the land to? and, How are we to insure that the landlord shall not acquire these advantages by raising his rent? The answer to this question is, that it is simply impossible to step in and dictate to either party what contract shall be made. The freedom of trade requires that each side to a bargain should be free to make his own terms; and all that the State can do is to step in, in the absence of any other agreement, and decide the right which shall be recognised by law as appertaining to each side. The farmer is, in most cases, perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and we can no more by law regulate the rent of land than we can fix the price of a quartern loaf. All that we can do is to turn the occupier into a copyholder by giving him the three F's; and it should be very clearly understood that this is the unmistakable nature of these famous provisions for the Irish tenant which, it is the belief of many, he has in justice a claim to; while others believe, on the other hand, that if he is to have them given to him he must purchase with his own money.

All these difficulties were met in England under the old patriarchal system by yearly tenancies and undisturbed possession during good behaviour, low rents, and a general display of good feeling and kindly interest on both sides. Much of this old state of things no longer exists; the competitions of life among landowners and new proprietors have raised the general rental of farms; the custom of the country has been disregarded; and in the last twenty years we have seen an increase in the rent of agricultural land of over 20 per cent., which state of things is rapidly working out its own cure to-day.

Thus it has happened that the leasing of land has taken, in many cases, the place of the old year-to-year custom, twenty-one-year leases being granted to tenants with capital, as is the custom in Scotland. The objection to twenty-one-year leases to a small tenant is, however, the same as the objection any one of us would have to purchasing the tail-end of a town lease. We should certainly be protected against having our rent arbitrarily raised by our landlord, but we should have got a thoroughly unsaleable article; and if one of us were to die or change our mode of life, there is no one who would purchase the remainder of the lease from us except the landlord; in fact, we should be saddled with an unwished-for contract. Thus a small farmer, who dreads the uncertainty of the seasons and the advent of bad times, gains nothing by having a lease for twentyone years; he is infinitely better off, as all of them will admit, as a yearly tenant with a 'two' years' notice to quit; in fact he would prefer this to anything. It remains, however, to be considered how far it might not be advisable for owners of property to sell leases of their farms for fifty to one hundred years on fines which would represent say one-fourth of the rental capitalised. It would then be in the power of a small farmer to lay out some hundreds in purchasing a lease in the same way as a man invests in house property in towns. He VOL. IX.-No. 48.

T

might erect buildings on it, or do any other sort of improvement, and feel sure that, if anything happened to him, his heirs would be able to realise the value of his expenditure by the enhanced price the lease would fetch in the market; there would be nothing either to stop the landowner's entering into a contract with the tenant to agree to certain permanent improvements, such as farm buildings, being revalued at the expiration of a lease, and the tenant would have no difficulty in obtaining advances on easy terms from the local banks for improvements of an exhaustible nature, or for helping him in bad times. Such a system of loans would be far more profitably and economically spent than where estates are managed, as they must be, by agents, when of inordinate size.

Land would come to be a form of investment like the funds; the cultivator would be free, and large estates would cease to be as common as they are now. A landowner would not care for more property than he could manage himself personally, and his park, woods, and home farms would represent his own personal stake in the agricultural interests of the country. This would be in the end a far happier and easier state of things for the landowner than the constant source of care which the deputed agency of a large property gives, while it yields none of the personal and political power it used to do. Indirectly the influence of the landowner would be much the same; he would still, by his position and wealth, possess a considerable stake in the country; and, while his personal cares and burdens would be lightened, he would be realising a greater profit from his property by saving the expenses of agency and repairs, &c. ; while the social and aristocratic privileges of the landowning class would be unimpaired.

It is sometimes asserted that an aristocracy without land is like a king without subjects; that the possession of large landed estates tends to make the Upper Chamber not only independent of the fickleness of popular opinion, but also to bring it perpetually into harmony with all that is most truly stable and national in public thought. It is urged, moreover, that an aristocracy without land, a house of peers without large estates endowed with the prestige of hereditary transmission, would infallibly sink to a lower level in the estimation of the people, and that the balance of the constitutional principle would be destroyed. The House of Lords is thus supposed not only to represent the landed interest of the country, but also to occupy the often difficult position of a sort of hereditary jury to decide between the conflicting interests of the two great political parties in the State, and it is assumed that its usefulness will be impaired if its peculiar attributes are changed.

