THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE GIFT OF Vr. " LAND SYSTEMS LONDON: I'RINTHI) I)V BI'OrilsWOODK AND CO., NKW-HT1MKT SQIAKK AM) I'AIU.UMKNT RTKKKT I >-/ I I LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY IRELAND, ENGLAND, AND CONTINENTAL COUNTRIES. fr E. CLIFFE LESLIE, LL.B. OF LINCOLN'S INN, BARHISTER-AT-LAW : Kfaminer in Political Economy in the University of London, and ProJ'tstur of Jurisprudence and Political Economy in the Queen'i University in Ireland, and Queen's College, Belfast. LONDON : LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND CO. 1870. CONTENTS. I'AfiK *1. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867 . , . o III. IRELAND IN 1868 . . . . .34 *IV. THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870 . . .57 A". POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION . . Sfl VI POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE TENURE OF LAND 117 VII. LOED DUFFERIN ON THE TENURE OF LAND . 133 VIII. MR. SENIOR ON IRELAND. . . . lol IX. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867 . ifid *X. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870 . . '204 XI. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869 . 2oO *XII. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1869-1870 . LV>1 XIII. A VISIT TO LA CREUSE, 1868 . . a Co vi CONTENTS. fJLQf *\IV. A SECOND VISIT TO LA ('REUSE . 283 XV. THE PEASANTRY AND FARMS OF BELGIUM, 1867. 294 *XVI. THK FARMS AND PEASANTRY OF HKLGIl'M, 1870. 341 XVJl. APPENDIX: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE RATE OF WACHS :>J7 LAND SYSTEMS &c. INTRODUCTION. ALOXG with a republication of several essays in de- ference to many suggestions, this volume contains additional articles * on the Land Systems of Ireland and England, and on the industrial economy of La Creuse, Westphalia and the Euhr Basin, and Belgium, founded on later study and local inquiry. It appears to the author that the Land Systems of England and Ireland are best studied together. The two systems react in many ways on each other ; their results present some striking resemblances, and where they differ most, the differences are instructive. They have a common origin and foundation. The first sentence in Mr. Furlong's standard treatise on the Law of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland is : ' The common law regulating the enjoyment of real property * Marked with an asterisk in the table of contents. B 2 INTRODUCTION. both in England and in Ireland is founded upon and governed by the principles of the feudal system.' Their similarity of structure is the main cause why the Irish land system has remained intact down to the introduction of the Land Bill now before Parliament. This is so, not only because the landowners of England have been reluctant to permit interference with powers similar to their own, but also through the influence of the structure of the English land system on the ideas of other classes. Had there been in England a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants' improvements, an open registration of title and transfer, a considerable number of peasant properties, the rural economy of England would long since have created unanswerable objections to the Irish land system in the public mind. On the other hand, there are striking differences in the results of the two systems, which throw much light on both. The Land System of Ireland, for ex- ample, tends to suppress the existence of towns ; that of England, on the contrary, to give to large towns undue predominance in our industrial and social economy. The English agricultural labourer, again, answers to the Irish small tenant-at-will. And emi- gration is the movement in the case of Ireland corre- sponding with immigration into large towns in England. The latter movement is moreover swollen by immigrant INTRODUCTION, 3 poverty from Ireland ; and there is a reflux of its own poverty into that island. Both Irish emigration and English immigration into towns contrast curiously with an immigration from the country into the towns of France, arising from a very different cause, the economic and political effects of which are among the subjects discussed in the two articles on La Creuse. Although the author has described effects of the Land Systems of France, Germany, and Belgium, he has, in doing so, simply recorded facts which have come under his own observation, and the genuine im- pressions made on his mind by careful inquiry on the spot. He has endeavoured also to indicate the in- fluences of geological and other physical conditions on the industrial economy of the Continental localities of which a description is given in the volume. Without reference to such conditions, to history, and to positive institutions, the author believes it impossible for the economist to arrive at a true theory of the causes which govern the production and distribution of wealth. It is right to acknowledge the obligations the author is under to the extensive and profound learning of his friend Mr. Francis S. Eeilly for information and suggestion on many, but especially legal, subjects ; al- though he ought to add that Mr. Eeilly is in no way responsible for his conclusions. B 2 4 INTRODUCTION. Without the hospitable aid and instruction which he has received from M. Leonce de Lavergne during visits to La Creuse, it is improbable that he would have attempted a description of that singular department the history of which, isolated as it is, has been strangely interwoven with the political and social history of France for more than two hundred years. 2 STONE BUILDINGS, LINCOLN'S INN: February 21, 1870. THE STATE OF IRELAND* 1867. STUDENTS of Irish history know how from time to time in its troubled course, after some overwhelming dis aster, there has come a pause in misfortune, a tranquil interval, when statesmen, beholding the capabilities of the country and its people, and mistaking the signs of exhaustion for those of a new life of peace and pro- sperity, congratulated themselves upon the regeneration of Ireland in their own days. 'In the first nine years of King James,' wrote Sir John Davis, after three rebellions in the reign of Elizabeth, ' there hath been more done in the reformation of the kingdom than in the 440 years since the Conquest.' A still profounder statesman, Bacon, four years afterwards congratulated a Chief Justice of Ireland on his appointment at a time when ' that kingdom, which within these twenty years wise men were wont to doubt whether they should wish it to be a pool, is like now to become a garden, and younger sister to Great Britain.' A generation had not passed before these words were foUowed by * Reprinted from l Macmillan's Magazine' for February 1867. In the reprint of this and other essays in the volume, a passage here and there has been omitted. In other respects hardly any change has been made. But as the situation of things has changed in succeeding years, changes in the author's views may occasionally appear, owing; to that cause, or to further inquiry and reflection. G LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. another rebellion, suppressed in its turn in such a man- ner that Sir William Petty in 1672 expressed his con- viction that the Irish never would rebel again, the more so, as they had never before such prosperity as then.* Political wisdom and sagacity are both supposed to have made great progress since the reign of Charles II., yet such has been the falsification of repeated hopes of Ireland's reformation that there are still to be found men who repeat the very wishes (doubtless ignorant of their antiquity) which Sir William Petty 200 years ago sternly rebuked, and of which nearly 300 years ago the poet Spenser exposed the folly. f The repe- tition of such sentiments in itself might merely prove that political and moral progress has been unequal in England as in Ireland, and be worth notice only on the part of those historic minds who find an inte- rest in every living vestige of ancestral barbarism in either island. But it is connected not remotely with inquiries of more practical interest and importance, to which conflicting answers are returned ; inquiries such as, What is really the present state of Ireland ? Has it made any real progress since its last great disaster? Is the land, the people, or the law, the cause of its * ' Political Anatomy of Ireland,' chaps, iv. find xii. t ' Some furious spirits have wished that the Irish would rebel ngain, that they might be put to the sword. P>ut I declare that notion to be not only impious and inhuman, but withal frivolous, and pernicious even to those who have rashly wished for those occasions.' .Sir W. Petty, ' Political Anatomy,' clmp. iv. ' So have I heard it often wished that all that land were a seapool, which kind of speech is rather the manner of desperate men than of wise counsellors: for were it not the part of a desperate physician to wish his patient dead rather than to apply the best endeavour of his skill for his recovery 1" ' ' A New View of the Slate of Ireland,' by Edmund Spenser, 1090. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 7 long backwardness and misery ? Can legislation do anything for its benefit ? The chief difficulty in answering the two first of these inquiries arises from the very different state of different parts of the island. Different counties and towns adjoining estates, and even adjoining farms and houses are very differently circumstanced, and would return a very different report; nor is it too much to assert that the man does not exist who could give a complete and true account of Ireland's present condition. Even the very same results may be pro- duced in different places by opposite causes, and are of different import and omen accordingly. Of this a striking instance offers at once in the rate of wages ; O O ' an instance of great importance in itself, because it touches the root of the whole Irish question, as for brevity it is sometimes called. Great stress is laid by some on the advance in Irish wages as a proof of a proportionate increase in general prosperity, and of the benefit of emigration. As a matter of fact, the rise in wages is much less than those who take this view suppose ; and, in truth, the bulk of the employers of labour below the landed proprietors are in no condi- tion to pay such a price for it. The demand at such a price as has been stated could in most Irish counties be that of one small class alone ; and such wages would therefore imply a much greater emigration of labourers and disappearance of farmers than has as yet taken place. But, moreover, those who allege a rise in wages as a conclusive proof of a proportionate increase in general prosperity, overlook the distinction between a 8 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. home demand for labour and a foreign one, to which alone they refer it. If ten thousand labourers only were left in the island, they might earn perhaps more than a pound a day from the upper ten thousand ; but would such payment be a proof of Ireland's great pro- sperity ? Would it not rather prove that Ireland had lost one of the three great instruments of production, labour ; and that the industry of Ireland had gone to develop American instead of Irish natural resources? The following table shows the rates of wages earned by agricultural labour throughout the year just closed in different parts of the island, as ascertained by personal inquiry : s. d. s. d. County of Antrim from . . . 7 to 10 a week. Down . , . .70 10 Armagh . . . .70 90,, Monaghan . . .GO 80,, Cavan . . . .00 70,, Dublin . . . .70 11 Wexford . . . .GO 80,, Cork . . . .CO 80,, Mayo . . . .GO 7 G Donegal . . . .GO 80,,* From the foregoing table it appears that wages throughout most of Ireland do not average more than a shilling daily throughout the working year, which, though a great improvement upon former * Even such rates as the above are not maintained in all the districts remote from railways : occasional wages of 2,s. Cxi. a day in the West arc far from being a sign of agricultural prosperity and a permanent demand fur labour. In parts of Mayo, for example, where oats nnd potatoes are commonly grown in alternation until the land is exhausted, there is a great demand for labour at spring-time and harvest (when wages some- times reach 2s. CJ. a day) and very little demand through the rest of the year. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 9 rates when constancy of employment is considered, is yet at present prices a low rate, and one which threatens or promises, as people may think it, a great additional emigration, if the home demand for labour be not greatly improved. And, in connection with this, it is an important point to notice that wages are highest in the localities where population, in place of decreasing, has increased a point illustrative of the distinction between a home demand for labour and a foreign one. When wages rise by reason of the amount of profitable employment, the quantity and brisk circulation of capital, the wealth and consumption of large classes within a country, it is not only an advantage to the labourers, but a sign of general affluence ; it is otherwise when it means no more than that labourers have disappeared. Happily it means the former in at least one-half of Ulster. In that vast system of manufactures which now stretches over several countries, it is around towns in which popula- tion has doubled in half a generation that agricultural wages are highest. This circumstance deserves the more attention since it has been lately persistently alleged that the want of coal . and iron is the cause of Ireland's poverty, and a cause which must keep it always poor. Writers who persist in such statements can surely never have heard of Derry, Coleraine, Ballymena, Antrim, Newtownards, Lisburn, Banbridge, Newry, Armagh, Strabane, and many other manu- facturing towns of Ulster, besides Belfast, to say nothing of the numerous factories which stud the rural districts of the provinces, or of the great amount of 10 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. industry engaged in the domestic manufacture of the finer fabrics, which the power-loom cannot for many years compete with. Much of the wealth and useful- ness of Belfast itself arises from the fact that it is the commercial centre of several counties ; and were it overthrown by an earthquake to-morrow, the United Kingdom would have lost one of its best cities, but the looms of Ulster would remain numerous and busy. That the natural deficiency of coal and iron is not the chief obstacle to Irish wealth is indeed sufficiently established by the fact, that in Belfast manufactures in iron are successfully carried on. A fact of still greater significance is that Belfast has in one generation sprung to its present importance, through the land on which it stands becoming the property of its citizens, from being the property of a single proprietor hampered by settlements and incumbranccs, and by no means brought up to industry. This is a fact which in itself might justify a presumption that the want of other than agricultural employment for labour in Ireland, and the consequent rush to a foreign demand, is due to no faults of the people or the island, but to the law. A noble writer has recently described with graphic eloquence the long series of restrictions laid on almost every branch of Irish trade and industry by English legislation in less enlightened times than our own ; and the importance due to such historical causes is proved by the different history of two Irish industries the linen and the woollen manufactures. Almost at the same moment that Protestant manufacturers were flying from France on the Revocation of the Edict of THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 11 Nantes, to lay the foundation of the linen manufacture of Ulster, now one of the most flourishing industries of the world, woollen manufacturers, both Protestant and Catholic, were flying in thousands from Ireland to parts of the Continent where the industry they planted flourishes still, but in Ireland has only begun to revive. The history of Flanders affords a precisely parallel instance ; the manufactures which the Spaniards drove from its provinces took lasting root in Great Britain, but only begin to reappear in the land of their birth.* The foregoing is not the only historical explanation of the exclusion from three provinces of Ireland of every industry but that of tilling land. It has been pointed out by Adam Smith, that whatever progress was made by England in rural industry itself, originated in the trade and freer institutions of its towns. In common with other philosophers, he has also remarked that in every part of Europe wealth and civilisation began upon the borders of the sea, where there was com- paratively free and easy communication with the outer world, but in Ireland the English seized every impor- tant port ; and Sir John Davis, early in the seventeenth century, asked, ' When the Irish might not converse or commerce with any civil men, nor enter into any town without peril of their lives, whither should they fly but into the woods and mountains, and there live in a wild and barbarous manner ? ' It was no more the policy of the age following than of the one preceding that * When manufactures started up with steam in Belgium, it was in the "Walloon provinces near mines of coal and iron they rose. Now, how- ever, the Flemish provinces begin to count their growing manufactories a<>ain. 12 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. eminent statesman, to civilise and elevate the Irish ; and the period of the Commonwealth was signalised by repeated orders to drive all Irish and Papists to a distance from every considerable town. When to this we add the blighting influence of the penal laws and the exclusive municipal institutions of a later time, we need hardly wonder that the Irish people clung with 4 morbid hunger ' to the land alone for their support. But why did the land afford so little support ? why was their only industry so barren of results when starvation was frequently the penalty of failure ? Why, as it has been often asked, did the English system of landed property, which has succeeded so well in Eng- land, fail so utterly in Ireland ? The first answer such a question ought to get is that the English system has not succeeded well in England, but has, on the contrary, proved a most disastrous failure. Agriculture, it is said indeed, has been carried in England to the greatest known perfection. If this were so, it would nevertheless be true that the proper test of any rural system is the peasantry, and not the beasts or herbs it produces ; and that the English peasantry, descendants of a noble race, arc a reproach to the name of Englishmen. But can agriculture really be said to have prospered when Sir Robert Peel in 1850 could describe it in the terms that follow, though favoured by the very circumstance the Irish cultivator lacked, the contact and demand of wealthy towns ? ' You will find,' the statesman wrote to Mr. Caird, ' immense tracts of good land in certain counties, Lancashire arid Cheshire for example, with good roads, THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 13 good markets, and a moist climate, that remain pretty nearly in a state of nature undrained, badly fenced, and wretchedly farmed. Nothing has hitherto been effectual in awakening the proprietors to a sense of their own interests.'* Such was the state of English agriculture under the legislation of the proprietors of the soil for its especial benefit ; and the improvement since an improvement far from general is traceable to an opposite policy, the policy of commerce and of towns ; towns which have long been cities of refuge for the rural population while half the island is un- cultivated. But England at least had towns to receive and employ its landless population, while Ireland was without them. And thus, while the chief movement of population in England has been a migration from the country to large towns, in Ireland the chief move- ment has been emigration to the towns of England and America. This emigration of the rural population of Ireland to America is no new phenomenon of this century ; it was the subject of treatises more than a century ago. 'What was it,' says a writer of 1729, ' induced so many of the commonality lately to go to America, but high rents, bad seasons, and want of good tenures or a permanent property in their lands ? This kept them poor and low, that they scarce had sufficient credit to procure necessaries to subsist or till their ground. They never had anything in store, all was * This description was more than borne out by the published accounts of Mr. Caird's tour, and in reference to many counties in addition to those particularly named by Sir II. Peel. 14 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. from hand to mouth, so one or two bad crops broke them. Others found their stock decaying visibly, and so removed before all was gone, whilst they had as much left as would pay their passage, and had little more than would carry them to the American shore.' * It might have been urged then, as it is urged now, that the emigrants were but seldom evicted. Eviction was unnecessary not even a notice to quit was com- monly required. The broken down, the breaking down, and those who feared to break down, fled along with the evicted. Even farmers with capital, the writer adds, fled likewise, from the want of security for its investment on their farms. It has been lately maintained that the absence of leases cannot be the present cause of the distress and emigration of the farming classes of Ireland, since leases were ' almost universal in the eighteenth century,' when rural dis- tress was as great as it is now, or lately was, before the worst cases of distress disappeared. But in the first place, the fact is not so ; fanning leases were not common in that century. Where leases to farmers existed at all, they were for the most part too short to permit of the permanent improvements essential to hus- bandry being made by the tenant ; and the landlord never made them what with settlements, charges, and mortgages, seldom could make them. The actual culti- cj O 7 vators, however, for the most part had no leases and * ' An Essay on the Trade of Ireland,' 1720. A beautiful edition <>f this and several other rare treatise* on Ireland, including those of the pout Spenser, Sir .John Davis, Sir W. Petty, and others, was publislied some years a:o by Messrs. Alexander Thorn, of Dublin, with {.Teat libe- rality, for private circulation. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 15 were placed arid displaced, as the Highlanders are to this day, at the whim of the landlord. Accounting for a decrease in the number of houses in Ireland, the writer last quoted observed in 1729 : ' Another reason I apprehend to be that from gentlemen's receiving or dismissing whole villages of native Irish at once ; and this is done just as gentlemen incline to break up their lands and improve them by tillage, or as they lay them down under grass and enlarge their sheep-walks ; and by this means the poor are turned adrift, and must remove to some other place where they can get em- ployment.' And this was while Ireland had no Poor- law the contrivance in England to prevent insur- rections of the peasantry. But the middlemen, it is said, had leases, and long leases, yet cultivation did not prosper with them. The middleman, however, was a landlord, not a cultivator ; and it is for cultivators that security is demanded. It is not proposed to increase the security of landlords, otherwise at least than by making their titles more marketable and their tenants more solvent. The middleman lived in a world from which commerce and enterprise were banished ; his only ambition was to live like a landlord ; he was often deeply embarrassed ; his title was almost always defective ; but he had a famishing crowd round his doors offering rent, and a power of distress to take all they could give. The petty free- holders of a more recent date were not middlemen, it is true, and they had leases of a kind much better than none ; but they were made at random for political objects ; the measure of security allowed them came 16 LylA'D SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. unattended with any other change to teach agriculture either by example or precept, or to furnish a market for their produce or any safe investment for their savings. What indeed are all such arguments against leases intended to prove ? Is it that security is need- less as a motive for investment ? Do men of sense build houses or shops on other men's land without leases? Cases of actual confiscation of tenants' im- provements may be .rare; but a single such case as that of O'Fay and Burke alarms every tenant who hears it or reads it, and ill news now travels faster than ever. Does any one measure the mischief of an agrarian outrage by the injury to the victim, or the harm done by a Fenian by his personal acts of destruction ? It is really not against his actual land- lord that a tenant most needs security, but against all / f o possible landlords ; security in fact against the law, which is for him a law of confiscation. It is one of many examples of the tardy accommodation of human jurisprudence to justice, that 270 years ago the poet Spenser urged the necessity of legislative protection for the tenantry in Ireland in terms which apply to this day as well as to that at which they were written : ' Iren. There is one general inconvenience which reigneth almost throughout all Ireland : that is, that the lords of the land do not there use to let out their land for terms of years to their tenants, but only from year to year, and some during pleasure. ' Eudojc. But what reason is there that any land- lord should not set, nor any tenant take, his land as himself list ? THE STATS OF IRELAND, 1867. IT ' Iren. Marry, the evils hereby are great : for by this means both the landlord thinketh that he hath his tenant more at command to follow him into what action soever he shall enter ; and also the tenant is fit for every occasion of change, for that he hath no such state in any his holding, no such building upon any farm, no such cost employed in fencing or husbanding the same as might withhold him. All which he hath forborne, and spared so much expense for that he hath no firm estate in his tenement, but was only a tenant at will, or little more, and so at will may leave it. And this inconvenience may be reason enough to ground any ordinance for the good of the common- wealth, against the private behoof or will of any land- lord that shall refuse to grant any such term or estate unto his tenant as may tend to the good of the whole realm. ' Eudox. Indeed it is great wilfulness in any land- lord to refuse to make any longer farms unto their tenants as may, besides the general good of the realm, be also greatly for their own profit and avail. For what reasonable man will not think that the tenement shall be made much better for the landlord's behoof, if the tenant may by such good means be drawn to build him- self some handsome habitations thereon, to ditch and inclose his ground, to manure and husband it as good farmers use ? For, when his tenant's term shall be expired, it will yield him in renewing his lease both a good fine and also a better rent. And also it shall be for the good of the tenant likewise, who by such buildings and inclosures shall receive many benefits. c 18 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL EGONOMY. First, by the handsomeness of his house, he shall take more comfort of his life, more safe dwelling, and a delight to keep his house neat and cleanly, which now being, as they commonly are, rather swine-styes than houses, is the chiefest cause of his so beastly manner of life and savage condition. And to all these other commodities he shall in short time find a greater added that is, his own wealth and riches increased and wonderfully enlarged by keeping his cattle in inclosures, warm covered, that now lieth open to all weather.' This passage contains the whole political economy of the question of small farms. There is hardly any part of Europe, save England, better fitted for farms of the smallest description than the greater part of Ireland, excluding its waste lands ; and even its waste lands could be made highly productive by Flemish culti- vation. The soil of Flanders was once all waste ; the spade of the peasant, as a Flemish proverb denotes, has turned sand into gold.