The Sun.
London, England, 1847-12-25 00:00:00

TENANT
e, TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.
~.3'3'nt,--The Corporation of Dublin have recently
they
a petition in favour of tenant right, in which
ulster
declare their opinion that the tenant right of
ulster ought to be extended to the rest of Ireland ;
and they define (but in very:loose and inartificial
lan-
guage) the tenant right of Ulster as ".the right by
Which tenants in possession of occupancies, which
they have held at will, or from year to year, are per-
nutted to sell their right of occupation and tenancy
their holdings to the highest bidder, subject to
e new tenant paying the annual rent to which the
Premises are liable at the time of sale, or such charge
f rent as shall be afterwards settled from time to
time on a fair valuation, agreeable to the usual letting
value on the estate."
There is, I believe, no difference of opinion as to
the justice and expediency of compensating tenants
I°r improvements; but to give to mere occupancy,
Without improvements, a legalised value is quite
another proposition; and it is desirable that the dare.
telloe in principle between tenants' compensation,
Which assumes improvements as its basis, and a pea.
IlitOt proprietorship, such as that called for under the
name of tenant right, and which is grounded on mere
tneeopaney, quite irrespective of improvements, should
be distinctly put before the public. The name tenant
tight has, indeed, been greatly abused, being made by
some tenant advocates to mean a division of property,
transfer, in fact, of so many years' purchase from
the landlord to whatever occupant may happen to be
in possession of the land—while others confine it to
What I believe to be its real meaning in the north of
Ireland, viz., a permission to sell an occupancy with
the chance of being continued at the old rent, subject
to the landlord's approval of the incoming tenant.
41 is obvious that arrangements of that kind
are altogether matters of feeling and goodwill,
and that any attempt to enforce particular
feelings by Act of Parliament would be absurd.
An Act of the Legislature might put an end to
'lnch relations, but could never originate them.
Those, therefore, who desire legislative interference,
are obliged to go far beyond the existing limits of
tenant right, and to ask for an enactmezlt which shall
Convert the chance of being retained at the old rent,
or at a valuation rent in place of it, into a certainty,
and require the erection of some new tribunal, which
shall supersede ordinary operations of demand and
Ripply, and fix the rent between the parties. This
Was the demand of the meeting at Holycross ; this is
what the corporation of Dublin contemplate by their
"fair valuation ;" and this was the principle of the
amendment supported by Sharman Crawford, at the
Meeting convened by the Irish Council in November.
The discussion at that meeting was conducted with
great deliberation and decorum; and the result of a
three days' debate was the affirmation of the original
resolution, recommending a system of compensation
for improvements; the value of the improvements at
the end of the tenancy, to be either paid in cash or
Cowed for by way of fine, or the grant of a lease
for 31 years. The reasons which induced the corn
Inittee of the Irish Council to prefer such a system to any
extension of existing tenant right usages are stated in
14111 exposition of the views of the council by Mr. Fer
gluon, one of the secretaries, in a letter to the editor
of the Londonnerry Sentinel. With the historical
question in dispute, it is not my intention, at present,
to interfere further than to say, that it is impossible the
tenant right usages of Antrim and Down could have
originated in the Articles for the plantation of Ulster,
as contended for by the editor of the Derry Standard,
for the simple reason assigned by Mr. Ferguson, that
neither of these counties are included in the Articles
in question; and the same may be said of the county
of Monaghan, as well as of various other localities in
Ireland where those natural and just relations between
landlord and tenant already exist. 'She following is
Air. Ferguson's letter :
" TO THE EDITOR OF THE DERRY STANDARD.

