The Irish problem: what lacks the backward farmer most: security or skills?. Hibernicus
would produce, if it is possible to make an enactment which shall ensure good farming.
It will be said that we here point to a sort of ideal despotism by which the law is to make every body good and happy in spite of themselves.
Nothing of the sort. We only propose that the channel of legislation should be turned into such a direction that each and all—landlords and tenants—will find it to their decided advantage to keep pace with the progress of civilisation around them, and to their decided disadvantage not to do so.
And how can this be effected? We have already observed that the landlord has no stimulus in the shape of self-interest, to make it worth his while to devote himself to property-management as a real mercantile business, which if he manages badly, it will be so much the worse for him, and if he manage well, it will be so much the better for him. The improving landlord who endeavours, but endeavours in vain, till he gives it up in despair, to get his farms to be something like Belgian farms, has at least one consolation if he fails. He gets his rents in full, all the same. Even this amiable individual requires another goad to stimulate him to still greater exertions. Even over his head there must be held the fear of the periodical government valuation which, if his farms fall back in productiveness, must visit him with a depreciation in his rental. He will then see that the backward farmer, by gentle means if possible, or if these fail, by sterner ones, must be made to advance, or to give place to another. And that the backward farmer may not have it to say that he had no stimulus, the same periodical valuation which raises or lowers the rental of the landlord, must give the tenant full credit for all improvements of proved value made by him with his landlord's consent, on or in the soil. And safeguards must be given against vexatious refusals on the part of the landlord or tenant, to make or to acquiesce in the making of such necessary improvements as shall fall to the part of either of them to effect.
The present idea of Ulster Tenant Right amongst the farming class appears to be that a farmer should be irremovable so long as he pays his rent, and that he should have the right to sell his interest to the highest bidder. This idea may suit the private interests of the farmers themselves well enough; but we—while ready to forego for the public good much landlord prerogative—assert most decidedly our opinion that such an idea does not tend to the best interests of the community at large.
The farmer ought to be removable by his landlord for improper cultivation, aye and for persistence in maintaining a piggish habitation, (cases of which a government official should be the judge if appeal was demanded). And, in order to restore our patchwork holdings to proper shapes and sizes,so that they may be farmed in accordance with the laws of economy, the landlord should have the selection of the successor to a tenant about to leave. As for sales to the highest bidder—that may be all very well amongst a certain class who know what they are about; but we have already alluded in the columns of the Tyrone Constitution to the influences of whiskey and "sweeteners" in transactions of this nature! We beg of the many farmers in favoured and wealthy districts, and of some newspaper writers, whose experience is for the most part confined to the trim farms in the neighbourhood of our towns, to weigh well our very earnest words, written, we honestly declare, in the interest of no particular class, and we heartily trust under the influence of no particular prejudice; and we hope to unite all our readers, in the name and for the sake of Irish progress, in the opinion we have already expressed that the land legislature of the future ought to be based upon the principle "that the bad landlord and the had tenant should be compelled by law, to do that which the good ones would naturally do from a sense of duty and of their own real advantage."
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