THE LAND PURCHASE BILL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVIII, Issue 4, 23 May 1890, Page 18

THE LAND PURCHASE BILL.

{Truth, March 27.)

A friejsd sitting by me on Monday when we were listening to Mr Balfour's Land Purchase Bill, a-ked me whether I thought it would pass. I replied, "If you fell amongst a band of bandits.doyou think you would partcompany with them with your purse in yoor pocket?" This is the condition of the British taxpayer, and will be so, so long as the classes to whom he foolishly gave power at the last general election retain that power. The Bill, however, ought to be opposed line by line and word by word, in order that the British electors should be brought to understand clearly the monstrous robbery which is being perpetrated. This will be the course taken by British Radicals t»nd by the representatives of Ireland.

An Irish landlord is to have the option of selling his estate to us, provided that he can cajole or bully his tenants into agreeing to the sale, and we are then to sell it to the tenants. Land is almost unsaleable at present in England or Ireland. Why, then, are the Irish landlords to be provided with a solvent purchaser ? The terms on which we are to buy are outrageous terms. Toey are to include arrears, and they are to be estimated on what Mr. Balfour calls net value, this net value including cost of management and bad debts. We are to give anything up to twenty years' purchase, and Mr. Balfour explained why by an example. He supposed an estate worth seventeen years' purchase He adds one year's purchase for cost of management to the present owner, and two years' arrears of rent to the actual owner. We should, therefore, pay for that estate twenty years' purchase, and' our security would be the estate worth seventeen years' purchase. If we do not get our annuities from the tenant, we are to lay hold of certain moneys now paid to Ireland by the Imperial Exchequer, and if that does not cover the deficit we are to provide money neither for education, nor luoatics, nor paupers in Ireland and behind this is to be an Imperial guarantee. This, Mr. Balfour laboriously explained, ia no sort of guarantee. The answer is obvious :ifit is not a guarantee, then why give it ? The value of a security is not based upon the borrower's estimate, but upon that of the lender, Without this guarantee go one would advance mone/ on

security at 6 per cent. ; with it anyone would advance it at 2| per cent. Can anything, therefore, be more absurd than to say that the guarantee is nominal ?

Bat the scheme for the congested districts is even more Bcandaloua. Tne land, for agricultural purposes, is, generally speaking, worthless. Irishmen live ou it because it is their home, and because they have built their houses ou it. Mr. Balfour proposes to immigrate or emigrate a portion of the population, and to throw several holdings into one. A? the residential value would thus disappear, he asks thatithe landlord should be paid for the existing residential value from funds belonging to the public. This is much as though the ratepayers of the metropolis were told that they must pay landlords of insanitary rookeries the value of their rookeries, based upon the rents that they have derived from herding human beings in stye* like animals. Tbe houses that are to be pulled down belong, be it remembered, to the tenants. They are to receive nothing for them, for evidently a tenant-right in a house to be pulled down is nonexisting,

Mr. Balfour explained that several principles must ba laid down in a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland. Here are thrss which alone would make such a Bill acceptable to Liberals :— l. It must involve no use of Imperial credit. 2. It must involve no nse of Irish credit without the assent of the Irish psople whose credit is pledged. 3. It must be approved by the Irish people through their representatives.