the tenant less secure, in so far
as it made the process of ejectment less costly and more simple, and
enabled the landlord in many instances to confiscate improvements.

Twenty-three Bills in favour of the tenants were thrown out in the forty
years which followed Emancipation. The struggle between landlord and
tenant was occupied with the attempts of the latter to enforce the
custom of tenant-right in Ulster, and secure its application in the
other provinces. The Land Act of 1870, for the first time, gave legal
sanction to this principle by giving the tenant a claim to compensation
for disturbance. It gave its imprimatur to the doctrine that an Irish
tenant does not contract for the occupation of a farm, that Irish land
is not the subject of an undivided ownership, but of a simple
partnership. The pecuniary damages to which a landlord was liable under
its provisions was a blow aimed at wanton evictions, and with the
curtailment of the power arbitrarily to effect these, the threats by
which landlords had been able unjustly to raise rents were robbed of
much of their force.

The tenant under the Act secured a recognition of his property in the
land and of his right to occupy it, provided he complied with certain
conditions, and, in addition, he obtained compensation, albeit
inadequate, for disturbance for non-payment of rent, in cases in which
the Court considered the rent exorbitant, and in which failure to pay
was due to bad seasons. Thus tenant-right, which Lord Palmerston had
dismissed with epigrammatic flippancy as landlord wrong only a few years
before, received the sanction of law from his own party.

In actual practice under the Act the landlords recouped themselves for
the compensation which they had to pay to an evicted tenant by raising
the rent on his successor in the tenancy in the comparatively few cases
in which the evicted tenant could afford the legal costs which the
filing of a claim for compensation entailed, but this much at least had
been secured, that the virtual confiscation of the tenants' improvements
had been stopped. The Act of 1870 had been passed to prevent arbitrary
evictions and to secure to the tenant compensation for improvements, and
in certain cases for disturbance. It succeeded only in making arbitrary
evictions more costly for the landlord, it gave the tenant no fixity of
tenure since the compensation for disturbance was inadequate. To remedy
this Isaac Butt in 1876 introduced a Bil