The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II Part 24

The plan ultimately adopted, after a severe struggle and with momentous consequences, did not first spring from Mr. Gladstone's brain. The idea of adapting the law to custom in all its depth and breadth, and extending the rooted notion of tenant-right to its furthest bearings, was necessarily a plant of Irish and not of English growth. Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the Irish chief secretary and an Irishman, first opened a bold expansion of the familiar principle of many tenant-right bills. He had introduced such a bill himself in 1866, and the conservative government had brought in another in 1867. It is believed that he was instigated to adopt the new and bolder line by Sir Edward Sullivan, then the Irish attorney-general.

Away from Sullivan, it was observed, he had little to say of value about his plan. In the cabinet Fortescue was not found effective, but he was thoroughly at home in the subject, and his speeches in public on Irish business had all the cogency of a man speaking his native tongue, and even genius in an acquired language is less telling. What is astonishing is the magic of the rapid and sympathetic penetration with which Mr. Gladstone went to the heart of the problem, as it was presented to him by his Irish advisers. This was his way. When acts of policy were not of great or immediate concern, he took them as they came; but when they pressed for treatment and determination, then he swooped down upon them with the strength and vision of an eagle.

II

His career in the most deeply operative portion of it was so intimately concerned with Ireland, that my readers will perhaps benignantly permit a page or two of historic digression. I know the subject seems uninviting.

My apology must be that it occupied no insignificant portion of Mr.

Gladstone's public life, and that his treatment of it made one of his deepest marks on the legislation of the century. After all, there is no English-speaking community in any part of the wide globe, where our tragic mismanagement of the land of Ireland, and of those dwelling on it and sustained by it, has not left its unlucky stamp.

(M86) If Englishmen and Scots had not found the theme so uninviting, if they had given a fraction of the attention to the tenure and history of Irish land, that was bestowed, say, upon the Seisachtheia of Solon at Athens, or the Semp.r.o.nian law in ancient Rome, this chapter in our annals would not have been written. As it was, parliament had made laws for landlord and tenant in Ireland without well understanding what is either an Irish landlord or an Irish tenant. England has been able to rule India, Mill said, because the business of ruling devolved upon men who pa.s.sed their lives in India, and made Indian interests their regular occupation.

India has on the whole been governed with a pretty full perception of its differences from England. Ireland on the contrary, suffering a worse misfortune than absentee landlords, was governed by an absentee parliament. In England, property means the rights of the rent-receiver who has equipped the land and prepared it for the capital and the skill of the tenant. In Ireland, in the minds of the vast majority of the population, for reasons just as good, property includes rights of the cultivator, whose labour has drained the land, and reclaimed it, and fenced it, and made farm-roads, and put a dwelling and farm buildings on it, and given to it all the working value that it possesses. We need suppose no criminality on either side. The origin of the difference was perfectly natural. In Ireland the holdings were small and mult.i.tudinous; no landlord who was not a millionaire, could have prepared and equipped holdings numbered by hundreds or thousands; and if he could, the hundreds and thousands of tenants had not a straw of capital. This peculiarity in social circ.u.mstances made it certain, therefore, that if the moral foundation of modern ideas of property is that he who sows shall reap, the idea of property would grow up in the mind of the cultivator, whenever the outer climate permitted the growth in his mind of any ideas of moral or equitable right at all.

In 1843 the Devon Commission had reported that it is the tenant who has made the improvements; that large confiscations of these improvements had been systematically practised in the shape of progressive enhancements of rent; that crime and disorder sprang from the system; and that parliament ought to interfere. A bill was proposed by the Peel government in 1845 for protecting the rightful interests of the tenant against the landlord. It was introduced in the House mainly composed of landlords. There it had such contumelious greeting, that it was speedily dropped. This was a crowning ill.u.s.tration of the levity of the imperial parliament dealing with Irish problems. The vital necessity for readjusting the foundations of social life demonstrated; a half measure languidly attempted; attempt dropped; bills sent to slumber in limbo; dry rot left quietly alone for a whole generation, until b.l.o.o.d.y outrage and murder awoke legislative conscience or roused executive fear. The union was seventy years old before the elementary feature in the agrarian condition of Ireland was recognised by the parliament which had undertaken to govern Ireland.

