THE LANDOWNERS' PANIC. 'DOCTOR, the thanes fly from me!' Did Mr. Gladstone utter any such words during the last few days as rumour came of the resignation of some other lord-in-waiting or gold-stick in office? Is est-il possible gone too? Such is the one joke said to have been made by James the Second. It was announced that his daughter Anne's husband had passed over to the enemy. Anne's husband had been in the habit before that of greeting each new announcement of defection from his father-in-law with the remarkable words est-il possible? Therefore, when he too went, James made his one jest. Who is the est-il possible of the present crisis, and has he gone yet? The author of Coningsby could alone have done justice to the events and the rumours of the last few days-the revolt of lords-in-waiting, the alarm that more substantial politicians were about to follow in their path. Mr. Gladstone was certainly placed in a difficult position when trying to carry his Compensation for Disturbance Bill through the House of Commons. Lord Elcho I think it was who likened the Prime Minister's trouble, with the Tories on one side and the Irish members on the other, to the proverbial condition of one placed between the devil and the deep sea. An honest French bourgeois once wrote to Scribe offering to pay him handsomely if Scribe would allow him, the bourgeois, to become a collaborateur in some future drama. Scribe wrote back an angry line or two in which he declared that it was not usual to yoke together a horse and an ass. The bourgeois was equal to the occasion, and instantly dashed off a letter demanding indignantly how Scribe had dared to compare him to a horse. Acting on the principle of the bourgeois, I shall assume that Lord Elcho compared the Irish members to the deep sea. Between the Conservatives, a section of the Whigs, and the Irish members, Mr. Gladstone was undoubtedly burdened with a difficult task. I cannot of course speak for the Conservatives or the Whigs, but I think I can say for the Irish members that even when they felt themselves most strongly compelled to oppose any of Mr. Gladstone's propositions they recognised to the full the spirit in which they had been put forward, and credited Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster with an honest purpose to serve the Irish tenantry. The measure itself is curiously out of proportion to the amount of panic which it seemed to stir up amongst Whigs and Conservatives. Although it has been explained again and again in the newspapers, I may venture on a very few words to put clearly before the readers of the Nineteenth Century what the object of the Bill really was. The Land Act of 1870 recognised a certain ownership or copartnership of the tenant in his holding. The labour of his hands must have gone to give the land some of its value, and the Act passed by Mr. Gladstone in 1870 recognised this fact. Where the Ulster tenant right existed, and where therefore the tenant had a recognised right to compensation for improvements and to the sale of his goodwill or ownership when leaving his holding or ejected from it, Mr. Gladstone simply took this Ulster custom and made it law. Where the Ulster tenant system did not exist, the Land Act of 1870 recognised the right of a tenant to compensation for improvements, and recognised also his right to claim compensation for the loss of his holding in cases of capricious, or unjust, or unreasonable eviction. The one exception it made was in the case of eviction for non-payment of rent. If the tenant failed from any cause to pay his rent, he lost that claim to compensation which it would otherwise have been his recognised right to make. But when the distress of 1879 and 1880 set in and threatened to deepen into famine, it was certain that a great many tenants would be unable to pay their rent simply because of the failure of the crops-in other words, by reason of what is formally described as the visitation of God. The question raised by the Compensation for Disturbance Bill was whether it is fair that a man who would pay his rent if he could, but whose crop had failed, should, on being evicted from his holding, forfeit all claim to the compensation to which he would have been entitled if Providence had not decreed that his field should be barren. That is the question in dispute. I hardly think there is any reasonable man who, looking at that question calmly, will not say that justice and equity, and feeling of right and every other consideration that can influence a statesman, were on the side of Mr. Gladstone when he introduced the measure to allow the evicted tenant in such a case some claim for compensation. It was to be strictly a measure for the relief of distress. It was to apply only in districts scheduled as actually suffering from distress, and to apply only for a short and limited time. Be it observed, too, that the claim which the Bill proposes to give to the tenant is not an absolute legal right which he is simply to ask for and to have. It is merely a claim which he is entitled to raise before the county court judge. The county court judge is to look into the whole circumstances of the case, and if he thinks the dispossessed tenant has any fair claim he may award him as much or as little as he believes the tenant entitled to demand. He may award the tenant nothing at all if he thinks he is entitled to nothing. The landlord gets his arrears of rent, and gets his land, ས The county court judges in before the tenant gets anything. Ireland are certainly not a class of men likely to be infected with socialistic doctrines. They are not, as a rule, members of the Land League. They are not enthusiasts on the subject of the Social Contract or the rights of man. They are not likely to be absolutely indifferent to the interests or the feelings of the landlord class. I am sure I do not wrong them when I say that, other considerations being equal, they would most of them rather stand well with the landlord class than not. Assuredly the tenant is not likely to get more than justice at their hands. I believe he would get justice as a rule; but there is not the slightest probability of any leaning in the minds of the judges towards any view of the relations between property and labour which could put the landlords in the least fear for the due preservation of their interests. A great deal was heard of the Irish Land League during all the recent discussions. The Irish Land League is supposed to set all sorts of dangerous agitation in motion. It is apparently regarded by many men in the House of Commons as the fountain and origin of all the ills of Ireland. The Land League, it should be remembered, is a body which has been only a very short time in existence, and it seems to me that we heard something of distress, and suffering, and agitation, and disaffection in Ireland, a good many years and for a good many generations before the Land League ever came into operation. But if the Land League is really so powerful and so dangerous a body as it is represented to be, there is only one way to render it less powerful and less dangerous, and that is to take away from it the excuse which it has at present. The other night, in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone, speaking of the alleged operation of Russian agitation and Russian intrigue in Bulgaria, made use of some words which, with a mere alteration here and there, might be applied to the present condition of things in Ireland, and to the alleged operations of the Land League. Mr. Gladstone declared that the only way to disarm foreign intrigue was to remove the pabulum of foreign intrigue, and take away the diet on which it feeds.' 