* The soil of Flanders is, in fact, the creation of man ; nature gave little but space for the exertion of his powers. ' Having visited Belgium,' says Dr. Mackenzie, of Eileanach, an expert in the management of small farms, ' by invitation of the Government, for the purpose of inquiring into the advantages of the petite culture there, I found much of the land of inferior quality, extremely light and sandy, yet, by force of liquid manure and intense care in weeding and stirring the soil, giving ' De spa is d-' goudmyn der boeren/ The spade is the peasant's gold-mine. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 19 wonderful crops of every kind.'* This description is true of the soil of almost every part of East and West Flanders, f the provinces of Belgium in which farms of the smallest size are most numerous. But every- where in Belgium, on rich and poor soils alike, wherever large and small farms meet in competition the former are beaten. Of the part of Belgium in which large farms are most numerous, Le Condroz, M. de Laveleye says : ' This is the region of Belgium which counts the greatest number of large farms ; those which reach one hundred hectares, so rare in the Flemish provinces, are here met often enough. As soon as a farm is divided in Condroz, the land is better cultivated, and the number of cattle increases. The small proprietors who cultivate their own two or three hectares know no fallow ; their crops are more varied, more carefully cultivated, and the produce is much larger. The too great size of the farms is thus one cause of the inferi- ority of cultivation in Condroz. But,' M. de Laveleye adds, ' there is another cause. To embark a consider- able sum in an agricultural operation, always long and * Letter to Lord John Russell on the State of the West Highlands, 1851. t An error prevalent in England respecting the natural fertility of the soil on which Flemish spade husbandry is so successful, has arisen partly from its actual productiveness, and partly from the real natural fertility of French Flanders. The soil of Belgian Flanders for the most part is by nature little more than sand. ' Essai sur 1'Economie rurale de la Bel- gique,' par Emile de Laveleye, pp. 1, 2. I have myself seen instances of this in M. de Laveleye's own family campagne, and elsewhere. Nor is the climate of Belgian Flanders so much drier than that of Ireland, as has been alleged. It rains there on the average by computation every second day. But, in fact, a moist climate like that of Ireland is the very climate for the growth of food for cattle, and therefore the very climate for the small farmer. c 2 20 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. hazardous, at least in appearance, there must be a certainty that the cultivator shall reap the results of his sacrifices and efforts ; and that certainty the con- tracts between landlord and tenant do not give.' Un- fortunately, in Flanders, too, the customary 7 contracts or leases do not give that certainty ; they run only for nine years, and the small farmer, in spite of the excel- lence of his farming, is very poor. He is poor, not because he is a peasant proprietor, as is sometimes supposed, but because he is not ; because he pays a high rent under a short lease for poor land which requires a great outlay of the produce to make it bear produce at all ; and because he marries earlier and has more children than the peasant proprietor in countries where peasant properties prevail. His spade has thus become a gold-mine for his landlord, not for himself. It is not then the soil or climate of Great Britain or of Ireland that prevents the success of five-acre farms, for which both islands have much greater advantages of nature than Flanders. ' I have seen,' says Dr. Mackenzie, ' three acres of land which I maintain to be quite inferior in many respects to much of our abused Highland soil, and cultivated far below what it might be, produce in the year 1842 : s. d. 80 bushels potatoes, sold a* Is. . . 400 21$ wheat 7*. . . . 7 10 6 44 oats &i. . . . G 12 2 calves 5 10 42.'i Ibs. butter, at 10f/ J7_1211 41 ~~6"~ 6 besides several pigs and poultry fattened by the butter- THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 21 milk, and skimmed milk sufficient of itself for a large family. And I assert that no average family can cultivate properly by the spade more than five acres of arable land, and attend to the stock and manure upon it, without hiring extraneous labour.' * The figures of produce in this passage were recently shown by the writer of these pages to several agricultural experts, English, Irish, and Scotch (one of particular eminence), all of whom admitted their probability, all of whom too added the remark that, as prices now are much higher, the value of the produce of the three acres would be proportionately greater. The writer next inquired where the three acres were situated ; and found to his surprise that they are on the estate of a friend of his own, a lady who has many similar acres under la petite culture in the south of England, suc- ceeding as well now as did the three acres in 1842 ; as the reader may judge from what is stated below,f * Letter to Lord John Russell, 1851. f In reply to inquiry on the part of the writer, the lady referred to states : ' The little farm whose produce you mention was let to a man named Dumbril, and is still occupied by his son, who is doing well, in spite of the disadvantage of the situation, which is on the side of the chalk down and excessively steep. let several of these small farms : most of them have become absorbed in the large ones, but some are doing well. I spoke yesterday to our bailiff'; and he says that if a man is industrious and can work a few acres with his own family, he is sure to make it pay, but not if he is obliged to hire labour or keep a horse. began the system of allotments here, and it succeeds admirably, and is a great boon to poor people. They are worked by labourers and small tradespeople, and give very good produce. To secure the rent, it is paid in advance most willingly. We have allot' ment gardens also at and at ; and they always pay well and are greatly sought after ; but the small farms are more doubtful, and success seems to depend in some measure on the situation, but especially on the industry and good management of the tenant.' The date of this letter is December 19, 1866. 22 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. in addition to the fact that their rent varies from 5/. 105. to 305. per acre. Dr. Mackenzie answers a question put by myself as to the possibility of an Irish peasant living by his spade on a few acres as follows : ' I know as surely as I write, that spade husbandry must succeed in Ireland and everywhere if properly pursued, and that land will never under horse labour give anything like the return it will give under spade and crofter cultivation. Who denies this ? ' To the same question a gentleman in the south of Ireland gives a different answer, but also a pertinent one : ' The very small high-farming peasantry do not exist here, because the house-feeding and keeping, which is the soul and body of this system, is unknown to our peasantry. Not having ever housed themselves, they have no notion of housing a beast in comfort and cleanliness.' The remark is just, but Spenser, in the sixteenth century, went still deeper into the matter, when he showed why the Irish peasant has never housed himself, and why lie had therefore no notion of housing a beast in comfort and cleanliness : * ' All which he hath forborne, and spared so much expense, * That from never seeing a decent cottage on a five-acre farm the Irish peasant should have no notion of such a thing is not surprising, when, owing to the same circumstance, persons who are as much his superiors in knowledge as in wealth and station, have no more notion of such a thing. One of the ablest land-agents in Ireland, managing one of the largest and best English estates, commenting on the Bill intro- duced by the late Government in a letter to the writer, remarked : ' The Bill specifies no improvements, and simply refers to the improvements recited in a late Act, where they are called "suitable." Now what is a suitalili- house for a five-acre farm ? Mud, clearly. Is the landlord to pav lor mud ? ' The Flemish live-acre farmer, nevertheless, and even the Flemish labourer with a much smaller plot, has a neat well-fur- nished cottage with three or four rooms. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 23 for that he hath no firm estate in his tenement, but was only a tenant at will or little more, and so at will may leave it.' From the foregoing evidence (and abundance of similar evidence is obtainable by any one who makes proper inquiry) it cannot be disputed that the landlords of Ireland might introduce the art of spade husbandry into the island with triumphant success, and make five- acre holdings more productive in many parts of it, even the barrenest, than large farms. It has actually been done in the highlands of Scotland, among a less sharp-witted peasantry than the Irish, but of the same race. ' I am factor on estates,' says Dr. Mackenzie,* 'where there are many crofters, who execute great improvements yearly without any aid from me beyond a fourteen years' lease ; and next May, on one estate, I shall be renewing fourteen years' leases to some thirty such crofters, who cheerfully agree to pay about I/, an acre for all they have added (by their own elbows) to their crofts of new land, worth nothing fourteen years ago. And all these are good regular rent-paying tenants, from 20/. down to 2/. crofts. I could get very few large farms let on these terms, so I value the crofters much as steady improvers of rental without any outlay on the part of the landlord ; and really without outlay on their part beyond spare hours, their capital in bank. I could name many who use their crofters for thus improving their waste lands, and then turn out crowds of them, and throw their land * In a letter to myself, December 19, 1866. 24 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. into large farms, on the plea of clanger from increase in the poor-rates. Our towns and villages are packed with these poor ill-used people.' Irish farms may be classified roughly as follows : first, those under fifteen acres, upon which no horse is kept; secondly, those from fifteen to thirty acres, upon which one horse is kept, but no hired labourer is regu- larly employed ; thirdly, those from thirty to fifty acres, on which two horses are generally kept, and some labour is usually hired ; lastly, large farms which re- quire a considerable capital. To all the smallest of these classes of holdings, direct legislation cannot give stability. The only mode of subsisting upon a few acres by which the tenant's very existence is not precarious, is by the Flemish system of spade husbandry, ela- borate, minute, and scientific. But that is in Ireland a new and difficult art, irksome to learn, and not to be learned without supervision and instruction by peasants to whose customs, traditions, and habits of life it is foreign. A peasantry is proverbially sceptical of new systems ; and so new is this system that the witnesses on behalf of tenants' compensation before Mr. Maguire's Committee never thought of it, giving it as their opinion that a tenant cannot live on a farm of less than from fifteen to twenty acres of good land. But in some parts of Ireland the land now occupied by the smallest holders is naturally too bad for the success of the Flemish system without great previous outlay of capital or labour; in others, from ill-cultivation, it is so ex- hausted that it would take years to restore it to fit condition. Time, therefore, is needed, and time would THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 25 not be given by a Parliamentary lease ; the tenant sometimes would fail in his rent, and be ejected for nonpayment. Even on the best soils Flemish hus- bandry would in Ireland be much stiffer work than it is in Flanders (because the soil is much stiffer), and therefore harder to learn ; though it would also be more productive in the end, because the soil is naturally better. Practical obstacles of this kind are indeed effects, and not causes of the present and past state of Ireland ; but they are effects not to be removed in a moment at the fiat of a law. It must necessarily be that the very causes which have thrown the bulk of the population of Ireland upon agriculture for support have thrust into the very smallest farms some who are naturally ill- adapted for such a business, though perhaps well-adapted for some other. In Ulster, for example, some were weavers by nature rather than farmers ; the handloom has failed, or is failing them, and the power-loom draws them to towns. If legis- lation could keep such men in their holdings, it would only keep them in privation, and keep men who might succeed out of them. The difficulty which surrounds legislation for small holdings, and the danger of its defeating its own aim, is exemplified by this fact, that the larger farmers with capital in Scotland are opposed to the landlords' right to distrain because it favours small farmers without it.* * See the Evidence taken before the late Commission on the Law of Hypothec (analogous to the English and Irish law of distress) in Scot- land. Dr. Mackenzie answers a question from myself on the subject as follows : ' Were the law of hypothec abolished, I could not give one hour's delay in payment of rent, and multitudes would thus be ruined 2G LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Indirectly however, legislation may assist la petite culture, if directly it cannot. It may abolish entails and sell incumbered estates, thereby introducing weal- thier and more business-like landlords. It may teach the rudiments of agriculture in every national school, and have a model farm around each, which the boys might be encouraged to cultivate ; and thus even their parents would learn that a constant succession of oats and potatoes must be a ruinous method of fanning. The Anglo-Saxon Dialogues of the tenth century, called Alfric's Colloquy, are a model to this day of the sort of industrial instruction which may be easily given in schools even by book. Unfortunately the Govern- ment of Ireland has gone backwards of late years as regards agricultural instruction; not its only retrograde step respecting education. The best service perhaps which legislation can render to the smallest holdings is to give legal security to the tenants of larger ones ; thereby removing the present temptation to landlords to get rid of the former, to escape a number of future claims for compensation. yearly. Now, every year I give delay to this or that tenant, who has had a squeeze and is not ready ; always with pain to the landlord and the greatest relief to the tenant.' To myself the right of distress appears a clumsy and anomalous expedient. Nevertheless a speedy, cheap, and ellectual remedy for the recovery of rent is undoubtedly beneficial to small holdings and poor farmers. So it is with other claims. One of the causes of the extortionate rate of interest often paid by the Irish tenant to the Gombeen man or local usurer, is that the Assist- ant Barrister's Court is a Court of Equity for defendants, but not for plaintiffs; and the money-lender charges in proportion to the difficulty of recovering his loan. The landlord's right to distrain is no doubt a cause of risk to the monry-lender ; but without it landlords would not let small holdings at all, or would require payment in advance, which would not improve the poor man's position. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 27 The system of farming at present pursued on the larger farms, though defective as regards manuring, rotation of crops, draining, and buildings, is so chiefly for want of security, and needs only to be improved, not to be superseded by a new system of cultivation, like that of Flemish spade husbandry. Farms of fifteen and twenty acres may seem ridiculously small to the eye of an English or Scotch farmer, but they prosper in many parts of Ireland, and even in some backward counties are now prospering under present prices for butter and stock as they seldom prospered before, although their husbandry is imperfect and their dwellings are sordid. For at present it may be downright imprudence on the part of the farmer to farm well, or to have a comfort- able house ; a rotation of crops implies a certain dura- tion of tenure, draining a longer one, and building one longer again. But a tenant may be turned out for voting as he thinks right, or because a new landlord comes in by succession or purchase, or because the present landlord desires to try a new system of farming, or to anticipate a long promised Act in favour of tenants. The very fact of an improvement may en- danger a tenant, since this present outlay may make it harder to meet two or three bad seasons and to pay his rent to the day. Those who deny the right of the law to interfere in any case between landlord and tenant, forget that the history of the law of tenure is the his- tory of successive interpositions to give security to the tenant, who originally was treated as the servant or serf of the lord of the soil, and whose work and improve- ments were then consistently viewed as done for his 28 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. lord. The principle of proper legal security to secure proper cultivation is one which the law of emblements and of implied tenancy from year to year recognised and established before the necessity of a rotation of crops and of durable improvements in husbandry was known.* The doctrine of non-interference applies only to the production of commodities under free com- petition. When railway companies were established, they too claimed exemption from State interference as a violation of the principles of political economy and of the law of supply and demand ; but the pretension was refuted by statesmen,! and set aside by the legislature. Not only is the supply of land strictly limited by nature, but the number of proprietors is limited by the law both directly and indirectly ; its few proprietors moreover are given by the law a distinct motive for refusing to their tenants proper security, in order to control their political action. For these reasons the principle of the Bill of the late Government giving tenants a claim for compensation within a specified limit per acre, in the absence of a lease for thirty-one years, was clearly a sound one.^ But to fix a uniform limit to compensation (or to the alternative lease) for * For this remark I nm indebted to Dr. Hancock, whose 'Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland ' find other writings are the real source of almost all the improvements in the law relating to landed property in Ire- land in the last twenty years. t See in particular Mr. Card well's speech, Hansard's Debates, Hallway Bill, July H, 1844. | The J5ill made, however, no provision for the registration of im- provements after completion. Some such provision seems only just to landlords, and desirable to prevent disputes and litigation. The attorney is not the proper party to be benefited. THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 29 holdings of all sizes alike appears to me inexpedient, as tending to the artificial consolidation of the holdings of from fifteen to thirty acres, so numerous and impor- tant in Ireland. At least, for the farmers of more than fifty acres, a larger margin for improvement, or a longer lease, appears to be required. These latter may justly aim at a higher class of house and a higher scale of permanent improvement than smaller farmers would attempt or desire ; and to put all classes of holdings of fifteen acres and upwards upon the same footing would tend to the extinction of the smaller class. For if twenty holders of fifteen acres apiece might each demand the same compensation for his house as a single farmer of three hundred acres, it would be the interest of landlords to seize every opportunity to crusli the small holders, and to extinguish small holdings for ever. Thus Ireland would lose in the end all that deserves the name of a rural population. It is not only to the maintenance of a rural popu- lation in Ireland, however, that just measures respect- ing the ownership and tenure of land would conduce. They would tend likewise to augment the home de- mand for labour in towns, to find new employments for capital, and to open a new sphere for manufactures and trade. For in the natural progress of industry and opulence, as Adam Smith has clearly explained, towns, manufactures, and a brisk and flourishing home trade are the natural consequences of rural prosperity, because agriculture, after providing for the first wants of existence, creates both a demand for higher things and the materials and subsistence of those who supply 30 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. it. This is especially true of a country like Ireland, where the bulk of the population is dependent on agriculture, and must furnish the consumption upon which home trade depends. The evidence of the last Committee of the House of Commons on the Tenure and Improvement of land appropriately ends : ' Do you account for the competition for holdings in Ireland from the fact that there are, as a rule, no other means of livelihood in Ireland for the great mass of the people ? I think their livelihood, generally speaking, must be obtained from agriculture ; there is no trade, or anything of that sort. ' And when there is a bad harvest, I suppose they do very little in the shops? The shops feel it imme- diately. ' Therefore it is of great importance to render this great branch of industry as prosperous as possible ? Yes, undoubtedly.' In the north-east of Ireland the country towns are rapidly increasing in population and wealth, because country and town react on each other, and the rural wealth created by town consumption of food, and town markets for flax finds its way back to the factory and the shop. In the south and west, on the contrary, the country towns are, in general, decaying, because the rural population is poor and declining, and the peasant must be content with home-made flannel and frieze. It is by no means only by its direct effects upon the agricultural classes, however, that the present land system tells upon trade and manufactures, and deprives the population of Ireland of a demand for THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 31 their industry at home. ' Would you see what Ireland might have been,' Lord Duflferin urges, ' go to Belfast.' The instance clearly proves, what has escaped the noble writer, that it is not only by direct legislation against its trade and manufactures that England has impeded the prosperity of Ireland, but still more by the introduction of a system of landed property designed to make land an inalienable instrument of political power in a few families, instead of the great instrument of production of a commercial society. Belfast has become what it is by passing from the hands of a prodigal noble. Settlements are intended to prevent prodigals from ruining their estates, but it is by keeping them, not by parting with them, that they really ruin them. There might have been fifty Belfasts instead of one but for settlements and other legal restrictions on the transfer of land.* The first great factory in another flourishing town of Ulster was built on a bankrupt's estate. Eecent statutes have attempted, with unintentional sarcasm, to mitigate the evil of feudal restrictions on the transfer of land by giving particular powers to present owners to improve their own land, or to let them to tenants for improve- ment : but such patchwork reform always defeats itself by creating costly formalities, and other impediments to its own object. No reform will suffice short of one, in the first place, giving ownership to each owner in turn, to deal with his land according to the circum- * A remarkable example of the exclusion of manufacturing enterprise in Ireland by the law of real property is instanced in Dr. Hancock's 'Im- pediments to the Prosperity of Ireland/ chap. xix. 32 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. stances of his own time and case ; and, in the second place, freeing landed property from incumbrances by its sale on the death of each owner to the amount of all charges and debts. The industry of towns, even more than that of the country, would be promoted by such legislation. It has been most unjustly alleged that the violence of the working-classes of Ireland has prevented the investment of capital and success of trade and manufactures in Irish towns. Those who desire evidence of what the character of the Irish working-classes really was even before a Poor-law existed, or emigration had provided an escape from destitution at home will find it in the Eeport of Lord Devon's Commission in 1841. In 18G5 a Government Iteport showed that in all Ireland an average of only six persons per annum in the ten years preceding had been even charged with combinations to raise the rate of wages, and of this more than one-half had been acquitted ; arid, according to the latest information, there was not one person for trial for such an offence in 1863, 1864, or 1865. Every candid inquirer will find history, statistics, and practical experience confirm alike the testimony which Sir John Davis has borne at the beginning of his essay to the character of both the land and its people, ' endued with extraordinary abilities of nature,' and that with which his essay con- cludes : ' There is no nation under the sun that doth love equal and indifferent justice better than the Irish ; or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves ; so as they may have the protection and benefit of the law when upon just THE STATE OF IRELAND, 1867. 33 cause they do desire it.' In the close competition of modern commerce, every country has become more than ever dependent upon its natural advantages, and the two great natural advantages of Ireland are its land and its people. It remains for legislation to remove obstacles to their combination created by the law, and to enable the people of Ireland to cultivate and im- prove the resources of the land of their birth instead of those of lands of their exile. 34 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. IRELAND IN 1868.* Two economic currents are flowing in Ireland a cur- rent of progress and a current of retrogression of the character of each of which this article aims at furnish- ing some indication and some suggestions for promoting the former and arresting the latter. For both purposes something must be said of the only strong political current visible in the island at present, one rushing back to the dismemberment of the kingdom, civil war, arid the dissolution of civil society. I speak here of Fenianism, not so much in its organised and criminal form, as in that morally blameless form, so far as many of its adherents are concerned, which it takes without any definite organisation, and spreading, as it were, in the air. Organised and criminal Fenianism, though it numbers more sworn members than seems commonly supposed, is by itself, or without aid from America, a destructive, but not a formidable power. The annual chapter of accidents includes in its catalogue a thousand times more suffering and disaster, yet does nothing to shake the foundations of the State, or to endanger the safety of the nation as a nation. Hut another kind of Fenianism is developing itself, under no specific name ' Reprinted from the ' Fortnightly Review,' of February 18G8. IRELAND IN 1868. 