It may, however, be doubted if the influence which landed property gives is not to be fully compensated by the possession of personal merit. The interests of the nation require that a better and

larger distribution of landed property should shortly be brought into operation by the modification of certain protective laws. It is idle to contend against these facts, and it would be dangerous for the best interests of the peers themselves were they to fail to recognise these necessities. The cost of their institution to the community might be felt to outweigh the usefulness of their functions, and a feeling might take root of general aversion to the hereditary principle, of which we have seen symptoms in the last session of Parliament. The House of Lords, as an institution representing essentially the landowning class, has survived many dangers in past times, and preserves to the present day an immense indirect influence on our legislative industry. The time is, however, at hand when, if it is to preserve its influence in the State, it will have not only seriously to modify its own constitution, but also to divest itself of that peculiar exclusive landed character it has heretofore possessed. The hereditary character may remain, tempered by judicious selection, and supplemented by the addition of intellectual eminence from other branches of the Legislature.7

It is, however, on its own merits, and on the individual character of its members, that it must be able to survive, rather than on the sentimental associations connected with an ancient monument.

Land measures will have to be brought before it, however, which many of its members will believe are destined to threaten the very existence of its constitution. The keynote of these measures was struck last year by no less a person than the late Prime Minister, in his speech on the Game Bill, when he warned the noble Lords that it was not over such small matters that they must waste their thoughts, but rather reserve themselves for that great constitutional battle he felt was coming. The battle will undoubtedly come, and we may expect to see many noble knights appear arrayed for the fray in armour of a very antiquated form, which will be of little avail for modern warfare. Fortunately there are still to be found members of the aristocracy and the landed class who are not so

The obstructive action of the House of Lords is well exemplified in the history of Irish legislation, on the four different occasions when important Land Bills came before them.

In 1829 an Arterial Drainage Bill for Ireland was sent up from the Commons and was dropped in the Lords, though that same year they passed an Arms Act.

In 1845 the Compensation to Tenants Bill of Lord Stanley, after having passed the Commons, was vigorously opposed in the Lords, and was therefore allowed to drop.

4

In 1854, when Mr. Napier's four Land Bills for Ireland were sent up to the Lords, they passed the first three bills, which were in every sense landlords' bills, giving relief and powers to owners of settled estates; but they carefully rejected the only bill which was of any interest to the tenant-namely, the fourth bill, which was a Tenants' Compensation Bill.'

Lastly, in 1870, the Land Bill of Mr. Gladstone was shorn of some of its most important provisions through the action of the Upper Chamber.

See Barry O'Brien's Irish Land Question, pp. 37, 75, 101.

utterly devoid of tactical skill. They will enlist on their side the great moderating element of the English nation, the large influential middle class, the employers of labour, the heads of mercantile enterprise; and thus, by timely concessions to the sound common-sense view of the influential portion of the electorate, the landowning classes will be saved from themselves and their own rashness. There are not wanting indications of how bitter the struggle will bebitterer in many ways than the battle that was fought over the great Reform Bill; but when it has been fought, and when it has been won, the institutions of this country will come out stronger from the fray. The just aspirations of the people will have been gained; the land monopoly will have been broken up; the democratic element will have been disappointed by seeing institutions which, if they and the ultra-Tory element had their way, would soon be destroyed, but which, by the moderating influence of capable statesmen, and the timely concurrence of the Liberal section of the privileged class, will have received a fresh lease of existence, preserving thus the continuity of our political life, and the true interests of the English people.

BLANDFORD.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

EVERYBODY has at one time or another quoted La Rochefoucauld; some with half apology, as though the light shed by his Maxims were an evil glamour from the enemy of mankind. But no classical writer of modern times is so little known and so much the creature of hearsay. His Maxims, about which he took infinite care, have been until these latter days most shamefully treated in France; and in England we have added to the falsification of the French text by a set of translations the most villanous that have ever been perpetrated. The result is that philosophers refute and rhetoricians rail at La Rohecfoucauld without knowing much about him, and certainly without knowing what were his genuine doctrines. In London one may hunt through all the second-hand book-shops for a day without being able to procure a single English copy of the Maxims, or any passable edition of them in French; and that tells a good deal of the oblivion. into which the celebrated author has fallen, at least in this country, through the unfaithfulness of his editors and translators. Indeed, for the most part, when people quote La Rochefoucauld, it is not because they have taken the trouble to read his little book as he issued it, but because they have culled from other books, or have gathered in conversation, half a dozen sentences which cleave to the memory. The volume, as he put it forth, is not to be found in English at all, save in translations which are a travestie, and very often reverse the meaning in the most ludicrous manner. As for the fate of the work in France, it has been so singular, when we take into account the splendour of the author's reputation, that it cannot escape our inquiries; and in truth it is only by unravelling it that we can fairly distinguish the true La Rochefoucauld from the fictitious one of common report. That unravelling is to come; but first of all, and to give it the importance which is due to it, let us glance at the position of La Rochefoucauld, and fix a few points in his career as a writer, as a moralist, and as a man.

French literature has been summarised as follows by a master:

Critics (he says), and especially foreigners, who in these latter days have judged our two literary centuries most severely, agree in the acknowledgment that what dominated in them, what reflected them in countless ways, what gave them