'Our desire is to shut out that influence that approximates too dangerously to intrigue, but the only mode of obtaining that end is to procure, by just and firm measures, that some stop shall be put to the monstrous evils that prevail in the Ottoman Empire.' Substitute 'Ireland' for the Ottoman Empire,' and 'agitation' for 'foreign intrigue,' and we have the moral applied with aptitude and with force. Mr. Gladstone's very simple Bill for compensation for disturbance would not of itself do very much to disarm agitation, or to take from disaffection the pabulum on which it feeds. It is so simple a measure, even regarded in its application to the present moment and to a limited district, that I for myself felt bound to join in a protest against its insufficiency. Something larger, more comprehensive, and having more promise of permanence, must be introduced into the Irish land system before we can disarm agitation and take from disaffection the pabulum on which it feeds. But the Bill was an earnest of an intention to do something towards the settlement of the land question in Ireland. In that spirit and because of that promise it was denounced and obstructed by the Tories. But of course it was not the poor little Compensation Bill which caused so much stir amongst Conservative politicians, and which threatened to lead to the opening of a 'Cave' among the Liberals. What alarmed Whigs and Conservatives was the fact that Mr. Gladstone was evidently resolved to deal with the whole land question at the first opportunity, and their conviction that this little measure for the relief of temporary distress embodied a principle which could never be got rid of, and was only an indication of the direction which future legislation is sure to take. The panic was hardly better than what some critics described it-a mere scare. There are two or three facts which must be well known to all landlords, reasonable or unreasonable, and for which all reasonable owners of property have long since made up their minds. In England the artificial restrictions which cling around and clog the settlement and the transfer of land are undoubtedly destined to be removed before long. The object of all rational legislation must be, as far as possible, to bring about that free trade in land which shall make it as easy to transfer property in land as property in railway shares or in shipping. The law of primogeniture will unquestionably before long have to be abolished. The law which makes the possessor of an estate not its owner but simply its occupant, and hands the ownership over his head to a yet unborn heir, is one which must be abolished. It is hardly possible to suppose that any educated landlord really doubts that such alterations in our law must be made. None of these alterations would in the slightest degree affect the just right of the landlord—that is to say, in the sense of restricting it. On the contrary, such legislation would tend to free the landlord from some of the restrictions which now in so many cases prevent him from following the dictates of prudence and of justice. Such legislation would be legislation, strictly speaking, for the relief of landlords from unreasonable restraint. In Ireland it is certain that legislation must take the direction of the Ulster tenant custom all over the country, and that some extended and systematic effort must be made, after the example of the Church Commission, to facilitate the purchase by tenants of their holdings. The experiment of founding a peasant proprietary in Ireland must be tried. If it be tried under the guidance of statesmen, and with the wise co-operation of landlords, it will have infinitely greater chances of success than it might have under other conditions. But the man who believes that the experiment will not be made ought to believe that the sun will not rise the day after to-morrow. The only alarm which Whigs or Conservatives could have felt if they looked reasonably into the question, when Mr. Gladstone brought forward his Compensation for Disturbance Bill, was that kind of alarm which people feel when the first announcement of a change is given which they always knew was certain to be made. This is not an alarm which calls for much sympathy or soothing. It is excusable on the part of the little boy who is going to be dipped into the sea to feel a nervous shudder when the moment comes for undergoing the actual immersion; but if we could assume the little boy to have sense enough to know that the dip was to do him good, and that it ought not to be postponed, we should expect him to get over his nervousness easily, and we should make no allowance for it at all in the case of one who had passed beyond the years of infancy. Even timid Whigs and old-fashioned Conservatives ought by this time to have grown out of the notion that Mr. Gladstone is a statesman of revolution. No measure that he has ever brought in has tended in any way to the disturbance of sound existing systems. On the contrary, all the measures for which he is responsible have tended to the settlement of our political systems on a more satisfactory basis. It was shown over and over again during the course of the recent debates in the House of Commons that where the Ulster custom existed in Ireland there has been no hint of disturbance, even in places where keen distress prevailed. Disturbance existed where there was distress, where there was the terror of famine, and where at the same time the unfortunate tenant had no security for his holding, or chance of compensation if, unable to pay his rent, he were to be evicted. It ought to be, one would think, an axiom in politics by this time that security for a man's holding does not tend to make him quarrelsome and disaffected. The impression on the mind of the Irish peasant that he has a moral right to a certain ownership of the soil he cultivates is founded in many cases on strict historical justice. There are many estates in Ireland which were transferred by confiscation to the ancestors of their present owners, and of which the owners, during generation after generation, did nothing but receive the rents. I am far from saying that it is so in all cases, or in the majority of cases, but there are many instances of Irish estates, the improvement and development of which were left for generations to those who worked the soil, while the owners did nothing but receive the rents. It would be impossible that under such conditions the man who tilled the soil should not become impressed with the idea that he had a moral right to a share of its ownership, and that the law was unjust which denied to such a right its practical recognition. What I am anxious to point out is that some change in our land system is unavoidable and is near; that only harm will be done by trying to prevent or to shirk it; and that it can be most safely carried out under the guidance of a man at once bold and conscientious like |