35 as yet, in declared antagonism to the integrity of the State ; which would shortly leave, if it gained its point, but one of the two economic currents before spoken of flowing in Ireland, that of backwardness and ruin. Various motives and feelings are converging to form a combination of a great part of the people of Ireland to demand separation from England. Eomantic and generous hopes of a great independent Ireland, old legendary Ireland resurgent in glory, derived partly from ancient tradition, and partly from the nationality movement on the Continent, blend with well-grounded discontent at the system of tenure and the consequent emigration, and with it must be added the selfish desires of some individuals or parties ; but the chief source of this gathering movement is an idea that England is fall- ing (an idea which mistakes the weakness of a Govern- ment for the weakness of a nation), coupled with a per- suasion that an English Parliament will concede any- thing to force or fright, nothing to justice and policy, and that even separation may be extorted by demanding it loudly in menacing numbers. What sort of legis- lation would follow the establishment of a separate Irish Parliament, if any legislation at all, might easily be anticipated, had it not been distinctly foreshadowed in a tentative declaration of some Catholic clergymen, drawn with great ability for its purpose, and assuredly not put forward without the private sanction of higher authority than it claims. It is enough to say it is declared that political economy will not do for Ireland, that the Irish manufacturer cannot compete with the English, and that the natural energies of the Irish D 2 36 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. people must be developed, that is to say, properly speaking, repressed by protection and prohibition. But there would, in reality, be small time or heed for legislation. The inevitable, immediate result of sepa- ration would be a furious war of religions and races, in which the upper and middle class of Catholics would be placed in a position of cruel embarrassment and danger from both sides ; both sides, moreover, would invoke foreign assistance, and to exclude any other occupation England would be driven to resume her former position by main force, after the island had become from one end to the other a compound of Mexico and the Campagna, with the anarchy of one and the desolation of the other. There is indeed a sense to be hereafter referred to, in which (paraphrasing a foreign writer's remark) it Avere well that Ireland should be de-anglicised ; * but in all other respects, what is especially desirable for the island, instead of separation, is a closer union with England. The greatest of all the calamities from which the Irish people suffered for centuries was not con- nection with England, but compulsory isolation, politi- cally, socially, and commercially. For six centuries they were kept forcibly aloof from the nearest border * Speaking of the lingering effects of Spanish law and misgovernment in Lombardy, M. Emile de Laveleye hns observed : ' Le soil de la Lomhardie fat semblable a celui des provinces llamandes : le Jong de l'Kspay J. S. Mill. t In this description it is not thought necessary to take account of a temporary stagnation of the linen trade of Ulster, nor of a partial failure of crops last year in particular counties, balanced by good crops in others. IRELAND IN 1868. 39 manners of the gentry, and that where the landlords are resident, prudent, improving, and trusted, the tenants are in many cases following the example of prudence and improvement. In a southern county on this side, not many years ago a backward one from its isolation, there is a locality comprising several large estates well known to the writer, which, within his remembrance, and chiefly within very recent years, has undergone a complete transformation. It was farmed, as most other parts of Ireland were farmed in his childhood ; it is now farmed as well as any part of England, and a single dealer in a small town within it sells artificial manure to the value of 25,000/. a-year, who could probably not have sold a pound's worth to a former generation. From this locality a large proprie- tor, of English descent, himself the cause of much of the improvement he describes, and who used to define the Irish tenant as a creature to whom multiplication and subdivision come by nature, but to whom the art of man cannot communicate an idea of farming or for- bearance from marriage, now reports : ' The twenty- acre men are holding on well, farming far better than formerly, and not involving themselves as formerly with wives and families as a matter of course. The farming of this class, Kornan Catholics and indigenous Irish, is exceedingly improved ; their prudence in the matter of marriage still more remarkable ; their sisters and younger brothers, too, remaining frequently un- married, as they will not marry out of their class, unless to better themselves. The condition of the country here shows rapid amelioration.' 40 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Other instances of a landlord's good example being followed by his tenants, where English markets have come within reach, and English improvements in farming have become known, fell under the writer's observation in a recent visit to other eastern counties ; and from one that was not visited a farmer, loud for tenant-right, writes : ' Farming in general is greatly improving in this district and the neighbouring ones. Here farmers are to some extent able to compete with the landed proprietors at agricultural shows and the like.' To compete with the landed proprietors at agricultural shows and the like ! From what quarter has this competition come if not from England, and what sort of competition has it superseded in Ireland ? With their fathers would it not probably have been a competition in the dissipation of their fortunes ? In other counties, such as Cavan, and even Boscominon, new crops flax, artificial grasses, and rape are ap- pearing, and land may be seen turned up by spade or plough in December, which not long ago would have been left untouched until the end of January. It is, again, English markets, English manufacturing towns, and English wealth that enable the Irish fanner to eke out in any way the scale of wages on the eastern side. No fallacy has more tended to hide the real condition of Ireland and the remedies it requires, than one into which writers of authority have fallen, that emigration must steadily raise wages in Ireland in proportion as it diminishes the number of labourers. The base of the fallacy is an imaginary ' aggregate wages-fund,' the share of each labourer in which is supposed to become greater as IRELAND IN 1868. 41 the number sharing becomes smaller.* But the bargain of wages is a transaction between the individual employer and his men ; what that employer can give depends on his own means or profits, and not on the sum of the funds in his own and other people's posses- sion ; nor are his means augmented by the scarcity of labour. Were only one labourer left in the country, would he earn as much as all the former labourers put together ? Clearly not, unless he did as much work, and worked for all employers at once ; for how else could the money be forthcoming to pay him. ? So far are wages from being equal through Ireland, as the doctrine of an aggregate wages-fund, shared by a smaller number of labourers, implies, that they vary from five shillings a-week to twelve shillings, and are highest where good labourers are most numerous, and on the side nearest England, instead of America. It is the English market for Irish commodities, not the American market for Irish labour, that raises wages in Ireland ; to say that it is the latter, is as much as to say that the rich enable the poor to pay high prices for things by paying high prices themselves. To the funds coming to Irish labourers from an English source must also be added the sums which the number who come over for the harvest bring back for the winter. And, speaking of this, one cannot but * Mr. Mill has employed the phrase 'aggregate wages-fund' merely as a short term to comprise all the funds employed in the payment of labour, whether derived from capital or income. He never meant that the funds in all employers' possession are put together and divided, as gratuities to waiters in a coffee-room are sometimes thrown into a box, and afterwards distributed. 42 LAND 8YSTEM8 AX1) LNVVSTUIAL ECONOMY. express abhorrence of that spurious patriotism which seeks to avenge the misfortunes of Ireland by the destruction of England. What have English labourers done, whose bread Irish labourers have divided for centuries, and never divided more largely than last year, that Irishmen should seek to ruin the country on which both subsist? What, on the other hand, have the multitude of poor Irish workmen done, who earn their living in England, that they should be marked out as the natural objects of suspicion and hatred, and exposed to violence, expulsion, and destitution ? There was never a better year than the one that has just closed for the Irish labourers of the west in England and Scotland, and many who came for the season found it to their advantage to remain. If among these there are any who are parties to the crimes which Fenianism contemplates, they are guilty botli of atro- cious treachery to the people who have received and supported them, and of a most cruel offence against those of their countrymen who are their fellows in labour, but not their fellows in treason. If there are any among them who brood over the sad history of Ireland, and behold in it the cause of that torpor, too common among its inhabitants, which Bentham has catalogued as the third order of evil following long insecurity and oppression, let them look along the eastern shore of the island, and they will behold how the contact and commerce of England are enabling Irishmen to shake off that torpor of ages. Belfast itself, as a great manufacturing town, is but one generation old ; its mechanical powers are of English IRELAND IN 1868. 43 invention, the advantage of its commercial position consists mainly in vicinity to England, and many in- habitants, of pure Irish as well as English descent, are sharing the fortunes of the town ; from which long arms, moreover, are now being stretched in the spirit of English enterprise up and down through the island to explore and develop its resources. Of the success of several of these enterprises it may be too early to speak (Feniamsrn is one of their chief impediments), but the nascent spirit they show is more important than their results, however successful. It is a spirit which, with tranquillity and wise legislation, would soon stir the western half of the island, over which it is too true that desolation and decline have been more commonly spreading of late years than giving place to advancement ; where the one great enterprise carried on upon a great scale is the emigration of the flower of the population from a deteriorating soil ; and where cultivation has receded, and a retrogression has taken place from agriculture to the rudest system of pasture. The proverb is far from generally true in Ireland that the benefactor of his country is the man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And although it may not be denied that many of the former holdings were too small for even secure sub- sistence, the sweeping conversion of small farmers into labourers is, whether they go or stay, a revolution full of danger to both England and Ireland, as one may see in their darkening looks. M. de Lavergne wrote fifteen years ago : ' Notwithstanding its detestable rural system, Ireland seems to have preserved one excellent 44 LAND SYSTEMS AN1> INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. feature, namely, the almost entire absence of day labourers properly so called.' It does not possess that feature now. The change has taken place, too, at a peculiarly ill-tinied epoch, when increased intelligence, communication with America, and ideas spreading over Europe, tended of necessity to make the Irishman less content than ever to descend to the rank of a servant. Instead of the conservative rural class of small farmers, with a fair security to improve, mixed with small proprietors, improving their own lands (which ought to have been the transformation effected after the famine), the real transformation is that a revolutionary and dangerous class has been established. Fenianism, in its worst form, is the direct result of the suspension of leases, the consolidation of farms, and that emigra- tion to which so many proprietors have looked for the regeneration of Ireland. The predominance of a current of economic decline, with its political consequences, on the western side of Ireland, will no doubt be ascribed by not a few to an inferior climate and soil, and an inferior and less mingled race. The theory of the faultiness of the Irish soil and climate is a late invention. The invaders held a dif- ferent notion, and in saying so no impeachment of their descendants' title is intended, for the Milesians them- selves had no other original title to their lands ; their own legends and traditions tell that they took them by the sword. But of the natural character of those lands the point here in question Spenser thus wrote : 4 And sure Ireland is ;i most sweet and beautiful coun- try as any is under heaven, besides the soil itself most fertile, and fit to yield all kind of fruit that shall be IRELAND IN 1868. 45 committed thereunto. Lastly, the heavens most mild and temperate, though somewhat more moist than in the parts towards the east.' Quoting this passage some twenty years ago, an experienced English observer wrote : ' I have been over every part of Great Britain ; I have had occasion to direct my attention to the natural capabilities, to the mode of cultivation, and to the produce of many parts of it : this very year I have traversed the country from the Land's End in Cornwall to John o' Groat's in Caithness ; but in no part of it have I seen the natural capabilities of the soil and cli- mate surpass those of Ireland, and in no part of it have I seen those natural capabilities more neglected, more uncultivated, more wasted than in Ireland.'* The in- ference Mr. Campbell Foster drew was one not favour- able to the industrial powers and virtues of the natives of an island so favoured in its natural gifts ; and there are many to agree with him in Ireland itself as well as out of it. ' Mettez y des Flamands, ils transformeront ITrlande, je pense,' said a Belgian economist and agriculturist lately to the present writer. But how are we to recon- cile with the explanation of an inert race the fact that landlords in Ireland, not being of Irish race, were * ' Letters on the Condition of Ireland,' by T. Campbell Foster, 1846. The eminent and accurate Professor of Agriculture, Dr. Hodges, at a later period says : ' The productive powers of the soil of this country are most remarkable, and enable it, even with its present imperfect culture, to produce crops which excite the astonishment of the most skilful farmers of England and Scotland. The island also possesses, it its geo- logical structure and genial climate, such advantages as render it equal to any country in the world for the growth of plants and animals. May we not, therefore, conclude that it will yet be made to yield an amount of food far more than sufficient for rewarding the industry of any popu- lation it is ever likely to contain ? ' Lessons in Chemistry in its Applica- tion 1o Agriculture, 1800. 46 LAND .SY.sTKAf.s 1 AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. formerly quite as bad farmers, and otherwise as im- provident in their way, all over Ireland, as the pure Irish tenants are still in the west, and are now very often (otherwise at least than in the matter of leases) both good farmers and prudent men ? And again, that on the eastern side the Celtic tenant is found in many places now improving in his farming, encouraged by good markets, and instructed by good example ? We may ask, too, what was the condition of farming generally over the most advanced parts of Europe fifty years ago, Prussia, and the Lowlands of Scotland, for example ? The race has not changed ; what then has changed the agriculture ? Is the race a different one, in each locality of England where you find the fanning good, from that in the localities where you find it bad ? The true causes, in addition to the state of the law, of the stagnation, and even decline, of ninny parts of western Ireland aro various, but among them one is chief; that there are the people who have suffered the most through history, who were thrust farthest from civilisation and commerce, who are still farthest from England and its markets, and whose chief landlords are far more commonly than in the east of the island absentees. One fact mentioned in the ' Evidence rela- ting to liaihvays in Ireland, 18(55,' illustrates sufficiently the nature of some of the disadvantages which the western farmer suffers from remoteness from England. The county of Donegal is one, generally speaking, of the most backward counties in the island, and in a corner of it one of the witnesses stated that he found fine IRELAND IN 1868. 47 chickens of good size selling in 1864 at \l,d. a piece.* It is not money only or profit which is excluded by such disadvantages, but also the ideas, the progress, the spirit, the methods, that are sure to flow in with commercial facilities of ingress. And, in fact, there are some indications of progress even in the west, and wherever they are they wear, as already said, the visible garb of their English origin. There are some English and Scotch settlers whose farming is excelled nowhere in Europe ; the chief resident proprietors farm like English ones ; and even the smallest holders here and there grow turnips (the crop of all others for Ireland), and begin to see the advantage of winter keep for their cattle, to mow their corn, to discard the old Irish log for the English spade, and to display the intelligence awakened through the national education established by England. There is no source from which improvement can come to the stagnant and retrogressive quarters of Ireland save from English connexion and English legislation. A great and benevolent statesman is re- ported indeed to have said that Ireland ought to be governed according to Irish ideas. But what are Irish ideas ? Are they the ideas of the Catholic clergy, an eminently virtuous class beyond question, but surely not the one to govern a nation in our time ? Are they the ideas of the best educated Catholic laity, a quiet class, who keep their ideas too much to themselves ? * Provisions are now (January 1868) very dear in the county of Donegal, and the labourers and small farmers are suffering greatly in consequence ; but this dearness comes of a failure of crops, not of a pro- fitable market. 48 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOW. Are they the ideas of the large Anglo-Scotch and Pro- testant population of the island, whose ideas are English, with a little provincialism. Or are they ideas which are not Irish in any sense, but the ideas of the Pontiff and Cardinals of Rome ? Whenever what are called Irish ideas are closely examined, they will turn out, if Irish at all, to be the ideas not of a nation, but of a class or a section : and Ireland has had only too much of class legislation and sectional government. It is English ideas the ideas of the nearest part of civilised and progressive Europe that are wanted for the con- trol and guidance of Ireland ; but when I say English ideas, I mean the ideas of the present English nation, not of the Anglo-Norman barons of the feudal age. What then is the English nation to do for Ireland ? No single measure, it may at once be affirmed, will make Ireland generally prosperous or appease the dis- content existing among a large portion of its inhabi- tants. A combination of measures is necessary to arrest the progress of sedition, to encourage improve- ment in farming, to facilitate the rise of a class of yeo- man and peasant proprietors, to remove legal impedi- ments to the development of the natural resources of the island and natural impediments which individuals cannot remove, to make its real condition and resources known in England, to diffuse agricultural skill, to check the enormous evil of absenteeism, and to bring all Ireland closer to England, and to the markets and progress of the European world. In the few pages at the writer's disposal, it is evident that so extensive a programme cannot be discussed in detail, but some IRELAND IN 1868. 49 remarks are due to the readers who have followed him thus far. , Of Fenianism first : that is to say, Fenianism as an organised conspiracy for the ruin of England ; which ought to be suppressed if it were only in mercy to not a few reluctant accomplices on its roll, for there are always not a few reluctant accomplices of an Irish con- spiracy. Fenianism knows too well its own utter im- becility as a belligerent power not to perish of sheer despair but for its hope in America, and the spoil it promises to the mercenary part of its adherents in an American war against England, or at least an American sanction to privateering against English trade. And in American hostility it has too much reason to believe a hostility very unjust as against the whole English people, and their common country, but not unprovoked by a considerable section of Englishmen, blockade- runners, and newspaper scolds if one must not add the laches or duplicity of some English officials during the late Civil War. The people of England owe it now to their own safety and strength to make generous compensation for the wrongs and insults of which the latter complain. If it be true, as the writer has some reason to believe, that the concession of British Colum- bia, really an American colony, would be accepted as a full compensation, that concession might perhaps be made. For while, by making it, England would get rid of a formidable embarrassment and danger, she would leave the resources of great regions to be deve- loped to her own future advantage by the only people in a condition to develop them. America, too, ought E 50 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. to be thankful to be thereby released from the incubus of a claim, the attempt to enforce which, even if successful (a very doubtful matter), would do cruel injury to the very class of Englishmen who, for the sake of American freedom, were unmurmuring sufferers by the war which upheld it. The working-classes must be the chief victims of every war, the wealthier classes enduring, by comparison, no real privation ; but a war between America and England, or against the commerce of England, would be one for the starvation of that very magnanimous working-class of Englishmen to whom America owes so much sympathy and admira- tion not to say also gratitude, though they really could have added an English war to her late troubles, had they joined their voices to the disgraceful clamour of others for that end. The next point in importance is the tenure of land, the difficulties of which cannot be surmounted by legislation relating to tenure alone. A parliamentary lease or settlement might necessitate a selection of tenants, which would by no means meet the views of all the present ones. On the other hand, England cannot leave the treatment of tenure to the landlords, who strangely tell us in one breath it is a settled axiom of political economy that a landlord's interest in his own property, just because it is his own, must lead him to improve it, and yet that Irish tenants will not improve if the holdings become their own for a time under a lease or, in short, that insecurity, not security, is the great incentive to improvement on the part of a IRELAND IN 1868. 51 tenant. It is added, on the landlord's part, that many tenants do not wish for leases : when this is the case, as it sometimes is, from entire confidence in the land- lord, it only shows that there is a supposed security in those cases ; but even under excellent and trust- worthy landlords, tenants are often shy of asking for a lease when they would be glad of one of sufficient length, were it not for its expense, and the fear at once of its legal technicalities and of offending the landlord by asking to be put out of his power. The subject of the tenure of land is, in connection with the legal technicalities referred to, bound up with the whole law of real property, and to have a pro- sperous and contented agricultural population in Ireland there is needed not only a legal right to compensation for tenant's improvements, in the absence of a lease for thirty-one years at least, but also a complete liberation of the transfer of land from legal restrictions and difficulties, so that fanners might buy land as well as hold it securely. For this end primogeniture and entail must cease, and a simple system of the transfer of land by registration must be introduced. It is in this sense only that Ireland, to repeat an expression used before, ought to be de- Anglicised, though in truth the English law of real property is neither English in origin nor approved of by the English people, and contains nothing injurious to Ireland which is not so to England too ; and it is only in respect of legal fetters which England ought to strike off from herself that she ought to follow the exhortation of an eminent E 2 52 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Irish lawyer in respect of Ireland, ' Loose her, and let her go.' * The writer's limit prevents a demonstration here of the invalidity of current arguments against the pos- sibility of yeomen and peasants prospering in either island as proprietors, or even becoming proprietors at all, under even rational land laws ; but an illustration must be given of the obstructions which the land laws under which Ireland has been placed have opposed to the enterprise and prosperity of its people in other ways. ' About fifteen years ago,' Dr. Hancock relates, in his. treatise on the * Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland,' ' an enterprising capitalist was anxious to build a flax-mill in the north of Ireland, as a change had become necessary in the linen trade from hand- spinning to mill-spinning. He selected as the site for his mill a place in a poor but populous district, situated on a navigable river, and in the immediate vicinity of extensive turf bogs. The capitalist applied to the landlord for a lease of fifty acres for a mill site, labourer's village, and his own residence, and of fifty- acres of bog, as it was proposed to use turf as the fuel for the steam-engines of the mill. The landlord was most anxious to encourage an enterprise so well calcu- lated to improve his estate. An agreement was cou- * In November, 18.">2, Mr. Xapier introduced a series of measures into the House of Commons for the adjustment of the relations of landlords nnd tenants in Ireland, saying, at the close of his speech : ' Enough for him, if he had provided a freer career for industry and raised up an ob- stacle to injustice. The voice of mercy had resuscitated Ireland, the flush and How of returning life reanimated her frame ; but she w.us still in the grave-clothes in which severe policy and sore affliction had bound her. Loose her, and let her go.' Ilansartfs Parliamentary IRELAND IN 1868. 53 eluded, but when the flax-spinner consulted his legal adviser, he discovered that the law prevented the landlord from carrying out the very liberal terms he had agreed to. He was bound by settlement to let at the best rent only ; the longest lease he could grant was for three lives, or thirty-one years. Such a lease, however, at the full rent of the land, was quite too short a term to secure the flax-spinner in laying out his capital in building ; the statute enabling tenants to lease for mill sites only allowing leases of three acres. The mill was not built, and mark the consequence. Some twenty miles from the spot alluded to, the flax-spinner found land in which he could get a perpetual interest ; there he laid out his thousands ; there he has for the last fifteen years given employment to hundreds of labourers, and has earned money. The poor but populous district continues as populous, but, if anything, poorer than it was. During the past seasons of distress, the people of that district suffered much from want of employment, the landlord's rents were worse paid out of it than from any other part of his estate. Could there be a stronger case to prove how much the present state of Ireland arises from the state of the law ? ' The present writer knows of several similar cases ; and when Lord Dufferin says of the industrial resources of Ireland, ' A hundred fountains remain to be unsealed,' he might have added that it is the seal of the law which closes them up, and that the law furnishes an answer to Bishop Berkeley's last question in the ' Querist,' a hundred and thirty years ago, ' Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues poor ? ' A part of the 54 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. impoverishment which Ireland suffers, not only pecu- niarily, but socially and morally, from entails, insecure tenures, incumbrances, and other consequences of the present state of the law, is absenteeism ; the evil of which is the one point about which all parties in Ireland are agreed, and in removing which the legislature would be really legislating according to Irish ideas. The excellent results which in several counties have followed the Government grant for instructors in the best methods of growing and saving flax, exemplify another direction in which the interference of the State is urgently required, namely, for general agricultural instruction throughout Ireland. The suppression of the Chairs of Agriculture in the Queen's Colleges was an act of sheer fatuity, as the suppression of the Pro- fessorships of Irish was an act of sheer barbarism on the part of the Treasury. There ought to be a model- farm attached to a national school in every parish, and there is no sort of reason why the Irish peasant should not learn the all-important lesson of a rotation of crops, and of the proper house-feeding of cattle, as well as to read, write, and count. The intervention of the State is also indispensable for the deepening of rivers and providing outfalls for arterial drainage. The state of the Suck, for example, is a scandal to a civilised Government, and an insuperable obstacle to the im- provement by private enterprise of a vast district which it floods. Lastly, remains the extension and cheapen- ing of railway communication. The completion of a commercial union between the two islands is almost as vital a point ;is the maintenance of their political IRELAND IN 1868. 