VII - The Land Act
In the autumn of 1881, the new Land Act became operative. The first day of tts existence, the clerk who had to pronounce the initial ceremonies, described the new tribunal as ‘the court of the Land League’, a description only too painfully accurate, for this Act was really the whole outcome of the Land League – the ridiculous mouse resulting from the upheaval of the whole island Perhaps it would be more proper to liken it to a centipede than a mouse, on account of its great length and complexity. It was noticeable that Mr Gladstone's Acts for Ireland were drawn in two ways. When they were intended for sheer persecution, and he was responsible for many of this sort, they were simple and easy to understand; but when they were not directly hostile, but what he would have described as ‘beneficial’, they were a perfect verbal maze, with the object, of course, of providing employment for lawyers, thus increasing the number of those who are attached to England by self-interest, and perhaps also, partly with the object of concealing the worthlessness of the legislation itself. The absurdity of this measure, however, was beyond the power of any complexity to conceal; it was patent at the first glance. The main provision of the Act was the transference of the power to fix rent, from the landlords to agents appointed by government, called the land commissioners, who delegated their power to a number of subcommissioners, appointed by themselves. Many well paid places were thus created, all according to well-established precedent; for of seekers after places is most of the Kingdom of England in Ireland composed and upheld. The Marquis of Hartington had said, while the Act was passing through parliament, that the way Irish landlords kept raising their rents made it absolutely necessary to deprive them of the power to do it, thus emphatically condemning not only his own past career but also the whole government ol Ireland since the conquest. Why government officials should be disposed to deal justly between man and man, or for the welfare of Ireland, he left it to our own imaginations to tell us. The chief absurdity of the Act lay in the great cost to each tenant entailed by this fixing of his rent for fifteen years only by the roving subcommissioners, with the subsequent appeals from their decisions to the commissioners themselves, together with the great length of time demanded by these processes. I remember once seeing a remark in some English newspaper to the effect that Irish tenants paid £5 to lawyers for every £5 reduction in their rents, and though that may have been an exaggeration, it was quite near enough to the truth to be taken as an illuminating description of the regime ushered in by the Land Act of 1881. But there is no need to dwell on the faults of this Act, since its uselessness has now been demonstrated by the plain fact that after it has been at work for a quarter of a century, the population of Ireland is still dwindling steadily, while insanity, idiocy, blindness, and every kind of physical degeneracy due to want are as steadily increasing.
Its best point was the power it gave the outgoing tenant to sell his interest in his holding, emigrating families being thus placed in a better position for starting life afresh in another country. This, of course, was only a gain to the other country, not to Ireland. The Act, it should be remembered, did not lower the rents but raised them, for the new rents were harder to pay, in proportion to the means the tenants had to pay them out of, than the old rents had been, up to about 1879. They were only lower, both nominally and in fact, than they had been for the last two years before the Act came into operation. The position of the Land League in October, 1881, was a very serious one; so serious indeed, that I have often wondered what they would have done if Mr Forster had not popped them all into prison just when he did. The deluge of costs was rapidly rising, and the impossibility of keeping their wholesale promises as to the payment thereof was becoming daily more obvious.
And these costs were not the only drain on their funds. They had asked for money for evicted tenants, and were therefore obliged to spend money on grants for them also. The large number of men imprisoned under the Persecution Act, called suspects, had also to be maintained, as the food provided by the government for these persons, impounded perhaps for eighteen months without trial, was not fit to sustain life. A fourth source of expense lay in the legal defences of the people all over the country who were being persecuted by prosecutions for everything imaginable, or unimaginable, many of the charges being inconceivably nonsensical. Where they were kept in prison while awaiting trial these ‘ordinary law prisoners’, as they were called to distinguish them from the ‘suspects’, had to have food and other necessaries provided for them. Taking these defences and the charge of these prisoners on itself was the one good thing the Land League did.
