Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1Bright, John
History
Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1
Bright, John
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
There is another, and what I should call a more permanent and far-
reaching remedy for the evils of Ireland, and those persons who stickle
so much for political economy I hope will follow me in this. The great
evil of Ireland is this--that the Irish people--the Irish nation--are
dispossessed of the soil, and what we ought to do is to provide for, and
aid in, their restoration to it by all measures of justice. Why should
we tolerate in Ireland the law of primogeniture? Why should we tolerate
the system of entails? Why should the object of the law be to accumulate
land in great masses in few hands, and to make it almost impossible for
persons of small means, and tenant-farmers, to become possessors of
land? If you go to other countries--for example, to Norway, to Denmark,
to Holland, to Belgium, to France, to Germany, to Italy, or to the
United States, you will find that in all these countries those laws of
which I complain have been abolished, and the land is just as free to
buy and sell, and hold and cultivate, as any other description of
property in the kingdom. No doubt your Landed Estates Court and your
Record of Titles Act were good measures, but they were good because they
were in the direction that I want to travel farther in.
But I would go farther than that; I would deal with the question of
absenteeism. I am not going to propose to tax absentees; but if my
advice were taken, we should have a Parliamentary Commission empowered
to buy up the large estates in Ireland belonging to the English
nobility, for the purpose of selling them on easy terms to the occupiers
of the farms and to the tenantry of Ireland. Now, let me be fairly
understood. I am not proposing to tax absentees; I am not proposing to
take any of their property from them; but I propose this, that a
Parliamentary Commission should be empowered to treat for the purchase
of those large estates with a view of selling them to the tenantry of
Ireland. Now, here are some of them--the present Prime Minister Lord
Derby, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Hertford, the
Marquis of Bath, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Devonshire, and many
others. They have estates in Ireland; many of them, I dare say, are just
as well managed as any other estates in the country; but what you want
is to restore to Ireland a middle-class proprietary of the soil; and I
venture to say that if these estates could be purchased and could be
sold out farm by farm to the tenant occupiers in Ireland, that it would
be infinitely better in a conservative sense, than that they should
belong to great proprietors living out of the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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