APPENDIX 105 



Vested interests can never continue indefinitely to prey on 

 any community ; they must sooner or later suffer a reaction 

 proportionate to their privileges. So long as the judicial 

 represented a decrease over the competitive rents, this legis- 

 lation was naturally popular with the tenant class. But it 

 was not clear what the attitude of the tenants would be in 

 the event of a market of rising prices. The measure of 

 success attained by the rent-fixing legislation was the out- 

 come of its incidental or particular results rather than a 

 justification of its principles. On this account, rather than 

 because of any paucity of results, the law of 1881 must be 

 looked upon as a failure. The rents were not fixed upon any 

 particular or just principle. The decreases bore no real 

 relation to the fluctuations in prices. What was determined 

 was not so much a judicial as a popular rent. Out of this 

 lack of a sound basis for the determination developed a dan- 

 gerous abuse, calculated not to strengthen Irish industrial 

 character as was necessary, but in fact to weaken it further. 

 A most important factor in the determination of the rent 

 came to be the evident prosperity of the tenant. One of 

 the chief abuses of the rack-rent system reappeared in a 

 new form. Thus of two brothers on similar holdings, the 

 more lazy and inefficient paid a lower rent than the more 

 enterprising. Not productivity, but production, and more 

 especially the evidences of production at the fifteenth 

 year, were the determining factors. The decrease in 

 agricultural prices during the eighties was a great spur to 

 increased efficiency of production in other countries, hasten- 

 ing the introduction of scientific agriculture, up-to-date 

 machinery, and better methods of business organization. 

 But in Ireland this quickening impulse was not felt for the 

 reason that the depression was met largely through the 

 decrease in rents. The attempt to put the landlord-tenant 

 system on a fair basis by artificial means evidently did not 



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