"My dear Sir,—You must not suppose that I al-
luded to you, when I spoke of our provincial editors
at the late meeting here, at which we discussed the
question of tenant right. I was not then aware of
the influential part you had taken in this important
fatter, and now greatly regret to find, from a copy
of the Londonderry Standard, which you have been
good enough to forward to me, that you conceive my
tsmarks were personally directed against you, which
hasten to assure you was not the case. You will
allow me, however, respectfully to intimate that, in
the historical view of the question which you have
adopted, I conceive you are in error.
"There was not any condition of making estates
IMPosed on the grantees of the Crown in Down or
Antrim. For this, lam unable to refer you to any
Published authority; but copious abstracts of these,
as well as of the ether grants of that period, are in
Print, and can be consulted in the unpublished sheets
of the sixth volume of the 'lrish Record Reports,'
copies of which are deposited in the libraries of the
Quern's Inns and Four Courts. You will join with
the in lamenting the discontinuance of the Commis.
lion which has left a work of so much na-
tional importance thus incomplete, and has deprived
so many worthy students of their just share
in the public sources of information. What
has been done is, however, sufficient to enable any one
here to satisfy himself that no such covenants, condi-
tions, or-provisos, exist in the patents for Down or
Antrim. Even in the patents for the counties re-
ferred to in the Articles of Plantation, the condition
that the landlords should make estates, is not ex-
Pressed either directly, or by reference to the Ar-
ticles. It can only be inferred that the making of
estates was contemplated by the parti€s, from the
covenants on the grantees' parts, to cause their
tenants in fee farm, for life or lives, or years, to build
their house- together for mutual protection. But the
grants of that period, both throughout Ulster and
elsewhere, did contain very express covenants and
P,r.ovisos against aliening or demising to the native
: and there remain a great number of inquisi-
tions (which are published and accessible in the public
libraries), finding patents of Ulster undertakers for-
feited, by reason of demises made by the grantees to
the natives; and these demises appear, with but one
exception that I can recollect, out of very numerous
instances, to have been for a year and at will; but
there are no inquisitions to be found, nor do there:appear
ever to have been any proceedings taken, or any
suggestion of an undertaker having failed to make
leases.
"Of course, I refer to proceedings against under-
!alters—recollecting that the neglect to make leases
Is said to have been one, among many other charges,
alleged against the London Companies, in those pro-
ceedings in the Star Chamber, which terminated in
the sequestration you mention ; but I recollect, also,
that the judgment of the Star Chamber was reversed,
on appeal, by the English Parliament:
" The existence, then, of tenant-rights in Down
and Antriin, and, I may add, in Louth and Meath,
as well as in your Ulster Plantation, suggests alto-
gether another origin for these relations than the
Orders and Conditions' of 1608. Orders and con-
ditions, let me again remark, which are not incor-
porated by reference or otherwise, in any patent I
have ever read, further than by the covenant above-
?nentioned to cauce the tenants to build together.
That such tenants having come over, and built, and
planted, would have an equitable claim to leases and
renewals of leases, on the score of their improvements,
every one will admit. Sir Thomas Phillips, the
mover of the Star Chamber information, went no fur-
ther. The Commissioners appointed in the 3d of King
Charles I, asked no more than that 'they who are
(as they ought to be), tied to build and plant, should
have a good long tenure to encourage them to
undergo the charge ;' but that he who had neither
built nor planted, nor undergone any charge to im-
prove his holding, or to purchase the improvements
made therein by his predecessor, should have an estate
in his more occupancy, is a doctrine which cannot be
found in any article of the British Government, nor
in any report of a British Commission, nor even in
any judgment of the British Star Chamber.
" Whatever tenant-rights, therefore, have origi-
nated under the Articles for the Plantation of Ulster,
are rights to compensation for outlay and improve-
ments. Other supposed rights annexed to the mere
occupancy, and to demises for a year, and from year
to year, may have sprung up along with those just
tenant-rights in improvements, there as well as else-
where ; but wherever these latter claims exist, they
are of a different growth, and look for their origin
and sanction to institutions of a different character.
" Without, however, going further into that ques-
tion, let me shortly state the reasons why the framers
of the Report of the Irish Council thought it more
expedient to propose their plan of compensation for
future improvements, than to interfere with exist-
ing interests, whether professing to be grounded on
improvements, or on improvements and occupancy, or
On occupancy alone.
"It appeared to them that a legal right to sell the
,occupancy would be merely illusory, so long as the
law left it in the lessee's power to make the occupancy
Worthless, by exacting an unlimited rent ; and that,
therefore, if the law interfered in the manner pro-
Posed, so as to convert what is at present a mutual
good-will into independent rights, it ought to prevent
the conflict between the adverse rights which it would
thus call into existence, by going a step beyond the
tenant-rights of Ulster, and erecting a tribunal for
the compulsory assessment of rents.
" Such, I may add, is the view universally adopted
°Y the country, and, to meet this necessity, Mr.
Crawford had to import into your Derry definition of
tenant-right, the Holycross principle of a valuation
rent, which I believe most northern landowners and
occupiers will recognise as a novel feature in their
system.

" There appeared no inducement to adopt a course
so violent as this for the sake of effecting what pos-
sibly would prove to be no more than a new distrilm-
"on of the existing insufficient means of the
Country; for there is no guarantee, but only
It loose supposition and speculative assurance
t'llat the common wealth would be at all increased