THE LAND BILL THROUGH COMMITTEE.
THE first of the Government omnibuses is as good as through Temple Bar ; and the now familiar illustration recalls—if indeed it had ever been possible to forget—the absence from the Irish Land debates of the great man who suggested that illustration, and who then showed his experience and appreciation of the working of the House of Commons by what at the time seemed to others an almost despairing appre- hension of the difficulties and delays which the measure would encounter. Those difficulties and delays have indeed from time to time appeared so serious that some of the strongest supporters of the Bill, though not, we have reason to believe, the Government themselves, felt a little anxious. There was indeed a moment in the latter debates when the Opposition seemed about to renew their tactics—do they deserve a name implying intelligent plan I—which had so long delayed the progress of the Bill before Easter ; and the shudder with which Mr. Fortescue confessed that he heard Lord Elcho name the name of Scotland must have passed again not only through his frame, but through that of many another honourable member, when Lord Claud Hamilton, and Sir Lawrence Palk, and such distinguished representatives of the squfrearchical mind, lifted up their voices to discourse eloquently on the first principles of political and economic science. But as the fortunes of Rome survived the evil omen when bos locutus eat in foro, so the Irish Land Bill has escaped at last from the perils of bucolic eloquence in the British Parliament.
But why, it has been many times asked, has not Mr. Glad- stone acted as peremptorily as he did with the Irish Church question, seeing that at the last general election the constitu- encies called him to a virtual dictatorship on the one as on the other subject? True, they did so, and, as we have said before, we are satisfied that in the last resort the constituencies would make it apparent that their will is still what it was two years ago. But the immediate practical differences in the two cases are great, and great allowance must be made for them in comparing the actual progress of the two measures. When an election is over, the representative becomes in a manner detached from his electors and their opinions ; and very properly so, if he is to be their representative, and not their delegate. But then he loses in impetus what he gains in independence ; and there could not be a better illustration of this ordinary process than in what has actually occurred in the case before us. At the last general election, the Liberal majority was undoubtedly returned to Parliament to support Mr. Gladstone in his plans, whatever they might be, for giving peace, contentment, and good government to Ireland ; but the first question involved in those plans—that of the Disestablish- ment and Disendowment of the Irish Church—not only because it was the first, but because it was intelligible and interesting to the constituencies, had excited their enthusiasm to the utmost ; and this enthusiasm of the hustings and polling- booths imparted to the majority of the new House of Com- mons an impetus which was shown by that silent, steady, unswerving vote which carried all opposition before it at once on the Irish Church Bill. Again, the thing to be done was a simple work of pulling down and clearing out of the way a whole structure which was no longer wanted, which was not to be reformed and adapted to still exist- ing requirements, but simply to be abolished, as far as the State was concerned. And if the enthusiasm of the constituencies had not of itself made powerless for the moment the influence of selfish interests in the minds of their newly elected representatives, such 'selfish interests were, for the most part, remote. It was not their own house which was to be pulled down. Both attack and defence would have been very different if the Irish Church question had been fought out in the House of Commons by rectors and archdeacons, instead of by squires, and lawyers, and merchants, and other "lay elements." And lastly, there was a wide-spread belief— unhappily hitherto disappointed—that this great sacrifice of our most cherished Scotch and English prejudices, and even convictions, in order that the Irish might be governed according to their own views and wishes, would have been at once followed by a general disposition among that people to show an increased respect for law and order, while the Government and Parliament were maturing further measures for the same end as that for which they were disestablishing and disendowing the Irish Church.
But how different have been the circumstances under which the Government, with no less earnestness and no less ability than they showed last year, have now carried through the Laud Bill! The long series of agrarian outrages, which compelled
the suspension of the progress of the Land Bill while the Peace Preservation Act was being passed, has chilled the sympathies, nay, revived the antipathies, of that popular English sentiment which is created by the occurrences and the phrases of the day, rather than by that "historical con- science" which would teach us what are the inevitable results of centuries of oppression. The actual question of the Irish Land Bill, what it professes to do, and whether it does it in the best way, is, moreover, in itself altogether uninteresting to the English and Scotch constituencies ; they neither under- stand nor care to understand it, whilst most of their repre- sentatives—as one hears every day avowed by them in society —know and care as little. These have not only been de- tached, and left running with a diminished, almost exhausted, impetus, but their constituencies have not been eager to re- new that influence which many a political Antonia from time to time has felt and understood so well. The oldest and most experienced members of the House say they never knew the details of a Bill so debated; but the really informed and intel- ligent debaters on either side have been few, though there has been much talk by those who, with a little learning in law, and political economy, and landowning, have had no suspicion how dangerous and misleading such half-knowledge is, when it prompts to the founding fidgetty action upon it. In the Irish Church case we had a simply destructive measure, with no parsons to defend their real or supposed interests under it ; but here we have had a most complicated and delicate scheme for the reconstruction of the relations of landlords and tenants in Ireland, at the mercy, so far as unlimited discussion went, of squires who believed that their interests were directly involved ; of lawyers with their superstitious reverence for the worst laws if only they exist, and their superstitious horror of these being meddled with even by the law-making power itself ; and of political economists who have not learnt from Mr. Mill to rise from maxims to principles, and from sciolism to science.
