• THE LAND ACT OF 1881
• CRITICISMS OF IT
• EXTENT OF PREVALENCE OF DUAL OWNERSHIP IN OTHER COUNTRIES
• THE IRISH LAND PURCHASE BILLS
• THEIR OBJECTS AND WORKING
• RECORD OF ULSTER UNIONIST PARTY.

This power of arbitrarily raising the rent made the provisions of this Bill to a large extent futile. It was useless to compel the landlord to give compensation for improvements when he could indirectly confiscate them by increasing the rent. Moreover, the Act of 1870 made compensation for disturbance pay able only when the tenant was being dispossessed by a notice to quit. It was not as a rule payable when he had to go owing to non-payment of rent, so that a bad year produced the same sort of cumulative misfortunes as those which took place during the famine period.

The 1881 Land Act

Mr. Gladstone, who was then Prime Minister, first tried coercion, and then concession. He introduced and passed the Land Bill of 1881 of which the principles he had before denounced formed the basis. It legalised for the first time the principles of Fair Rent, Free Sale, and Fixity of Tenure. This is another example of a British Government conceding to fear what it had refused to justice. Mr. Gladstone with characteristic frankness has admitted as much:-

"I must record my firm opinion," he said in 1891, "that the Land Act of 1881 would not have become the law of the land if it had not been for the agitation with which Irish society was convulsed."

Criticisms of the Act

My conclusions might seem to point in the direction of advantage having been taken of popular ignorance, but in view of the fact that equal ignorance is permissible in members of Parliament and even Cabinet Ministers, I shall in all cases of doubt take the more charitable view. The most convenient book of reference on the subject, which is entitled "Systems of Land Tenure in various Countries", has the misfortune to be issued by the Cobden Club, but seeing that it came out nearly forty years ago, before the progress of Tariff Reform had reduced that institution to its present desperate shifts, and contains contributions by such respectable and distinguished persons as the Hon G C Brodrick, uncle of Lord Midleton, late Secretary of State for War in the Unionist Government, Sir George Campbell, KCSL, formerly Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Robert Morier, a distinguished British Diplomatist, and M Emile de Laveleye, a Belgian scholar and writer on economic subjects, presumably free from any English party bias, it will not be taking any very great risk if its statements are accepted on matters of fact.

Before going into details, I might also point out that where land is rented from a landlord for agricultural purposes, in the nature of things there must always be a certain amount of dual ownership if the tenant is not to be robbed of whatever improvements he may make, and is to take any pride or interest in his work, and not simply regard himself as a contractor whose only object is to make all the money he can while he has the chance; and having gone as near as he safely can to exhausting the soil, go off elsewhere when his term expires.

Experience Abroad

Where he did not, he did not make them, and irrigation not being one of these, one consequence was that France has occasionally suffered severely from disastrous droughts. In France also there existed a large quantity of common land, estimated by Professor Cliffe Leslie at nearly ten million acres, in the possession of various local bodies. If dual ownership is bad, what must be the state of centesimal or millesimal ownership, and yet France has not merely staggered along under the burden, but shares with England the reputation of being one of the richest countries in Europe.

In Germany, being composed of a large number of states, the details of the transition from the feudal to the modern system of land tenure naturally varied in each, but as the general principles followed were usually the same, it will be sufficient to describe the Prussian legislation of 1850. A consideration of it should give pause to those who sometimes refer to the Emperor William as the Deus ex machina who will, if the necessity arises, deliver Ulster from the fate to which Home Rule would subject her. If one of the conditions of deliverance is the application of the Prussian land legislation to Ulster, those landlords without whose presence no Unionist gathering at the present day seems to be complete, will feel not merely that the money spent on rifles has been wasted, but that they are very much in the position of the frogs who exchanged king Log for king Stork.

Up till 1850 there existed certain feudal dues to which the landowners were entitled. In that year the Prussian Legislature not merely passed a law commuting them into money payments, but committed a further outrage by applying to them the iniquitous principle of compulsory purchase, and fixing the price at eighteen times the amount of the rent charge. No conferences here, or bonuses increasing in proportion to the number of years purchase the landlord succeeded in wringing out of the tenant, or pleasing spectacle of landlord and tenant settling their differences amicably at the expense of the general public.

Had this Prussian legislation of 1850 been taken as the model for the Irish land legislation of 1903, every Irish farmer would long since have become a proprietor, millions of pounds of the taxpayers' money would have been saved, and Ulster would not have been penalised for its loyalty by its supposed friends in the way it has been. If any negotiations with Germany have been entered on by the Ulster leaders, it is to be hoped that there is a clause in the contract making it quite clear that it is only the German army and navy that is wanted, not the German land laws; otherwise those who have hitherto successfully resisted compulsion may unconsciously be the means of bringing it about.