Before the union Ireland was governed by the British cabinet, through the Irish landed gentry, according to their views, and in their interests.

After the union it was just the same. She was treated as a turbulent and infected province within the larger island; never as a community with an internal economy peculiarly her own, with special sentiments, history, recollections, points of view, and necessities all her own. Between the union and the year 1870, Acts dealing with Irish land had been pa.s.sed at Westminster. Every one of these Acts was in the interest of the landlord and against the tenant. A score of Insurrection Acts, no Tenant-right Act.

Meanwhile Ireland had gone down into the dark gulfs of the Famine (1846-7).

Anybody can now see that the true view of the Irish cultivator was to regard him as a kind of copyholder or customary freeholder, or whatever other name best fits a man who has possessory interests in a piece of land, held at the landlord's will, but that will controlled by custom. In Ulster, and in an embryo degree elsewhere, this was what in a varying and irregular way actually had come about. Agrarian customs developed that undoubtedly belong to a backward social system, but they sprang from the necessities of the case. The essence of such customs in Ulster was first, a fair rent to be fixed not by compet.i.tion, but by valuation, and exclusive of tenant's improvements; second, the right of the tenant to transfer to somebody else his goodwill, or whatever else we may call his right of occupancy in the holding.

Instead of adapting law to custom, habit, practice, and equity, parliament proceeded to break all this down. With well-meaning but blind violence it imported into Ireland after the famine the English idea of landed property and contract. Or rather, it imported these ideas into Ireland with a definiteness and formality that would have been impracticable even in England. Just as good people thought they could easily make Ireland protestant if only she could be got within earshot of evangelical truth, so statesmen expected that a few clauses on a parchment would suffice to root out at a stroke the inveterate habits and ideas of long generations.

We talk of revolutionary doctrinaires in France and other countries.

History hardly shows such revolutionary doctrinaires anywhere as the whig and tory statesmen who tried to regenerate Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century. They first of all pa.s.sed an Act (1849) inviting the purchase of the estates of an insolvent landlord upon precisely the same principles as governed the purchase of his pictures or his furniture. We pa.s.sed the Enc.u.mbered Estates Act, Mr. Gladstone said, "with lazy, heedless, uninformed good intentions." The important rights given by custom and equity to the cultivator were suddenly extinguished by the supreme legal right of the rent-receiver. About one-eighth of the whole area of the country is estimated to have changed hands on these terms. The extreme of wretchedness and confusion naturally followed. Parliament thought this must be due to some misunderstanding. That there might be no further mistake, it next proceeded formally to declare (1860) that the legal relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland were to be those of strict contract.(186) Thus blunder was clenched by blunder. The cultivators were terror-struck, and agitation waxed hot.

Oliver Cromwell had a glimpse of the secret in 1649. "These poor people,"

he said, "have been accustomed to as much injustice and oppression from their landlords, the great men, and those who should have done them right, as any people in that which we call Christendom. Sir, if justice were freely and impartially administered here, the foregoing darkness and corruption would make it look so much the more glorious and beautiful." It was just two hundred and twenty years before another ruler of England saw as deep, and applied his mind to the free doing of justice.

III

Almost immediately after recovering from the fatigues of the session of 1869, Mr. Gladstone threw himself upon his new task, his imagination vividly excited by its magnitude and its possibilities. "For the last three months," he writes to the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 5), "I have worked daily, I think, upon the question, and so I shall continue to do. The literature of it is large, larger than I can master; but I feel the benefit of continued reading upon it. We have before us a crisis, and a great crisis, for us all, to put it on no higher ground, and a great honour or a great disgrace. As I do not mean to fail through want of perseverance, so neither will I wilfully err through precipitancy, or through want of care and desire at least to meet all apprehensions which are warranted by even the show of reason."

It was not reading alone that brought him round to the full measure of securing the cultivator in his holding. The crucial suggestion, the expediency, namely, of making the landlord pay compensation to the tenant for disturbing him, came from Ireland. To Mr. Chichester Fortescue, the Irish secretary, Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 15):-

I heartily wish, it were possible that you, Sullivan, and I could have some of those preliminary conversations on land, which were certainly of great use in the first stages of the Irish Church bill. As this is difficult, let us try to compare notes as well as we can in writing. I antic.i.p.ate that many members of the cabinet will find it hard to extend their views to what the exigencies of the time, soberly considered, now require; but patience, prudence, and good feeling will, I hope, surmount all obstacles.