When once the fiat for the disestablishment of the Irish Church had gone forth, the work was simple enough ; for it was one of those destructive processes which, however neces- sary, belong, as the Spectator has on other occasions pointed out, to the statesmanship of the past rather than of the future. But the problem which the Government proposed to itself to solve as regards the Land question, and which we believe,— as we have said from the day that Mr. Gladstone stated the problem and its proposed solution in introducing the Bill,— to be adequately solved by that Bill, was how to recognize, and preserve, and give a future legal right of existence to every beneficial custom or usage which had grown up in Ulster, or any other part of Ireland, in the relations of landlords and tenants ; and how to create, by statute, rights analogous to those customs, and therefore presumably suited to the genius of the Irish people, wherever the hard rule of the conquerors and their descendants had prevented such customs from thriving, or even taking root. On the one hand, the measure was to do all this ; but on the other, it was to recognize and provide for the fact that Ireland stands in intimate relations, political and social, with England and Scotland, and that it is interpenetrated by English and Scotch modes of thought and action at various points, and not least by the introduction of those notions of land being held and occupied on the basis of commercial contract between landlord and tenant which, though almost unknown out of Britain; are yet here so ingrained in men's minds as to be commonly taken for laws of nature. Nothing, indeed, has been more curious in the late discussions than the way in which the advocates of the aris- tocratic faiths and interests as to land have opposed the Irish Land Bill for its assertion of the rights of tenure and status against those of contract, in comfortable unconscious- ness of what is plain enough to those who can anticipate results in their germs, that the great changes which are assuredly coming upon the relations of landlord and tenant in England and Scotland will not be derived from Irish pre- cedent, but will be the logical consequences and natural developments of this very doctrine of freedom of contract in land. The Act of Parliament which a few years ago declared that the only relation of landlord and tenant in Ireland was that of contract, and not of tenure, fell as dead as every Act must do which declares that to be which is not; but it was not the less true of England and Scotland because it was false of Ireland; and it is in adjusting the relations of Ireland to England and Scotland in this respect, and so really effecting what that absurd declaration of Parliament meant to do, that much of the difficulty and delicacy of the work of the present Government
has consisted. Such an adjustment was necessary in order to meet all the facts of the case,—the facts of the partial exist- ence of contract by the side of tenure and status in the owner- ship and occupation of land in Ireland, as well as its more complete existence in England and Scotland; but it was also necessary for that practical reason which no statesman can disregard,—that it would have been impossible to carry in the Imperial Parliament any measure for Ireland which did not offer some points of contact and appreciation to English habits of thought and prepossessions of feeling. "Policy, justice, possibility," are the characteristics which Mr. Fortescue claimed for his Bill, in his speech on the second reading,—a speech which will well repay the reading again by those who can appreciate the close and clear exposition of a piece of truly constructive legislation. Both in its retrospective survey of the growth of opinion on the question, and in its explanation of the principles and method on which the Bill has been actually framed, it is to our mind an instructive specimen of the way in which a true statesman prepares his work for Parliament. How the worth of the measure has since been tested in Parliament only those can fully know who have sat night by night in the House with the Bill in one hand and the interminable list of amendments in the other, listening to the successive speeches on either side ; for the reporters have given but slight sketches of what actually went on. And out of this ordeal the Bill has come, improved no doubt in details, and those in a liberal sense, but in the main what it was originally, and what we then pronounced it to be,—a strong Bill and a good Bill, and no such clumsy and inefficient work as some superficial critics have called it. It was striking, in the debate on Sir John Gray's scheme last week, to hear not only the more important Irish supporters of the Govern- ment, but their unsparing though not ungenerous opponent, Dr. Ball himself, arguing against that scheme, on the ground that it would disturb the operation of the Government measure in Ireland, and its acceptance there as a full and
final settlement of the question. That it will event- ually be so accepted, all our most recent accounts of the feeling of Irish landlords and tenants make more and more probable.
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