Should any Ulster landlord, in his disgust at the legalised robbery of his class that has taken place in Germany, turn to Russia as a country in which democratic forces have as yet made little progress, it is to be feared an even greater disappointment awaits him.

The Russian peasants were originally serfs of the landowners. By the legislation of 1861, they were not merely freed from this position, but the landlord was compelled to hand over to them in hereditary copy-hold against the payment of rent, an amount of land of which not merely the minimum was fixed in regard to quantity but in regard to quality also, and the law required that as a general rule the best land should be handed over to the tenants.

Nor was this all. Not only was the landlord compelled to give up the best of his land to the tenant at a rent, but the tenants as a body were given the option of buying out their farmyards with or without their holdings, as they preferred, at 16.67 the amount of the rent, that is at what we should call 16 and 2/3 years' purchase. Where all did not agree to do so, any particular tenant who so desired could assert his own right of purchase by paying one-fifth more. Four-fifths or three-fourths of the amount necessary to effect the purchase, according as the sale was a complete or partial one, was advanced by the State. Being only an ordinary Ulsterman and not an Ulster leader, it is no part of my business to endeavour to turn the thoughts of those susceptible to my influence towards foreign countries, but I fancy there are a good many Ulster farmers who, having waited in vain for nearly thirty years for an opportunity of purchasing their holdings, would, if they knew the above facts, almost wish themselves Germans or Russians.

In Belgium the ideal of the earlier English legislation in connection with the Irish land question, has as a rule been attained, and the relations between landlord and tenant based entirely on contract. The result has been that the agricultural population are as a rule very poor, that the landlords rarely give leases for more than nine years lest they should have to wait too long before being able to raise the rent, and that in the period between 1830 and 1866 the average rent per acre increased by 78 per cent. Even in Belgium, however, the outgoing tenant has to be compensated for certain unexhausted improvements, so that there is still some falling short of the ideal of absolute ownership.

In the Dutch province of Groningen there exists a tenure called the Beklem-regt, which is the very essence of dual ownership, under which the rent can never be raised, and subject to certain payments on transfers, the tenant can do pretty well whatever he pleases with the land so long as he does not diminish its value. The results of this system, instead of bearing out the dismal prophecies in regard to the consequences of dual ownership, are thus described by M de Laveleye:-

"Thus, instead of tenants with the fear of losing their holdings always before their eyes, and ground down by ever-increasing rents, this system, derived from the Middle Ages, has created a class of semi-proprietors independent, proud, simple, but withal eager for enlightenment, appreciating the advantages of education, practising husbandry not by blind routine and as a mean occupation, but as a noble profession by which they acquire wealth, influence, and the consideration of their fellow-men; a class ready to submit to any sacrifice to drain their lands, improve their farm buildings and implements, and looking for their well-being to their own energy and foresight alone."

Similar tenures have existed in Portugal and Italy, and with regard to the former country, in the province of Minho, where it was specially prevalent, it was found the produce per acre of land was a good deal more than double that of the province of Alemtego where it did not exist, though the latter province is naturally much more fertile.

It is curious that the criticisms of the principle of dual ownership and the attempt to correct the supposed evils produced by it were entirely confined to Ireland, and in another part of the Empire those evils were left to work their way unchecked among a population more than fifty times as great.

An examination of Sir George Campbell's article (1)on the Indian land tenure shows that dual ownership is there the rule rather than the exception. His summary of the tenures in the various provinces is as follows:-

"The present distribution of tenures in the different provinces may then be stated to be (speaking generally) as follows:- Oude being at one extreme with an aristocratic system, which gives the land to nobles and financiers; Madras and Bombay at the other, with a system which gives the land to the people.

"Oude:- Great Zemeendars, almost complete owners, with few subordinate rights.

"North-west Provinces:- Moderate proprietors; the old ryots have fixity of tenure at a fair rent.

"Punjab:- Very small and very numerous peasant proprietors; old ryots have also a measure of fixity of tenure at fair rent.

"Bengal:- Great Zemeendars, whose rights are limited. Numerous sub-proprietors of several grades under them. Ancient ryots who have both fixity of tenure and fixity of rent. Other old ryots who have fixity of tenure at fair rent variable from time to time.

"Central Provinces:- Moderate proprietors. Ancient ryots who are sub-proprietors of their holdings at fixed rents for the term of each settlement. Other old ryots have fixity of tenure at a fair rent.

