Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1901-1910; Land tenure -- Ireland
'Three F's,' infringe the statutory conditions imposed on them, they may
be dispossessed, and he may enter upon their farms again. But,
notwithstanding exceptions and possibilities like these, the Irish
landlord has, for practical purposes, been well-nigh assimilated to a
rent-charger, and his tenants have been nearly converted into owners of
the soil, an utter revolution in the whole land system, in truth, turning
it upside down. The status, indeed, of the Irish landed gentry now bears a
strong resemblance to that of the chief landlords of the eighteenth
century, who, separating themselves altogether from their lands, let them
in perpetuity at low rents, and, as a necessary consequence, produced the
middleman, the pest, as he has rightly been called, of Irish land tenure.
The enormous and, as I believe, the unjust benefits secured by recent
legislation to the Irish tenant, are not, however, so complete as they
appear to be, and are not without disadvantages attendant on them. Tenants
of holdings, to which the law does not apply, such as tenants of demesnes
and large pastoral lands, if rightly excluded, nevertheless complain; and
'future tenants,' and petty occupants, who cannot afford to seek 'fair
rents' from the Courts, have, from their point of view, solid grounds of
complaint. The scope of the new land code is, therefore, to some extent,
restricted; and if the law has actually caused a general reduction of
rents, it has not secured the 'Three F's' for a considerable body of
farmers, not improbably a fourth or fifth part of the class as a whole.
And even the occupiers of the Irish soil, who have obtained the advantages
of the new mode of tenure, have not obtained these without a certain kind
of drawback. Completely separated as they now are from their former
landlords, they cannot expect indulgences from a class which considers
itself to have been shamefully wronged; the allowances, which, whatever
may be said, had been made to them, in thousands of cases, have, as a
rule, been altogether withdrawn; they get no help in making improvements;
they are usually obliged regularly to pay their 'fair rents;' above all,
landlords, of a strict or harsh nature, are sometimes on the look-out to
see if they do not violate the statutory conditions to which they are
subject, in order to convert them into 'future tenants,' outside of the
protection of the law, and even to reacquire their lands. These
circumstances are not without adverse effects; though unquestionably they
are far more than countervailed by the change which has been wrought in
Irish land tenure, and has given the Irish tenant the benefits already
described. Yet, even from this point of view, the law does not operate as
unreservedly in his favour as might be supposed. He has his 'fair rent,'
probably much too low; his 'fixity of tenure,' a perpetuity in all but
name; his right to 'free sale,' sometimes worth thousands of pounds. But,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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