limit of the colony. Great Britain had hitherto restrained colonists from entering the territory; if they did so they went at their own peril; but by the proclamation of 1886 the Imperial Government gave them full warrant to go where they willed within the Schomburgk line, and assured them that they would be protected. And with what result? That the area has been parcelled out into mining districts; that it has been supplied with magistrates, police, and the machinery of civil government; that British capital to the extent of about £200,000 has been sunk in placer mining operations; that there are about three thousand British subjects in the territory; and that the value of the gold exports of British Guiana has risen from £3,249 in 1885 to £492,937 in 1892-93. For a century and more, since the voluntary withdrawal of the Dutch from the interior to the mud flats, the great north-west and western area had been unoccupied. The British subjects, who since 1886 have gone there under the sanction of the Imperial Government, have but re-entered the regions in which the Dutch had mined and traded with the aborigines. Are they to be abandoned? Lord Salisbury will not even run the risk of their abandonment by throwing the territory in which they work open to arbitration by anybody; and in this Lord Salisbury is taking the only possible course. He cannot go back upon the policy of 1886the final and definitive declaration of the irreducible minimum of the British claim-without making every colonist feel that when he does what the Imperial Government tells him he may do, and will back him up in doing, that same Government will retract its instructions and allow itself to be bounced out of its rights by any foreign power which chooses to interfere in a dispute in which it has no valid conThe whole matter should be susceptible of an easy settlement. Let us hold the territory up to the Schomburgk line, whatever befalls. Less than that we cannot do, unless Lord Salisbury is content to tear up the proclamation of 1886-an act he cannot commit without losing the respect of all but members of the party of peace at any price. And let us leave Venezuela in the peaceable possession of that territory of ours which she grabbed in defiance of the agreement of 1850. We did not turn her off when she established herself there, and it is not worth while to do so now. We are not so hard-up for territory as to begrudge her the area she has already filched. If, however, Venezuela and the United States are of opinion that they can make us relax our hold of the country up to the Schomburgk line, by the exercise of force, Great Britain will no doubt be able to give a good account of herself. It would be ungracious to use stronger and more precise language now that the people of the United States appear to be recovering from the fever of pugnacity induced by the Presidential message and the Olney despatch.

cern.

H. WHATES.

THE LANDED SYSTEM OF IRELAND AND PLANS TO REFORM IT.

Ir is to be regretted, I think, that the late Opposition voted for the second reading of the Irish Land Bill brought forward last Session ly Mr. Morley. The reservations made by Mr. Balfour were, no doubt, ample; but, even in its principles, the measure was one of the very worst proposed by the late Government. It was founded on the Report of a Committee of the House of Commons, of which nearly a fourth part was composed of men branded by the judgment of the Special Commission for having made war upon Irish rents and landlords. Had those members of the Committee taken no part in it, the Report would have been rejected by a large majority of votes; and if a characteristic, it was certainly a strange document. It abounded in misrepresentations of many kinds; exhibited ludicrous ignorance of law; was formed on wholly inadequate evidence; and, almost from first to last, was one-sided and unjust. The Bill, embodying its conclusions, was of a piece with it; had it become law it would have done the grossest wrong and mischief. Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act of 1881-we pass by its mere supplement of 1887-set principles of sound legislation at nought, was not adapted to the circumstances of the Irish land, and has well-nigh subverted the Irish landed system. But it was based on conceptions not altogether false; the object of its author was to do justice; it was not without reverence for the fair claims of property. Mr. Morley's Bill simply tore up the settlement made by Mr. Gladstone-such as it was; removed nearly all the checks he had placed on iniquity, fraud, and the maladministration of the law; and destroyed the rights of Irish landlords wholesale, even rights secured by recent Acts of Parliament. It was more far-reaching, however, in its evil scope; it enunciated doctrines in conflict with all civilised law, and fatal to the rights of property in the Three Kingdoms.

If Lord Salisbury's Government is pledged to introduce an Irish Land Bill, it will not follow Mr. Morley's leading; yet the occasion is one to consider shortly the position and prospects of the Irish Land Question, and existing plans for a reform of the Irish landed system. I have some claim to be heard on this subject. Many years ago, as Commissioner of The Times, I investigated the state of Irish land

(1) The exact words are: "A conspiracy by a system of coercion and intimidation to promote an agrarian agitation against the payment of agricultural rents, for the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country the Irish landlords, who were styled 'the English Garrison.'"

tenure, and my reports certainly contributed to the successful passing of the first, and the best, of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Acts. As an Irish County Court Judge of nearly a quarter of a century's standing, I have had, besides, very large experience in the working and administration of the Irish Land Code; and if I am an Irish landlord, I have passed through the ordeal, even of the Act of 1881, well-nigh unscathed.

I can only refer to the historical causes, infinitely the most potent and far-extending, which have disturbed Irish landed relations, and have made them different from what they are in England and Scotland. It must be enough to remark that, in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, conquest and confiscation have drawn a line between the owner and the occupier of the soil, marked by a distinction of race and faith; and this division exists largely, even in Ulster. But a word must be said on the economic causes, for these are, in themselves, important, and legislation, perhaps, can directly affect these only. Ireland, with considerable exceptions, is a land of small farms; and in Ireland, therefore, as in other lands under similar conditions,1 the improvements made on farms are, as a rule, the work of the tenant, not of the landlord. In Ireland, moreover, it has been an immemorial custom to pay large sums on the transfer of the "goodwill" of lands; this has been especially the case in the North, but it has been common also in the three Southern Provinces. By those means, notably in the present century, the tenant class in Ireland, by degrees, acquired concurrent rights in the lands they occupied, ranging from the established Tenant Right of Ulster, to an inchcate Tenant Right in the other parts of Ireland; and those rights obviously clashed, more or less, with the absolute freehold ownership secured by law to the landlord. Unquestionably, in the great mass of instances, the landlords respected these concurrent rights; this has been proved over and over again, whatever may be said by reckless demagogues; indeed, as Mr. Lecky has acutely remarked, they could not have grown up, had they not been protected. But these rights, which, as they increased, approached a kind of joint-ownership in many cases-singularly like the archaic tenures of the Celtic tribeswere not lawworthy until quite recently; and, accordingly, they were sometimes invaded by undue raising of rent and unjust eviction.

