Democracy and Liberty. William Edward Hartpole Lecky
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service a Government can render to morals seems to be the maintenance of a social organisation in which the path of duty and the path of interest as much as possible coincide; in which honesty, industry, providence, and public spirit naturally reap their rewards, and the opposite vices their punishment. No worse lesson can be taught a nation than that violence, intimidation, conspiracy, and systematic refusal to pay debts are the natural means of rising to political power and obtaining legislative concessions. No worse habit can be implanted in a nation than that of looking for prosperity to politics rather than to industry, and forming contracts and incurring debts with the belief that a turn of the political wheel may make it possible to cancel them.
It is, indeed, a curious and melancholy study to trace the effects of recent legislation on different classes in Ireland. The landlords who have suffered least have probably been those who simplified their properties by the wholesale evictions, the harsh clearances, that too often followed the Famine. Next in the scale came those who exacted extreme rack-rents from their tenants. Those rents had been received for many years, and though they were ultimately more reduced than rents which had always been low, they still, in innumerable cases, remained somewhat higher than the others. The large class who regarded land simply as a source of revenue, and, without doing anything harsh, or extortionate, or unjust, took no part or interest in its management, have suffered very moderately. It is the improving landlord, who took a real interest in his estate, who sank large sums in draining and other purposes of improvement, who exercised a constant and beneficent influence over his tenants, who has suffered most by the legislation that reduced him to a mere powerless rent-charger, and in most cases rendered the sums he had expended an absolute loss. As I have already noticed, the careless and slovenly farmer had his rent more reduced than the farmer who, by good cultivation, had maintained his farm at its full value. An Arrears Act was carried conferring great benefits on the farmer who had allowed his rent to fall many years into arrear, but doing nothing for the farmer who, by steady, conscientious industry, had in bad times honestly paid his way. Even the land purchase Acts, though they are by far the most valuable parts of recent Irish land legislation, had a similar tendency. As the tenant is no longer asked to advance any portion of the purchase money, no premium is given to industry and thrift; the value of the purchased land has been artificially depreciated by agitation and attacks upon property; and as the landlord whose income has already been twice reduced by a land court knows that in most cases, in addition to heavy legal expenses, a sale will reduce each remaining 100l. a year to 60l. or 70l., he is, not unnaturally, unwilling to sell when his tenants are honest and solvent, though he may be ready to do so on easy terms when they are dishonest, troublesome, and unpunctual.
To crown the edifice, a measure was introduced by the Government, in 1894, for the purpose of reinstating, at the cost of 250,000l. of public money drawn from the funds of the Irish Church, those tenants who, in spite of judicial reductions and all the delays and indulgences of the law, had been either unable or unwilling to pay their rents, and had been in consequence evicted. By this measure it was proposed to invest three men nominated by the Government, and uncontrolled by any right of appeal, with an arbitrary and almost absolute power of reinstating any Irish tenant, or the representative of any Irish tenant, who had been evicted for any cause since 1879. The only restriction was that the consent of the present tenant must be obtained; but in a great part of Ireland he could not withhold it without imminent danger to his life. The tenant might have been evicted for dishonesty, for violence, for criminal conspiracy, for hopeless and long-continued bankruptcy. He might be living in America. The owner of the soil might have delayed the eviction for years after the law had empowered him to carry it out, and he might have at last taken the land into his own possession, and have been, during many years, farming it himself. He had no right of refusing his consent, and his only alternative was to take back the former tenant, or to sell to him the farm at whatever price a revolutionary and despotic tribunal might determine.
The explanation of the measure was very plain. It was specially intended for the benefit of the ‘Plan-of-campaign’ tenants, who had placed money which was actually in their possession, and which was due to their landlords for benefits already received, in the hands of ‘trustees,’ for the express purpose of defrauding their creditors. This ‘Plan of Campaign’ had been authoritatively pronounced by the highest law court in Ireland to be ‘clearly and absolutely illegal.’ It had been condemned by the head of the Catholic Church as distinctly immoral. It had been avowedly ‘a political engine,’ devised by political conspirators for the purpose of defeating the Government, proving that the Land League was stronger than the law, and persuading the peasantry that its directors were the real rulers of Ireland. The instigators of this conspiracy were now in Parliament. The Government depended for their majority upon their votes, and their terms were that the Plan-of-campaign conspiracy should be triumphantly vindicated. The proposed measure was not a mere measure of amnesty closing an old controversy, granting indulgence to poor men who had been duped by men far more dishonest than themselves. It was a measure of triumph, giving special and exceptional favour to defaulting tenants. No solvent tenant could become the owner of his farm without the consent of his landlord. This privilege was reserved for the evicted tenant.
In the light of this clause and of the persistence with which it was maintained, no reasonable man could doubt the character, the origin, and the motive of the measure. The Government bought the Irish vote by a Bill to carry out their design, and it resolved to devote a large amount of public money to the purpose. It is true that this scandalous instance of political profligacy was defeated by the House of Lords, and that in the Land Bill of the succeeding year the compulsory clause was dropped; but the fact that a British minister could be found to introduce, and a party majority to vote it, is not likely to be forgotten in Ireland. Never, indeed, did a minister of the Crown propose a measure more distinctly calculated to encourage dishonesty, and to persuade a deluded people that a sufficient amount of voting power was all that was needed to make it successful. It has been truly said, that the worst feature of the old penal code against Irish Catholics was that some of its provisions placed law in direct opposition to religion and to morals, and thus tended powerfully to demoralise as well as to impoverish. A system of government has, in our day, grown up in Ireland not less really and scarcely less widely demoralising. Those who have examined its effects will only wonder that so much honesty and virtue have survived it.
It has been well said by Senior, that ‘the most revolting, and perhaps the most mischievous, form of robbery is that in which the Government itself becomes an accomplice; when the property of whole classes of individuals is swept away by legislative enactments, and men owe their ruin to that very institution which was created to ensure their safety.’46 Probably the most serious aspect, however, of this Irish legislation is to be found in the precedents it created. I have not concealed the difficulties under which it grew up, and which explain and palliate the conduct of the legislators, and if a comparison were made between the losses English landlords have undergone through economical causes, and the losses of Irish landlords under the action of the law, it is very doubtful whether the position of the former would appear the more desirable. But, when all this is said, it is impossible reasonably to deny that this legislation involves as distinct instances of national faith violated, of property guaranteed by law taken without compensation, as can be found in the proceedings of any of those defaulting governments of South America on which English public opinion has so often and so largely expended its indignation. If Parliament passed a law repudiating its railway guarantees, or the whole or part of the interest of the National Debt, or limiting by an act of power the profits of tradesmen, or compelling a London lodging-house keeper to give fixity of tenure at a reduced rent to a London workman, or placing the debentures and preference shares of a railway on the same basis as the ordinary shares, or obliging a railway company to expend the whole or nearly the whole of its profits in cheapening fares, instead of increasing dividends, it would not be invading the rights of property more clearly.
It is idle to suppose that such a precedent can be confined to Ireland, or Irish land, or Irish landlords. With a suffrage that gives the predominant power to the very ignorant and the very poor; in an age when every kind of predatory theory relating to property is in the air, and when the province of State interference is continually extending, and under a Constitution which gives no special protection to contracts, such a precedent is certain