55 union, and a Government can look to indirect and dis- tant results in promoting it, which are not economically within the contemplation of private enterprise. The English buyer, for example, who pays but a small sum to a company for his fare, may be worth more than a thousand times the amount to the trade of both islands ; and a not unimportant economy in the workings of the Irish lines could be effected by a centralisation of management.* Other things there are, doubtless, which ought to be done for Ireland, and among them are some which Parliament has not at present the requisite information to do ; therefore, among the things which ought at once to be done is, to make inquiry into the actual condition and resources of the island, not for the purpose for which such inquiries have too often been made, of postponing legislation, but to prepare for it. But if even the measures sketched out in these pages were carried at once into effect, in the next generation but one economic current of progress * It is to be feared that the purchase of the Irish railways by the State will meet with great difficulty from the exorbitant demands of Companies ; and, perhaps, also from a demand on the part of the Go- vernment for a guarantee on the part of Ireland alone against loss, which the shareholders are very ready to offer on behalf of the people of Ire- land, but which the latter ought not to be expected to give. A railway which carries the produce of the west of Ireland cheaper to England, benefits producers in the former and consumers in the latter; and why should the consumer in Ireland, who does not benefit as a producer the fundbolder, for example pay part of the carriage of provisions away from himself? If the cost of carriage were annihilated between the islands, meat and other provisions would become cheaper in London, and dearer in Limerick and Galway. Why should consumers in Limerick and Galway, but not in London, guarantee the State against loss by a measure tending to that result ? 56 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. would be found flowing through Ireland, and the answer to Bishop Berkeley's question would be that * poor Ireland ' does not still continue poor. The ballad might then ask with truth in 1898, the cen- tenary of the last Eebellion, < Who fenrs to apeak of '08 ? "\VJio blushes at the name ? ' 57 THE IEISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. MANY CAUSES have tended to concentrate almost ex- clusive attention on that side of the Irish Land System which relates to agricultural tenure. In so far as those causes are historical, they have been to some extent indicated in preceding pages. The exclusion of the Irish from the maritime ports of their own island, the confiscation of their lands, the denial of landed pro- perty to Catholics, restrictions on Irish manufactures and trade, have necessarily left their traces in the indus- trial economy of Ireland at this day. These historical causes, however, being now beyond control, are worth taking into practical account only as disposing of inso- lent theories of race on the one hand, and adding urgency on the other to the necessity for a thorough reformation of a land system, which, by making agri- culture the only employment accessible to a great mass of the people, and tenancy the highest position to which they could aspire in connexion with agriculture, has made agricultural tenure appear almost the only land question. The real problem which the legislature has to solve relates to the Irish Land System as a whole, to the distribution of landed property, and the conditions of ownership as well as to tenure ; to commerce, manu- 58 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. facturcs, and mines as well as to agriculture ; to the towns, in short, as well as to the country. The system of agricultural tenure is admitted on all sides to be an in- tolerable evil, both politically and economically regarded ; but it has become so, not through its own inherent impolicy and injustice alone, but by reason also of the entire structure of the land system, which gives the occupation of the tenant-farmer an undue predomi- nance in the economy of the island as in the mind of the public. The position of the tenant-farmer cannot indeed be fully understood without reference to the unhealthy and unnatural economy produced by the land system as a whole. A complete investigation of the condition of Ire- land would show that its prosperity has been cramped in every direction, and with respect to all its resources and natural uses for its inhabitants. It would show that much as its cultivators have suffered from the insecurity of their own position, they have suffered more by its being generally the only career open to them above that of hired labour, by the excessive com- petition to which they have been exposed in it, and by the loss of the numerous local markets which a community flourishing in all the departments of industry would create. It would show, too, that much as the country has suffered under the present land system, the town using the term for brevity, to denote non- agricultural employments in general suffers still more, for it suffers extinction. Xo more than an indication can be attempted in these pages of the manner in which both town and country are affected. The interests of both are closely THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 59 interwoven, and it is a misfortune in this as in many other cases that a description in words cannot place things in their true relative position at once under the eye. As they can be presented only in succession, it is natural to glance first at the state of the country, which comes first in the natural order of develop- ment, and goes far to determine the state of the town ; although it must be subsequently shown that it is by no means only by its effects on the rural population and on agriculture that the land system militates against the prosperity of other employments and classes. ISTot only is the town dependent on its rural neighbour- hood for a local market, and for cheap supplies of materials and food, and is straitened accordingly if the population and cultivation around it decline, but security and freedom of action are even more necessary to its prosperity and its very existence. Town in- dustry is a more delicate plant and of slower growth than the industry of the country. It is the creation of man nature does nothing for it directly. The country cannot disappear under any land system, and will pro- duce something, at least in these islands under any. Crops will rise and ripen even under a notice to quit ; grass will grow over a soil so fertile as Ireland's with- out even an effort on the part of the husbandman. But the town draws no nutriment from the ground on which it stands, nor from the air around ; rains do not refresh it, suns do not bring it to maturity, its harvests need much costlier sowing and labour, and much longer abstinence. Whatever evils then follow in the case of the country from insecurity and restraints on industrial energy must be tenfold greater in the 60 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. case of the town. The effects of the Irish Land System on agriculture deserve attention accordingly, not only for their own sake, or for their immediate bearing on other industries, but also as examples of influences operating with far greater force on the latter ; although for that very reason their effects may be to a great extent indiscernible. Towns and villages that are falling to decay may be seen, those which have alto- gether disappeared, and those which have been pre- vented from coming into existence, are invisible. And looking even at the agricultural side of the island, one may see such evidence of the effects of a land system essentially anti-industrial (if the expression may be allowed) in its structure and principles, be- cause essentially feudal, that the chief mark of its influence on the life and business of towns might almost be expected to be an entire absence of towns. It is not indeed a feudal land system in the sense of se- curing the defence of the State ; but it is so in aiming at the concentration of territory and power in a few fami- lies and in the feudal line, by regulations and restrictions absolutely hostile to all commercial policy and indus- trial progress. One observation relating to both country and town should be borne in mind throughout; namely, that there ought to have been in the case of both con- tinuous and rapid improvement in the last twenty years ; the period selected on all sides as a test of the working of the system under which the island is placed. That period includes the sudden removal of THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 61 an enormous mass of pauperism ; the effects of na- tional education ; an extensive system of drainage effected by public works and loans ; a general advance throughout the world in the industrial arts ; and an immense improvement in the commercial position of the island by means of roads, railways, and steam navigation, with a consequent augmentation of the value of Irish commodities which official statistics by no means sufficiently indicate. An illustration of the impetus which the combination of new methods of locomotion ought naturally to have given to agricul- ture is afforded in the instance of roads alone ; with an excellent system of which the undervalued public works, executed during the famine, furnished the island. Describing in 1845 the importance of means of in- ternal transportation for the development of the in- dustrial resources of Ireland, Sir Eobert Kane observed : ' The consequence of not having roads is illustrated by the evidence of Mr. Fetherstone, who, describing some of his important improvements to a Committee of the House of Commons, says, " The oats these lands grow is so very fine, and of such a rich gold colour, that if we can possibly get it down to the lowlands, we sell it for seed oats ; but the roads being so bad, we put it to the purpose of illicit distillation. It is a great deal cheaper to distil it than bring it to market, for we could only bring a sack at a time. . . . There are no roads. The oats are beautiful, and an enormous crop ; but what is the good of it ? you cannot send it to market." Add to roads railways, such as they ought to be, or even such as they are ; to both 62 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. add rapid conveyance to the chief English ports, and the consequent leap in the prices of Irish produce, and what ought not to have been the gains of Irish producers and the improvement in the methods of production ? The following table of comparative prices was given in evidence before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1867 : Butter Beef Mutton Tork per cwt. per cwt. per cwt. per cwt. t. d. i, . d. t. d. 1826 . . GO 33 34 25 5 1868 . . 109 3 59 1 GO G 51 10 Even this comparison (probably furnished from some principal town on the eastern coast) falls considerably short of showing the real rise in the prices of many Irish commodities throughout the greater part of the island in the last twenty years ; for in numerous inland and western localities the prices of meat and butter were doubled those of poultry much more than doubled immediately by railways.* ' Markets,' says M. de Lavergne, in his work on the Rural Economy of England and Ireland, referring, it is well to observe, to the aptitude of some countries for small farms, ' this is the greatest and most pressing require- ment of agriculture. There is only one law which admits of no exception, and which everywhere pro- duces the same results the law of markets.' But * The following prices are given in ' Reports from Poor-Law Inspec- tors on Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Ireland, 1870,' p. 26 : 1819 1869 s. if. s. d. Meat . . . .02 05 Milk . . . .05 08 Oatmeal, per cwt. .96 15 THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 63 M. de Lavergne had first laid it down that the natural consequence^ of markets is the introduction of leases ; just as Adam Smith traces the origin of long leases on the decline of feudalism to the new markets opened by commerce for the produce of agriculture and the necessity of increased security for its improve- ment. Eising prices in themselves and unaccompanied by security, only imperil the position of the tenant- farmer, by tempting the proprietor to sudden changes in the terms of the tenure, or in the tenancy itself. And in Ireland the actual accompaniment of markets was additional insecurity. Mere tenure-at-will be- came commoner than before the Devon Commission condemned it as 'a pressing grievance to all classes of tenants, paralysing all exertions, and placing a fatal impediment in the way of improvement.' The natural consequence has been that system of husbandry which so experienced a judge as Mr. Caird lately described as everywhere meeting his eye, save in Ulster and the eastern seaboard of the country : ' What the ground will yield from year to year at the least cost of time, labour, and money is taken from it.' The description might stand for an economic definition of tenure from year to year. On the very border of commerce with England, under better conditions of tenure than else- where prevalent, and under landowners more generally resident, a considerable change for the better in Irish husbandry has taken place on the whole ; although there are indications that the progress even of that favoured side of the island has come to a stand-still, and that the Ulster farmer has been made to feel that, 64 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. without legal security, improvement is dangerous. But taking Ireland as a whole, a glance at official statistics shows the general direction in which agriculture has been moving. One-half of the island in what is called grass or pasture, nearly one-fourth bog or waste, little more than one-fourth in cultivation, and but one and a-half per cent of the whole area wood or plan- tation, is the picture agricultural statistics present. But for the absence of wood, of which an explanation will be found in a subsequent page of this volume, one might suppose oneself looking at the statistics of a new country just occupied by a colony, in place of an old country which the inhabitants have been deserting in millions to seek subsistence elsewhere. Cultivation moreover has been receding much faster than statistics show at first sight. The entire area under crops was 5,970,139 acres in 1861, and but 5,575,843 in 1869 ; but these general figures are far from exhibiting the real retrogression, because the increase of cultivation which commenced after 1847 reached its maximum in different years in different counties, and then steadily declined in each. Comparing the entire number of acres under crops in 1869 with the number attained in all the counties together at their maximum of cultiva- tion, it would be found that 1,398,881 acres in place of only 394,296 have gone out of cultivation. It is not meant that in every case the substitution of pasture for tillage is a change for the worse, for a good tillage farm should have a portion, if possible, in permanent grass properly supplied with manure ; but that the total extent of cultivation, in place of decreas- THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 65 ing ought to have largely increased, is not only agreed by the highest authorities on agriculture in the island, but shows itself in an actual diminution in cattle as well as of crops, through the want of winter keep, and, what is worse, through a positive deterioration of the depastured soil. The following table, considering the rise in the price of cattle, and the decrease of crops, is startling : Number of Horses Cattle Pigs 1859 . . 629,075 3,815,598 1,265,751 1869 . . 527,248 3,727,079 1,079,793 There has been, it is true, between 1859 and 1870 a considerable increase of sheep, but of that something hereafter. Looking first at the effect of the grazing system on the number of cattle, it may be observed that a Scotch Member of Parliament, versed in the agriculture of his own country, yet apparently not opposed to a very different method of cattle-feeding in Ireland, himself states that on estates in the county of Mayo which he lately visited, where Italian ray grass for stall-feeding was substituted for natural pasturage, ' four cows were kept on the same extent of land as was barely sufficient for one cow under the old system.' * To this difference in summer food must be added the loss of winter food by ' the old system.' And to both we should add the loss of human food. 'In eleven years,' says a high scientific authority, 'Ireland has lost the power of feeding more than 1,800,000 of her population, while Scotland has gained the power of feeding about * 'Land Culture, &c. iu Ireland.' By P. Macla-ran, M.I'., 1869. F 66 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. 300,000 more people.' * Take further the difference of profit to the farmer and wages to the labourer. The lecturer at the Glasnevin Model Farm, who adds to high scientific attainments practical experience in agri- culture in every province, has lately shown that on ordinary Irish soil, clay loam on a limestone formation, tillage properly conducted, gives an excess over pasture of 2GO/. in profit, though at lower than current prices of corn, and with an outlay in wages of 194/. instead of but 30/. to a single herd. This calculation, however, as- sumes a five-course rotation an assumption involving a tenure sufficient not only for five years of cropping, but also for subsoiling, draining, and building, which in Ireland must be done by the tenant, if done at all. For the effects of the Irish system of pasture on the soil, we may refer to the evidence of ' an Ulster land- lord aijd tenant,' who, while writing energetically on the side of the landlords, incidentally states with respect to some land of his own, that ' used for several years as a grazing farm, and paying a good return, at length a portion showed symptoms of returning to coarse grass and heather, and twenty acres were broken up, limed, and cropped with oats.' f Mr. Longfield draws a distinction between two kinds of Irish soil, one being rich stiff clay, and improving every year under pasture, another and lighter soil, on the contrary, if kept in pasture, having a tendency to run into unprofitable moss.$ Without questioning this * 'Of the Declining Production of Food iu Ireland.' By Dr. Lyon riayfair, C.B., M.P. ' Recess Studies,' p. 249. t Letters to the ' Standard,' January, 1870. J Cobden Club Volume, p. 35. THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. G7 distinction, it may be confidently maintained that a great part of the land actually in pasture in Ireland has tendencies of the latter character ; that the soils are few arid rare in the island which, even if well adapted for pasture, could not yield at once more profit to the farmer, more wages to the labourer, and more food to both man and beast under a good system of tillage ; and that in the end the soils best adapted for grazing must be exhausted by the exportation of cattle without the restoration of the element of fertility withdrawn. It does not rain bones and flesh even in Ireland. Mr. Brodrick, in one of the essays which the Irish land question has elicited from distinguished English- men, mentions with something of surprise, as a fact of which his inquiries in the island have convinced him, that fifteen and ten acre farmers in Ireland pay a higher rent than larger farmers, with at least equal punctuality.* The truth is that they generally produce more ; and that the consolidation of farms means the diminution of crops, the extension of grazing, and sooner or later, the ex- haustion of the soil. The table in the note, taken from the last volume of Irish agricultural statistics, affords con- clusive evidence that cultivation decreases, and ' grass, bog, and waste ' increase in exact proportion to the size of farms.f It may be true that not a few of the small holdings which have disappeared in recent years were, soil and situation considered, too diminutive ; but they * 'Irish Land Question. ' By the Honourable George Charles Brod- rick. ' llecess Studies.' t ' The number of holdings ; the quantity of land held by each class of landholders ; the area and proportion under crops, grass, fallow, woods 68 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. were so because the best land has been generally given to large grazing farms ; and because the same error which has made landowners look with disfavour on small farms, has led them to drive them to the worst ground and the worst situations, and to limit unduly both the duration of their tenure and the amount of land left to them.* and plantations, and bog and waste, and also the average extent of the holdings, are given in the following tobies: ' Tfte Number of lidding* by Classes in 1868 ; the entire extent of Land under each Class; also the Area under Crops, Grass, Fallow, Plantations, and Bog and Waste, unoccupiid, in the several Classes. Extent of Diriiion of Land Cluiiflcatton of Ho dlngi Hold- In^ in Land held by each Woodi each claw Land, bolden Under Croj)i Grazing 1.4111.1 F "- FUEL tloni BOK and Waste AcTM Acr^ Acrei AIT.- ' A cm Acrei Iloldinps not exceeding 1 Aero 4!), 70!) 25,014 21,002 1 .489 38 235 2,1 HO do alx>ve 1 5 Acres 77.108 273,930 ni,43* 77.050 323 2,785 22,328 do alx>ve 5 15 I7l'.li|o 1,799.083 841,224' 782,442 1.5!Ht 10,1503 104,121 do above 15 f 30 130,580 3,050,954 2,210,802 1,473,431 3,179 1U.472 341,010 do above 30 ~ 50 72.205 2,913,712 1,019,919 1,48:1,887 3,849 20,875 385,182 do above 50 g 100 54,8-10 4,028,455 1,158.204|2,182,054| 6,002 44,470 639,724 do above 100 - 200 22,iofi 3,321,075 697,698 1, 805,315 4,205 08,039 085,818 do above 200 9 500 8,181 2,807,038 352,548 l,4ti5,OO( 2,017 90,f>72 897,171 do above 500 Acres . 1 ,572 2,090,403 71,010 008,718 277 67,8071,291,648 Total . 594,341 20,319,9245,547,971 9,999,393 22,110 322,258 4,428,192 The foregoing Table reduced to Proportions per Cent. Claiilftcatlon of Holding! Propor- tion per Wood! Average cent, of Under HoUlinei trc.pi Grain Fallow am! Planta- Bog ami Total F.xu-nt uf thr Holding, in In each tion! " each clan Clan Holdings not excelling 1 Acre 8-4 84-2 fi-0 0-2 0-9 8-7 100 A. H. p. 2 1 do. nl)vo 1 * " 13-0 C2-0 2S-1 0-1 l-ii x-2 loci 3 2 13 do. above 5 15 28-9 40-7 43-5 0-1 0-0 9-1 loo 10 1 :n do. above 15 - 30 23-0 399 48-3 0-1 0-5 i 11-2 100 22 1 14 do. above 30 12-1 35-0 51 -0 0-1 0-7 13-2 100 40 1 17 do. above 50 a loo ;>..' 28-7 54-2 o-l 1-1 15-9 100 73 1 33 do. above 100 o 2(Mi 3-7 21-0 '.0-2 0-1 2-1 20-0 1(10 150 1 2 do. Rlwve 200 500 1-4 12-0 r .2"_> o-l 3-2 31-9 100 343 19 do. above 500 acres . . 0-3 3-4 j Jl-9 0-0 3'2 01-5 1011 1,335 2 Total . 100-0 27-3 49-2 0-1 1-6 21-8 100 ! - ' * On this subject, as on many others which cannot bo discussed with the saint: advantage in tbese pages, the reader is referred to the letters of Mr. Morris, Times Commissioner, on tho ' Irish Land Question.' THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 69 The consolidation of farms, in place of being an advance, has involved a palpable retrogression in Irish husbandry and in its productiveness. But the mischief does not end in the country, it goes on to the town. The dis- appearance of the agricultural holding has involved the disappearance of the town holding ; the decline of agriculture has been followed by the decline of neigh- bouring trade and manufactures ; just as in the six- teenth century, ' the decay of husbandmen ' in England was followed by the decay of the country town and the village. It has been stated that against the decrease of both crops and cattle there is to be set a large increase of sheep ; and the effect on both town and country is well exemplified by a statement cited, for a different purpose, by Lord Dufferin from the evidence given before the Devon Commission : ' Upon the plains of Eoscommon one man has 4,000 sheep and only two herds attending the flock.' * At that time the number of sheep in the county Eoscommon was under 100,000 ; it had increased to 213,134 in 1868 ; and the follow- ing figures sufficiently indicate the differences in respect of both town and country between the counties in which sheep are many and those in which they are few : Number of sheep in 1868 Antrim . . 19,255 Armagh . . 16,500 Down . . . 76,996 Number of sheep in 1868 Galway . . 710,279 Mayo . . 372,231 Roscommon . 213,134 ; Irish Emigration and Tenure.' By Lord Dufferin, p. 153. 70 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. If the picture of a fertile island, half under grass and nearly one-fourth waste, is one of stagnation and desolation, it is nevertheless life and activity compared with the scene which statistics of towns, manufactures, and trade, as complete as those of agriculture, would present. It is no small defect in administrative art that no such statistics are forth- coming. Mr. Thorn's * Almanack ' affords on this, as on other subjects, a prodigious amount of information for a private work ; but a private work cannot perform the office of a statistical department. Attention has often been drawn of late years to the diminished proportion in Ireland of houses of the lowest class which statistics exhibit ; but there are no statistics of the dwellings of all classes which have fallen to ruin in the towns, nor of the multitude of villages whose place knows them no more. Draw a line from Dublin to the nearest point of Lough Swilly in the north, and another to Ban try Bay in the south, and the angle contained by those lines between the capital and the Atlantic covering about three-fourths of an island which ought to l)e studded with cities, fine country towns, and smiling villages does not include one large or flourishing city, and includes hardly a town or village whose trade and population have not decreased in the last twenty years. It includes, indeed, but few which are not in a state of complete decay, in spite of all the auxiliaries to town industry, mechanical, chemical, and intellectual, which those twenty years have created. Inferring to the town of Longford in his stati-tie.- of boroughs and municipal towns. Mr. THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 71 Thorn states : ' This place is by far the most thriving and important town between Dublin and Sligo. Population in 1861, 4,872.' Of Sligo itself he states that it is 'the most important seaport on the north- west coast;' and its population was but 13,361 in 1861 having been 14,318 at the previous census. Limerick is the only large town in the angle above described, and Mr. Monsell portrays its condition as follows : ' I have taken some pains to ascertain the condition of the population in the city of Limerick, the centre of a rich grazing district. In the old town the poor live generally in large, decaying houses, a sin- gle family rarely occupying more than one room, and sometimes three or four families living together in the same room. There is seldom more than one bed for a family, and this bed consists frequently of straw with an old quilt or blanket, to which are added at night the day garments of the family. The furniture is made up of an iron pot, a few old saucepans, a rickety table, and one or two old chairs very often there is neither table nor chair. These rooms are exposed day and night to cold wind and rain. It is quite common to meet in these rooms grown persons who are unable to go out for days and weeks on account of want of clothes.'