MR. PARNELL'S BILL.
MR. PARNELL'S Land Bill, as it stands, is inadmissible, but we cannot like the spirit in which it is discussed, or the summary style in which the whole of it is ruled out of court. It is quite certain that the Nationalist leader is asking a great deal too much, and quite probable that he knows it, and is using his Bill as an instrument to excite his countrymen and breed discord between the Unionists and the Government. If it is so, Mr. Parnell is very badly advised, for he cannot achieve the great object he has at heart without another disso- lution, and every instance of bad faith or trickery will in that dissolution cost him thousands of votes ; but still, he may be, as so many assert, only playing a game. But then, it is only the more necessary that Unionists should care- fully examine the requests which he thinks will stir his countrymen, and consider whether any of them cannot, in part at least, be granted. There is no way of breaking the power of an agitator like removing or diminishing the grievance on which he relies, and the business of Parliament is to benefit Ireland, not to baffle Mr. Parnell. Let him win by all means when he is in the right, and do the bit of good he can, in compensation for the mischief he has done. In the present instance he puts forward three demands, which are all excessive, but whhh are by no means all alike, or all excessive in the same degree. One of them is practically that leaseholders shall enjoy the full benefit of the Land Act and of judicial rents. That is not unreasonable in itself, certainly not outside the pale of argument. We never did quite see why leaseholders were originally excluded, for the notion that interference with them was in some special way an interference with contract is not tenable. The whole meaning of the new Land Law was to abolish free contract for land, as inconsistent from historic and economic circumstances with the safety of society in Ireland, and to substitute for free contract a compulsory contract settled by the superior authority of the State. The single objection to this pro- posal is, therefore, that it is inopportune. There can be no thorough discussion at the fag-end of the Session, and the lease- holders are not a necessitous class pleading their prospect of immediate ruin as an excuse for precipitate action. They can wait very well till next year, and unless the Government has decided to grant their prayer without further inquiry, they shculd wait, with a clear pledge that they shall not be forgotten.
The next demand is an extravagant one, and clearly must be rejected. It is, in fact, an enormous disturbance of the Land Act, on principles far too lax and dangerous to be accepted, and, indeed, we should think, almost inapplicable by any Court. We ourselves believe that the judicial rent must in the end be revised, and that the principle of a sliding-scale, to be fixed according to an average of prices and of the previous three years' harvests, should be introduced ; but Mr. Parnell goes far beyond this. He wishes to permit any tenant who is dis- contented with the judicial rent to pay in half of it, and half any antecedent arrears, and then demand an abate- ment, to be settled by the Court, solely on considera- tion of his inability to pay " without loss of hia holding, or depreciation of the means necessary for the stocking and cultivation thereof." That will never do. That means, or certainly will be interpreted to mean, that no tenant shall pay more than half the judicial rent unless he has got it out of the land ; that, in other words, he shall not borrow money or reduce his capital in order to pay his rent. Con- sidering that agriculture is of all trades the one which fluctuates most, and about which one year's experience teaches
least, that is grossly unfair, and would be so even if it did not offer a premium cn bad farming and extravagance. Clearly, under this Bill, the tenant who got least out of his land and had spent most would have the largest abatement. Such an injustice could not be perpetrated, and the working effect of the Bill would be that the extreme abatement tolerated by the Court would be given to everybody. We do not object to that while the Court is sedulously fixing a "fair" rent, for the Legislature, wisely or unwisely, has adopted that principle ; but to base rent on the capital left to the tenant is impossible. That detail has nothing to do with the "fairness" of the landlord's charge. Suppose the tenant is in debt, is his abatement to be one-half ? We can hardly imagine that Mr. Parnell devised that clause himself, and can only fancy he trusted some ideologue who believes that rent is the pro- portion of produce left after the tenant has expended on himself as much as he likes. It would positively be wiser and fairer to declare Ireland over-rented, and for a specified time
reduce all rents one-half, provided they were paid into Court. Be it observed, we are not talking, like our contemporaries, about disturbance of contract. If it is just that a Court should fix a fair rent in one year, it is just that it should fix a different one in another—most English landlords do that uncompelled—but then it must be a fair rent, not a rent dependent on circumstances with which variations of season and market beyond the tenant's control have nothing to do.
Those clauses must go ; but we confess we feel much more difficulty about the third demand. Its wisdom and fairness seem to us to depend on evidence alone. It is quite certain that a large Land Bill must be among the Government projects next year, intended, if that be possible, to increase largely and rapidly the number of proprietors in Ireland. That Bill is awaited with satisfaction by the tenantry, who know quite well it will not decrease their share in the soil ; but they say that numbers of them are so crushed by the low prices now prevail- ing, that they will be evicted in heaps this winter, and lose not only their holdings, but all their hopes beside. If that is true, they have not exactly a grievance, but a sound plea for con- sideration, the very idea of the "fair rent" now legally settled being that it was one which could be paid. Whenever the plea of inability is true, we see no unfairness in giving time by decree, just as a decent landlord would give it by consent. The debt is not wiped off. The proportion to be paid before the plea can be put in—one-half—may be too small, and the delay granted—two years—may be too long ; but those are matters which can be settled in Committee. Under our own Bankruptcy Laws, the applicant for relief who paid 15s. in the pound into Court would, in practice, receive very gentle treatment. We do not see, if the evidence is forth- coming, that this "law of the moraturum," as they call it in Eastern Europe, is outside discussion at all—indeed, it is included in the laws establishing County Courts even in England—while the fact that a good many tenants will tell lies to get the benefit of it has nothing to do with the matter. Insolvents tell lies in every bankruptcy suit in the country, and the creditors and the Court find the lies out. We still think, if Mr. Parnell can make out his case, and if prices have so fallen that the judicial rent is no longer what it was intended to be, Parliament might so recast his Bill as to make this concession, which at least gives the landlord this advantage,—that he can turn away a hopelessly pauperised or wilfully defaulting tenant who does not pay even the fixed proportion. We ought to do what a just Irish Parliament would do, and a just Irish Parlia- ment would grant some delay. The grand effect of the whole matter to our mind is to increase our conviction that till this agrarian question is settled, nothing can be done in Ireland. It is the permanent root of the unsoundness of society there. Grant Mr. Parnell to be a patriot, and see how the conditions of Irish tenancy trouble him. Grant him to be a thoroughly bad agitator, and see how instinctively he fixes on the conditions of tenancy as his readiest instrument for evil. There will be no peace in Ireland until the tenure of land is altered in its radical principle, and the man who cultivates, however burdened with quit-rents or mortgages, feels that while he pays his debts his land is inalienably his. He may be wishing for a worse position than the wage-receiver,—no doubt very often he is; but then, that is his wish, begotten in him partly by the experience of centuries, partly by a fear of being thrown adrift on the world, from which, so far as we know. only the Englishman is free. "I'm a braver man than you, for I dare spend my last shilling," says the typical English labourer ; but every other labourer in the world thinks him a fool.
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