THE FAIR RENT PROVISIONS OF THE IRISH LAND ACTS II 7 



by one of the principal landlords of the country, who was about to let the 

 land to solvent tenants on leases say of 21 years. " In spite of this the 

 valuation was anything but uniform in Ireland, and in many counties was 

 reckoned to be 25% below the fair rent. The Bessborough Report states: 

 " If anything has been clearly established on evidence during this enquiry, 

 the fact that the present Government Valuation is not a trustworthy 

 standard for the settlement of rents has been most thouroughly demon- 

 strated. " Of course in a valuation for rating pvuposes it would not have 

 mattered so much whether land was overvalued or undervalued, provided 

 the one uniform standard was adopted all round, but as a matter of fact 

 the Commissioner of Valuation in 1869 admitted that from 12^ to 25 % 

 should be added to the valuation of the Counties in Leinster, Mtmster and 

 Connaught to bring them up to the level of the valuation in Ulster. 



Mr. Gladstone in 1870 delivered a strong attack on the proposal to fix 

 rents according to prices. " Can any man," he asks, " fix by law any system 

 on which it will be possible to adjust rents by calculations founded upon 

 prices of agricultural produce of ail kinds" and he goes on to put his finger 

 on the weak sjDot in all such proposals : — 



" What are we to say with regard to the quantity of produce? Suppose 

 the quantity of produce is doubled, is the landlord to receive the same price 

 for the increased quantity or is he not? If he is to receive the same price 

 for the increased quantity, where is the tenant's inducement to increase 

 the quantity? But if the quantity is to remain the same, by what right 

 do you cut off the whole of the landlord's interest in the prospective increase 

 in the quantity of produce?" 



II must be tmderstood, of course, that what is here attacked is not the 

 proposal to take agricultural prices into account in fixing the value of land, 

 but the proposal to fix that value by such prices alone, without taking any 

 of the other factors in the question into accoimt. Every valuer, when he 

 has ascertained the produce of the land, proceeds to enquire what are the 

 average prices at which that produce has sold in the distiict, and calculates 

 the value of the produce accordingly, and it is that value, when allowance 

 has been made for cost of production, and the ordinary profits of farming 

 upon the ammnt of capital or labour invested in the cultivation of the farm, 

 which forms the basis of the valuer's estimate of the fair rent c f the holding. 



A digression may be made here to say that a rather remarkable attempt 

 was made to proportion rents to agricultural prices in 1887, 1888, and 1889. 

 There was a considerable fail in the agricultural prices in 1886 and an Act 

 was accordingly passed in 1887 providing for the alterat on <: f the fair 

 rents fixed before 1886 in accordance with the change in prices, this altera- 

 tion to be made during each of the three years above-mentioned. The 

 lyand Commissioners in carrying this out took the Poor I^aw Union as the 

 unit of their investigations, and appointed scrutineers to ascertain the 

 prices of the staple products in each district, and took from the statistics 

 compiled by the Registrar-General the area occupied in each Union by the 

 several products, and ascertained quantities and values accordingly. The 

 Commissioners state " the want of trustworthy local statistics of prices of- 