* Mr. Monsell instances Limerick in connection with his statement that ' the most miserable portion of the agricultural population is to be found in the grazing districts.' Adam Smith pointed out that the town follows the country in ' the natural order of * 'Address to the Statistical Society of Ireland.' By the Eight Honourable William Monsell, M.P., I860. 72 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. opulence ; ' and Limerick shows that the town likewise follows the country in the natural order of indigence. A Scotch member, already cited, says of the towns of Ireland : * In Cork, Waterford, Belfast, and Derry, we have all the bustle of mercantile and manufacturing towns ; in the interior of the country we have neat pretty towns such as Parsonstown ; and in the towns situated in an agricultural district we have far more bustle and stir than in similar towns in Scotland, showing a larger population in Ireland and the larger trade done between town and country.' The conclud- ing sentence of this statement illustrates the connection between a large country population and the business and life of towns. But Mr. Maclagan does not specify the ' agricultural districts ' to which he refers. The four great ' mercantile and manufacturing towns ' are G O on the eastern side of the island, and outside of the angle described above. Parsonstown is a flourishing country town, which will be referred to again ; but how many such towns did Mr. Maclagan see in all the western and midland counties together? He speaks himself of other towns ' which show strong traces of decay;' instancing Galway, where 'tottering walls of uninhabited houses threaten to fall on us ; or the frequent gaps in the streets tell us that buildings once stood there which it would not pay to rebuild.'* Galway may be taken as a type of the town through- out the west of the island ; a.s Trim, again, the capital of the chief grazing county, may be taken as a type of the town in the midland counties. 'Trim,' says ' Land Culture, &c. in Ireland.' By P. Maclagan, M.P., p. 3. THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 73 Mr. Morris, ' is the capital of the county of Meath ; but it is little more than a declining village, and it has a dreary and decaying aspect.'* One more example is afforded in the capital town of the county in whose plains we have seen that two herds fill so prominent a position. Mr. Thorn's account of its population and wealth is as follows: 'Population in 1861, 2,619; town rates in 1869, 90/. 13s. lie?. ; town revenue, 123/. s. bd: Mr. Smiles, describing the industrial progress of England, remarks that its early industry was almost exclusively pastoral, its principal staple being wool. He might add that Ireland has in the last twenty years been rapidly returning to that primitive condition of industry. The losses which both country and towns in Ireland sustain from the absenteeism of great landowners, drawing immense revenues from the island, have been recently described with great force by a very eminent writer. Not only does the peasant lose a large custom close at hand for his poultry, eggs, and butter, but also in the neighbouring village, ' the shops are few and ill supplied ; goods are sold at a high price ; and yet for want of sufficient custom the profit of the shopkeeper is very small. 'f Great, however, as is the loss to a coun- try town, such as Lisburn (to take an actual instance) of remitting from its immediate neighbourhood fifty or sixty thousand a-year to an English Marquis in Paris, * ' The Irish Land Question.' By W. 0. Morris, Times Commissioner. t ' The Tenure of Land in Ireland.' By the Eight Honourable M. Longfield, ' Cobden Club Volume/ pp. 10, 11. 74 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. it is small compared with the loss sustained by the coun- try towns throughout Ireland from the absence (arising from the same causes which have created great absen- tees) of a large and prosperous peasantry and yeomanry round them. Travelling among the half-clad peasantry of France, before the Revolution, Arthur Young indig- nantly denounced the blindness of a Government which could not see how much more important to the trade and manufactures of a kingdom is a prosperous rural population than a wealthy nobility. Divide the lands which yield to a Marquis G0,000/. in rent among a thousand peasants, and how much greater and more constant will be their custom with the market-town than it could derive from the expenditure of the Marquis, even if frequently on the spot ? ' The peasant proprietor,' as Sismondi said, ' is of all cultivators the one who gets most from the soil. Of all cultivators the peasant proprietor is the one who gives most encouragement to commerce and manufactures, be- cause he is the richest.' * The island of Jersey is owned and for the most part fanned by small proprietors, and with less than 28,000 acres, has a population of 55,613, and 55,000 tons of local shipping, carrying on trade with every quarter of the world. The Isle of Wight has not one peasant proprietor, and with 86,810 acres of land has a population of 55,362, and scarcely any commerce or shipping, f But the trade which a prosperous rural * Sec Mr. Mill's Chapters and Speeches on the 'Irish Land Question,' r .r>. t Fur much useful information, respecting the Channel Islands and THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 3870. 75 population creates, is not only much larger than that which springs from the demand of a wealthy few ; it is also much less precarious. And there is a similar difference between the industries which rest on a local market, and have, as it were, an agricultural basis, and those which depend on a foreign demand. The principal manufactures .of Ireland are branches of one great staple, mainly dependent on an external market. But since the close of the American war, these manufactures have been by no means in a flourishing state ; and the linen factories of Ulster have been working short time, or only a part of their machinery, while its artificial manure factories have been doino; as laro;e a business as ever with the tenant- o o right farmers of the province. The clothing merchant's trade in Belfast, in like manner, is slack with all the manufacturing population, and also with the farmers dependent on the prosperity of flax ; while it continues to be brisk with the rest of the rural population. In the villages round Belfast, the same principle finds examples. There are three not many miles distant, all beginning with the Irish name for a town ; two of which were dependent on weaving, and these are dwindling into mere hamlets ; while the third (the trade of which springs from the agricultural population of its neighbourhood) has grown in a few years into a small town of 1,300 inhabitants with a nourishing business. It is true that the decline of the trade of some of their laws, see ' Observations on the Law of Descent in the United Kingdom.' By Henry Tapper, of the Itoyal Court of Guernsey. 76 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the towns of Ireland has been in part natural and unavoidable resulting from a change in the lines of communication and traffic, with railways and steamers. Such changes, however, only alter the sites of traffic, and do not destroy it ; they afford, moreover, an additional illustration of the importance to towns of a local demand which does not shift with every variation in the course of external commerce. But it is by no means only through its effects on the country that the Irish land system cramps the growth of the town, or suppresses it altogether. The accumu- lation of the greater part of the national territory in unproductive hands, settlements with the difficulties of title and transfer they cause, the obstacles to in- dustrial progress arising from the feudal principles of English law, the intricacy of the most technical and tortuous jurisprudence the world has ever known, the uncertainty and enormous cost of litigation, the in- security of town as well as of agricultural holdings, compose a network of restrictions to the development of the manufacturing, mining, and commercial re- sources of the island which have been more fatal to the prosperity of the town than even to that of the coun- try. The first sentence of Mr. Furlong's treatise on the ' Law of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland,' is ' The common law regulating the enjoyment of real pro- perty, both in England and Ireland, is founded upon and governed by the principles of the feudal system.' But the feudal system contemplated agriculture, al- though ina servile form ; it never contemplated manu- factures, mines, or commerce. Belfast, the onlv Lrreat THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 77 manufacturing city in Ireland, owes, as has been mentioned in a previous page, its greatness to a fortunate accident which converted the ground on which it stands from feudal into commercial territory, by transferring it from a great noble to its own citizens. But the growth of Belfast itself, on one side has been strictly circumscribed by the rival claims of two noble proprietors, who were in litigation respecting them for more than a generation ; and in a step the inhabitant passes from new streets to a filthy and decaying suburb, into which the most enterprising capitalist in the neighbourhood has been prevented from extending his improvements.* On the other side of the town is some ground which the capitalist just referred to bought three years ago for the purpose of building ; but which remains unbuilt on, in consequence of diffi- culties in the legal title ; although in equity the title is indisputable, and is not disputed. Some years ago the same capitalist contracted for the purchase of another plot of ground in the neighbourhood. It proved, how- ever, that the vendor was precluded by his marriage settlement from completing the contract, although it reserved to him the unusual power to grant leases for 999 years. That, however, did not answer the same purpose ; in the first place, because (a consequence of the land system, with its distinction between real and personal property) the succession duties are heavier on leasehold than on freehold estates. What is more important, a tenant for years has not the rights of ownership, as was afterwards experienced in the very * See also on this subject the next article. 78 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOtrY. case before us. The capitalist accepted a lease for 999 years ; although diverted from his original design with respect to the ground. In putting it to a different pur- pose, he proceeded to level an eminence, and to carry away the gravel for use elsewhere. Hut the Law of Landlord and Tenant says : ' If a tenant open pits for the purpose of raising stone or w**4e, it will be waste.' And this being the law, the landlord actually obtained an injunction to restrain the tenant's proceedings and mulcted him in damages. Once more ; in another county the very same capi- talist opened an iron mine by arrangement with the lord of the soil, and commenced works on an extensive scale. The landlord then demanded terms to which he was not entitled by his contract ; but the price of Irish iron has not been high enough of late years to defray the cost of a Chancery suit in addition to the cost of production ; and delay, worry, and anxiety are not inducements to industrial enterprise, so the iron works were suspended. Here are five cases within the author's knowledge, all happening in recent years, in which a single indi- vidual has been arrested in the course of town enter- prise and improvement by the state of the law. Add centuries to the last few years, and multiply this one individual by all the others whose industrial efforts have been cramped and restrained directly by the state of the law. and even then the full tale of the mischief is not told. For whenever one individual stalls a new and successful business, it leads to other advances and improvements great and small: and the smothering of a THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. * 79 single enterprise may entail indirectly the loss of the growth of a town. Look, then, with this consideration in mind, at the loss Ulster has sustained by the conduct of the twelve London companies who hold a great part of the county of Londonderry in mortmain, and who have added to the injury of absenteeism the crime of refusing leases. ' It is well known that there are no manufacturing establishments on the companies' estates, because these London guilds persistently refuse to give perpetuity lease for such purposes ; while on the borders of the county Cookstown, Ballymena, Bally- money, and Coleraine, where such leases are granted, manufactures have increased and prospered, and even in the county, where freehold sites can be procured, manufactures have taken root.' * In a passage quoted above Mr. Maclagan speaks of smart country towns in the interior of Ireland, naming, however, Parsonstown only, the prosperity of which is mainly due to its exceptional good fortune in obtain- ing long leases. But Mr. Maclagan himself discovered ' whole villages and towns which have been built by the tenants, and from which the landlord can evict them at a six-months' notice.' A notion was formerly carefully diffused by way of apology for the land system of Ireland, that it had no natural capability for manufactures, that agriculture was therefore at once its only trade, and an imremunerative one for want of home markets. The truth is, the industrial resources of the island are considerable. The outcrop of iron is * ' The Irish Land Question, and the Twelve London Companies in the County of Londonderry,' p. 24. 80 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. large, and an instance has been given of the fate of an attempt to turn it to account. There is no lack of material for fuel, if invention once got fairly to work at it ; coal, too, can be carried to Dublin cheaper than to London ; and with a proper railway system, the cost of English coal would create no obstacle to manufac- tures in the West. Holland without mines is becom- ing again a manufacturing country, by means of low railway freights for coal and iron from the Ruhr Basin and Belgium. Ireland moreover is rich in marble, stone, and clays available for many industrial purposes, and rich also both in materials for textile and leather manufactures, and in the genius of the people for manufacturing them ; as is proved not only by the ancient success of some which legislation, followed by heavy duties on coal, extinguished, but also by existing fabrics in all parts of the island, lace, tabinets, sewed muslins, damasks, linen and frieze, leather works, all of indigenous growth ; besides rising cottons and woollens after the English model in a few favoured situations. The truth is that the law and the land system built on the law have cramped the manufactures even more than the agriculture of Ireland, because the former stand even more in need of security and liberty for their prosperity, and are not the first necessaries of life. The saying of Swift that in the arithmetic of the customs, two and two instead of making four, some- times made only one, is yet truer of the political arithmetic of the Irish territorial system, with ils con- trivance's for adding acres indivisibly together in un- productive hands, kfub^titutc the land system for THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 81 ' slavery ' and tenants-at-will for ' slaves ' in the fol- lowing passage, in which Mr. Cairnes a few years ago described ' the kind of economic success which slavery had achieved in the Southern States of America,' and the passage will read as true as before. i It consists in the rapid extraction from the soil of the most easily obtained portion of its wealth, by a process which exhausts the soil, and consigns to waste all the other resources of the country where it is practised. By proscribing manufactures and commerce and confining agriculture within narrow bounds, by rendering im- possible the rise of a free peasantry, by checking the growth of population, in a word by blasting every germ from which national well-being may spring ; at this cost, with the further condition of encroaching through a reckless system of culture on the stores designed by Providence for future generations, slavery may undoubtedly for a time be made conducive to the interests of the man who keeps slaves.' Mr. Caird fell naturally almost into Mr. Cairnes' first words when he said of the results of the Irish land system : ' What the ground will yield from year to year at the least cost of time, labour and money, is taken from it.' One large business indeed, a system which ' exhausts the soil, proscribes manufactures and commerce, and confines agriculture within narrow bounds,' does never- theless create. It necessitates the existence of a large army of policemen and soldiers. In the tenant-right and agricultural county of Down (outside of Belfast) 1 in 1,112 of the population is a policeman ; in the great grazing county of Meath the proportion is 1 in 379. G 82 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. In the last eleven years the cost of the army and navy of the United Kingdom has amounted to three hundred millions no small part of that cost being in reality caused by the disaffection of Ireland yet there are economists who argue that the Treasury cannot afford to advance a few millions to enable Irish tenants to purchase their holdings, although the Treasury ac- tually has for a number of years been lending money to landlords in both England and Ireland. But even three hundred millions is a small sum compared with the waste of productive power in both country and town which the Irish land system has caused in the eleven last years. A perception that other interests besides those of tenant-farmers are concerned in the land system has sometimes led opponents of the tenants to reply, truly enough, that they are not the only class in the nation ; but the proper inference is that the entire land system of every country in any age ought to be, and, in a democratic age, must be constructed with no other object than to make the national territory minister to the general welfare and happiness of the nation, and that for the sake of at once strengthening the foun- dations of property and diffusing the sources of pro- sperity, it must aim both at a wide distribution of landed property, and at opening all the industrial resources which land comprehends to productive use and invest- ment. The problem accordingly which the legislature has before it will not be solved by legislation relating solely to agriculture and agricultural holdings. The THE IRISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 83 prohibition of entail, reform of the law of intestate succession, the transfer of land by simple registration at the least possible cost,* security of tenure, the sale of absentee estates to the tenants, or in towns to trustees for the citizens, are measures even more neces- sary for manufactures and commerce than for agricul- ture in a country in such a condition as Ireland's ; mea- sures, too, in favour of the town, are measures in favour of the country. ' If you wish to encourage agriculture, develope manufactures and commerce which multiply consumers ; improve the means of communication which bring consumers and producers nearer to each other. The agricultural question is nothing else than one of general prosperity.' -J* Mere reformation, however, of the laws relating to land, trusting to the gradual operation of wise and just institutions in the future, is by no means sufficient now, either for the general prosperity of Ireland or for that of its agriculture in particular. The legislature has not only noxious and barbarous laws, but also their effects, both economical and political, to remove. On a popula- tion cut off from manufactures and commerce, a land system has been imposed, carefully contrived to exclude * As an example of the close connection of the reforms needed in the Irish land system, it is worth observing that to give the force of law to the Ulster custom of tenant-right will be a positive injury to many tenants, without a simple law of transfer and succession; since the interest of the tenants will otherwise become subject at once to the costs and risks on account of which they have invested their capital in the purchase of a customary right instead of in the purchase of land. The Landed Estates Court, it may be added, is not a poor man's court, and is a very costly and tedious court even for a rich n:an. f ' Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland.' By M. de Lavergne. G 2 84 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. them from property in the soil, and even from the secure cultivation of the small forms to which they were driven for subsistence. In France, Germany, and Belgium, landed property is a national institution, and a national benefit, and the nation is for it ; in Ireland it has been, both in origin and in effect, a hostile insti- tution, and the nation is against it. Yet the very causes which have produced this unnatural situation have concealed themselves in the violence of their own effects ; and the system of tenure has appeared the only great evil, because it has been almost the only career open to the nation ; proprietorship having been altogether denied to it. The system of property, an oligarchic and feudal system of property, is the radical evil, of which the system of tenure is only a single branch. The great aim of Parliament ought to be to diffuse property in land widely throughout the nation ; treating all immediate cost incurred for that end in compensating existing proprietors as incurred, not only for the improvement of Ireland, but also for the security of the Empire. The provisions of the Irish Land Bill now before Parliament need much amendment for the protection of tenants. But the success of any law of tenure, however well framed in itself, will mainly de- pend on the number of proprietors the conditions of purchase and reforms in the law of property shall call into being. 85 POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGEATION * THAXKS to four or five great writers in a century, a few statesmen, and the particular interests and accidents which led to a comparatively early adoption of free trade, England is looked up to on the Continent as par excellence the country of political economy. In few other countries nevertheless is this branch of political philosophy less carefully or commonly studied, how- ever commonly its terms are in use ; and it becomes daily more evident that the air ought to be cleared of clouds of confusion enveloping those very terms. For instead of facilitating thought, as the terms of a science should do, they have come to supersede it ; they are taken to settle several problems about which economic inquiry is almost in its infancy ; and, what is yet more misleading, they have caused different and even oppo- site things to be confounded under one name as has been the case not only with several economic terms commonly made use of in discussing emigration, but with emigration itself. In no other branch of philosophy indeed, unless metaphysics itself, does the ancient mist of realism continue so to ' darken counsel by words without * Reprinted from 'Fraser's Magazine,' May 1808. 8G LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. knowledge.' A resemblance lias been seen by a phi- losopher in a number of different things viewed in one particular light, and a common name has been given to them with reference only to that point of resem- blance ; often indeed the general term introduced in this way was not originally meant to denote a complete induction, but simply to put a conspicuous part for the whole, leaving something to human intelligence ; presently, however, the entire class comes to assume a perfect identity in the minds of some of the philo- sopher's most intelligent followers. In like manner, a phrase used at first to signify merely a tendency of things under particular conditions comes to stand for a universal law or principle of nature, and a generali- sation, which originally threw a new light upon pheno- mena, finally involves them in almost impenetrable obscurity. Emigration, for example, though really a name for several different kinds of emigration, and, in particular, for two opposite kinds on which we shall have particularly to dwell, has been spoken of as a thing, the beneficial effects of which, in every case, have an a priori certainty that leaves no room for discussion. It is all supply and demand, one person will tell you ; labour, whether it be English labour or Irish labour, is a commodity which finds its way to the best market. Another, arriving by a somewhat less mechanical process at the same positive conclusion, tells you that it must be beneficial, since it takes place through the operation of the private interest of all the parties concerned the term ' private interest,' it will be observed, being in all such reasoning confounded POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 87 with another deceitful abstraction, ' the desire of wealth.' A third argues that it must of necessity raise the rate of wages, by distributing the 'aggregate C_J * */ O <-J<~J CJ wages fund ' among a smaller number of labourers. That the rate of wages is not determined by any -siagle law or set of conditions, we hope to demonstrate in a subsequent article.* At present it is enough to remark, in the first place, that there are no funds necessarily destined to employment as wages ; and coincidently with a vast emigration there may be, as its very result or as the result of a common cause, a substitution of pasture for tillage, and a withdrawal of capital from farming, with a diminished demand for labour in consequence. Moreover, the aggregate amount of the funds expendible as wages does not, given the number of labourers, determine the rate of wages at all. If a single employer, or a few w r ho could combine, had the entire amount, all the labour in the country which could not emigrate might be hired for its bare subsistence, whatever the rate in the power of the employer to give. Again, if the whole amount were, as it really is, very unequally shared among employers, the price of labour might be im- measurably lower than if it were equally shared ; just as at an auction, the prices paid for things will pro- bably be immensely higher if the purchasers have equal means, than if most of the money is in the hands of a few. If two bidders, for example, have each 50/., one of them may have to spend his whole fifty to get half what he wants ; but if one of them has but 5/. * See Appendix. 'Political Economy nnd the Rate of Wages.' 88 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. and the other has 95/., the latter may get all he wants for 5/. 5s. There may be a convenience in having a collective term for all the sources of wages, all the funds, whether capital, income, or the revenue of the State, expendible upon labour ; but the misfortune is that the collective term employed for this purpose has created an imagi- nary collective fund destined to the payment of labour ; and the payment is inferred to be higher or lower in proportion to the number of labourers. In like man- ner the phrase ' private interest,' though really a col- lective term for a number of individual interests, by no means all for the public interest, has assumed, in the minds of a number of economists, the form of a single beneficent principle, animating and regulating the whole economic world. ' The desire for wealth,' in the same way (which is by no means, as already observed, the same thing with private interest, for wealth is not the predominant interest of the most powerful classes*), * 'There is a firm oasis in the desert upon which we ma)' safely rest, and that is afforded us by the principles of political economy. I enter- tain a prejudice adopted l>y Adam Smith, that a man is at liberty to do what he likes with his own, and that, having land, it is not unreasonable that he should be free to let his land to a person upon the terms upon which they shall mutually agree. That I believe to be good political economy.' [Speech of Mr. Lowe in the House of Commons, March 14.] Now what has Adam Smith really said ? ' It seldom happens that a great proprietor is a great improver. ]?ut if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are lea*t of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages demonstrates that the work done by slaves is in the end the dearest of any.' 