State.

As Irish taxation increased 50 per cent, while that of England only
increased 18 per cent., the Irish people did not find Mr. Gladstone's
Act soothing or profitable.

His next perpetration was the Land Act of 1870, whereby he provided that
no landlord could turn out his tenant without paying him for all his
improvements (even if these had been done without the knowledge or
sanction of the landlord) and giving the tenant a compensation in money
equal to about one-fourth of the fee-simple.

This Act might have been all right in principle, but it was useless in
practice, and the compensation made to the County Court Judge for
adjudicature came to far more than the amount awarded.

This is easily accounted for, thus:--

You might as well bring in an Act of Parliament to prevent people
cutting off their own noses.

No sane person does such a thing, and no landlord ever turned out an
improving tenant.

But the Irish tenants, having almost the sole representation of the
country in their hands, returned a body of representatives pledged to
the confiscation of landed property; and in order to keep his party in
power by securing their votes, Mr. Gladstone brought in the Land Act of
1881.

I heard him introduce the motion in the House of Commons, and his speech
was a truly marvellous feat of oratory. He was interrupted on all sides
of the House, and in a speech of nearly five hours in length never once
lost the thread of his discourse.

As far as I could judge, he never even by accident let slip one word of
truth.

When the Act passed, Mr. Gladstone anticipated that eight
sub-commissioners would do the work. This number very soon ran up to one
hundred sub-commissioners and more than twenty County Court valuers.

The result is that every tenant has been running down his land and
letting it go out of cultivation, for the tenants know the commissioners
value the ground as they find it, and a premium is thus, of course, put
on neglecting the soil.

To show the system on which the valuation was done, many cases have been
known of the commissioners arriving to value a property after three
o'clock on a December afternoon.

It is a positive fact that there are professional experts who obtain
substantial fees for showing tenants the speediest methods of damaging
their own land.

All the same I cannot help thinking their services are a matter of
supererogation, for a recalcitrant Irish tenant in the South and Wes