under which the
farm was to be held, and the number of years during which it was to be
alienated from its owner. The fundamental clause of the lease distinctly
stipulated that at the end of the assigned term the tenant must hand
back that farm to the owner from whom he received it. The law has
interposed, and determined that the rent which this farmer had
undertaken to pay shall be reduced by a government tribunal without the
assent of the owner, and without giving the owner the option of
dissolving the contract and seeking a new tenant. It has gone further,
and provided that at the termination of the lease the tenant shall not
hand back the land to the owner according to the terms of his contract,
but shall remain for all future time the occupier, subject only to a
rent fixed and periodically revised, irrespective of the wishes of the
landlord, by an independent tribunal. Vast masses of property in Ireland
had been sold under the Incumbered Estates Act by a government tribunal
acting as the representative of the Imperial Parliament, and each
purchaser obtained from this tribunal a parliamentary title making him
absolute owner of the soil and of every building upon it, subject only
to the existing tenancies in the schedule. No accounts of the earlier
history of the property were handed to him, for except under the terms
of the leases which had not yet expired he had no liability for anything
in the past. The title he received was deemed so indefeasible that in
one memorable case, where by mistake a portion of the property of one
man had been included in the sale of the property of another man, the
Court of Appeal decided that the injustice could not be remedied, as it
was impossible, except in the case of intentional fraud, to go behind
parliamentary titles.[44] In cases in which the land was let at low
rents, and in cases where tenants held under leases which would soon
expire, the facility of raising the rents was constantly specified by
the authority of the Court as an inducement to purchasers.

What has become of this parliamentary title? Improvements, if they had
been made, or were presumed to have been made by tenants anterior to the
sale, have ceased to be the property of the purchaser, and he has at the
same time been deprived of some of the plainest and most inseparable
rights of property. He has lost the power of disposing of his farms in
the open market, of regulating the terms and conditions on which he lets