'The pride of man,' nevertheless, he continues, ' makes him love to domineer. AVherever the law allows it therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.' If'wlf/i of K'uttitii*, book ', chap. ii. And in the only sentence in which Adam Smith speaks of allowing the landlord to pursue his own interest in his POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 89 is really a name for a multiplicity of wants, passions, and ideas, widely differing from each other, both in their nature and in their effects on production as the accumulation of land differs from the hunger for bread yet it stands for one identical and industrious princi- ple with many considerable speakers and writers. And in virtue of these terms, and a few others of like gener- ality, a school of Economists of no small pretensions, strongly represented in Parliament, supposes itself to be furnished with a complete apparatus of formulas, within which all economic knowledge is comprised ; which clearly and satisfactorily expounds all the phe- nomena of wealth, and renders all further investigation of the causes and effects of the existing economy of CJ v society needless, and even mischievous as tending to introduce doubt and heresy into a scientific world of certainty and truth, and discontent and disturbance into a social world of order and prosperity. Political writers and speakers of this school have long enjoyed the double satisfaction of beholding in themselves the masters of a difficult study, and of pleasing the powers that be, by lending the sanction of ' science ' to all established institutions and customs, unless, indeed, customs of the poor. Instead of a science of wealth, they give us a science for wealth. And so blind has been the faith reposed, even by acute and logical minds, in the infallibility of the formulas, that Arch- own "way, he insists upon the State giving to the tenants ' the most per- fect security that they shall enjoy the full recompense of their own industry.' Adam Smith, moreover, has pronounced, without reserve, against the system of proprietorship and management of land created by primogeniture and entails. 90 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. bishop Whately could point to the play of demand and supply, as the most striking proof natural theology can adduce of omniscient and benevolent design, instancing, in particular, in his argument the beneficent results of private interest in the dealings of the London retailers of food. For ourselves, we are convinced both that no branch of philosophy has suffered more than political economy from the intellectual weakness which M. de Tocqueville contrasts with omniscience in the following passage, and that evidence of that weakness is what is most striking in such arguments as the Archbishop's ; a weakness which leads men to imagine an unreal uni- formity and order in the world, corresponding with their own classifications, and which arises mainly from the inaccuracy and inadequacy of the general terms in which they place such unlimited confidence : ' Dieu ne songe point au genre humain en general. II voit d'un seul coup d'ceil et separement tons les etres dont I'humanite' se compose, et il apercoit chacun d'eux avec les ressemblances qui le rapprochent de tons et les differences qui 1'en isolent. Dieu n'a done pas besoin d'idees generates ; c'est-a-dire qu'il ne sent jamais la necessite de renfermer un tres-grand nombre d'objets analogues sous une meme forme afin d'y penser plus commodement, II n'en est point ainsi de I'homme. tSi 1'esprit humain entreprenait d'examiner et de juger individucllement tons les cas particuliers qui le frappent, il se perdrait bientot an milieu de I'lmmcnsite des details et ne vcrrait plus ricn ; clans cctte extremite, il a recours ;i un precede imparfait inais necessaire, qui aide sa fuiblesse et qui la prouvc. Apres avoir con- POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 91 sidere superficiellement un certain nombre d'objets, et remarque qu'ils se ressemblent, il leur donne a tous un meme norn, et poursuit sa route. Les idees generales n'attestent point la force de 1'intelligence humaine, mais plutot son insuffisance, car il n'y a point d'etres exacte- ment semblables dans la nature ; point de faits iden- tiques ; point de regies applicables indistinctement et de la meme maniere a plusieurs objets k la fois. Les idees generales ont cela d'admirable qu'elles permettent a Tesprit humain de porter des jugements rapides sur un grand nombre d'objets a la fois ; mais d'une autre part, elles ne lui fournissent jamais que des notions incom- pletes, et elles lui font toujours perdre en exactitude ce qu'elles lui donnent en etendue.' * Emigration is, for example, one word, and it lias be- come accordingly to many economists one thing. Yet the history of mankind might be called the history of emigration, and does any one see in that great historical movement a single phenomenon ? Emigrants founded, and emigrants overthrew, the empire of Eome ; emi- grants raised all the modern States of Europe, and planted the new worlds ; arid, as Tocqueville's observa- tion suggests, omniscience would see in those move- ments the individual actions of every member of the Aryan family, not to speak of other races. Or, con- lining the view to a much smaller field, looking, that is to say, only to the emigration of fifteen recent years from the United Kingdom, as given in the last statisti- cal abstract, omniscience would see in it the separate departures of more than three million persons to various * 'Pe la D^mocratie en Amdrique.' 92 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. places, for various individual reasons, and with various individual results. Number of Emigrants from the United Kingdom to various Destinations. Years To the North American To the United States To the Australian Colonies To Other Places Total Colonies and New Zealand 1852 32,873 244,201 87,881 3,749 308,704 185.3 34,522 230,8*5 01,401 3,129 329,937 1854 4.3,701 193,005 83,237 3,3(50 323,429 1855 17,UGG 103,414 52,309 3,118 170,807 1850 10,378 111,837 44,584 3,755 170,554 1857 21,001 120,905 01,248 3,721 212,875 1858 9,704 59,710 39,295 6,257 113,972 1859 0,089 70,303 31,013 12,427 120,432 18(50 9,780 87,500 24,302 0,881 128,409 1801 12,707 49,704 23,738 5,501 91,770 18(52 15,522 58,700 41,843 5,143 121,214 18(5.3 18,083 140,813 53,054 6,808 223,758 1804 12,721 147,042 40,942 8,195 208,'. XX) 1805 17,211 140,258 37,283 8,049 209,801 1800 13,255 101,000 24,097 0,530 204,882 3,009,403 The science of the human economist must fall in- finitely short of affording him such complete know- ledge, as he contemplates such a table ; but it ought at least to help him to see in its figures something more than the ' total ' column, or one general move- ment of the British population : it ought to suggest some economic difference in the different streams of emigration ' to the North American Colonies, to the United States, to the Australian Colonies and New Zealand, and to other places.' We need not here, however, dwell upon more than one main distinction, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 93 that is to say, between the nature and effects of the movements to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada on the one hand, and of that to the United States upon the other. It is not difficult on a moment's reflection to perceive that emigration is here a name for at least two great movements as widely different in the main, both in respect of their causes and their results, as colonization is from depopulation, as improvement is from waste, and as enterprise and hope are from ruin and despair. It is a name, on the one hand, for the intelligence, energy, and facility with which the labour and capital of old countries now flow to distant re- gions ; for a healthy tendency of the age to develop the resources of the whole world, especially in places hitherto neglected and backward ; and, on the other hand, for insuperable obstacles to the prosperity and improvement of old countries themselves, and of a consequent flight of industrious enterprise and pro- ductive power from places whose natural resources are made, in a great measure, inaccessible to industry and development. Even in the emigration from Ire- land, there has been this double movement : there has been a healthy emigration (though comparatively on a very small scale) springing from increased in- telligence and knowledge, from the accumulation of small capitals, and from new outlets for energy, strength, and skill, as well as an emigration springing from misery, discontent, and the absence of all other pro- spect of a career : and there has been a reflux of emi- grants whose fortunes have been made, and of their industrial spirit, as well as of Fenians and Fenianism. 94 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. * At this moment/ says Lord Dufferin, speaking of Ulster, ' some of the most prosperous farmers on my estate are men who went in their youth to Australia and America, and have returned in the prime of life with an ample supply of capital/ Even in the south of the island some similar cases are known to the writer. But there would have been much more of this healthy and natural emigration Australia, Xew Zealand, and Canada would have received and made the fortunes of many more Irishmen, and sent more back with full hands to their native land had there not been also a different emigration, on an immensely greater scale, with an opposite reflux. Lord Mayo said truly enough of the different feelings toward Great Britain of Irish emigrants in America and Australia : * In Australia, though their numbers are not reckoned by millions, the Irishmen who have settled there do not exhibit towards Great Britain any of those hostile feelings which unhappily are found in America ; ' but it seems not to have occurred to the noble earl that they brought out different feelings, that they emigrated for the most part for different reasons, and that to suffer the emigration to the United States to take such a direction, is a proof of the same want of statesmanship which has failed to remove, or even, as it should seem, to discover its causes. For if it were true, as we hope to show it was not, that most of those who went to America could not have been supported in comfort at home, it would nevertheless be true that half of the four hundred millions expended in the last fourteen years POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 95 on a wooden fleet, on useless fortifications, on an * army of deserters ' (as a large portion of the British army has with harsh truth been called),* on military and naval mismanagement of every kind, might have planted New Zealand, Australia, and Canada with loyal subjects, instead of the United States with enemies to Great Britain. There have been however, as already said, two opposite streams of emigration even from Ireland, and how are we to measure their relative breadth ? Some- thing of a measure is afforded, as already observed, by the direction of the streams, but it is possible also, as we hope to show, to discover another. We must first allude to an alleged criterion in the rate of wages, the rise in which, according to some writers, proves that the whole emigration from Ireland has been beneficial, and gives the exact measure of the benefit. Even Lord Dufferin, apparently regarding Irish emigration in the main rather as a necessary evil than as a good, sees in it a curative process, and refers to the rise in wages as evidence. We undertake to show that, on the contrary, the bulk of the emigration from Ireland has been the result of a perpetuation of the evils of Ireland instead of a cure for them ; that it is a waste of industrial power arising from obstacles to industrial enterprises of every kind in Ireland itself; and with regard to wages, that the rise is not only due principally to * Of the recruits obtained in the seven years, 1859-65, upwards of 47,000 deserted. See Report of the Commissioners to Inquire into the Recruiting for the Army, 1867. Appendix ] 2, 8. 96 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. other causes than emigration, but would have been considerably greater if there had been no such emi- gration, that is to say, if the enormous emigration ascribable to the cause just adverted to had not taken place ; if the natural resources of Ireland had been all freely accessible ; if the most vigorous part of the population and much capital had not been removed by it from a great part of the island ; if a decline in the fertility of the soil, with a retrograde movement of husbandry, had not been its accompaniment ; and if Feniamsm and popular discontent and disquiet were not among its results. The writers who attribute the rise in wages to emigration are oblivious alike of the accompanying rise in the price of commodities and of the principal mone- tary phenomena of the twenty years of new gold mines, steam, and free trade of an equalisation of prices, and a consequent rise in the price of both labour and commodities in all parts of the world, where means of communication with the best markets have been greatly improved. Dr. Johnson in the last century, talking of turnpike roads in England, said : ' Every place communicating with every other. Before there were cheap places and dear places ; now all refuges for poverty are destroyed.' Add steam-navigation and railways to roads ; add the treasure of California, Australia, New Zealand, and British Columbia, to the money circulated by them in ' cheap places,' and it is not difficult to discover why they have become ' dear places;' or why the prices of both labour and commodities have risen in Ireland as they have risen POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION, 97 in India, in Egypt, and in every provincial town in France, in the same period, though emigration cannot be assigned as the cause. It ought to be sufficiently clear to every professed economist that, although emigration may force employers either to pay more for labour or to forego it, it cannot enable them to pay more for it as higher prices of produce will do ; and that it may, on the contrary, compel or determine them to diminish their outlay upon it, may force or induce them to relinquish enterprises already on foot, to forsake tillage for pasture, to emigrate themselves, and in various other ways to withdraw funds from the labour market. It may actually disable them from paying the same rate of wages as formerly, by with- drawing the strongest and most skilful hands from their employment ; and again, in place of being the cause of a rise in the rate of wages, it may be the consequence of a fall. These are not merely possible cases (though even as such they are enough to dispose of the argu- ment that emigration must have raised wages by diminishing the number of labourers competing for employment) ; they are, as we shall presently see, cases of actual occurrence in Ireland. But let us glance first at the true causes of the rise in the price of labour in Ireland, and the corresponding rise in the price of commodities which has in a great measure neutralised its purchasing power to the labourer. In the town of Wexford, between thirty and forty years ago, the price of meat was 2 Id. a pound ; it rose with steam-communication to 4d. ; and with improve- ments in steam it had risen, ten years ago, to between H 98 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Id. and Sd. In Athlone down to 1852, meat con- tinued to sell at from 3rf. to 4d. a pound, and then rose at once with railway communication to between Id. and 80?. What, then, has raised prices generally throughout Ireland ? The answer is evident. Roads, railways, steamers, proximity to the English markets, increased demand in those markets, the influx of gold, the equalisation of prices, and the immigration of money, not the emigration of labour. What con- clusively proves that emigration is not the chief cause of the rise is, that for nine years the money rate of wages has remained stationary throughout the greater part of the island in spite of enormous emigrations in the interval. The writer has for many years been collecting statistics of prices in connection with a different question, and can affirm that wages have remained at Is. a day throughout the greater part of Ireland, since 1859. Earl Russell has recently cited 1 on official authority,' some figures which illustrate the real movement since 1831, and show how small is its connection with emigration beginning before emigra- tion and not continuing with it: County 1831 1841 1851 1861 1866 s. s. s. . 3. Kildnre (little 1 money > wajres J 4 to 5 7 8 8 Tipperary . \\exford 5 5 to C 5 to 7 6 8 to 7 8 flto 7 Kilkenny . 5 to 6 5 to 6 6 to 7 6 to 7 POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 99 Nor in estimating the effects of emigration upon the real condition of the Irish labourers can we leave out of the account the loss of their little farms by some 400,000 small occupiers who, with their sons, were formerly the chief agricultural labourers of the island. It is a great mistake to take the money-rate of wages in 1845 and 1848 as a criterion of the comparative condition of the labourer at the two periods, not only on account of the rise in the price of provisions, but also because the agricultural labourer has generally a little farm of his own as every agricultural labourer should have, and rarely possesses one now. * Not- withstanding its detestable rural system,' said M. de Lavergne, some fifteen years ago, ' Ireland seems to have preserved one excellent feature, namely, the almost entire absence of day labourers, properly so called.' It has no such feature now. So much with respect to the alleged rise in the price of labour arising from emigration. We have now to show that, instead of causing a rise of wages, emigra- tion has been, in many cases, the consequence of a fall in most cases of their continuing wretchedly low be- cause of obstacles to the combination of the three in- struments of production, labour, capital, and natural agents ; and that every source of national income, wages, profit, and rent would have been more abun- dant had there been much less emigration that is to say, had none of that emigration taken place which has been caused by legal impediments to the prosperity of the island, to the development of its industrial re- sources, and to the use of the great aids to their develop- H 2 100 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. mont, from roads, railways, steam -navigation, English markets, education, and the ingress of that spirit of enterprise shown even in emigration itself. The true inference from the rise of prices in Ireland, is not that emigration has been beneficial, but that a great market ought to have been found for Irish labour at home, and that the enormous loss of industrial power is the more lamentable, apart from its political consequences and the economic evils resulting, in that it has taken place at a period when there ought to have been an immense burst of prosperity.* * From an essay, published some years ago, on the movements of prices in different parts of the world, the writer takes leave to quote the following sentences in illustration both of the causes of the rise in Ire- land and of the inference above. ' The chief monetary phenomenon of the period is the rise of prices in remote places, put suddenly more nearly on a level with the neighbourhood of the great centres of consumption as regards the market for their produce. The ruder and remoter regions are at length, if commerce be allowed its natural course, brought into neighbourhood with the regions more advanced, and endowed with the same advantages, especially with that advantage to which the latter mainly owed their earlier progress the advantage of a good commercial situation, which steam-navigation, railways, and roads, are giving to many districts rich in food and the materials of industry, but until lately unable to dispose of their wealth, unless upon beggarly terms.'- Mtu-- tnilhtii'it MiKju-lnc, August, 18>4. See also ' North British Review,' June, 1S5"), Art. 'Cold Mines and Prices.' Compare with this the following, from Sir Ilichard Temple's recent ' Letter to the Government of India on British and Native Systems of Government ' : ' In the n >rth-west provinces a great increase of cultivation could lie statistically proved. Similar proof could be obtained for the I'unjaub generally. ( )ude will so readily suggest itself that I need in t allude to it further. In Bengal Proper there has certainly been a great increase. In Madras and Bombay the revenue survey records will show specifically givjit inerease of cultivation. In Berar the astonishing rise of cultivation during the few years of British administration, is shown by the figures of our animal reports. The rapid growth of British JJnrmah is attested bv f;irt~ recently published. 1'nder Briti-h rule th" pric.s of everything, necessaries and luxuries, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND EMIGRATION. 101 Of Irish emigration being in many cases the con- sequence of a fall instead of the cause of a rise in wages, one example deserves particular attention, from the light it throws on another phase of the subject. Not long ago one of the most successful capitalists in the island undertook a mining enterprise in a backward county of lakes and bogs, having obtained a license for the purpose from several adjoining proprietors. Wages were at 5s. a week in the locality when he began his operations, and before they stopped, a few months ago, the same men were earning weekly sums varying from 85. to 18 ' O J. roof of their own. The next thing is to have cattle, that foundation of all cultivation. First they feed a goat and some rabbits, and then a calf on the herbs that spring about. When at last they possess a cow, the family is safe ; there is now milk, butter, and manure. Little by little a capital is made ; at the end of some years, the labourer lias become a farmer. As the population increases, new cottages spring up, the old ones are enlarged. In half a century the Avhole district is made a complete conquest to cultivation, thanks to incessant labours which the capitalist could not have- paid for at the average rate of wages without incurring a loss. The petty cultivator, who is assured LORD DUFFERIN ON THE TENURE OF LAND. 145 of enjoying for at least thirty years the fruits of his efforts, spares neither his time nor his trouble. Work- ino- with more zeal and intelligence than he could exert o o for another, he gives value to a soil which la grande culture would have no interest in attempting to culti- vate.' * The Fleming, however, it may be supposed is an exceptional being. But almost exactly the same thing takes place in the Highlands of Scotland, where the Celtic cotter Ls given a chance though a poor one as Dr. Mackenzie describes it. ' In this country a man comes to me, and offers to rent some acres of waste land, to trench, clear, drain, and cultivate it on a nineteen years' lease for a small rent ; he putting up the cottage, the new land supplying the stones, and I giving him the necessary wood. And generally, with not !()/. of his own at starting, we see this- man put up his buildings, mostly with his own hands, improve his land, and rise to a considerable degree of prosperity, so as, at least, to have food, good clothing, and decent furniture, and, at the same time, pay his rent with regularity during hi lease; at the end of which his land is all in decent crop, ready for a new lease at an improved rent, although all that the landlord has done towards this has been to grant rough standing wood for the buildings. A theorist would say, the cotter without capital could never im- prove his moor. But the fact is, the cauntry is im- proved exactly as I have described. The improver finds work in his vicinity for a time, runs home with his wages, and till they are done, tears up his lanclj gets some seed borrowed and sown, and off again to, * ' Economie rurale des Flandres/ second edition, p. 82, L 14G LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. another job at daily wages, of which less than our southern friends would credit is spent upon food. Had landlords to put up smart cottages for such land im- provers, improvement would soon come to an end in this country. In my memory, all hereabout, most of our large farms, extending over thousands and thou- sands of acres, on which I have shot grouse and deer, have been brought to their present shape on the above plan. For generally,' to the shame of those whom it concerns, Dr. Mackenzie adds, ' soon after a contigu- ous batch of such crofts as I have described have been put into crop, the improvers are all ejected, with- out payment for what they have done, unless from some thin-skinned, laughed at, ram avis of a philan- thropist landlord, and one large farm is made of them.'* If there are any readers who are doubtful of the disposition of cotters in Ireland to improve, they would do well to consult the evidence of Mr. Curling, an English agent, of great experience, before the Com- mission on the Tenure and Improvement of Land in 1865, from which the following answers are taken : ' You have been the manager of the Devon estate for seventeen years, you say? Yes. ' Do you think there is anything deficient in the cha- racter of the people which would prevent improvements from being made, provided a just law were given to them ? I do not ; I think they arc as energetic, as industrious, as moral, and as well-behaved a people as I have ever met with, and more grateful than any other people I know. Letter to the writer, March 11, 18(X),0()0; but tin- noble lord must have confounded those who by tech- nical title are freeholders with yeoman proprietor?. