Lord Salisbury insisted much on a point he is never
weary of labouring, that whether the Irish landlords have pressed their proprietary rights to a cruel extent or not, Parliament, in pass- ing the Irish Encumbered Estates Act, intended to give them those rights to the full, and relied on the principles of the old political economy to set the Irish question to rights. No doubt it did. And in precisely the same way, before the Ground Game Act of 1880 was passed, Parliament gave Eng- lish landlords the power of refusing to the tenant the right to kill all sorts of game ; but that did not in the least prevent Par- liament from recognising that the English farmer suffered from that state of the law, and that English landlords abused it This is, indeed, precisely what Parliament did recognise in 1881, in reference to the use by the Irish landlords of their legal rights over Irish tenants ; and we cannot see what in the world the Encumbered Estates Act of 1848 has to do with the matter. In 1848, it was believed that the encumbered condi- tion of the Irish estates was the root of the evil, which was an error. But why that error of the Legislature should be pleaded in bar of all interference with the undue exercise of their rights by the landlords, we are wholly unable to understand. We once trusted to self-interest to ensure the due ventilation and regu- lation of mines and collieries ; but that did not prevent as from recognising that self-interest had failed to do what we expected -of it; and that the owners of mines and collieries needed stimulus, or restraint, by subsequent legislation.
Previous page
