John Morley

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.

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 the holdings were small and multitudinous; 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…

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…

This was a crowning illustration 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 bloody outrage…

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.

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.

Every one of these Acts was in the interest of the landlord and against the tenant.

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…

The essence of such customs in Ulster was first, a fair rent to be fixed not by competition, but by valuation, and exclusive of tenant’s improvements; second, the right of the tenant to transfer to somebody else his goodwill, or whatever…

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…

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.

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.

The crucial suggestion, the expediency, namely, of making the landlord pay compensation to the tenant for disturbing him, came from Ireland.

I anticipate 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.

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

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.

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…

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.