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LORD DUFFERIN'S PAMPHLET.

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trap originally baited by no less a person than Sir Robert Peel when Prime Minister, and into which they have been invited to enter by successive Acts of Parliament, by the highest courts of judicature, and by those eminent statesmen who, in passing the Land Act of 1870, induced them to agree to it on the plea that, if it curtailed some of the privileges of property, it gave an impregnable stability to those which were left?"

Yet Lord Dufferin, though he fought hard for his land, had by this time discerned that the cause of the landlords was lost, and that by each successive law the tenants were gaining ground for renewed attack upon the central position.

"In the estimation of the tenant Mr. Gladstone's Act put him into the same bed with his landlord. His immediate impulse has been to kick his landlord out of bed. The temptation of the government will be to quiet the disturbance by giving the tenant a little more of the bed. This will prove a vain expedient. The tenant will only say to himself, 'One kick more, and the villain is on the floor.' If, however, instead of giving the tenant more of the bed, we cut the bed in two, he will then roll himself up in his blanket, and be all in favour of every man having his own bed to himself. In other words, the problem is to render Ireland conservative, to make it the interest of the peasantry to support law and order, to recognize the sanctity of property, and the reasonableness and necessity of rent. This can only be done by making him an owner, and an owner upon a very extensive scale-upon such a scale as to render it the interest of the greater part of the population to insist upon the remainder fulfilling their legal obligations.

"How is this to be done? Let a necessary sum, raised on public securities, be devoted to the purchase, upon fair and proper terms to be regulated by a trustworthy Commission, of a considerable proportion of the lands of Ireland."

198

EMIGRATION.

[CH. VI He proposes, in short, the final expedient of State purchase to which the Legislature resorted twentytwo years afterwards. But he believed that in the west of Ireland, with its cottier tenements, its poverty, and its potato cultivation, even this drastic remedy of establishing a peasant propriety would be impracticable. For this poor folk there could be no help, he thought, except in emigration; and his recent residence in Canada suggested to him a picture of what might be gained by quitting a small island with a swarming population for the vast unpeopled plains of a great continent.

"Within the compass of little more than a week, after a pleasant voyage, a proportion of these unhappy multitudes might be landed on the quays of Quebec, the women healthier, the children rosier, and the men in better heart and spirits than ever they have been since the day they were born. Four or five days more would plant them without fatigue or inconvenience on a soil so rich, that it has only to be scratched to grow the best wheat and barley that can be raised on the continent of America. I myself have seen an immeasurable sea of corn clothing with its golden expanse what two years before had been a desolate prairie, the home of the lynx and the jackal, simply through the exertions of a small Russian colony that had run up their shanties in that favoured land. In the neighbourhood was an Irish settlement containing many descendants of the cottier peasantry who had fled from the famine of 1846, now converted into happy, loyal, and contented yeomen. Instinctively my mind reverted to the sights I had seen in Mayo, Connemara, and Galway in 1848. Strange to say, the appearance of the horizon in each case was identical. Its verge stood out against the setting sun like the teeth of a saw; but in Ireland this impression was produced by the gable ends of deserted cottages:

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THE LAND ACT OF 1880.

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in Manitoba by the long line of corn-stacks which sheltered every homestead."

But pictures of prosperity beyond sea were not likely to divert from their purpose the chiefs of the Land League, who were using agricultural claims as leverage for clearing the road toward Home Rule. Mr. Parnell was now raising Ireland against the ministry, and the Land Act of 1881 was passed under stress of violent agitation.

"The Three F's' were now wrenched from the Government by one of the most lawless movements which had ever convulsed any country. . . . 'I must make one admission,' said Mr. Gladstone in 1893, 'and that is that without the Land League the Act of 1881 would not now be on the Statute-book.'"*

It may be observed, in conclusion, that Lord Dufferin came into possession of his estates at the beginning of what may be termed the revolutionary period in the history of Irish land tenure, and that he lived very nearly to the end of it. When he succeeded to his inheritance, the landlord's rights were legally intact. But the Devon Commission had just then (1845) submitted to Parliament their Report, in which the growth and operation of the custom of tenantright was thus described.

"It is difficult" (they said) "to deny that the effect of this system is a practical assumption by the tenant of a joint proprietorship in the land: and that the tendency is gradually to convert the proprietor into a mere rent charger, having an indefinite and declining annuity, or the lord of a copyhold. Landlords do not perceive that the present tenant-right of Ulster is an embryo copyhold, which must decline in value to the

p. 293.

Barry O'Brien, "The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell,' vol. ii.

200

BRIEF RETROSPECT.

[CH. VI proprietor in proportion as the practice of tenantright becomes confirmed, because the sum required by the outgoing tenant must regulate ultimately the balance of gross produce which will be left to meet the payment of rent. They do not see that the agrarian combination throughout Ireland is but a methodized war to obtain the Ulster tenant right, or that an established purchase not only may but must erect itself finally into law; unless the practice itself is superseded by putting the whole question on a sound and equitable basis."

For the next thirty-five years the process described in the foregoing extract went on with increasing pressure and agitation, with many vicissitudes of attack and defence in the contest for proprietary right, as the tenants won point after point against the landlords: until, after 1881, the relative positions of the two parties became nearly inverted. For by that time. possession of the land, and the power to dispose of it, had virtually passed over to the tenant in occupation, and it was the landlord who found himself with a precarious holding, imminently liable to eviction.

Whatever may be the different views held regarding the policy that prevailed in the long struggle between landlords and tenants, and between political parties, in Ireland, over the problem involved in the settlement of property in land, it must be admitted that Lord Dufferin's championship of his class, during so many years, was conducted with intelligence, foresight, and generosity. He had been a liberal and painstaking landlord, whose sympathy with the needs and grievances of the tenantry was incontestable, and who acted upon a genuine belief that the ultimate interests of the two classes were identical, and might be reconciled. From the day when he started from Oxford to do his best toward relieving the miseries

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CONCLUSION.

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of the famine, down to the end of his life, his warm interest in the welfare of Ireland never failed. He had found himself, on coming of age, in the possession of an ample income from an estate that was supposed to be secure; and in the improvement of this property he had invested large sums. But the encumbrances, most of which he had inherited with the estate, pressed heavily on a falling rent roll; the trend of legislation was adverse to landlords; so that prudence dictated to him the sale of the greater part of his land, and this change in his position and prospects must have inevitably affected his subsequent career. So far as it turned him toward foreign service, this may be reckoned to his advantage, for he rose to eminence and distinction. Yet for a man with his tastes and habits, among which must be included an hereditary propensity to profuse generosity-to large and liberal expenditure in high places-this separation from the land was probably detrimental, because the preservation of his ancestral estate would always have been his first concern, would have acted as a check upon incautious magnificence, and might have saved him, it is likely, from being left, after a series of great and for the most part costly appointments, with a small property and a straitened income. After 1872, when Lord Dufferin accepted the Canadian Governor Generalship, his close attention to Irish affairs was necessarily interrupted and relaxed. And we may take the same date as marking his withdrawal from active participation in the internal politics of the United Kingdom, since thenceforward he remained abroad, with intervals of residence at home on short holidays, till 1896.