yond the power of Parliament to settle the
terms which shall be fair. "_Caveat emptor_" is the only rule by
which fair rents may be reached. By fixity of tenure is meant such a
holding of the land as shall enable the tenant to obtain an adequate
return for his labour and his capital, and to this is added a
romantic and consequently a most unjust idea that it may be well to
settle this question on behalf of the tenant by granting him such a
term as shall leave no doubt. Let him have the land for ever as long
as he will pay a stipulated sum, which shall be considerably less
than the landlord's demand. That idea I call romantic, and therefore
unjust. But, even though the beauty of the romance be held sufficient
to atone for the injustice, this was not the poetical re-arrangement
of all the circumstances of land tenure in Ireland. Freedom of sale
is necessarily annexed to fixity of tenure. If a man is to have the
possession of land in perpetuity, surely he should be allowed to sell
it. Whether he be allowed or not, he will contrive to do so. Freedom
of sale means, I take it, that the so-called landlord shall have no
power of putting a veto on the transaction. We cannot here go into
the whole question as it existed in Ulster before 1870; but the
freedom of sale intended is such, I think, as I have defined it.

Whether these concessions be good or bad, this was, at any rate,
no time for granting them. They seem to me to amount to wholesale
confiscation. But supposing me to be wrong in that, can I be wrong
in thinking that a period of declared rebellion is not a time for
concessions? When the Land Bill was passed the Landleague was in full
power; boycotting had become the recognised weapon of an illegal
association; and the Home-Rulers of the day,--the party, that is, who
represented the Landleague,--were already in such possession of large
portions of the country as to prevent the possibility of carrying out
the laws.

At this moment the Government brought forward its romantic theory
as to the manipulation of land, and, before that theory was at work,
commenced its benevolent intentions by locking up all those who were
supposed to be guilty of an intention to carry out the Government
project further than the Government would carry it out itself. It
is held, as a rule, in politics that coercion and concession cannot
be applied together. Ireland was in mutiny under the guidance of
a mutinous party in the House of Commons, and