The Irish Land Question

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE PERMANENT LAND QUESTION. Having alluded shortly to those temporary difficulties, which are consequent upon recent changes in Ireland, the question as to the best mode of regulating the permanent tenure of land, remains for a more full consideration. That question has ever been, in all...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE PERMANENT LAND QUESTION. Having alluded shortly to those temporary difficulties, which are consequent upon recent changes in Ireland, the question as to the best mode of regulating the permanent tenure of land, remains for a more full consideration. That question has ever been, in all countries and in all ages, the most important, as well as the most difficult of solution. It has been too often decided by the sword, through foreign conquest or domestic confiscation. Sometimes it has been determined by a popular revolution. At other times by partial and unjust legislation. In all such cases the effect is the same. Either by force or fraud, one class of persons acquires the land through the plunder of another. The law of the stronger prevails, and is upheld as just by those who profit from it. Quam facile in nosmet legem sancimus iniquam. Seldom indeed has this Gordian knot been fairly solved, by an even-handed legislation ?defrauding no one, doing violence to none. The difficulties of dealing with the land question are much increased, by a variety of conflicting interests and passions. In every country an intense desire to possess the land exists in the bosoms of all classes. Its ownership is usually guarded by complicated laws, whose administration is involved in so much obscurity and expense as to interfere greatly with all legal transfers of land, and thus in effect materially diminish its intrinsic value. To no part of the world do these observations more truly apply than to the land ofIreland; which has for many centuries undergone confiscation after confiscation, under various forms and pretexts. In the twelfth century, the form of confiscation consisted in a grant of Ireland, from the Saxon Pope, Adrian IV. (Breakspear), to the ...