The first of Mr. Gladstone's Land Acts-that of 1870-was passed to remedy these undoubted mischiefs. It gave the sanction of law to the Tenant Right of Ulster, and to the analogous Right in the other three Provinces; it, in a word, grafted these concurrent rights on the landlord's ownership. It went, however, very much farther-it annexed a kind of Tenant Right to the immense majority of farms in

(1) England appears to have been no exception to the rule. Until the large farm ystem was developed in England improvements seem to have been made by the tenant.

Ireland, in the form of "compensation," should the tenant be "disturbed;" and it secured to the tenant compensation for improvements he had made. It thus aimed at protecting the quasi jointownership of the Irish tenant; but it sought to guard against reform being let run riot. Mr. Gladstone excluded certain classes of lands, more or less completely, from the scope of the Act. They may be briefly described as "residential holdings," "town-parks," "demesne lands," and large "grazing farms;" and the reasons for their exclusion can hardly be gainsaid. Mr. Gladstone, moreover, was properly cautious with respect to improvements made by tenants; he saw how claims to compensation, under this head, would open a door to fraud, and might do wrong, and he placed them under large, but well-conceived, restrictions. In the first place, he took care to define what an “improvement" is. Here I shall, also, compare Mr. Morley with him; enough to say now that the definition was reasonably just. In the second place, while he provided that, in most cases, the tenant should be presumed to have made the improvements, he reversed the presumption in many others, in which it would press too hard on the landlord; in short, he threw the burden of proof on the tenant, an important, and obviously a right precaution. And, in the third place, certain kinds of improvements were not permitted to create a claim to compensation in respect of them; and, most important of all, it was declared that, in the case of improvements made before the Act, and of the great mass of Irish tenancies, length of enjoyment and benefits in the shape of reduced rent, or otherwise, were to be taken into account in considering claims for compensation-a provision in accord with civilised law. Here, again, I shall contrast this legislation with Mr. Morley's scheme; it may, for the present, be said that, by this means, the law, though not free from danger, was brought, in the main, into harmony with justice.

The Land Act of 1870 had defects; it fell upon unpropitious times; it was unwisely evaded in some cases; it did not fully accomplish its author's objects. Mr. Gladstone took up the reform of the Irish landed system again, under the stress, unhappily, of the Land League movement; and the result was the celebrated Act of 1881, followed by its appendage, that of 1887. The Act of 1881 was formed on principles completely different from those of the Act of 1870; Mr. Morley is in error in thinking the principles alike. The later statute endeavoured to vindicate the kind of joint ownership, before referred to, by creating for the tenant an estate in the land, renewable every fifteen years, but, practically, a perpetual estate; his rent was to be fixed by a Tribunal of the State; and it was specially provided that his improvements were not to be charged with rent. The law changed the landlord nearly into a rent-charger; but still Mr. Gladstone had regard for his remaining rights; and the Act of 1881,

impliedly, but very plainly, retained provisions of that of 1870, to which I have before adverted. The same classes of lands were excluded, in both instances; the definition of improvements was not changed; the rules as to presumption were left untouched; and it was to be distinctly inferred, as respects improvements, that the right of exemption from rent, under the Act of 1881, was correlative to the right to compensation under the Act of 1870, that exemption was not to exist in the one case, if compensation was not to be made in the other. It is idle to cite ambiguous words, dropped by Mr. Gladstone, against this view; the Court of Appeal in Ireland has given this construction to the two Acts, many years ago, a construction accepted by the great body of the Irish Bar; and the rights of landlords and tenants by tens of thousands have been determined in accord with it.

Mr. Morley's Bill almost broke down the structure of the landed system moulded by Mr. Gladstone, disregarded the precautions he took to protect landlords, and simply confiscated rights given them by the Acts of 1870 and 1881. The first step in the process of destruction was to include within the limits of the new measure lands excluded by the preceding Code, to subject these to the perpetual estate of a tenant, at a rent settled through the intervention of the State, and practically to expropriate the landlords from them. "Residential holdings," that is lands which, whatever their extent, were taken as a residence, and had a house on them, were to be brought within the operation of the law, unless the Court, appointed by the State, should consider the house to be the main part of the holding; so that a professional man who might rent a villa, with an addition of forty or fifty acres, should have a right to a lease for ever, at a State-fixed rent, and should be entitled permanently to extrude his landlord! "Town parks," that is, accommodation lands in the neighbourhood of towns, held by their inhabitants, and yielding, for the accommodation, an increased rent-lands usually rented by tradesmen, market gardeners, and the like-were to be placed in the same category, if a town had a population of less than 2000 souls, and if the "town park" were let as a farm; though this enactment would obviously rob the landlord, and though it has been proved by a host of instances that, in the necessary interests of towns in Ireland, holdings of this kind should be kept in free commerce, and not bound by the shackles of an Act like that of 1881! "Demesne Lands "that is the lands annexed to a family mansion, and held with itwere the next marked out by the Bill for sacrifice, unless "they were let for the temporary convenience of the landlord, or to meet a temporary necessity"; in other words, a tenant of demesne lands, let for a term of years, nay, probably, from year to year, during a minority, lunacy, or a professional career, was to be made their virtual owner, at an arbitrary rent, and to eject the real owner for all time, the demesne