"Madras and Bombay:- The ryots are generally complete proprietors of the soil, subject only to payment of revenue."

It will thus appear that in every province except Oude dual ownership is the normal condition of things, if it is borne in mind that in most of Madras, Bombay, and the Punjab the Government is the landlord, and that a peasant proprietor simply means a tenant who has no landlord between himself and the Government. In Oude, however, the land is owned by large landowners, as against whom their tenants have few rights; Sir George Campbell's verdict on the system prevailing in this province is that it has not been a success, in spite of a great deal of official and unofficial sympathy and assistance at the commencement. The following passage, describing the state of things at the time he wrote bears a painful resemblance to certain unfortunate passages in Irish history:-

"So far from improving the country as capitalist landlords, it has been necessary for Government to come to the assistance of the aristocratic system by lending the Talookdars money to stave off their creditors and protecting them from legal procedure. They have made free use of the power to raise rents and evict; notices of ejectment have been annually served by tens of thousands. Sub-proprietors and ryots have attempted to resist, and a war of classes has prematurely arisen, involving questions which elsewhere have not been reached in several generations."

It would therefore seem that the advantages of absolute as compared with dual ownership are by no means obvious, while its disadvantages are sometimes painfully apparent, and it is notorious that whatever party has been in power at home, the whole tendency of Indian legislation in recent years has been in the direction of affording further protection to the tenants, that is of increasing the dual nature of the ownership instead of attempting to get rid of it.

The Irish Land Purchase Bills

The first part of the criticism would have been more to the point if the improvement of the lot of the tenants had not so often taken the form of ensuring that they lived the simple life by depriving them of the means of living any other. The second part deals rather with the administration of the Act than with the principle of it, and in any case is by no means confined to the situation created by it.

Under a system of pure contract the hard and grasping landlord will in the nature of things come off better than the kind-hearted and generous one, while if he continues to do so here, it is only due to the incompetence of the officers entrusted with the duty of fixing the rent. If the thriftless tenant profited more than the industrious one, this also was due to the imperfection of the instrument, and in any case the discouragement to thrift is less than under a system by which the proceeds of it are automatically confiscated. While there is much to be said for the creation of a system of peasant proprietors so long as it is done in a businesslike way and at a reasonable price, this should not blind us to the enormous improvement in the condition of the Irish farmer effected by the Land Act of 1881.

The economic improvement was for a long time not marked, as the fall in rents hardly kept pace with the fall in prices, but the social and political benefits were enormous. A phrase which in most cases would be merely a piece of rhetorical exaggeration could be truthfully applied to Mr. Gladstone when in addressing an Ulster audience a speaker said:- "He found you slaves and he left you free men."

At the time of the passing of the Land Act of 1881, Nationalist opinion, as expressed by Parnell, was in favour of State-aided purchase of Irish land. This doctrine was heretical while its only advocates were Parnell and his followers. Since 1903 it has been the gospel of the Unionist Party in regard to Ireland. Nevertheless even before 1881 tentative efforts were made by the State towards assisting a number of Irish tenants to become the owners of their farms.

The Unionist Party is accustomed to take to itself all the credit for the beneficent policy of land purchase. But it was not adopted until the legislation of the Liberals had substantially lowered rents. Was the guiding principle concern for the tenant's interest, or a desire to allow the landlord to get back something of what he had lost? In subsequent pages I shall quote facts and figures which will show that this question can have only one answer.

The Unionist Party adopted the principle of voluntary land purchase in 1885. In that year the Ashbourne Act was passed, and by it £5,000,000 was advanced to enable tenants to purchase their holdings. O'Connor Morris says in this connection:-

"Instead of paying as hitherto part of the purchase money, the tenant was to have the whole sum lent to him by the State, repayable by a terminable annuity much lower than an ordinary rent. The transaction, therefore, was not, in a real sense, a purchase; it was, properly speaking, a gift akin to a bribe." (O'Connor Morris, p303)

O'Connor Morris doubtless means that it was a bribe to the tenants. It was equally a bribe to the landlord. The tenant was bribed to buy by the prospect of paying less as an annuity instalment than he had paid in rent, unless he bought at an absurdly high figure. As the process was to be voluntary on the landlord's side, he had to be bribed to sell by obtaining a good deal more than the value of his land. This is the characteristic vice of the principle of voluntary land purchase, which runs through the Wyndham Act of 1903 to an even greater extent than in the case of this Act. As I shall now explain, both Acts were so framed that it would pay the tenant to buy at a price much higher than the real value of his land, and the question as between him and his landlord was not in the least what the land was worth, but how much he could be induced to pay, and what retaliatory measures he was likely to take if the landlord refused to sell.

