You cannot eat your cake and have it, uriless perhaps it
should happen to be oil cake, and, strange as the state-
ment may appear to a land-legislator with his eyes fast
shut to the baneful side of his efforts, you cannot eat a
landlord and have a landlord. In other words you
cannot drive capital from these improvements—such as
the planting of shelter belts for one instance—which
the landed capitalists will alone effect, without most
permanently fatal results. This elementary fact will,
I fear, only be perceived by land-legislators when it is
too late—too late, because all experience has shown that
capital when once driven away from a business or a
country (Ireland for instance) can hardly ever be
induced to return.
The publication of this letter may seem premature,
and I therefore quote from Mr. Ure (the Solicitor
General for Scotland) the following passage from a letter
of his to a correspondent, published in the Scotsman
of November 22nd, 1907. He says:—“I personally
would not deny to large farmers a fair rent court, and I
have no doubt that, when large farmers are agreed upon
that topic, as small farmers now are, their wishes will
be given effect to by the legislature.”

Here we have a direct promise of the worst feature of
Trish land legislation, the natural results of which are
shown in the above given letter—i.e., the cessation of
landlord’s improvements, and a complete severance of
the old relations between landlord and tenant.
APPENDICES.
JAMES HUNTER, Chester.
Mr. Hunter's Paper. 147


APPENDIX I.