Like you, I am unwilling to force a peasant proprietary into existence.... The first point in this legislation, viz., that the presumption of law should give improvements to the tenant, is now, I suppose, very widely admitted, but no longer suffices to settle the question.... Now as to your "compensation for disturbance."

This is indeed a question full of difficulty. It is very desirable to prevent the using of augmentation of rent as a method of eviction. I shall be most curious to see the means and provisions you may devise, without at present being too sanguine.

(M87) Meanwhile he notes to Lord Granville (Sept. 22) how critical and arduous the question is, within as well as without the cabinet, and wonders whether they ought not to be thinking of a judicious cabinet committee:-

The question fills the public mind in an extraordinary degree, and we can hardly avoid some early step towards making progress in it.

A committee keeps a cabinet quiet. It is highly necessary that we should be quite ready when parliament meets, and yet there is so much mental movement upon the question from day to day, as we see from a variety of curious utterances (that of the _Times_ included), that it is desirable to keep final decisions open. Much information will be open, and this a committee can prepare in concert with the Irish government. It also, I think, affords a means of bringing men's minds together.

He tells the Irish secretary that so far as he can enter into the secretary's views, he "enters thoroughly into the spirit of them." But many members of the cabinet, laden sufficiently with their own labours, had probably not so closely followed up the matter:-

The proposition, that _more_ than compensation to tenants for their improvements will be necessary in order to settle the Irish land laws, will be unpalatable, or new, to several, and naturally enough. You will have observed the total difference in the internal situation between this case and that of the Irish church, where upon all the greater points our measure was in a manner outlined for us by the course of previous transactions.

At the end of October the question was brought formally before the cabinet:-

_Oct. 30._-Cabinet, 2-5-.... We broke ground very satisfactorily on the question of Irish land. _Nov. 3._-Cabinet. Chiefly on Irish land, and stiff. 9.-To Guildhall, where I spoke for the government. The combination of physical effort with measured words is difficult. 22.-Worked six hours on my books, arranging and re-arranging. The best brain rest I have had, I think, since December last.

The brain rest was not for long. On Dec. 1 he tells Lord Granville that Argyll is busy on Irish land, and in his views is misled by "the rapid facility of his active mind." "It is rather awkward at this stage to talk of breaking up the government, and that is more easily said than done." I know no more singular reading in its way than the correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll; Mr. Gladstone trying to lead his argumentative colleague over one or two of the barest rudiments of the history of Irish land, and occasionally showing in the process somewhat of the quality of the superior pupil teacher acquiring to-day material for the lesson of to-morrow. Mr. Gladstone goes to the root of the matter when he says to the Duke: "What I would most earnestly entreat of you is not to rely too much on Highland experience, but to acquaint yourself by careful reading with the rather extensive facts and history of the Irish land question. My own studies in it are very imperfect, though pursued to the best of my ability; but they have revealed to me many matters of fact which have seriously modified my views, most of them connected with and branching out of the very wide extension of the idea and even the practice of tenant right, mostly perhaps _un_recognised beyond the limits of the Ulster custom."

Then Lord Granville writes to him that Clarendon has sent him two letters running, talking of the certainty of the government being broken up. "The sky is very far from clear," Mr. Gladstone says to Mr. Fortescue (Dec. 3), "but we must bate no jot of heart or hope." The next day it is Mr. Bright to whom he turns in friendly earnest admonition. His words will perhaps be useful to many generations of cabinet ministers:-

It is not the courageous part of your paper to which I now object, though I doubt the policy of the reference to feebleness and timidity, as men in a cabinet do not like what may _seem_ to imply that they are cowards. It is your argument (a very over-strained one in my opinion) against Fortescue's propositions, and your proposal (so it reads) to put them back in order of discussion to the second place _now_, when the mind of the cabinet has been upon them for six weeks.... Had the cabinet adopted at this moment _a good and sufficient scheme for dealing with the Irish tenants as tenants_, I should care little how much you depreciated such a scheme in comparison with one for converting them into owners. But the state of things is most critical. This is not a time at which those who in substance agree, can afford to throw away strength by the _relative_ depreciation of those parts of a plan of relief, to which they do not themselves give the first place in importance.