The economic absurdity underlying all the Unionist Land Purchase Acts is so glaring that it is to my mind absolutely incomprehensible how they failed to awaken a storm of protest. It requires very little mathematical or technical knowledge to see that under normal circumstances when a payment in perpetuity is to be commuted into a payment for a term of years, during that term of years the amount paid should be greater than before. What happened in this case was that owing to the fact of the Government being able to borrow at a lower rate than private individuals can, it could afford to buy out the land and repay itself by instalments which were actually less than the previous rent.

Objectives and Workings of the Bills

Where the instalment was 3.25%, anything less than 30.75 years' purchase would still afford some profit to the tenant as compared with not being able to buy at all. The landlords, in the absence of a compulsory clause, took full advantage of these facts, and demanded prices not according to what the estates were worth, but according to what there was a prospect of the tenants being induced to give. To make absolutely sure that no landlord should sell too cheap, and give the last Gilbert and Sullivan touch to an already absurd situation, the Wyndham Act of 1903 gave a bonus to the landlord at the expense of the British taxpayer, and this bonus was in proportion not to the rental but to the purchase money, so that the more was got out of the tenant the more was got out of the taxpayer, and any landlord who sold at a reasonable price lost doubly. The so-called Purchase Acts were really Landlords' Endowment Acts, and only served the former purpose incidentally so far as it was involved in serving the latter.

It must, however, in fairness be admitted that the possibilities of the situation were only gradually appreciated, or else it required the confidence engendered by a long spell of office and the majority secured in the khaki election (2), to give the courage requisite for taking full advantage of them. In the Purchase Acts of 1885, 1887, and 1891, the instalments were fixed at 4% of the purchase money, so that a tenant who agreed to a term of more than 25 years' purchase would have to pay more than his former rent. As the whole attraction of the scheme from the tenants' point of view was to get a reduction of rent, this was never done, and the average price of the land sold under the Ashbourne Act was only about 18 years' purchase (Bonn: "Modern Ireland and her Agrarian Problem," p138, footnote). (3)

So long as the instalments remained at 4%, the absence of compulsion is important rather as retarding sales than as increasing the price, and the Unionist Ministry cannot be very severely criticised for their failure to include it, in view of the fact that not merely did their Irish supporters in the House of Commons not use their influence in this direction, but when in 1896 a proposal was made by the Government itself to apply the principle to properties in the Landed Estates Court, whose duty it was under certain circumstances to sell the encumbered property in its charge, the present Ulster leader opposed the Bill which contained it as a "betrayal", and criticised its terms most scathingly. In a letter to The Times of July 23, 1896, Sir Edward (then Mr) Carson left no doubt as to the class of the Irish people whose interests he and his fellow Irish Unionists had at heart in their criticisms of the Bill. In this letter he wrote:- " I say nothing now of the manner in which those of us who represent landlords' interests in the House have been treated by our friends" (the italics are mine, JJ).

The election of 1895 had been fought in Ireland entirely on the question of Home Rule. No sooner was the Union safe than these Ulster Unionist members made it perfectly clear that on land questions they were in the House of Commons to represent, not the interests of the Ulster tenant farmers who had returned them by their votes, but those of the class to which they themselves almost exclusively belonged.

Sir Edward opposed this Bill as of a socialistic and revolutionary character. The then champion of orthodoxy has now become a revolutionist himself, and I greatly fear, as I have indicated some way back, that there is considerable likelihood that the Provisional Government which has by this time been set up, will have to go a good deal further in the direction of socialism than the Land Bill of 1896 went, if a considerable proportion of its subjects are not to die of starvation during the first fortnight of its existence.

The attitude of the Ulster leader is essentially the same to-day as it was in 1896. Circumstances, however, and consequently the methods it is advisable to use, are different. In 1896, the Union being safe for the time being, he was free to consult the interests of his friends the landlords; at present, the Union being again in danger, he desires to save the Union doubtless in order that in future he may be able once more to promote the same interests he admittedly had at heart on that occasion. In each case the fixed idea to which everything else must give way is that the Irish landlords must be preserved in their rights and privileges at all costs, and as for the rest of the population, where not deserving of extermination as hereditary enemies, it should be extremely thankful if it is allowed to live on the crumbs let fall from the rich man's table. If there is to he a civil war, it is to be hoped that the rank and file, especially the agricultural classes, clearly understand what they are fighting to establish, otherwise the splendour of the victory, if there is one, may be dimmed, as in the case of the Balkan allies, by the outbreak of hostilities among the conquerors.

