But this is not all; the Land Act of 1880 has put a stop to all possible improvement of land, for no reasonable man will expose himself to the risk of losing his money on improvements, because, notwithstanding any contract he may have made with his tenant, the Land Commission may step in and legalize a breach of the contract.[85] The typical landlords in Ireland, whom you hold up for public execration, are not rich noblemen; it would be better for Ireland if they were, but they are mostly men of the middle class, struggling hard to escape the pauperism your iniquitous legislation has brought upon them. Mr. Gladstone on one occasion said:-- “If Great Britain has become a place where the majority can oppress the minority in this way, it has come to be a place of which I should say that the sooner we get out of it the better.” I repeat Mr. Gladstone’s sentiment with greater emphasis. If Mr. Gladstone, with his majority, are allowed to oppress the minority in this way, England is no longer the place for honest and loyal subjects. FOOTNOTES: [82] Total livestock in Ireland in 1874, 9,665,700; in 1883, 8,667,000. [83] Decrease of acreage farmed in 1882-- Cereal crops 20,356 acres. Green crops 21,072 ” Flax 33,643 ” Meadow and Clover 39,256 ” ------- Total decrease 114,327 acres. _Statesman’s Yearbook_, 1883. [84] “It forced properties to a general auction, to be sold for whatever they would bring, at a time when _legislation had imposed new and unheard of burdens on landed property_. At a time of unprecedented depression in the value of land, it called a general auction of Irish estates. _English History records no more violent interference with vested interests_ than the provision by which this Statute forced the sale of a large portion of the landed property at a time no prudent man would have set up an acre to be sold by public competition.” (Tenant Right in Ireland, Butt, p. 881.) “Estates that would have been well able to pay twice the encumbrances laid upon them, if property was at all near its ordinary level of value, now failed to realize enough to meet the mortgages, and the proprietors were devoted to ruin.... The tenants complain that they have gained little and lost much in the change from the old masters to the new.” (‘New Ireland,’ A. M. Sullivan, p. 88.) At the sale of Lord Gort’s property thirteen years’ purchase was the maximum; many lots were sold at five. Some portions of the property since resold have fetched twenty-five and twenty-seven years’ purchase. Excessive rack-renting has been attributed to sales under this iniquitous Encumbered Estates Act. “In those sales persons buy small portions of property; of course their interest is to get as large a return as they can, and they think of nothing but an increase of rent.” (_Minutes of Evidence, Lords Committee_, 1867.)