than
the eye can reach. In ten years 282,000 peasant homes
are destroyed, and a million and a half of the Irish people
cross the Atlantic. | Between 1849 and 1860, according to
Mulhall, the statistician, 373,000 Irish families are evicted,7
numbering just about two million persons in all. The
notices to quit keep falling, according to the well known
saying of Gladstone, as thick as snow flakes.
"In one
union," according to Sir Robert Peel, "at a time of
famine, within one year, 15,000 persons have been driven
from their homes. .
; I do not think the records of
any country, civilised or barbarous, ever presented such
scenes of horror." 8

But what was England doing throughout all this period? What steps was the Government taking in view of the gravity of this crisis? None, unless it were to pass coercion laws. Already, in the year 1845, a great Commission of Enquiry, the Devon Commission, composed of Englishmen and landlords, had diagnosed the disease and suggested a treatment,9 but its report was allowed to lie unopened. In 1850, the Tenants' League, the organization both of the north and of the south, issued a very moderate programme of reforms, based on a demand for the recognition of that tenant-right, which Gladstone afterwards sanctioned. "Tenant-right," replied Lord Palmerston, “is landlord wrong!" From 1829 to 1867, Parliament threw

7 Dictionary of Statistics, London, 1886, p. 175.

8 Young Ireland, by Sir C. G. Duffy, p. 239. Cf. New Ireland by A. M. Sullivan, Chap. XI.

9 Vide the extracts from its reports in Perraud I., 381 and following pp. Cf. Young Ireland of Sir C. Gavan Duffy, p. 640, etc.

out or strangled 23 bills in favour of the Irish peasant. To make up for this it passed two agrarian laws, liberal in appearance, but both very strongly marked with the tendencies of the time, that is to say, with the doctrines of the Manchester school, and fated in practice to do nothing but harm to Ireland.

The first was the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. The Irish landlords, for their part, had not passed through the Great Famine without suffering, though in a less degree than the peasants. Their rents had fallen in value, and in some cases almost disappeared. Simultaneously there had occurred a rise in local taxation (poor rate) so serious as sometimes to absorb the whole rent. As a result about one-third of them had succumbed. Now, therefore, said the English economists, let us liquidate the past; let us clear off this dead weight, and open up the land market. Capital is the only force that can regenerate Ireland; then let us call into Ireland the capitalists of Great Britain. The outcome of these ideas was the Act of 1849, which established in Dublin a Court, known as the Encumbered Estates Court, whose function was to negotiate the sale of encumbered properties on the demand of creditors or even of the owners themselves, This tribunal, afterwards reorganised in 1858 under the name of the Landed Estates Court, with an enlarged jurisdiction and a permanent status, was finally incorporated in the Supreme Court in 1877 under the name of the Land Judge's Court. It was endowed with very wide powers, and at once proceeded to make a wide use of them. In less than ten years it had sold encumbered estates to the value of twenty millions sterling.10 One-sixth of the soil of Ireland changed masters and passed into new hands. The new owners comprised eight or ten thousand "capitalists," men of

10 A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland, Ch. XII. This would have been a magnificent opportunity for the creation of a class of peasant proprietors, if British statesmen had not been trained from their youth to a prejudice against a system of small holdings.

business or rich townsmen, land jobbers and speculators. These novi homines, seeing that the law had provided no protection for the peasant, hastened to raise their rents to the highest possible limit in order to obtain the highest possible profit out of the transaction, and proceeded to exploit the tenants with a pitiless severity unknown under the ancient race of landlords. The new "Plantation " was, in reality, only another "confiscation," at the expense, firstly, of the landlords, who were expropriated at a miserable price, and, secondly, of the tenants, whose rights were appropriated by the newcomers.II The net result was merely a little more misery for Ireland.

The second piece of agrarian legislation voted by the British Parliament, Deasy's Act-Deasy being the name of its author-came into operation in 1860. It was destined, in spite of its equally good intentions, to produce equally deplorable results. Lawyers will tell you that before 1860 the relations between landlord and tenant were founded not upon contract but upon tenure, or in other words upon custom. The Irish tenant was neither a “farmer” in the legal sense, nor a "leaseholder," but enjoyed a real right capable of being sub-let or sold, a circumstance involving a series of legal consequences into the details of which we cannot here enter.12 These vestiges of ancient feudal right, however, were of a nature to shock the theorists of laissez-faire and free competition. To solve the agrarian question in Ireland, they argued, there was but one thing both necessary and sufficient, namely, commercial liberty. Ireland must have freedom of exchange in all matters connected with land. Therefore, it was on a foundation of free contract, express

II On this point see our remarks on the rights of the tenant to improvements and to the increase in value of the soil.