It is customary in Unionist circles to speak with bated breath of the Wyndham Act of 1903 as the finest flower of British statesmanship, and to allege that if the wicked Liberal Government had not killed it by the modifications introduced in the Act of 1909, Ireland would now be an earthly paradise, and the very thought of Home Rule would be indignantly repudiated lest the ideal perfection of the situation should be marred.

Let us examine how far this description of the measure and its results can be accepted as correct. Friendliness and harmony are rather at a discount at present, but when it is considered desirable to praise those virtues, it is pointed out that it was in connection with this measure that almost for the first time in history all parties were united.

The Act was the sequel to a conference, the proceedings of which I must frankly admit form the strongest argument in favour of the Union of any I have yet seen, since in this case it provided a milch cow whose productiveness was only equalled by its docility. The landlords were there to get as much as they could for their land. The Nationalist leaders were there to get a substantial reduction on the payments to be made by the tenants. How were these conflicting interests to be reconciled? The difficulty might well seem insuperable, but it was triumphantly overcome. In regard to the manner in which the problem was solved I shall again quote from the German historian already mentioned, who writes as follows:-

"If the payments of the tenants were to be reduced by 15% to 25%, and the gross income of the landlord to be reduced by only 10%, on the basis of 3% investments, it is clear that there must be a gap to be filled up. This gap was to be filled by the Treasury of the United Kingdom, by means of a bonus to be accorded to the landlord in the interests of the pacification of Ireland."

That the harmony thus established failed to be permanent is in no way surprising. Austria and Russia have not ceased to quarrel because they agreed on the partition of Poland, and as it is no part of the policy of the Irish Party to consult the interests of the British taxpayer while they are kept at Westminster against their will, while the landlord classes instinctively look on him as their natural prey, an agreement on this point means no more than it did in the analogous case I have alluded to. The Nationalists took what they could get, and the landlords got what they could take. This turned out to be considerable. Under this Act the period of repayment was extended, and the instalments reduced to 3.25% of the purchase money. The effect of this on raising the price of the land has already been pointed out.

A zone system was also introduced, by which if the reductions on purchase were between 10 and 30% on second term rents, and 20 and 40% on first term rents, the Estates Commissioners were bound to make the advances at once, whereas in other cases a tedious investigation was necessary. This meant in effect the establishment of a legal minimum price of 21.53 and 18.46 years' purchase respectively, or practically of 21.53 since most of the rents by that time had become second term. Then on the top of all this was the bonus of £12,000,000, which was given in proportion to the price realised, so that the landlord might have a double inducement to hold out for a high figure. And as if to remove any possible doubt that the objects of the framers of the measure was to subsidise the landlords, not to benefit the tenants, there was another ingenious provision, which I shall leave it to the German historian to describe. Bonn, at page 141, English translation, writes as follows:-

"The landlord, however, is permitted to sell his residence and demesne, not to the tenants, but to the Land Commission. He can afterwards buy them back from the Commission by means of an advance which they will make him, but which it must be observed may not exceed one-third of the total value of the estate. The landlord has never drawn rent from this demesne, but on an estate of the value of say £20,000 he has perhaps encumbrances amounting to some £10,000 for which he is paying interest at 5 per cent. For every £1,000 of net rental he, therefore, received only £500. Now let us suppose that he sells his residence with the estate and receives £5,000 for it. With this £5,000 he pays a part of his old debt and contracts a new one at 2% interest; that is to say, instead of paying £250 interest he pays only £140, thus saving £110."

In other words, lest the pressure of his necessities should induce any landlord to sell to the tenants at a reasonable rate, the Government steps in, obligingly buys his residence and demesne land, and then sells it back to him at what is, so far as he is concerned, little more than half-price, since it reduces his liabilities by that equivalent. In this way a certain proportion of the money which the deluded British taxpayer had been induced to vote under the impression that he was establishing peasant proprietors in Ireland, not merely did not go to establish them, but was utilised so as to prevent their establishment by relieving the landlords of the necessity of selling their tenanted land, and consequently raising the price of all such land sold, and causing the money left to be devoted to this purpose to go a much shorter way than it otherwise would.

The most superficial consideration will show that the inevitable result of all these provisions was to inflate artificially the price of Irish land sold under the Act. It was calculated when the Wyndham Act was introduced, that the £100,000,000 which it contemplated advancing would suffice to bring about the transfer to the tenants of all the agricultural land remaining in the bands of the landlords.

