Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/39

 that a tenant should enter on a farm shorn of half his capital, and having paid nearly the value of the freehold for liberty to cultivate it. But it is an evil to prevent a greater evil: it is inoculation and not vaccination. It is the interest of the landlord, however, not to attempt a violent abolition of this custom; he should rather try to satisfy the out-going tenant himself, and then admit a new tenant with his capital free from payment to his predecessor.

Loans to landlords are in certain cases sanctioned by Parliament. It would be a far better plan to extend this system than to allow the incoming tenant to incur debts before he begins to cultivate his new holding.

I hold the equitable tacit compact between landlord and tenant to go far beyond the law of emblements. Not only when the tenant has sown the land is he entitled to the crop; but when he has so improved the land as to fit it to bear larger and better crops in future years, he is entitled, in my opinion, to the benefit either of a lease long enough to reimburse himself with interest for his outlay, or to obtain from the landlord who has ejected him, that compensation which he has not been allowed to extract from the soil. Such I understand to be the principle of your Bill, and whether it passes under the name of Lord Mayo or your own does not make a material difference.

From this review of the past and present, we may, I think, draw the following conclusions:—

1. That the commutation of tithes, the introduction of poor-laws, the sale of encumbered estates, the