The Irish Land Acts/Agriculture Situation consequent on the Fair Bent Acts
SECTION IX.
Differences between the English and the Irish Land Systems.
It may fairly be asserted that, so far as the occupying tenantry was concerned, there was no more objectionable land system in Europe than that which prevailed in Ireland before 1870, and no more favourable system than that which exists at the present time. To appreciate the agrarian situation in Ireland at the point at which we have arrived, it is necessary to keep in mind the fundamental difference between the English and the Irish systems which I have before pointed out. In England, speaking generally, agricultural farms are let by the owners fully equipped with buildings, fences, farm roads, and other improvements necessary for the proper working of the holding. The tenant contracts to pay a rent for the farm so equipped, and if he finds that the particular holding does not suit him, he gives it up at the end of his contract term and goes elsewhere. Under this system, what Adam Smith termed "the higgling of the market" is the easiest test of land value, as it is of all other commodities with regard to which competition is free. In Ireland, on the other hand, the landlord, speaking generally, owned only the soil. The agricultural equipment of each farm was the property of the tenant, who was practically an hereditary occupier. He or his predecessor in title had undertaken the drainage and reclamation, bad made the fences and farm roads, had built the houses. Consequently, he was not free; if he walked out at the end of his term, he had to leave behind him his houses, roads, fences and drains; and, even if he were content to lose the benefit of his own improvements, he had nowhere else to settle.
As is natural in a country in the greater part of which there is no other employment or industry than that of agriculture, the competition for farms is so keen that very large sums—often far in excess of the value of the land, if measured by any standard of productive capacity—are paid for the mere right to occupy. The same lack of alternative occupation for the inhabitants allows land in certain poorer parts of the country to yield a profit to the owner which it could not afford if managed on the English system of equipped farms. It is worked by small occupying tenants who are willing to expend their labour and that of their families without any economic income. Without their intervention there would be no adequate return for the necessary expenditure of capital and labour, and, being below the margin of economic profit, the land would go out of cultivation.
Here we have the explanation and the justification of the series of Land Acts from 1870 to 1896. They were an attempt to adjust the law of landlord and tenant to the facts of the case. Before 1870, the law regarded the landlord as the sole owner of the farm, while in fact and equity the tenant was co-owner. The Act of 1870 recognised to a limited extent the co-ownership, but gave insufficient relief. The Act of 1881 was bolder— was, indeed revolutionary— in its principles and methods; it gave complete recognition and more effectual relief; but drastic as it was it did not settle the Irish land question finally. The landlords realised- that the system of periodically fixing rents tended to a periodic reduction of them, and the more far-seeing turned their attention to the abolition of the dual ownership by the sale of the landlord's interest to the occupying tenants by the help of State funds. The difficulties that had arisen in adjusting the relation between landlord and tenant were to be solved by its abolition; and land ownership was to take the place of land tenure.