It is most dangerous to discredit _propositions which you mean to adopt_, in the face of any who (as yet) do not mean to adopt them, and who may consistently and honourably use all your statements against them, nay, who would really be bound to do so. No part of what I have said is an argument against your propositions.... If your seven propositions were law to-day, you would have made but a very small progress towards settling the land question of Ireland.

For all this very plain speech, you will, I am sure, forgive me.

A letter from Mr. Gladstone to Fortescue (Dec. 5) shows the compet.i.tion between Bright's projects of purchase by state-aid, and the scheme for dealing with the tenants as tenants:-

I am a good deal staggered at the idea of any interference with present rents. But I shall not speak on this subject to others. It will be difficult enough to carry the substance of the plan you proposed, without any enlargement of it. I hope to see you again before the question comes on in the cabinet.... Bright is very full of waste lands, and generally of his own plans, considerably (at present) to the detriment of yours. He wants the government to buy waste lands, and says it is not against political economy, but yours is. I think he will come right. It appears to me we might in the case of waste lands lend money (on proper conditions) to _any buyers_; in the case of other lands we are only to lend to occupiers. What do you think of this?

(M88) At this date he was still in doubt whether anybody would agree to interference with existing rents, but he had for himself hit upon the principle that became the foundation of his law. He put to Fortescue (Dec.

9) as a material point:-

Whether it is expedient to adopt, wherever it can be made available, _the custom of the country as the basis for compensation on eviction and the like_. I cannot make out from your papers whether you wholly dissent from this. I hoped you had agreed in it. I have acquired a strong conviction upon it, of which I have written out the grounds; but I shall not circulate the paper till I understand your views more fully.

Lowe, at the other extremity, describes himself as more and more "oppressed by a feeling of heavy responsibility and an apprehension of serious danger," and feeling that he and the minority (Clarendon, Argyll, and Cardwell-of whom he was much the best hand at an argument)-were being driven to choose between their gravest convictions, and their allegiance to party and cabinet. They agreed to the presumption of law as to the making of improvements; to compensation for improvements, retrospective and prospective; to the right of new tenants at will to compensation on eviction. The straw that broke the camel's back was compensation for eviction, where no custom could be proved in the case of an existing tenancy. Mr. Gladstone wrote a long argumentative letter to Lord Granville to be shown to Lowe, and it was effectual. Lowe thought the tone of it very fair and the arguments of the right sort, but nevertheless he added, in the words I have already quoted, "I fear he is steering straight upon the rocks."

What might surprise us, if anything in Irish doings could surprise us, is that though this was a measure for Irish tenants, it was deemed heinously wrong to ascertain directly from their representatives what the Irish tenants thought. Lord Bessborough was much rebuked in London for encouraging Mr. Gladstone to communicate with Sir John Gray, the owner of the great newspaper of the Irish tenant cla.s.s. Yet Lord O'Hagan, the chancellor, who had the rather relevant advantage of being of the same stock and faith as three-fourths of the nation concerned, told them that "the success or failure of the Land bill depends on the _Freeman's Journal_; if it says, We accept this as a fixity of tenure, every priest will say the same, and _vice versa_." It was, however, almost a point of honour in those days for British cabinets to make Irish laws out of their own heads.

(M89) Almost to the last the critical contest in the cabinet went on.

Fortescue fought as well as he could even against the prime minister himself, as the following from Mr. Gladstone to him shows (Jan. 12):-

There can surely be no advantage in further argument between you and me at this stage-especially after so many hours and pages of it-on the recognition of usage beyond the limit of Ulster custom as a distinct head. You pressed your view repeatedly on the cabinet, which did not adopt it. Till the cabinet alters its mind, we have no option except to use every effort to get the bill drawn according to its instructions.

How much he had his Irish plans at heart, Mr. Gladstone showed by his urgency that the Queen should open parliament. His letter to her (Jan. 15) on the subject, he told Lord Granville, "expresses my desire, not founded on ordinary motives, nor having reference to ordinary circ.u.mstances":-