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 167 land unmarketable, and therefore makes the little that is sold a luxury for the rich, and an unprofitable invest- ment for the poor. In the language of Adam Smith, it is the result of ' regulations which keep so much land out of the market, that there are always more capitals to buy than there is land to sell, so that what is sold sells at a monopoly price. The small quantity of land which is brought to market, and the high price of what is brought, moreover, prevents a great number of small capitals from being employed in its cultivation, which would otherwise have taken that direction.' By one and the same system, the old farming class of pro- prietors is extinguished, a new farming class is prevented from rising in their place, and a non-productive class is maintained and gains ground. A line of eldest sons has the odds against it, in the long run, in any line of business ; and accumulating family charges and legal costs and difficulties swell the odds against the small proprietors with whom farming is a business. The unproductive owners of great estates, upon the other hand, though heavily encumbered for the most part, too, are seldom actually dislodged ; and when they are, a rich man buys their estates. He does not buy them for immediate profit ; and he can afford to buy legal advice in his subsequent dealings with them. The disappearance of the; yeoman landholders evi- dently renders it of great importance that the next agricultural order, that of the tenant-farmers, should possess such security for improvement and such political independence as should both enable them to fill to some extent the place in society and in the constitution 168 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. of the disappearing grade above, and also furnish them with some substitute for their ancient prospect of acquiring land of their own. But here, too, we find a retrograde movement, and the course of ancient pro- gress interrupted and reversed. The tenant-farmers of this country were originally of two descriptions copyholders, and tenants for terms of years both of whom rose gradually from a servile status and dependence for their holding on the mere will of the landlord, to a position of great security and independence. The copyholders, who might once be ousted at the pleasure of their lords, gained by successive steps the point at which Sir Edward Coke could say : ' Now copyholders stand upon sure ground ; now they weigh not their lords' displeasure ; they shake not at every blast of wind ; they eat and drink securely ; only having an especial care of the main chance, namely, to perform carefully what services their tenure doth exact ; then let lord frown, the copyholder cares not, knowing himself safe.' The estates of this once numerous order of agricultural tenants have long been passing, like those of the yeomanry, to a different class ; and as witli the yeo- manry, so with the copyholders, ' vestigia nulla re- trorsum.' The other class of tenant-farmers, those who held for years, were originally in the eye of the law the mere husbandmen of the landlord ; but their position in like manner was improved by successive steps, until they gained the remedy of ejectment against both lord and stranger ; and a legal writer concludes the historv of their gradual ascent : 'Thus were tenants THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 169 for years at last placed on the same level with the freeholder as regards the security of their estates.' This gradual elevation of the English tenantry, and the growth of a custom of long leases, ha been dwelt upon with especial emphasis by the author of the 4 Wealth of Nations,' who, after remarking that a great part of them in his time held by a freehold tenure which gave them votes, and ' made the whole order respectable ' by the political consideration it gave, concludes by attributing the grandeur which England / O O if had attained to in his time especially to the growth of laws and customs so favourable to its agricultural tenantry. At the same period, Dr. Johnson, notwith- standing the strength of his political bias on the side of rank, and his confession that if he were a landed gentlemen he would turn out every tenant lie could who did not vote as he desired, expressed his opinion that none but bad men could refuse leases to their tenants, or desire ' to keep them in perpetual depen- dence, mere ephemera mere beings of an hour.' A writer of our own generation, not without some- thing of Dr. Johnson's bias, comments, in various editions of the ' Wealth of Nations,' on Adam Smith's opinion of the value of the suffrage to the farming class, when safe from dispossession, as many were by the freehold tenure common at that time ; and after remarking that the last Eeform Act extended the franchise to all tenants at a certain value, adds : ' There is too much reason to fear that it will in the end sub- vert that system of giving leases for nineteen or twenty years certain, that has been the main cause of the 170 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. wonderful improvement of Scotch agriculture. Tenants, as such, are the last description of persons on whom the franchise ought to be conferred. It would be easy to corroborate this by reference to the history of land both in England and in Ireland, in both of which the conferring of the franchise on tenants has been most injurious to agriculture and to the public interest. But the circumstances must be perfectly well known to all moderately well-informed readers.* Mr. M'Culloch's premiss that the actual consequence of the extension of the franchise a consequence, as he says, 'most in- jurious to agriculture, and to the public interest ' has been a subversion of the ancient English custom of long leases, is beyond dispute. Where the legislature meant to enlarge the political representation of the farming class, the result has been that they have lost at once their old political representation and their old security of tenure ; their votes have become part of the private property of their landlords, and they have ceased to have a voice in legislation for their own interests, or even to have a claim to the suffrage accord- ing to an old doctrine of constitutional writers that the ground of the freeholder's vote was his absolute independence of the will of his lord. ]iut instead of the conclusion which Mr. M'Culloch draws, that tenants are the last description of persons on whom the franchise ought to be conferred, the true conclusion is evident, that the country needs another lie form Act to restore the independence and security of its tenant- farmers. At present, instead of balancing the power * Adam Smith's ' Wealth of Nations,' by J. It. M'Culloch. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 171 of the great territorial proprietors, they only swell the power of the latter to legislate adversely to their tenants, when matters which concern them, such as game laws and compensation for improvements, are before Parliament. Passing next to the third agricultural order, the labourers, we find here again the ancient course of upward movement turned into a decline. Not to advance is to fall back in a progressive world ; but the peasantry of England have in many important par- ticulars positively as well as relatively retrograded. By the aid of Christianity and commerce, and of fundamental principles of the common law, derived from the civilised jurisprudence of Eome, and in perpetual conflict with the barbarous jurisprudence of feudalism, the serf became at length a free labourer for hire. The legislation respecting his wages and apparel in the fifteenth century, though intended to restrict them, proves that his condition had become one of affluence compared with what it is at present. The rules of the Church alone limited his consumption of animal food, and his clothing was abundant and even rich for the age.* Soon afterwards, indeed, his class began to lose in many instances the best of their possessions, their little plot of ground ; and by the eviction of numbers of the peasantry of every grade was laid the foundation of English pauperism, and of that unnatural migration to great cities of which we have to speak. Nevertheless, the connection of the * < History of the English Peasantry : Over-population and it Remedy.' By W. T. Thornton. 172 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. lowest grade of the rural population with the soil, and their comparative real wealth at the close of the last century, was still such that Arthur Young could say, ' I know not a single cottage without a piece of ground belonging to it.' The eminent agriculturist who, in the middle of our own century, trod in the steps of Arthur Young, would have been nearer the truth in saying of several counties, ' I know scarcely a single cottage with a piece of ground belonging to it.' Mr. Caird's tour in 1850 and 1851 through the counties of England established, moreover, that while in the purely agricultural counties the rent of land and the rent of a labourer's cottage had risen since the tour of Arthur Young 100 per cent., the price of butter 100 per cent., and of meat 70 per cent., the rise in the labourer's wages was but 14 per cent. Mr. Caird adds, indeed, that the price of bread, ' the great staple of the English labourer,' was about the same in 1850 as in 1770 ; but bread was not always the labourer's staple. In the year in which Mr. Caird began his tour, Mr. Kay's admirable book on the ' Social Condition of the People of Europe ' was published, with the following description of the cottages of the people of England : 1 The accounts we receive from all parts of the country show that their miserable cottages are crowded in the extreme, and that the crowding is progressively in- creasing. People of both sexes and all ages, both married and unmarried, parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers, sleep in the same room, and often in the same bed.' Thus by the middle of this century not only the plot of ground and the cottage had gone, but THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 173 a separate room, and even a separate bed, was going or gone. And following the chain of evidence to the O ^ present decade, we find the rural labourer still descend- ing in the scale of material civilisation, and the room made for him in the land diminishing fast. Accounts published by Parliament last year showed that between 1851 and 1861 the number of houses had diminished in 821 agricultural parishes, while the population had increased ; and it is known that in many other parishes a decrease in the rural population was accompanied by a still greater decrease in the number of houses in the same period. Nor does what has been said exhibit the whole change for the worse in the agricultural labourer's lot. ' A hundred and fifty years ago there was scarcely a parish without a considerable extent of common, on which every householder was at liberty to turn out a cow or a pig, or a few sheep or fowls. The poor man, therefore, even after the loss of the fields attached to his cottage, might nevertheless contrive to supply his family with plenty of milk and eggs and bacon at little or no expense to himself. He has since, in most cases, been deprived of this advantage too.'* The process of enclosing common land began in the reign of Anne on a scarcely perceptible scale, increased steadily in the two following reigns, and afterwards with such rapidity, that between 1760 and 1834 nearly seven million acres had been taken from the patrimony of the poor and added to the private property of the rich. The legislature of the present reign has only put a limit to the process by almost completing it. * Thornton's ' Over-Population and its Remedy.' 174 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Thus every grade of the rural population has sunk ; the landed yeomanry are almost gone ; the tenant- farmers have lost their ancient independence and interest in the soil ; the labourers have lost their separate cottages and plots of ground, and their share in a common fund of land ; and whereas all these grades were once rising, the prospect of the landed yeomanry is now one of total extinction ; that of the tenant-farmers, increasing insecurity ; * that of the agricultural labourer, to find the distance between his own grade and the one above him wider and more impassable than ever, while the condition of his own grade is scarcely above that of the brutes. Once, from the meanest peasant to the greatest noble all had land, and he who had least might hope for more ; now there is being taken away from him who has little, even that which he has his cottage, nay, his separate room. Once there was an ascending movement from the lowest grade towards the highest ; now there is a descending movement in every grade below the highest. Once the agricultural class had a political representation, and a voice in legislation which they dared to raise against the landed gentry and nobility; now the latter have the supreme command at once of the soil and of the suffrages of its cultivators. Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, in a recent interesting essay, argues, with respect to agricultural labourers, that * time is a necessary element in the elevation of any class,' and that ' the extension of the suffrage to any class enfeebled by traditional dependence and servile habits results in its political subserviency.' But time is CairJ'a ' English Agriculture/ p. uO-3. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 175 only a name for the operation of causes which may tend either to elevate or to depress, according to their nature. The very steps by which the villein rose, as Sir James Shuttleworth describes them, are now lost to the peasantry of England : ' Our ancient Saxon polity had a representative constitution in which the villein gradually rose to participate, and that just in proportion as he was admitted to the possession of property independently of the lord of the soil. The gradual transition from the occupation of land by villenage to the cultivation of loan land, and the freedom of the tenant to migrate, to carry with him his acquisitions, and to acquire land as a personal possession, are the chief steps of advance of the class of villeins to the class of small tenant-farmers, and to the establishment of the independent class of yeomen and " statesmen " who cultivated their own land.' Only one of these steps can now be said to remain the freedom to migrate ; and the consequence is a forced and unnatural migration from the country to a few great manufacturing towns and the metropolis, largely swollen by other circumstances (also connected with our terri- torial system), which limit to a few centres the space for manufactures and urban employments. We are told that the movement of the rural popula- tion to cities is an effect and symptom of progress, resulting from the great increase of manufacturing employment and wages on the one hand, and the economy of labour by the natural tendency to the en- largement of farms on the other. With respect to the former of these allegations, it will presently be shown 17G LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. that the same causes which limit the employment, the wages, and the room for the labouring population in the country diminish all three for the labouring population in towns. But it ought first to be shown to be a wholly fallacious assertion that the natural tendency of agricul- tural improvement in England is towards the enlarge- ment of farms and a smaller employment of labour. The chapter at the end of Mr. Caird's standard treatise on 'English Agriculture in 1850-1851,' contains a table of the rent of farms in different counties, and the following observations upon it: 'The great corn-grow- ing counties of the east coast yield an average rent of 23s. Sd. an acre; the more mixed husbandry of the midland counties, and the grazing, green crop, and dairy districts of the west, 31.*?. bd. Leases are the exception throughout England ; and though more pre- valent in the west, there has been no sufficient unifor- mity to account for the difference of rent. But the she of farms has an undoubted influence on the rent. In the dry climate of the counties on the east coast the operations of a corn farm can be carried on on an extensive scale. By this means the landlord's outlay in buildings and fences is economised. As we proceed westward the country becomes more wooded, and better adapted for pasturage ; the enclosures are smaller, the farms less extensive. Still farther west the moist- ness of the climate materially affects the mode of culti- vation unfavourable to corn crops, and favourable to grass. The farms arc of small extent, and held by a numerous class of tenants, who live frugally, and in many cases assist, witli their families, in the labours of THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 177 the farm. We have here all the elements necessary to make a difference in the rate of rent. The large eastern farmer looks principally to barley and wheat. The landlord of the western and midland counties pos- sesses the two great advantages of his soil being used for the production of the most valuable of our agricul- tural commodities, whilst his farms, from their size, are accessible to a larger body of competitors, in short, are in greater demand than the (large) farms of the east' After these conclusions with respect to the past, Mr. Caird proceeds to some with reference to the future : ' As the country becomes more prosperous, the difference in the relative value of corn and stock will gradually be increased. The production of vegetables and fresh meat, hay for forage, and pasture for dairy cattle, which were formerly confined to the neighbour- hood of towns, will necessarily extend as the towns become more numerous and populous. The facilities of communication must increase this tendency. Our insular position, with a limited territory and an in- creasingly dense manufacturing population, is yearly extending the circle within which the production of fresh food animal, vegetable, and forage will be needed for daily supply, and which cannot be brought from distant countries. They can be produced in no country as well as our own. Wool has likewise increased in value as much as any agricultural product, and there is a good prospect of flax becoming an article in extensive demand. The manufacture. of sugar from beet-root may yet be found very profitable to the 178 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. English agriculturist. Now, all these products require the employment of considerable labour, very minute care, skill, and attention, and a larger acreable appli- cation of capital than is requisite for the production of corn. This will inevitably lead to the gradual diminu- tion of the largest farms, and to the concentration of the capital and attention of the farmer on a smaller space.' In a speech in the House of Commons little more than two years ago, we find Mr. Caird again saying : ' I differ with my honourable friend (Mr. Dunlop) with regard to the change which he asserts to be taking place in Scotland. My honourable friend says that the small-farm system is disappearing, or is likely to disappear. My own observation leads me to say that it is quite the contrary. The more minute and perfect the system of farming adopted in order to work them with profit, the more likely is the system of small farms to increase than to diminish. The arable farms in Scotland and the north of England sixteen or twenty years ago were much greater in extent than they are at present.' It is thus clear that the natural tendency of this country was never, and is less now than ever, towards large farms ; and that the causes of the tendency which formerly existed, and which still exists in many of the counties of England, towards the extinction of small farms, have been the following : first, and espe- cially, the inability and indisposition of encumbered inheritors of great estates upon the one hand, and of tenants without leases on the oilier, to furnish small THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 179 farms with the requisite buildings and fixtures ; se- condly, the artificial pauperism produced by causes already mentioned, and the anxiety of landlords, re- sulting therefrom and from the frame of the Poor-law, to clear their estates of the peasantry ; thirdly, pro- tectionist legislation in favour of corn. The chief of these causes are still in existence, and customs and opinions engendered by the rest also remain. One of the ablest living advocates of the existing law of primogeniture has urged that it is favourable to agriculture, because large estates tend to make large farms.* They certainly do ; but it is because they are encumbered, and because their owners prefer political power to good fanning, such as leases alone can pro- duce. It is beyond contradiction that the products which are best suited to the soil and climate of England are those which small farmers produce best ; it is found that small farmers can and do pay higher rents than large farmers in England itself, as in Flanders ; and it follows that the English peasantry have been dislodged from the soil and degraded in condition by laws and customs contrary to those of political economy and nature. There is no reason in political economy or in nature why there should not be in England a predomi- nance, not only of small farms, but of farms such as foreigners call small. The petty farmer of a few acres outbids every other in Flanders on a soil far inferior to that of England. f ' The larger farms in Flanders,' says * Speech of Sir II. Cairns on the Real Estates Intestacy Bill, 1859. t On the natural quality of the soil of Flanders, see M. de Laveleye's ' Essai sur 1'Ecouomie rurale de la Belgique/ pp. 1, 2 ; and 37. K '2 J80 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the highest authority on the subject,* ' tend constantly towards subdivision, for the simple reason that when subdivided they yield a higher rent. This subdivision, too, increases the gross no less than the net produce. In general, the smaller the farm the greater the pro- duce of the soil. Cultivators and proprietors alike rejoice in the subdivision : the former, because it places more land within their reach ; the latter, because it doubles their rents.' When to this we add the con- sideration that the farm produce for which England, is best suited requires, as Mr. Caird states, an immensity of labour, and that, as Mr. Thornton expresses it, ' English agriculture would be exceedingly benefited by the application to it of at least double the actual quantity of labour,' we may pronounce that England is fitted by nature to support an immense rural population in comfort ; that landlords, in clearing their estates of the labourers' little farms and cottages to diminish pauperism, have fallen into the common error of mis- taking the preventive for the disease ; that the immense migration from the country to the city has been a forced and unnatural movement ; and that the misery and decline of the English rural population is the result of a svstem adverse to the interests of all classes, not excepting the proprietors of the soil. But the evils of the system do not end here. As it has cramped and misdirected the indu-try of the country, so has it the industry of the town ; and the migration of the pea- " M. de Laveleye innv !>> called the highest authority on this sub- ject. 1 aii-e lie not only has made it u special study, but is both a distinguished professor of political economy and one of 'the lauded interest.' THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 181 santry has been accompanied by another forced move- ment of the population to a few great cities, to which urban industry has been in a great measure unnaturally restricted. The result is, that enormously dispropor- tionate numbers are huddled together in a space which yearly becomes less as those numbers increase ; that the town population, like that of the country, has yearly less room for its growth ; that the mass of the labouring population is degenerating both in country and in town ; and that a land question has arisen in our cities, more imperiously demanding solution than even the land question in the country. Adam Smith observes that, contrary to the course of nature (which makes agriculture the first, because the most necessary and the most attractive, of human occupations), the first growth of industry and opulence in mediaeval Europe was in towns ; and that this inversion of the natural order of progress was caused by the insecurity and oppression of the cultivators of the soil, while the inhabitants of towns enjoyed com- parative liberty and safety. But the philosopher's rea- soning, taken along with well-known facts of history, leads to a further conclusion which he does riot ex- pressly state, that urban industry was itself unnaturally confined to a few walled and chartered cities, within which the inhabitants might leave their substance to their children, and were tolerably secure from both leo-al and illegal pillage. Such of these towns as made O CJ i < ' remarkable progress were uniformly enabled by their situation to obtain supplies of food and materials of industry and trade from a distance ; but it was not so 182 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. much the superior facility as the superior security of water carriage which gave towns in such places their principal advantage, for the want of means of land carriage was more the consequence than the cause of the backwardness and misgovernment of the country. The villein need not have fled to remote fortified cities, had artificers been free to settle at his door ; towns would have come to him, would have grown up around him by the gradual extension and improve- ment of village manufactures. But civic industry and traffic were confined by feudal laws and customs to certain privileged sites, and custom and prestige, and the facilities which time and labour bring, gave some of them a lasting superiority not ascribable to natural gifts alone. 80 far the past operation of our territorial system is in fault. The truth, however, is that it tends at this day to limit trade and manufactures to places with no economic superiority over a number of others from which they are excluded by the great monopoly of land ; and that immense unapproachable estates, overgrown demesnes, restricted rights of proprietor- ship, defective titles, and all the other causes which keep land out of the market, keep out manufactures and trade from many natural homes for their settle- ment, and imprison them within bounds where space- is at once insufficient and extravagantly dear. One of the most flourishing towns in the United Kingdom owes its extraordinary progress in the present gene- ration chielly to the fact that it stands upon ground which the sale of the estates of a ruined noble made the property of its citizens, and thus transferred to the THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 183 many from the one. Those who are versed in the published and unpublished history of towns will readily call up several similar cases. But of many eligible sites for urban industry and opulence the history has not been suffered to begin. In the same county in which the town just spoken of is situated, a wealthy manufacturer deplored to the writer of this paper, some years ago, that he could not extend his manu- facturing premises where he lived, and had been driven to invest a large capital in a factory many miles from his own eye, because he could not obtain the security of a sufficient lease from a proprietor of the soil who had only once visited his immense estate, and had not even a residence upon it. In such and many other ways the space for urban life and industry is artificially limited. ' Even in towns,' a member of Parliament complains, ' the great landed monopoly is often griev- ously felt. How many towns there are, favoured by natural position, whose growth is stunted, and the prosperity of the inhabitants cut short, because the great proprietor under whose shadow they lie would rather preserve the privacy of his demesne than add to its revenue. Nor is this the only way in which a town is liable to suffer from the contiguity of a great estate, and the abuse of the power that belongs to it. It is matter of notoriety that in many cases the course of a railway has been marked out, and the places of its stations have been selected, to suit the convenience of the landowner, in place of that of the small town.' * * ' The History of the Law of Entail and Settlement.' By Charles Neate, Esq., M.P. 184 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Thus it is that the paths and homes and bounds of trade are far from being what nature would have made them ; nor can there be a reasonable doubt that although time and legislation never may restore the course of nature altogether, yet, if the restrictions which now surround them were once removed, the population and capital in our straitened cities could forthwith iind an outlet and a relief, and much capital which leaves our shores would find new and profitable employment upon English ground. Nor is it capitalists and labourers alone who are pent unnaturally within a few great cities. There, behind counters, is the pale youth which might have recruited the ranks of a blooming tenantry ; there the children and descendants of the fading yeomanry, of the rural clergy, and of country gentlemen themselves, are gathered ; there are the many shops and trades that might have pros- pered well in country towns ; there are the families of every middle grade whose incomes are no longer equal to the costly luxury of a country home. Thus the middle classes involuntarily occupy the space in our chief towns which the working-classes want ; and the tide of immigration from all ranks throughout the country meets a town population yearly increasing from within in a space long since insufficient, and ever growing less. Already in 1801 it was found that while the country population of England little exceeded nine millions, nearly eleven millions were inhabitants of towns, and of these more than seven millions and a half had congregated into the larger towns.* Of the * These towns contained in 1801 a population of only 2,221,753. