Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/44

41 character. But it is that simple solution of the question to which events are rapidly tending—unless anticipated by a just and efficient change in the law of tenure, which shall reconcile the rights of both- the cultivator and the landowner.

I feel that I expose myself to the charge of presumption in putting forward any opinion I may have formed upon the mode in which this knotty question of tenant-right in Ireland can be best solved. But having been led to consider the subject closely so far back as 1835, when a member of Mr. Lynch's committee—having for many years past supported Mr. Sharman Crawford in his earnest and persevering advocacy of a legal compensation to tenants for their improvements—having fully studied the evidence recently given before the Devon Commission—and anxiously watched the progress of opinion and current of events by which some immediate settlement of the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland is rendered imperatively necessary to avert (let me speak it openly) an agrarian revolution or civil war—I do venture to think that the opinion of an impartial bystander, who has long made a study of the economical bearings of the various modes of land4enure that prevail through the world, may not be without its utility in the present emergency, as a contribution to the amount of thought now directed to this question.

Let me begin by remarking that the object to be