12 The landlord did not guarantee " effective possession " and enjoyed no privilege over the goods of the tenants as security for payment of the rent. The tenant, on the other hand, was not bound to cultivate "en bon père de famille " nor at the end of his tenure to restore the land in good condition. V. Richey Irish Land Laws, 35, etc. Cf. Fournier, La Question Agraire en Irlande, p. 62 and the following.

or implied, a contract analogous to that of hiring,—that the Act of 1860 based the future legal relations between tenant and landlord,13 Of genuine rights there was no longer to be any question. The farmer could be expelled for non-payment of rent by a mere action for ejectment. Eviction being thus facilitated, a new clause, concerning the farmer's improvements on the land, permitted the landlord to prevent or confiscate these improvements at will. The pretended reform, therefore, merely aggravated matters, by taking from the peasant those few forms of protection, the last safeguards that he had hitherto found in traditional custom or legal formality. Fortunately,

Deasy's Act, when once placed on the Statute Book, was but little used in practice.14 Nevertheless, it marks a stage in the history of the Irish agrarian question. Before 1860, the law had intervened only to strengthen the rights of landlords and to protect them against their tenants. In 1860, it seeks to come to a position of equilibrium between the parties, or, in other words, of nonintervention. Soon the makers of the law will come to understand that they must interfere on the other side, on behalf of the farmers; and that after having for almost two centuries favoured the legal exploitation of a whole people of peasants by those whom conquest had made masters of the soil, they must now protect the weak against the strong, the tenants against the landlords. This, therefore, became the aim of the legislation soon afterwards inaugurated by Gladstone and the Liberal Government in England. But, before examining the broad lines of Gladstonian reform, it will be well to take a summary glance at the conditions surrounding the Irish agrarian problem, and to bring into relief certain points of a general character which exercise a predominating influence over the question.

Cf.

13 Consequently, the lessor is impliedly held to guarantee to his lessee peaceful possession; the farmer is held to have undertaken by contract to pay rent, and to restore what is let to him in good condition. Richey, p. 52 and following pages, and Fournier, p. 87, etc. 14 Report of the Bessborough Commission, p. 6.

Q

II.-GENERAL DATA OF THE PROBLEM.

First of all, then, we must realise the importance of the agrarian question, and its pre-eminence above all other economic questions in Ireland. This may be measured

by the fact that, out of the whole Irish people, numbering rather less than 4 millions, the rural classes-which in England amount to only 19 per cent. of the wholeactually account in Ireland for more than two-thirds of the population, or over three million inhabitants.I Agriculture in Ireland employs directly, according to the Census of 1901, 2,664,204 people.2 The landlords are some 12,000 to 15,000 in number. The cultivators, that is to say, tenants, or former tenants who have acquired the ownership of their land under recent land-purchase Acts, show a total of 544,625 (heads of families), in 1903,3 and there are in addition the agricultural labourers. Many of these, being at the same time tenants and labourers, have already been included in the figures quoted, but a certain proportion, which cannot be accurately determined, must come under a separate category as neither possessing nor cultivating land for their own profit.

We have, thus, a whole population which depends for its daily life directly on the land, on the annual profit obtained off the 15,536,751 acres of cultivable soil which are available in Ireland.4 This annual profit is estimated by statisticians at a mean figure of 40 millions sterling, including the wages and profits of farmers and agricultural labourers, and the rent of the landlords. This latter item is nowadays not valued at above 8 millions, although

I 3,073,846 according to the Census of 1901 (General Report, p. 10). In Germany, agriculture occupies 41.67 per cent. of the population (G. Blondel, Les populations Rurales de l'Allemagne, Paris, 1897, p. 5). In France, 50 per cent. (De Foville, La France economique, p. 51).

2 General Report, p. 16. This figure is certainly less than the true number.

3 Agricultural Statistics of Ireland, 1903, p. xix.

4 Agricultural Statistics of Ireland, 1903, pp. v. and 3.