One example of the kind of thing they were combatting will suffice. A speaker at a public meeting was prosecuted for saying, ‘We must kill landlords,’ a very unlikely remark for any public speaker to make. But an English commercial traveller who happened to be present at the meeting had to be brought over from England to testify that the words used were, ‘We must kill landlordism,’ because Irish evidence for the defence is never accepted by an Irish judge in a criminal case, or by any Irish jurymen who are what the English call ‘loyal’ when the government want a conviction. And since then the law has been changed so that the government can get jurors who are all ‘loyal’ whenever they like. Considering how perpetually the English rave about their own love of fair-play, the extreme justice of their institutions and how unctuously they parade their imaginary principle, that ‘every man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty’, it is not surprising that they called this attempt partly to supply one of the most elementary requirements of plain justice for their Irish victims, ’a criminal conspiracy’.
To accept the Land Act would extricate the League from a large part of its dilemma, as it would put an end to rent resistance for all except lease-holders, who were not entitled to have their rents fixed for them. It was therefore of great importance to them that the Act should be possible of acceptance. Under the circumstances they adopted the best policy they could. They advised the tenants to wait until some test cases, which they proposed to submit to the new land court, had been decided, before applying to the court to have their own rents fixed, so that they might have some means of judging, before they confided their interests to the land commissioners,’ whether the scale of rent reduction to be effected by those officials would be such as to justify this step on their part. Any other course could only lead to very small reductions, with great delay in getting them, and a block in the land court which would almost paralyse it.
I think most of these test cases were taken from the evicted tenants whose six months redemption was still unexpired. They were poverty cases, and if they could have been presented to the land court at once, without the accompaniment of a number of other applications sufficient to furnish that tribunal with an excuse for delay in pronouncing judgement on them, considerable light would have been thrown, in a short time, on the question of how much benefit the Act would be likely to confer on the tenants as a whole. But Mr Gladstone had no intention of allowing his comic legislation to be deprived of any of its beauties, and soon made short work of the Land League policy towards it, by sweeping the whole staff of the League into prison, excepting two or three of the minor clerks.
The test cases might still have been persevered with through solicitors and barristers not expressly connected with the League, but such agents, if they had honestly tried to do their duty by their clients, would certainly have been imprisoned in their turn, the determination of the government being firmly fixed that the Act should bear as harshly on the tenants as possible. The attempt to persevere with these cases, would probably only have resulted in the lawyers engaged wasting the Land League money while they protected themselves from governmental vengeance by not attempting to forward the interests of their clients. Like much else that Mr Gladstone did in the way of legislation, this Land Act had an elasticity which rendered it in some measure adaptable to different sets of circumstances, and if the Land League had made itself respected, and brought the agrarian position to anything like the point where it should have been at this date, the mere imprisonment of the Dublin staff need not have put an end to all chance of the Land Act working to the best advantage consistent with its character.
If the tenants had followed the most ordinary rule of prudence, and held aloof, as a body, from the land court until the earliest applications to it had been disposed of, the scale of reductions would certainly have been larger, and the financial strain on the whole country for the next 15 or 20 years would have been eased proportionately. But, as it was, there was no obstacle to the new Act accomplishing all the harm its composition might make possible. Its natural effect was to stimulate evictions at once, as the faster the landlords evicted, the greater would be the number of ‘present tenants’ they would get rid of before they had time to have their rent fixed by the court. ‘Present tenants’ were the tenants actually holding at the time appointed by the Act for the new order of tenure to commence, or those who acquired the interest of a tenant so holding, and these alone had the right to have their rents fixed for the fifteen years term.
Once a tenant had been evicted for six months, or once his interest had been sold by the landlord, the right to fix the rent for his holding became vested in the landlord again as it had been in the past, although he could become a ‘present tenant’ with the landlord’s consent. Of course a block in the land court facilitated the process of annihilating present tenancies and therefore a block in the land court was what Mr Gladstone wanted, with plenty of evictions. The tenants had defi e government and had not tried to translate their defiance into action. Now they were to feel the consequences. There may be something to say for much noise and no action, but there is nothing whatever to be said for much noise and weak action. It was the latter combination the Land Leaguers had resorted to.