Page:Letters to Lord John Russell on the Further Measures for the Social Amelioration of Ireland.djvu/45

42 held in view in legislating upon the subject at this time is two-fold:—

First, To calm the excitement that so generally prevails throughout the class of occupying peasantry in Ireland, and induce them to relinquish that spirit of combination against the law, and that sympathy with agrarian crime, which are engendered amongst them by the insecurity of their present tenure, and which, so long as they last, will be an effectual bar to the introduction or investment of capital in the improvement of Irish agriculture.

Secondly, To call forth the utmost industrial energies of those who have the soil of Ireland in their possession, by guaranteeing to them the full benefit of any increased productiveness they may create.

The first of these objects has not, I think, been sufficiently kept in view by many who have proposed alterations of the law of landlord and tenant. The measure which was produced to Parliament by Sir Robert Peel's government, and even the recommendation of the Devon Commission, equally had this serious defect, that they related only to future improvements, and had no reference to those already effected by the existing tenantry. In a word, they were merely prospective, not retrospective in their operation.

Now this I conceive to be a fatal error. It overlooks altogether the necessity of reconciling to the law the minds of the present race of tenants, by the