Under the Wyndham Act £85,410,602 has actually been, or is about to be, advanced. The Act of 1909 has added £11,225,234 to that figure. Even now, however, one-third of the land of Ireland still remains unsold, and the cost of selling it is estimated at £60,000,000. If there was any accuracy in the calculations of the framers of the Wyndham Act, it would seem that a considerable proportion; say half, of £60,000,000 has been simply wasted, though perhaps the Party responsible for that Act would dissent from this view on the principle that "It's not lost what a friend gets." In other words, the Irish landlords who have sold, have got anything up to £30,000,000 more for their land than it was worth.

The most annoying thing in connection with this enormous squandering of public money is that it was entirely unnecessary, even in the interests of the landlords themselves. One reason why many landlords were unwilling to sell except at a prohibitive price, was that where estates were entailed, the purchase money could only be invested in trustee securities, which only as a rule yield from 3 to 3.5%. Had this provision been relaxed, investments could have been found at 4 and possibly even 4.5%, which would have been safe enough for all practical purposes, and the price could have been reduced in a corresponding degree without loss to the existing owner.

A foreigner would have expected that a government which called on the taxpayer to make such sacrifices and incur such liabilities in order to bring about a certain result, would have taken all the subsidiary measures requisite to ensure that result being attained - in fact the German author I have quoted criticised this portion of the Act rather severely - but this presupposes a logical completeness in English legislation the absence of which is its greatest pride.

Besides if once the voice of logic or reason had been allowed to begin to make itself heard, it would have gone on to demand a compulsory clause, and to take some steps to check the inflation of value created by the operation of the Act, and that would have, been downright socialism. It was rather hard on the tenants whose lands were not sold, but the sacred principle of property was at stake, and as those who were hit hardest were Ulster loyalists, they had the satisfaction of knowing that they were being martyred for the cause.

Consequently it was left to the Act of 1909, and to that introduced during the last session, to remedy this and the other glaring administrative defects of the Wyndham Act, after that measure of frenzied finance had collapsed under the weight of its own extravagance.

The absence of compulsion did not matter very much in the south and west, as the custom which used to prevail in some of those parts of shooting at a landlord who showed too marked a disregard for the interests of his tenants, and the other practices incidental to a land war, made a large proportion of the landlords only too glad to sell out when the opportunity was afforded them of being able to do so on favourable terms.

In Ulster, however, where except in backward places like Donegal, the people not merely do not shoot at their landlords, but send them to represent their interests, as they fondly believe, at Westminster, the situation was different. The landlords there are quite content with the existing arrangement of things, and in a great many instances have elected to remain. As long ago as 1905, Bonn, the German author I have frequently had occasion to quote, foretold this, when he wrote:-

"There will, however, always be a number of properties whose owners will decline to sell. These will be precisely those estates whose tenants pay their rents regularly and will not be led into acts of disorder - that is to say practically the Ulster tenantry."

In order to verify the extent to which this has happened, I have thought it advisable to examine the most recent statistics on the subject. They are complicated somewhat by the fact that holdings above a certain size do not come within the scope of the Act, and also, if I may be allowed to say so, by the other fact that nearly half of the population of Ulster is Nationalist, and in Nationalist districts the attitude of the landlords and tenants towards each other is very much the same as in the South and West. These circumstances make the figures I have obtained all the more striking.

A recently published return for the period up to 31st March, 1913, gives the area, poor law valuation, and purchase money of (a) lands sold, and (b) lands in respect of which proceedings for sale have been instituted and are pending under the Irish Land Purchase Acts; also the estimated area, poor law valuation, and purchase money of lands in respect of which proceedings for sale have not yet been instituted. The details are given for counties and provinces as well. From this return it a pears that 12,202,591 acres of land have been sold, or are in process of being sold, under those Acts, and that 6,577,219 acres have not been sold, and no negotiations for their sale are pending. That is to say 65% of the land of Ireland has been affected by already existing Land Acts.

What are the figures for the respective provinces? In Ulster 2,989,866 acres have been, or are about to be, sold, whereas 2,173,198 acres do not come in either of these categories. The total number of acres of land in Ulster is thus 4,963,064; 65% of this is 3,225,991. But the amount of land actually sold or about to be sold in Ulster is less than this by 436,125 acres.

Thus the proportion of land sold in Ulster is rather less than the average for the whole of Ireland in the proportion of 56 to 65. Let us take the figures for the other provinces. The total number of acres of land in the other three provinces is 13,816,746. 65% of that is 8,980,884 acres. But the amount actually sold, or about to be sold, is 9,412,725 acres. That is to say over 68% of the land of the other three provinces has been, or is about to be, sold, as against 56% in Ulster.

