attempt to fix prices arbitrarily applied only to the letting and
hiring and not to other transactions. To give a typical instance of
what has occurred in many cases: a tenant held land at a rent of £1.
15s. 0d. per acre; he took the landlord into Court, swore that the
land could not bear such a rent, and had it reduced to £1. 5s. 0d.;
thereupon he sold it for £20 an acre; and so the present occupier had
to pay £1. 5s. 0d. to the nominal landlord, and the interest on the
purchase-money (about £1 per acre) to a mortgagee; in fact, he has
to pay a larger sum annually than any previous tenant did; and this
payment is "rent" in the economic sense though it is paid not to a
resident landlord but to a distant mortgagee. In other words, rent
was increased, and absenteeism became general. Fourthly, it sowed
the seeds for future trouble; for it was the temporary union of two
antagonistic principles. On the one hand it was said that "the man who
tills the land should own it," and therefore rent was an unjust
tax (in fact it was seriously argued that men of English and Scotch
descent who had hired farms in the nineteenth century had a moral
right to keep them for ever rent free because tribal tenure had
prevailed amongst the Celts who occupied the country many hundreds of
years before); on the other it was said that the land belonged to the
people of Ireland as a whole and not to any individuals. If that is
so, what right has one man to a large farm when there are hundreds of
others in a neighbouring town who have no land at all? The passing of
the Land Acts of 1881 and 1887 made it inevitable that sooner or later
a fresh agitation would be commenced by "landless men." And fifthly,
when an excitable, uneducated people realize that lawlessness and
outrages will be rewarded by an Act remitting debts and breaking
contracts, they are not likely in future to limit their operations
to land, but will apply the same maxims to other contracts. The
demoralizing of character is a fact to be taken into consideration.