Above : Picture Of Gladstone

SINCE the overthrow of the power of the Tenant Right League the Irish Land Question had lain more or less dormant, though the agrarian conditions were as unsatisfactory, and the discontent excited by them as great as before, and outrages following evictions continued in numbers.Some very bad cases of wholesale clearances, and especially certain incidents connected with the estate of a Mr. Scully, a Tipperary landlord, were commented on in the English Press, and excited a good deal of interest in England. It began to be understood that, in the words of a Tudor statesman, ” the same order suiteth not for Ireland as for England,” the conditions of the two countries being so different, and to be confessed that laws, the results of which were so deplorable, should be changed.

Gladstone, who considered that by the Disestablishment of the Church he had triumphantly and finally settled one Irish question, was confident of equal success in dealing with another. In 1870, he placed his Land Bill before Parliament, and with little opposition it passed into law. This measure legalised the Ulster Custom ; entitled all tenants, if evicted for causes other than non-payment of rent, to receive both ” compensation for disturbance ” and the value of their improvements, empowered them to sell their ” interest ” with the landlords’ consent, and arranged for advances of money, to be given through the Board of Works to those anxious to purchase their holdings.

Owing to a variety of causes the Irish Land Act of 1870, while it cannot be fairly described as an actual failure, by no means achieved the beneficial results confidently expected from it. The intense attach¬ment of the Irish peasant to the soil which he, and perhaps his fathers before him for many generations, had tilled, had not been sufficiently considered. The assigned “compensation” for disturbance or improvements could only be obtained when he was actually evicted, and rather than be evicted he strove to pay excessive rents. At first he perhaps succeeded, often by borrowing a part of the money. Then he fell into arrears, and so was evicted finally without compensation. The Laud Question was not yet solved.