[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—Before Parliament meets and takes the question of the Irish land out of the hands of the Press and the outside public, I hope you will permit me, who am neither a landlord nor a tenant, to publish a word of warning against a blunder with which we are threatened. Mr. Caird, in his recent pamphlet on this subject, proposes that, in the absence of any written contract to the con- trary, land should be presumed by the law to be let for five years instead of for one, as at present ; that is to say, not for the time needed for one crop, but for a rotation. Nothing can be fairer in principle than this suggestion, but it is much better suited to England or to Scotland than to Ireland. It does not touch the root of the Irish difficulty, which is that the occupation of land, in fact and in popular opinion, depends on custom, while the law supposes it to depend on contract. To give every farmer in Ireland a lease for five years, which would be the effect of Mr. Caird's proposal, would utterly deprive the landlord of any means of pre- venting a tenant from exhausting the land. This objection applies to all plans of making leases general in Ireland ; the last few years of the lease will be spent in exhausting the land, and there is no public opinion among the farming class themselves against this.
The more I think on the subject, the more convinced I am that the right way is neither to make leases general nor in any directly acting method to "root the people in the soil," but to give damages to an evicted tenant, provided that if he alienates, sublets, or divides his farm he may be evicted without compensation. Any change that gives the present race of tenants the power to sublet will only bring back the state of things that led to the famine.—I am,
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