THE LAND QUESTION.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3054, 9 April 1881, Page 3

THE LAND QUESTION.

The following lecture, delivered recently in Birmingham, by Mr Murdoch, editor of The Highlander, Inverness, Scotland, will go far to show the erroneous nature of the •widespread notion that the Land Question is confined to Ireland. In commencing his lecture, Mr Murdoch said that the Land Question was not peculiar to Ireland. The came system prevailed over the three kingdoms—that was, the land was owned by a few, farmed by a middle class, and laboured by a landless mass, and this system came into existence by violence, fraud, and confiscation. In the olden times the land even of England, as well as of Scotland and Ireland, was held by communities of families called " clans " in the Highlands ; these clans had strict regulations under which fair play was enforced, and for purposes of cooperation in peace and war they had chiefs chosen to rule over them. But the Norman Conquest in England resulted in the land being distributed among the Conquerer's followers, the right of the native population being set aside. By various means this system, modified by time and circumstances, "was extended to Scotland and Ireland. In the course of time the proprietors reduced their own obligations and increased the burdens of the tenants and of the landless millions. This was exemplified in the case of the land tax which two hundred years ago was over 20 millions, but was now less than two millions a year. It waa to make up for these twenty millions poached by the landlords that the system of universal intermeddling known as the Excise came into existence. Tins system of irresponsible landlordism was the same in Protestant England, in Presbyterian Scotland, and in Catholic Ireland. Evictions in Ireland and clearances in Scotland were the natural sequence of the consolidation of farms which took place in England, and against which statutes were passed in the reigns of Elizabeth and Henry VII., as there have recently been measures formed by recent Parliaments to check the action of felonious landlords in Ireland. Manufactures in England absorbed the large porbion of the people who were cleared off the land, and thus the incidence of the landlord system was not felt so much. The peace and prosperity of the North of Ireland, as of England and lowland Caledonia, were due largely to the presence of manufactures. Over the rest of Ireland the woollen manufactures were put down by English law, as they competed too successfully with English manufacturers. It was further modified by tenant right in Ulster. Another fact was that, by a strange freak, the religion of the minority was established in Ireland, while that of the majority was established in Scotland, and thus the clergy in Scotland were thrown into • -the same boat with the proprietors, and have been a wet blanket in all agitation against the land fraud; while in Ireland the clergy were placed in a state of dependence upon the masses, and thus the Irish people, with all the conservatism of the Irish Church, have never been without an educated class to advocate their cause. And thus while little has been heard of the land wrongs of England and Scotland, thanks to Providence, the whole world has heard of the land wrongs of Ireland. The Highlands were treated pretty much the same as Ireland, but few knew of it. The Highlanders had no newspaper until within the last eight years, and the greatest crimes against them were not only not complained of by the pres3, but were actually represented as great benefits. For example, the Sutherland clearances were effected in the most atrocious manner, 300 houses being set on fire on one occasion for the purpose of forcing the people off their good farms. Yet, not only did the newspapers not lay the matter before the world, as should have been done, but the affair was actually paraded in a book, written by the desolator-in-chief, as a grand example of what wealth and power were able to do in furtherance of civilisation. The special pleading o£ this book was doing duty to the present day in gazeteers and guidebooks, and it would take some generations to undo the effects of the misrepresentation. Many persons thought that the Lothians were in a satisfactory condition. In dashing through the country by railways they saw magnificent farms, all well tilled, and everything appeared in a satisfactory condition; but let them go and inquire into the circumstances of the farmers and of the labourers, and they would find that the latter were kennelled in miserable huts, and huddled together like a lot of barbarians, while many of the farmers were in a state of bankruptcy. But there has been no stir about the condition of the people, because the manufacturing centres absorbed the population. Under the present land lawe, almost all the best lands in Scotland and Ireland, and much of the land, of England, had been massed into

large farms, a large proportion of which had been thrown out of cultivation, while the British people were made to depend upon foreign lands for bread, and for a market for the products of British industry, when there should bo a large and prosperous rural population to supply food to the towns and consume their manufactures. The land question was thus not merely an Irish one, nor even a rural one ; the whole British people were deeply interested in it, and he (the lecturer) had always tried to get English, Irish, and Scotch to see eye to eye and work shoulder to shoulder in a cause which was really the life of Celt and Saxon.