These facts speak for themselves. Moreover, this is not all. In Ulster practically every holding comes within the terms of the Land Acts previous to 1909, while in Leinster and Connaught, and to a lesser extent in Munster, there are many large grazing farms and holdings so large as to be excluded from the scope of the 1903 Act. By that Act no holding worth more than £5,000, or in exceptional cases £7,000, might be sold. If we take it that practically every holding with a poor law valuation of £200 and upwards is worth upwards of £5,000, we can see to what extent the figures ought to be re-arranged in order to bring out the true proportion. In Leinster there are according to the last Census return 2,078 such holdings with a total area of 858,567 acres. In Munster there are 920 with an acreage of 368,744. In Connaught there are 397, with a total area of 236,760 acres. In Ulster there are only 553, the total area being 184,940 acres.

Let us make the necessary corrections by excluding the lands not eligible for sale and then compare the results obtained. They work out to 58% and 76% respectively. In other words only about three-quarters as much land has been sold in Ulster as would have been if it had kept pace with the rest of Ireland. This is the reward of loyalty and industry, and all those virtues which their leaders and their newspapers are never tired of telling the Ulster people they possess, and that the rest of the population are conspicuously without. And more wonderful still, the only chance of getting this state of things remedied is by a measure introduced by a Government against whom they are even now preparing to take up arms, and which is kept in power by the assistance of the "hereditary enemies".

When this is the manner in which Ulster farmers are treated by their friends, apart from all moral considerations, it seems rather a waste of energy to kill their enemies, much more to undergo a long and laborious training in order to be in a position to do so. When their friends behave as their enemies, would it not perhaps be advisable to wait and see if after all their supposed enemies are not their friends? They cannot well be less so than those who have hitherto posed as such.

It is usually asserted that the Liberal Government by the Land Act which they passed in 1909 killed land purchase. It is more correct to assert that the Act was killed by its own financial absurdities. The £100,000,000 which Mr. Wyndham fondly hoped would complete the sale of Irish land was nearly all used up by 1909 and less than two-thirds of Irish land was sold. Owing to the reasons given above, the prices paid were very much inflated, and consequently the money available was used up in buying out landlords who found it convenient to sell, and did not go so far as it would have gone had there been a compulsory clause and machinery for fixing a fair price.

Moreover, by a clause in the Wyndham Act which for sheer cynical audacity eclipses all the others, the cost of the flotation of Land Stock fell ultimately on the Irish rates, so that the tenant who was deprived of the privilege of being able to buy, might at least participate indirectly by helping to pay for the land of those who did have the opportunity. However, the stock fell so much in value, and the liability of the rates mounted to such an extent, that it became imperative to relieve them, which was done by the Act of 1909 passed by the Liberal Government. The Act of 1903 was a failure in the congested districts of the West, where holdings are uneconomic, and a tenant could not afford to pay the price which the landlord would be willing to accept. On such holdings a peasant proprietary could no more thrive than did the tenant farmers they would be replacing.

There were in 1902 upwards of 200,000 holdings of the class technically known by this name, that is to say, with a poor law valuation of under or a little over £4. In this case the problem is one not of the mere purchase of a tenant's holding, but of the purchase of untenanted lands and their resale in lots to the occupiers of uneconomic holdings. The Congested Districts Board was founded in 1891 to deal with this situation. It had no compulsory powers of expropriation and consequently the progress of the work was so slow that in 1903 it had only dealt with some 44 estates. By the Land Act of 1909 the requisite powers of compulsory expropriation were given to it, but that good friend of Ulster, the House of Lords, threw out the compulsory clause so far as it applied to the rest of Ireland, and since then land purchase in the congested districts has proceeded rapidly. Mr. Birrell introducing the new Land Bill said:-

"Then came the much abused Act of 1909, and the result of that Act was in the very part where land purchase hardly moved at all. The Congested Districts Board had been able to purchase for the relief of congestion and the improvement of the people 1,485,774 acres of land. Since the passing of that Act land purchase had proceeded in the West even faster than it had in any other part of Ireland"

This was the result of the existence of a clause compelling the landlords of untenanted lands to sell their land at a fair price, in order that they might be distributed among the occupiers of the uneconomic holdings in question.

The Congested Districts Board is a fairly large and expensive Government department, yet the party which is now trying to make political capital out of the fact that the administration of the Insurance Act has to be paid for, kept it practically idle while they were in office rather than give it the powers necessary to secure its efficiency.

