572 Hon. George C. Brodrich [May 6, 



that of illness. But the landlords would be a larger body, containing 

 fewer grandees and more practical agriculturists, living at their 

 country homes all the year round, and putting their savings into land, 

 instead of wasting them in the social competition of the metropolis. 

 The majority of them would still be eldest sons, many of whom, how- 

 ever, would have learned to work hard till middle life for the support 

 of their families ; and besides these there would be not a few younger 

 sons who had retired to pass the evening of their days on little pro- 

 perties near the place of their bii'th, either left them by will or bought 

 out of their own acquisitions. With these would be numbered other 

 elements in far larger measure and greater variety than at present — 

 wealthy capitalists eager to enter the ranks of the landed gentry ; 

 merchants, traders, and professional men content with a country villa 

 and a hundred freehold acres around it ; yeomen farmers, who had pur- 

 chased the fee simple of their holdings from embarrassed landlords, 

 and even labourers who had worked their way upwards and seized 

 favourable chances of investing in land. Under such conditions, it is 

 not too much to expect that some links, now missing, between rich 

 and poor, gentle and simple, might be supplied in country districts ; 

 that " plain living and high thinking " might again find a home in 

 some of our ancient manor houses, once the abode of landowners, but 

 now tenanted by mere occupiers ; that with less of dependence and 

 subordination to a dominant will, there would be more of true neigh- 

 bourly feeling, and even of clanship ; and that posterity, reaping the 

 happy fruits of greater social equality, would marvel, and not without 

 cause, how the main obstacle to greater social equality — the law and 

 custom of Primogeniture — escaped revision for more than two centuries 

 after the final abolition of feudal tenures." 



V. Let us lastly turn our eyes, once more, to the Irish land system, 

 if that can be called a land system, which is a patchwork of antique 

 customs and modern enactments, plastered one upon another, with little 

 regard to consistency or symmetry. It is not my purpose to criticise 

 the policy of the new Irish Land Bill ; it may or may not be a necessary 

 sequel to the Act of 1870 ; it may be framed in a spirit of justice, or it 

 may have been dictated by political expediency. With all this we have 

 nothing to do. What mainly concerns us is its self-evident tendency to 

 establish a new form of double ownership, or agrarian partnership 

 between landlord and tenant. We sometimes hear the great reforms 

 carried out by Stein and Hardenberg in Prussia cited as a precedent 

 for such legislation. Exactly the reverse is the fact. The reforms of 

 Stein and Hardenberg were directed, and successfully directed, to sub- 

 stitute unity of ownership for double ownership — to give the peasant 

 the greater part of his former holding as his own absolute property, 

 relieved of all vexatious services ; and to compensate the landlord for 

 the loss of those services by a fixed allotment of land or by a fixed 

 rent. In other words, these reforms substituted proprietorship for 

 landlordism and tenancy, but left freedom of contract untouched. The 

 reforms now proposed for Ireland assume the maintenance of the 



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