The Express.
London, England, 1867-04-30 00:00:00

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BERM

!!0 Dpi —MarnlMl, 101 E blm Alltenoos, lit ngs.
so-momunr—moning, lib. Ma.. -• • Aftersoos, Ob. On.

LONDON, TUESDAY, APRIL 30.

Tea Government is dealing with the Irish Land
question in a spirit akin to that which it has
exhibited on the English Reform question.
It is practising on the conscious weakness, not
to say the fears, of both sides of the
House of Commons. It appeals to the strong
feeling of party allegiance among the Tories
as a means of inducing them to vote for
principles which they abhor, consoling them with
the whispered assurance that the principles will be
inoperative. It sets up Liberal doctrines to which
it does not intend to give effect, in the hope
that Liberal members will either be deceived
by the shallow artifice, or will be afraid
of the false charge of inconsistency should
they seem to oppose that which they have hitherto
supported. Tenant right plays the same part in
the Bill of Lord NAAS that household suffrage
plays in Mr. DISRAELI'S Reform Bill. The name
is there, or is allowed to be officiously used, and
there is a false semblance of the thing ; but the
reality is wanting. The Land Bill leaves all but an
infinitesimal portion of the Irish farmers in a posi-
tion analogous to that in which the Reform Bill
leaves the groat majority of the English borough
occupiers. The Irish tenant-at-will is treated
by Lord NAAS as the English compound house-
holder is treated by Mr. DIRRAELI. The one
may console himself with the name of household
suffrage, the other may simply feed his imagina-
tion upon the idea of compensation for improve-
ments effected without the consent of his land-
lord. But between the written law and its opera-
tion there is erected a barrier of forms and proce-
dure, which in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred will be, and is intended to be, prac-
tically insuperable. Liberal members, we
repeat, are afraid of seeming to vote against
their principles, even though those prin-
ciples be marred in the application of them.
Tories are unwilling to vote against their party,
even when it has deserted its principles ; and
the Government acts upon these natural, though
unworthy motives, from the motive, yet more un-
worthy, of maintaining itself in office. Almost all
the speeches delivered last night from the Oppo-
sition benches betrayed, even when they did not
openly express, the conviction, that the Govern-
ment Bill is too bad to be amended. Yet no one
ventured to hint at throwing it out. The first
words of Mr. Gasooav's amendment, though fol-
lowed by the assertion that no enactment will be
satisfactory which does not contain previsions
which have no place in Lord NAAR'S Bill, dis-
claimed prejudgment of the propriety of reading
the Bill a second time, and the mover began his
speech by a similar disavowal. Lord CLAUD
Hamitrox protested that the simple question
before the House was, should tenants receive
recompense for their improvements or not,
and denounced opposition to the Bill as hos-
tility to the principle of compensation. In so
doing, he gave articulate utterance to the impres-
sion which the Government leas directly seeks to
convey. The bitter opposition of Mr. SANDFORD,
by bringing the spirit of petulance and faction
into clear contrast with the comparatively
respectable motives of unflinching party allegiance
and personal fealty which Lord CLAUD HAMILTON
displayed, was more likely, we fear, to advance
than to discredit the measure he attacked. To
produce nugatory schemes which Liberals cannot
oppose without incurring the specious, but un-
founded, charge of apostasy, and Tory hos-
tility to which seems dictated by the wounded
vanity of omitted and disappointed men, is the
triumph of Mr. DISRAELI'S genius. His inspira-
tion, if not his hand, is traceable in the Irish
Land Bill almost as clearly as in the English
Reform Bill.

The mechanism of the Government Bill—its
array of inspectors, commissioners, applications,
estimates, loans, and valuations, which must be
set in motion before a tenant can venture to incur
the expense of draining a bog or clearing a moun-
tain side of stones, is, as we have had previous
occasion to point out, a fatal objection to the
measure. It would make the Bill, if it passed,
virtually a dead letter. No Laputan contrivance
was more ridiculously in excess of or amide
from its professed end. But the Bill itself
ignores the real necessities of Irish agricul-
ture. The tenant-at-will, when he has proved