Some of the most glaring defects of the Unionist measures have been or are in process of being corrected by the legislation of the Liberal Government, and because they do not go on pouring money like water into the lap of the Irish landlords, but insist on getting value for it in return, the latter and their phonographs in Westminster have actually had the effrontery to raise the cry that the Liberals have killed land purchase. They are so accustomed to consider themselves the centre of the universe that it never even crosses their mind that the interests of the rest of the nation may have to be considered as well as theirs. The whole guiding principle of the Unionist land purchase schemes has been admirably summarised by a French writer, M Paul Dubois (4), who in his book "Contemporary Ireland" writes thus about the Land Act of 1903:-

"Emanating from a Government friendly to the landlords, it hides badly, under an appearance of impartiality, clever attempts to place the landlords in a position of advantage to raise in their favour the price of the land."

Ulster Unionist Record

So far as the province they are supposed to represent is concerned, what have they ever done beyond endeavouring to keep everything as it was before, with an occasional sop to the landlord and the liquor interest when the party leaders at Westminster so decreed? They are at one with the rank and file of their party in Ulster only in their opposition to Home Rule; even in this particular they are only able to maintain the zeal of their constituents at fever heat by playing on their religions fears and repeating parrot-like the cry, "Home Rule means Rome Rule," a belief which they may or may not hold in their hearts, but of which in any case a slight acquaintance with history, a little breadth of view, or in the last resort a brief interview with the present Chief Whip of their Party ought to suffice to disabuse them.

Whether Home Rule means Rome Rule or not, everyone knows ritualism is essentially Romish, yet the Ulster Unionists helped to pass an Education Bill in 1902 which was a surrender to the ritualistic tendencies of the Church of England. Lest I should seem to be exaggerating, I add a quotation from a sermon by Rev W T Hanson preached at Albert Bridge Congregational Church on the anniversary of "Ulster Day" in obedience to the orders of the Ulster leader, his criticism of the general tendency of the Act for which Sir Edward Carson himself voted ought to be of interest to those Ulster Protestants who regard him and his party as the bulwark of their faith. The reverend gentleman is reported to have made use of the following remarks:-

"But why should I bring you centuries back that you might see the workings of Rome, for is it not in the memory of even the youngest her doings within the last few years? Think of the Education Act, an Act which practically hands over the whole education of the youth of England to Ritualists, and the next generation will be under the yoke of Ritualism. It was no friend of Protestantism that did that. Think of a Nonconformist child as the result of that Act being marched from his school and made to bow with other Ritualistic children before a crucifix. You may say that he can refuse through his parents, but a law that makes it even possible that Protestant children would be asked to do so in a Protestant country is iniquitous in the extreme, and should not be tolerated."

The Ulster Unionist members were "no friends of Protestantism" in 1902. Neither are they friends of temperance reform - a cause with which most Protestant denominations are closely associated. In fact their attitude on this question is notorious, and used to call down on their unrepentant heads the wrath of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the days when that body still possessed some vestiges of independence, and had not yet been transformed into a Unionist Club.

It is unnecessary, however, to enter into further details about the manner in which they have misrepresented the interests and flouted the desires of the general body of their constituents. I pass on to discuss their attitude towards the general question of the Government of Ireland, and their policy with regard to the present Home Rule Bill.

Notes and References

2. An election won by the Tories in a wave of Boer War jingoism.

3. Moritz Julius Bonn wrote extensively on imperialism and colonisation, his first being 'Modern Ireland and the Agrarian Problem' (Dublin and London 1906); of the 10 titles on record in the TCD library the last in 1961 is with Alan Denson and is a reminiscence of George Russell (AE) together with a collection of the latter's writings. He wrote critically in the 30s on the economics of the Depression, and in the 50s on European integration. He would seem to have been an agrarian economist of the Left, with co-operativist leanings, somewhat similar to JJ. RJ 19/03/99.

4. Louis Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland, Maunsel, Dublin 1908. There is an introduction by T M Kettle MP, in which he defines the Paul-Dubois position as '..definitely for Ireland and against England...for the Gaelic League and against linguistic imperialism, for the ploughed field and against the grazing ranch, for Home Rule and against the Act of Union..'. Paul-Dubois acknowledges help from T P Gill, Rev F J Hogan and the Maynooth authorities, and Sir Horace Plunkett; also J F Taylor KC, the late W E H Lecky, A E Clery, J M Hone and G F H Berkeley. The intellectual basis of pre-1914 all-Ireland Home Rule thinking needs exploration, especially as regards its inclusive non-sectarian character. RJ 29/03/99.

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1998