country yearly the profits of industry on which States thrive, and that public tranquillity, which is the balsam of life, would become impossible. The reader is invited to note that that measure originated the most serious part of the injustice disclosed by the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations of Great Britain and Ireland which is occupying Parliament and the Press while these pages are being written.[1]
The vote of the Irish members on the Budget satisfied the Government they had nothing to fear from those gentlemen. The result was prompt and decisive. Lord Palmerston immediately told the Select Committee on the Land Bills that he saw no necessity for any legislation on the question. Next day Crawford's Bill was set aside by nineteen votes to nine. Mr. Napier's Bills were next taken in hand and carefully pruned. The Tenants' Compensation Bill, as it left the Committee, ignored Ulster tenant-right, and denied compensation for the class of improvements most commonly made in Ireland. The country had been rendered habitable by an industry like that which raised Venice on a quagmire or Holland on a sandbank. Yet all improvements more than twenty years in existence were confiscated. Inordinate rents had, as we know, created habitual arrears. In former measures a landlord ejecting a tenant was enabled to set off these arrears against any claims for compensation, but the modified Bill went a step farther, and declared that if a tenant was ejected for non-payment of rent or arrears he should not be entitled to compensation for any improvements whatever.
Half a dozen bye-elections occurred shortly afterwards. Three seats were vacated on petition by election committees. In two of them the late members who had deserted with Mr. Keogh presented themselves for re-election and were chosen. At Sligo, where an English gentleman had lost his seat on
- ↑ Nearly forty years after this Budget debate, when Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was before the public, I wrote a pamphlet on the measure in which the necessity of inquiring into our financial relations before establishing a new Exchequer was insisted upon, and a Royal Commission on the subject suggested. "It is not a sentimental grievance which may be dismissed with other forgotten wrongs belonging to the dead past, but a practical one, altogether outside of party and which will largely determine the future fortune of the country. A Royal Commission (I said) of competent financiers ought to inquire and report on this subject. The inquiry must be now or never."
