Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/199

Rh of the case; but the common principle that private right must yield to real or supposed public convenience acquires additional practical importance by each successive recognition of its validity. The expropriation of the landowners in Prince Edward Island has received the more or less willing assent of Lord Granville, Lord Kimberley, Lord Dufferin, and Lord Carnarvon. It may therefore be assumed that some measure of the kind was necessary, or that it was less objectionable than the probable results of an alternative policy; but property is a delicate institution, depending for its security on unbroken custom. In Prince Edward Island, as in Ireland, the concessions which were professedly due to reasons of practical convenience had been clamorously demanded on revolutionary and communistic grounds. Occupiers who were impatient of the existence of landlords have for some years announced that property in land was a usurpation, and that the soil naturally belonged to the actual cultivators. It is probable that they may change their minds since they have acquired their freeholds for an almost nominal consideration. The occupiers of the island will repay the debt which they owe to the Irish tenantry by furnishing arguments in favour of Mr. Butt's agitation for the transfer of the remaining rights of Irish landowners. After a time English proprietors will be reminded in turn that their interests also are subject to the discretion of the legislature. Some of them are prematurely inviting attack by the suicidal policy of confiscating property which happens to be excepted from the ordinary course of hereditary succession.

It must be admitted that the absentee landowners of Prince Edward Island occupied an invidious position. Lord Carnarvon lately informed the House of Lords that about a hundred years ago the land was acquired by their predecessors in title through the odd machinery of a raffle. The prizes in the crown lottery were estates of twenty thousand acres each; and the winners, who perhaps scarcely understood where their new possessions were situated, could have little intention of colonizing the island in their own persons. The actual settlers have since held their tenements at a trifling rent, which has in most cases run into arrear. The prevalence and popularity of freehold tenures throughout the continent of North America not unnaturally rendered the islanders discontented with their position; but fifty or thirty years ago it would have been useless to ask the assent of a lieutenant-governor of the colonial office to measures for the compulsory acquisition of holdings by occupiers. The establishment and growth of popular power exercised by a democratic legislature has since changed the conditions of the controversy. One of the parties in the dispute returns all the members, while the other only held the property which was coveted by the constituency. An analogous division between the basis of taxation and that of representation has in other countries produced the results which might be expected. In Prince Edward Island the question was not as to the distribution of public burdens, but as to the ownership of all the land in the colony. Several bills were successively passed to enable the government to buy out the proprietors on terms so inequitable that the colonial minister or the governor-general of Canada refused to assent to them. Both Lord Dufferin and Lord Carnarvon at last sanctioned in 1875 an act which has effected the object of abolishing leasehold tenures. It appears by a recital in the preamble that when the island was annexed to Canada, the government of the Dominion undertook to contribute eight hundred thousand dollars for the purpose of enabling the government of the province to buy up the leasehold lands. The act constituted a commission which was to assess the compensation to be paid to the owners, the governor-general, the lieutenant-governor of the island, and the proprietors themselves respectively nominating one of the three commissioners.

Mr. Childers, who was appointed a commissioner by Lord Dufferin, was obliged to return to England after making an award on the claims of ten considerable proprietors. The principles on which he adjudicated have probably been adopted by his successors; and to those who are unacquainted with the country the results seem at least to explain the loudly expressed dissatisfaction of the expropriated owners. For the freehold of one hundred and thirty thousand acres of land the arbitrators awarded sixty thousand pounds. There is no reason to doubt either their competence or their impartiality, though the losers by the transaction may be excused for including the commissioners in the blame which they impute to the provincial legislature, to the government of the Dominion, and to the colonial minister. By the 28th section of the act the commissioners are required to consider,