the landlord the right of pre-emption, or in other
words the right of purchasing the tenant right when it was for sale, at
a price to be determined by the Court, and thus becoming once more the
absolute owner of his farm. The sum specified by the Court was usually
about sixteen years' purchase of the judicial rent. By the payment of
this large sum he may regain the property which a few years ago was
incontestably his own, which was held by him under the most secure title
known to English law, and which was taken from him, not by any process
of honest purchase, but by an act of simple legislative confiscation.

Whatever palliations of expediency may be alleged, the true nature of
this legislation cannot reasonably be questioned, and it has established
a precedent which is certain to grow. The point, however, on which I
would especially dwell is that the very party which most strongly
opposed it, and which most clearly exposed its gross and essential
dishonesty, have found themselves, or believed themselves to be, bound
not only to accept it but to extend it. They have contended that, as a
matter of practical politics, it is impossible to grant such privileges
to one class of agricultural tenants and to withhold it from others. The
chief pretext for this legislation in its first stages was that it was
for the benefit of very poor tenants who were incapable of making their
own bargains, and that the fixity of tenure which the law gave to yearly
tenants as long as they paid their rents had been very generally
voluntarily given them by good landlords. But the measure was soon
extended by a Unionist government to the leaseholders, who are the
largest and most independent class of farmers, and who held their land
for a definite time and under a distinct written contract. It is in
truth much more the shrewder and wealthier farmers than the poor and
helpless ones that this legislation has chiefly benefited.

Instances of this kind, in which strong expediency or an absolute
political necessity is in apparent conflict with elementary principles
of right and wrong, are among the most difficult with which a politician
has to deal. He must govern the country and preserve it in a condition
of tolerable order, and he sometimes persuades himself that without a
capitulation to anarchy, without attacks on property and violations of
contract, this is impossible. Whether the necessity is as absolute or
the expediency as rightly calculated a