1881.] on the Land Sijstems of England and of Ireland. 5G9 



that hero and thcro a good landlord compelled to part with a portion 

 of his property, has granted leases beforehand to old tenants, and 

 thereby protected their equitable rights against the purchaser. But 

 he believes such magnanimity to be very rare, and dares not count 

 upon it himself, especially as ho is told that since tenant-right has 

 come to mean downright confiscation, projirietors must get their 

 estates so far as jiossible into their own hands. He lives, therefore, 

 from hand to mouth, as his fathers lived before him, tilling no moro 

 land than ho can till with one horse and without machinery, never 

 laying out a penny that he can help, studiously keeping up the 

 appearance of poverty, and hoarding the little profits of his scanty 

 crops and butter in an old stocking, till ho can lodge them clandes- 

 tinely in a bank, not too near, for the marriage portions of his 

 daughters. It is vain to assure him that he may safely rely on the 

 honour of an individual who may die to-morrow, or sell to a Dublin 

 speculator, or be driven into a system of rack-renting by the pressure 

 of his creditors. Why, he asks, should not the law secure to me an 

 indefeasible right of possession, so long as I pay a fair rent, if this is 

 what I may fairly expect from my landlord's sense of justice ? Why 

 should I be left absolutely at his mercy, and my children at the 

 mercy of those who may succeed him, if it be admitted that it would 

 be an abuse of power to confiscate my improvments, or even to 

 disturb my occupancy ? * 



Such was the actual position of a representative Irish tenant 

 before the Act of 1870, and such, in spite of the Act, is still the 

 sentiment of a representative Irish tenant. For while the Act placed 

 a heavy penalty on " disturbance," it laid no effectual restriction on 

 the increase of rent. Moreover, as we are reminded, in the report of 

 Lord Bessborough's Commission, " what the aggrieved tenant wants, 

 in nearly all cases, is not to be compensated for the loss of his farm, 

 but to be continued in its occupancy at a fair rent." 



5. The case of the Irish labourer has received less attention than 

 it deserves. He is somewhat roughly defined, in the Report of Lord 

 Bessborough's Commission, as " a farmer who is without a farm." 

 In other words, there is hardly such a thing in Ireland as an 

 independent class of agricultural labourers. Most of those so 

 described in the Census are small farmers working in spare hours, or 

 sons of tenant-farmers, or perhaps men who have been turned out of 

 farms for non-payment of rent. In the west of Ireland, however, and 

 especially in Connaught, there are thousands of cottier tenants living 

 on patches of land incapable of supporting a family, even if they were 

 held rent-free, who eke out a livelihood by going over to England or 

 Scotland for harvest, and returning with their wages, on which they 

 mainly subsist during the winter. The misery of these poor creatures 

 who returned empty-handed after the bad harvests of 1878 and 1879, 



* This description of the Irish farmer has been extracted, with little varia- 

 tion, from an Essay on the Irish Land question in 1870, published in Brodrick's 

 • Political Studies,' 1879. 



