This is an article that appeared in Popular Science in August of 1886 and discusses the problems with land ownership on PEI.

With Right Hon. Hugh E. Childers as chairman, the commission went to work, and the voluminous evidence presented to it reveals how thoroughly the tenants regarded their leases as unsound and illegal. Whenever a lese was taken as a basis of valuation, the pleas was set up that the proprietor’s title was faulty, and that he had leased property to which his right was doubtful. In vain was it contended that the whimsical conditions of the original grant had been impossible of fulfillment. The retort was repeated that, therefore, proprietorship should be forfeited, and it was held that landlord influences at Westminster had, in early days of agitation, successfully fought off proposed concessions to tenants, which, if granted, would have spared the island grievous evils. The landlords maintained in their defence that the ownership had been repeatedly recognized by the Government, more particularly in the Fifteen Years’ Purchase Act of 1865. They pleaded that, if they had not rigorously enforced claims against their tenants, their forbearance arose from no uncertainty as to their titles, but from humanity in cases where their tenants were needy, and from social and political prejudices against legal collection where their debtors where thriving. Leases, it was clear, were very far from being leases in the British, Irish, or American sense; they were not contracts meaning what they said, but doubtful bargains open to discussions or rebate, just as landlords’ title could be discredited, indulgence obtained, or prosecution parried. Many tenants of rich land, abundantly able to pay their rent, had paid none. Often a tenant who decried his leasehold as poor and unproductive, was proved to have disposed of it for a handsome sum. Parallel with the accumulating of arrears on landlords’ ledgers had gone on the steady piling up by tenants as a class of savings in the banks. A disregard for property in rents extended itself to other kinds of property belonging to landed proprietors. It was not uncommon for woodlands to lose their vale through being stripped of timber by thieves. When in an extreme case a tenant was ejected from his holdings, no successor to him was to be found. Once a sheriff bearing a writ was met by an armed mob, headed by a member of the Legislature.

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