Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/37

 unnecessarily with the acquisition or distribution of wealth, may fairly look to the observance of these general rules. First, that property should have its rights and perform its duties. Second, that the tenants of landowners should live in comfort and security. Third, that a produce should be obtained from the land representing fair if not very skilful cultivation.

These conditions are the result of good government, and its proof.

Looking to the state of Ireland, it is impossible to say that these conditions are performed. Property does not fully perform its duties while there are proprietors who wantonly evict good careful tenants on the ground that they have voted conscientiously at a county election. Nor can the tenant be said to live in security and comfort while he is liable to so capricious an exercise of power on the part of his landlord.

Nor is the land fairly cultivated when the tenant has neither the security of a lease, nor a capital which he can lay out on his land with any certainty of reckoning on the return upon which the English and Scotch tenant may justly calculate.

On this complicated and difficult subject I know no remedy better than that afforded by your Bill. If the tenant has not a lease, he is fully entitled to compensation for his improvements in case of arbitrary eviction. The objection put forward on the part of the Conservative party to a law compensating a tenant for improvements to the making of which the landlord had not previously agreed, has now been withdrawn. It