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LORD DUFFERIN ON THE TENURE OF LAND.*

Ar the opening of his work upon Democracy, M. de Tocqueville sketches in a few sentences the political history of Europe for seven hundred years, from a time at which the right of governing descended with family inheritances, force was the only means by which man could act upon man, and landed property was the sole source of power.' Hardly a single event of importance in history, he proceeds, not one step in human progress since then, not one acquisition material or immaterial to the domain of civilization, but has raised rivals to the great landed proprietors, placed sources of social and political power at the disposal of new classes, and tended to the furtherance of equality. 'Poetry, eloquence, memory, the charms of wit, the glow of imagination, profoundness of thought, all the gifts which Heaven imparts indiscriminately, have turned to the advantage of democracy; and even when they have been found in the possession of its opponents, they have still done service to its cause by bringing into relief man's natural greatness; its conquests have spread therefore with those of civilization

Reprinted from 'Macmillan's Magazine,' July 1867.

and knowledge, and literature has become an arsenal open to all, in which the weak and the poor have found arms every day.' Whoever uses M. de Tocqueville's eyes to read the signs of the time, will accordingly see in the part taken by Lord Dufferin—at once a noble, a landowner, and a man of letters and genius-in the controversy relating to land, not a vindication of its proprietors which will exempt their conduct henceforward from scrutiny, but a mark of the irresistible force of a movement which is setting up rivals in every direction to inherited distinctions and territorial power; rendering public opinion the sovereign authority, and the public good the sole foundation on which institutions, however ancient, can base their continuance ;-above all, making landed property, once the sole source of legislation, now its recognised subject and creature, possessed of no title which is not derived from the public advantage, and amenable in all its relations to the control of the State. A great step has been made towards making the use of landed property reasonable, when its proprietors themselves begin to reason about it; not only is it a sign that they are ceasing to rely solely on power, but it exposes whatever is indefensible in their pretensions to immediate detection. A fool is said to be wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason, but sometimes he is wise beyond his conceit, for it may be ten times harder to answer folly than reason. The old vague and intractable assertions of 'the rights of property,' for example, however little to the intellectual credit of those who employed them,

were not without an impenetrable power of resistance to argument, which enabled them to hold ground; just as the stupidest animals are the most obstinate in an encounter, because they cannot see when they are beaten, and hold on to the death.

If, however, such characteristics as the foregoing of the great movement delineated in M. de Tocqueville's pages may awaken pleasure and hope in the minds of his disciples, others, unfortunately, are not wanting which cannot be viewed without both regret and alarm, even by those whose confidence is strongest that it is upon the whole a movement for good. Not the least portentous among these is that growing severance of the peasantry from the soil, and that increasingly selfish and exclusive use of dominion over it by its proprietors, of which M. de Tocqueville speaks as follows:- An aristocracy does not die like a man in a day. Long before open war has broken out against it, the bond which had united the higher classes with the lower is seen to loosen by degrees; the relations between the poor and the rich become fewer and less kindly; rents rise. This is not actually the result of democratic revolution, but it is its certain indication. For an aristocracy which has definitively let the heart of the people slip from its hands is like a tree which is dead. at its roots, and which the winds overturn the more easily the higher it is. I have often heard great English proprietors congratulate themselves that they derive much more money from their estates than their fathers did. They may be in the right to rejoice, but assuredly they do not know at what they rejoice.

They imagine they are making a net profit when they are only making an exchange. What they gain in money they are on the point of losing in power. There is yet another sign that a great democratic movement is being accomplished or is in preparation. In the middle age almost all landed property was let in perpetuity, or at least for a very long term. When one studies the economy of that period, one finds that leases for ninety years were commoner than leases for twelve years are now.' In his celebrated Essay on M. de Tocqueville's book, Mr. Mill has with similar prescience remarked that without a large agricultural class, with an attachment to the soil, a permanent connection with it, and the tranquillity and simplicity of rural habits and tastes, there can be no check to the total predominance of an unsettled, uneasy, gain-seeking, commercial democracy. Our town population,' it has long been remarked, 'is becoming almost as mobile and uneasy as the American. It ought not to be so with our agriculturists; they ought to be the counterbalancing element in the national character; they should represent the type opposite to the commercial— that of moderate wishes, tranquil tastes, and cultivation of the enjoyments compatible with their existing position. To attain this object, how much alteration may be requisite in the system of rack-renting and tenancyat-will we cannot undertake to show in this place.'*

So, in a late debate upon Irish tenures, in Parliament, it was argued with unanswerable force by Mr. Gregory, in reference to the tenure now generally pre

valent in the island: There could be no attachment to the institutions of a country in which the whole of a peasantry existed merely on sufferance; certainly there was nothing conservative in tenancies at will: indeed he believed such tenancies to be the most revolutionary in the world.' The conclusion is irresistible that the true revolutionary party in Ireland are unconsciously and unwillingly, but not the less certainly, the owners of land. When therefore it is alleged that the chronic absence of tranquillity and the periodical recurrence of sedition prevent the rise of other occupations than agriculture, thereby placing almost the whole population at the mercy of the landlords, who can in consequence impose unreasonable terms, the answer is obvious,-first, that prosperous agriculture and continued political tranquillity are equally incompatible with such a tenure ; secondly, that a prosperous agriculture is itself the true natural source and support of all other industries; and thirdly, that the allegation itself involves an admission that the power of the landlords is excessive. So far, moreover, is the competition for land from being the cause it could in no case be the excuse-of the insecurity of tenure in Ireland, that the immense reduction in the population and the number of the competitors for the occupation of land has been attended with increased insecurity. Before the failure of the potato, the Devon Commission urged the interference of Parliament, because the industry of the cultivators of the soil was paralysed by insecurity. The most general and indeed universal complaint,' they reported, brought before us in every part of Ireland was, "the want of

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