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 185 latter number, again, nearly three millions (more than a million of whom were born elsewhere) peopled the metropolis, where railways, immense buildings, and clearances of all kinds, are diminishing the space for the poorer classes to live in with fearful rapidity, entailing consequences which have been well described by Lord Shaftesbury from his personal knowledge. Speaking in the House of Lords of the destruction of the dwellings of the poor by railways, in the face of a natural increase of the city population, and a yearly immigration in addition computed at from thirty to forty thousand, he said : ' First look at the financial effects. There is a large population of workmen, such as shoemakers, tailors, printers, and dockyard labourers, who cannot remove from their place of employment without their occupations being wholly destroyed. Next, there is the change in the accommodation and its price. The proprietors of the meanest houses, seeing the great demand, raise the prices so that poor people who before lived in two rooms at a compara- tively low rate are forced to pay much higher rents, and have further to put up with the indecencies and discomforts consequent upon sleeping eight, nine, or even ten in the same room. This is the story, not of hundreds, but of thousands. And see, moreover, how the change affects their social condition. Their burial and sick clubs are broken up. their reading-rooms de- stroyed, their social meetings for what is called social improvement are rendered no longer possible, and they are forced into other neighbourhoods where they find none of these comforts, and are in addition highly un- 180 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. welcome arrivals, from the fact that they come still further to burden a labour market already overstocked, to raise rent, and to reduce wages.' After alluding to the shocking scenes he had lately witnessed in one of these wretched refuges of the dis- placed poor, the noble lord added : ' One very decent woman said to me, " We are just over the main drains, and the walls are so ruinous that Jack and I take it by turns to sit up at nights, for the rats come up in such numbers that we are afraid that if we do not, they may carry off the baby." But why did the man remain ? Because he knew that if he left his dwelling he could not find another in the neighbourhood, and would lose his employment.' This frightful situation of things is every month becoming more frightful. Six years ago there were nearly three millions of people in London. The whole population of England doubles in about fifty-two years ; but the chief increase is in the large towns, and most of all in the metropolis, where most of all the space for human habitation rapidly decreases. We are thus coming to a deadlock both in country and in town for want of bare room for the people to live in, while there is land enough and to spare. Already the popu- lation is degenerating both in town and country. The barrister threading the crowded lanes and courts be- tween the Strand and Lincoln's Inn has noticed year by year the signs of a degenerating race upon old and young, and now they, too, have been displaced to swell the numbers in some more crowded and more squalid haunts. In the country, the degeneracy of the race is THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 187 its most striking feature ; intelligence is almost extinct among the rural poor ; and in no other civilised land, and even in few savage lands, has any class of human being a look so cheerless, so unreasoning, so little human, as the English agricultural labourer, without the light either of intelligence or of animal spirits in his sullen face. But the working -classes are not the only sufferers. Already the dwellings of the middle classes in great cities not only are becoming dear beyond their means, but are beginning to disappear altogether ; and they too will find before long that there is no room for them in either country or town, and that they have before them only the hard choice of the ancient Britons. And the danger threatens a higher class still. A landless and houseless population will ere long be brought face to face with a few thou- sand engrossers of the soil, who seldom can sell or divide it, or make adequate leases of it if they would, but who will be charged with the consequence with making ' pleasure-ground,' as the Times recently called it, of all the land in the kingdom, while the nation has not enough for bare existence. Nor does the danger beset all classes only from within. We are coming closer year by year to both Europe and America ; and if we are to hold a place, not to say as a great, but even as a small independent State, we must find room for the nation to grow, and to grow in health and strength ; we must find room for increasing numbers of men to live as men, and not as rats. It is this land question in both country and town, traceable in both to the same source, which legislation 188 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. must solve to rescue the nation from degeneracy, revolution, and subjection ; but it is a question "which the present legislature is unable to solve not that it is insoluble by legislation (if it were, it would be all the more awful), but because, upon the one hand, the sufferers, whose energy and invention would be exerted to the utmost, are unrepresented or misrepresented in Parliament ; and because, on the other hand, a class, which is omnipotent in Parliament on all questions relating to land, inherits its opinions as well as its estates, and naturally but unwisely imagines its in- terests concerned in maintaining things as they are ; regarding all those who would do anything effectual to remedy the evil, though it threatens themselves and the existence of their estates, as its authors. In a speech on the question of intestate succession to real estates, Mr. Lowe declared : * The present state of our law with respect to land is the result of a series of conflicts in which the landed interest has invariably been on the illiberal side, and has as invariably been overborne and conquered by the feeling of the country.' It is because ' the landed interest ' is con- scious of this that it seeks to exclude the feeling of the country from representation in Parliament. Et est qui vinci pos.sit, eoque Dimciles aditus primus hubet. But it is surprising that a statesman, with the opinion just quoted of the legislative qualities of landed proprie- tors, should not see in the land question an unanswerable argument for reform, instead of an argument against c> *> c> it. In a speech on the extension of the franchise, Mr. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 189 Lowe said : ' Look at the land question alone. In America nobody covets land, because he can get as much as he likes. But here the case is different ; nothing is easier than to get up a cry about land ; and at this moment it is generally believed upon the Con- tinent that there is a law in existence under which the possession of land in England is confined exclusively to the aristocracy.' It is just because the supply of land is so limited by nature in England, that it is necessary that it should not be limited artificially, and that a parliament which will not remove the artificial limitation needs a reform. In America, 58,000 square miles kept out of the market by the state of the law would hardly be missed from the market ; but in England there are only 58,000 square miles alto- gether. It is to the reform of the law of landed property and the reform of Parliament for that end, that we must look for the solution of the land questions which present themselves alike in country and in town, and the same reforms will go far to solve both. To find dwellings for the overgrown population of the metro- polis, for example, we must make outlets for industry elsewhere ; we must remove the causes of the displace- ment of the rural population of a perpetual influx of extreme poverty into the principal cities of the little land which enters the market being artificially dear, and of the greater part never entering it at all from one century to another. If the unnatural congregation of multitudes in extreme poverty in one spot could be stopped, the question of dwellings for the poor in the 190 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. * metropolis would lose the chief of its terrors for the future. The evil has indeed been enormously increased by the merciless encroachment of companies powerful in Parliament, and with the instinct of ' the landed interest' on their side. Everything is possible. in engi- neering, and the energy and skill which laid a cable under the Atlantic could have carried every metro- politan railway under ground. There is, again,- no mechanical reason why an increase of space for the population of London should not be made upwards, in substantial houses ten, twenty, or thirty storeys high ; but there must be a foundation left to build on ; a forced competition must not make the rents of such houses exorbitantly high ; and the tenants, on the other hand, must not be paupers, too poor to pay even a moderate rent. And the state of the law of landed property, and the system founded upon it, are the main causes of all the pauperism in England. The law of landed property is, moreover, the radical cause which makes our jurisprudence a byword in the civilised world and prevents the possibility of reducing it to a simple and intelligible code. Thus the political question of lleform, which has been shown to be also a great economical question, involves a great juridical question besides. And the solution of the chief diffi- culties of both the economical and the juridical question may be found in measures which would not diminish but greatly enlarge the rights of property, properly understood, in which, however, cannot be included the right to deny them to men's successors, or to appro- priate the property and votes of their tenants. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 191 Even Dr. Johnson, notwithstanding his bias in favour of regulations tending to place hereditary leaders at the head of mankind, foresaw that the time would come when ' the evil of too much land being locked up ' would have to be dealt with. But his was the not very philosophical way of thinking to which another very learned man in our own age was inclined that cure is better than prevention.* For want of pre- vention the evil has now reached the magnitude only imperfectly described in these pages, and we are driven to seek at once for cure and prevention. There are three different methods recorded in history to make choice from. One is the French law of par- tition of family property among all children alike an expedient which deserves no higher commendation than that it is better than the feudal system of disin- heriting all the children but one. A second method which suggests itself, with higher reason on its side, is a limitation of the amount of land that any single individual shall take by inheritance. Such a measure, however shocking to present proprietary sentiments, could not diminish the real happiness, it may safely be asserted, of one human being in the next generation ; nor can it be confidently pronounced that the mischief resulting from the long retention of a restriction of a * BosiveU. ' I expressed my opinion that the power of entailing should be limited thus : that there should be one-third, or perhaps one- half, of the land of a country kept free for commerce ; that the propor- tion allowed to be entailed should be parcelled out so that no family could entail above a certain quantity.' Johnson. ' Why, sir, mankind will be better able to regulate the system of entails when the evil of too much land being locked up by them is felt, than we can do at present when it is not felt.' Boswell's Life of Johnson, 192 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. different kind upon the possession of land may not yet be found such that some such measure will be of necessity adopted, to make room for the natural in- crease of population. But it would be a remedy which only a violent revolution could at present accomplish, and what we want is a remedy which needs only an adequate reform of Parliament for its accomplishment. And if neither the French system of partition nor the agrarian system of the Gracchi is to be our model if the feudal model is set before us only as a warning we may yet find a model in the general tendency of English law reform since the system was established which first limited property in land to a particular line of descent in a particular number of families ; for that end depriving each successive proprietor of the chief uses of property itself. The feudal landowner forfeited the right to sell his own land, to leave it by will, to let it securely, to provide for his family out of it, to subject it to the payment of his debts ; he forfeited, therefore, the chief rights of property, taking only in exchange a right to confiscate the property of his tenants. The whole movement of English jurispru- dence relating to land ever since may be summed up as an effort to restore to landowners the just rights of proprietorship on the one hand, and to protect tenants from the unjust right of confiscation on the other. Tn a memorable speech on the reformation of Parliament, three-quarters of a century ago, the illustrious scholar, Sir William Jones, rested his main argument on the following ground : ' There has been a continual war in the constitution of England between two jarring prin- THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 193 eiples the Evil Principle of the feudal system, with his dark auxiliaries, ignorance and false philosophy ; and the good principle of increasing commerce, with her liberal allies, true learning and sound reason. The first has blemished and polluted wherever it has touched the fair form of our constitution. . . . What caused the absurd yet fatal distinction between property personal and real ? the feudal principle.' This argument errs only in representing the struggle as one of feudalism with commerce alone ; it has been a struggle with the interests and instincts, not only of commerce, but also of natural affection, morality, and justice. The view taken by Sir W. Jones resembles that of Adam Smith, already referred to, which attri- butes all the progress of Europe to a gradual victory of the commerce of towns over the feudal institutions of the country. The progress, however, which has actually been made, so far as it is due to the influence of commerce, is due to its action, not only in and by the towns, but in the bosom of feudalism itself in the commercial wants and necessities of the feudal lords of the soil, as well as of their tenants and their neighbours in towns. But we must go further and add, that not only the commercial side of human nature, but also its moral side, in the breasts of the feudal proprietors themselves, rebelled against a system which sacrificed the whole family save one, and all its dependents, to maintain the line of feudal succession. From the moment when the power of bequeathing and alienating lands, which the civilised jurisprudence of Borne had introduced into England, was abandoned o 194 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. for the barbarous and retrograde rule of male primo- geniture, an unremitting struggle began, to recover the ancient and legitimate essentials of property, by regain- ing testamentary powers on the one hand, and break- ing the fetters of entail on the other. With regard to the former the efforts and devices adopted to regain the right of testation over lands we may apply, totidem verbis, to England the description an eminent jurist has given of the origin of wills among the Romans : 4 We might have assumed, a priori, that the passion for tes- tacy was generated by some moral injustice entailed by the rules of intestate succession ; and we find them at variance with every instinct by which early society was cemented together. Every dominant sentiment of the primitive Roman was entwined with the relations of the family. But what was the family ? The law defined it one way, natural affection another.' * The writer referred to adds that the system of fidei com- missa, or bequests in trust, was devised to meet the disabilities imposed by ancient law on the proper ob- jects of natural affection. But the Roman law at least embraced in the family all the children in the line of agnatic descent, whereas the feudal system confined it to one single and perhaps remotely related descendant the heir-at-law. The device resorted to in England to remedy this still grosser outrage on nature was the same as in Rome the invention of uses or trusts. ' f * Maine's ' Ancient Law.' t ' 1 hold that neither of these cases was so much the reason of uses ns another reason in the beginning, which was, that the lands, by the common law of England, were not testamentary or devisable.' Lord Bacon's Reading on the Statute- of Uses. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 195 No more conclusive proof need be given of the total incompatibility of the feudal rules of inheritance with the wants of society, than that, whereas the Statute of Uses was passed in the reign of Henry VIII., expressly in order to put an end to testamentary and other dis- positions by uses away from the line of feudal descent, only five years afterwards it was found necessary to pass the Statute of Wills, which begins with a- recital that the king's subjects, as daily experience shows, can- not 4 discharge their debts, or after their degree set forth and advance their children,' and proceeds to enact that two-thirds of lands held in military tenure shall be thenceforward disposable by will. Nor could the re- striction on the remaining third survive the favourable experience of its abolition by an ordinance of the Commonwealth, of which the Act of Charles II. was a mere copy. The history of entails presents a similar record of a revolt of the feelings and wants of human nature against the principle of descent which still governs the trans- mission of the bulk of landed property in England at this day. For 200 years after the statute De Donis restored the feudal restrictions, which landholders had already found means to shake off, continued attempts were made in Parliament to obtain the repeal of that statute, the consequences of which are well described in an old treatise commonly ascribed to Lord Bacon, in terms which have lost little of their application since : ' By a statute made in Edward I.'s time, the tenant in tail could not put away the land from his heir by any act of conveyance, nor let it nor encumber it longer o 2 190 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. than his life. But the inconvenience thereof was great; for by that means the land being so sure tied upon the heir as that his father could not put it from him, made the son to be disobedient, negligent and wasteful. It hindered men that had entailed lands, that they could not make the best of their lands by improvement, for that none upon so short an estate as his own life would lay any stock upon the land that might yield rent improved. Lastly, those entails did defraud many subjects of their debts, for that the land was not liable longer than in his own time.' Two centuries after the statute of Edward, the method of barring entails by recoveries was introduced by the judges, and that fiction was succeeded by the Statutes of Fines in the three following reigns. In the foregoing and many similar efforts of our law, which we have not space to detail, one constant aim and movement is discernible to neutralise and evade, by shifts and artifices, the feudal restrictions on the rights of property in land, arid its free alienation, lease, division, and bequest.* But it may be laid down as a general proposition in the philosophy of law, that wherever, in the law of an advancing society, a per- petual effort and tendency manifests itself in a given direction by a succession of devices and changes, the general aim of those changes is essential to progress, and the tendency represents the spirit of progress itself the spirit of civilisation struggling with the old spirit * For example, powers of leasing entailed lands, and charging 1 the inheritance with improvements a mode by which the law attempts to restore indirectly and partially the rights of property which entails directly withhold. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 197 of barbarism. The ground of this proposition is simple, and it is one especially strong in the case of a country so tenacious of custom, so suspicious of speculative reason, as England that the expedients and changes in question are such as society is forcibly driven to by the personal experience of its members, and the demands of human nature and daily life. But the proposition is applicable only to the general aim and end of the efforts we speak of, not to the means. The means adopted to rid land of its fetters were in the first instance the fiction of uses and trusts, out of which grew the baneful division of our jurisprudence into a double system of equity and law.* And this was only the beginning of a new evil superadded to * In a recent debate in the House of Lords (Feb. 1870) the division between law and equity seems to have been referred to as caused by the division of courts. The author ventures, however, to maintain that the division of courts was the consequence, not the cause, of the inadequacy of the common law, and the consequent rise of a supplementary system of equity. The chief causes of the division may be enumerated in order as follows : First : and especially, the feudal restrictions on the testamentary disposition and alienation of land, rendering it unavailable for many of the wants of its successive holders, and so leading to the device of uses asd trusts, which the Court of Chancery eagerly stepped in to enforce. Secondly : defects in the remedies of the common law courts, or in the nature of the protection and reparation they could decree. Thirdly : defects likewise in their mode of trial, especially as regards the evidence of parties to suits. Fourthly : opposition to the Roman Law opposition in reality to ecclesiastical power! and pretensions on the one hand, and to arbitrary government on the other, with both of which it became identified. Fifthly : personal ambition and professional interests on the part of the founders of the system of equity. Sixthly : the influence of scholastic logic. The influence of the personal interest of the founders of equity on the growth of the system has been instructively pointed out in a learned and interesting essay by Mr. Neate, published in the volume of the Social Science Association for 1868. 198 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the old; for the new pieces which lawyers have put into the old garment of our law have only made its unfitness for the wear of civilised life greater than before. Lord Bacon, after observing that ' the main reason of uses at the beginning was that lands were not by the common law testamentary or devisable,' adds that, since the statute, another reason was ' an excess of evil in men's minds affecting to have the assurance of their estate and possession to be revocable in their own times, and irrevocable after their own times.' The object of settlements in tail, renewed in each succeeding generation, is to accomplish ends still more inconsistent to give each generation a free disposition over land, yet to bind the land from generation to generation in the feudal line of descent to give all the family property to the heir, yet not to ignore those claims of nature and justice which feudalism, in its naked and consistent barbarity, boldly set aside. The consequence is the practical i etention of the old evil of perpetual entails, and along with it the new evils of heavy incumbrances on land, of increased incapacity of its owners to improve, of an unparalleled complexity and uncertainty of title, and of a division between law and equity carried into interminable fresh ramifications. There is one way to remedy the old and new evils together, and at once to purge our jurisprudence, and to emancipate land from its burdens and trammels and that is to extinguish the force of settlements as binding and irrevocable instruments, save so far as a provision for a wife is concerned; to put family settle- ments, save as to a wife, on the same footing as wills, THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 199 ipso facto void upon marriage, and revocable by any subsequent conveyance or will ; to enact that each suc- cessive proprietor shall take the land he succeeds to free from any restriction on his rights of proprietorship ; and further, to make provision that all lands left bur- dened with any charges shall be sold immediately on the death of the owner to pay off the incumbrance. A moment's reflection might satisfy any unprejudiced mind that settlements impose unjust and impolitic restrictions, as well as pecuniary burdens, upon the owners of land. Take the case of a re-settlement, for example, in which the son joins with his father. It is commonly supposed that the son acts with his eyes open, and with a special eye to the contingencies of the future and of family life. But what are the real facts of the case ? Before the future owner of the land has come into possession before he has any experience of his property, or of what is best to do or what he can do in regard of it before the exigencies of the future or his own real position are known to him before the character, number and wants of his children are learned, or the claims of parental affection and duty can make themselves felt, and while still very much at the mercy of a predecessor desirous of posthumous greatness and power, he enters into an irrevocable disposition, by which he parts with the rights of a proprietor over his future property for ever, and settles its devolution, burdened with charges, upon an unborn heir, who may be the very person least fitted or deserving to take it. To make a settlement void upon marriage, unless so fur as relates to a provision for the wife, is only to 200 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. apply the principle of jurisprudence which, under the old law of wills, made marriage and the birth of a child and which, under the present law, makes mar- riage alone the revocation of a will. It is plainly absurd to make an arrangement for children irrevo- cable, which is entered into before they are in existence, and, therefore, before their claims can be weighed and provided for justly. It would for the same reason be insufficient to enact, as one eminent writer has pro- posed, that no estate should be vested by settlement in an unborn child ; * since immediately on the birth of the first son, a settlement in conformity with that restriction, yet open to the objections just stated, might be made. To complete the emancipation of land from artificial restrictions on its distribution and use out of the feudal line of descent, it is necessary to assimilate its devolution in the case of intestacy to that of personal property. Every mischief arid injustice which settle- ments leave uncommitted, the law of primogeniture steps in to accomplish. In assimilating in this and other respects the law of real to that of personal pro- perty, the legislature will be only promoting a move- ment which has characterised civilisation both in ancient and modern times. ' The idea,' in the language of Mr. Maine, ' seems to have spontaneously suggested itself to a great number of early societies, to classify property into kinds. One kind of property is placed on a lower footing than the others, but at the same * 'The Economic Position of the I'ritish Labourer,' p. 51. Bv II. Fawu-tt, M.P. THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 201 time is relieved from the fetters which antiquity has imposed upon them. Subsequently the superior conve- nience of the rules governing the transfer and descent of the lower order of property becomes generally recognised, and by a gradual course of innovation the plasticity of the less dignified class is communicated to the classes conventionally higher. The history of .Roman Property Law is the history of the assimilation of res mancipi to res nee mancipi. The history of property on the European continent is the history of the subversion of the feudalised law of land by the Romanised law of movables ; and in England it is visibly the law of personalty which threatens to absorb and annihilate the law of realty.' * Every step which has been made to communicate to land the alienability by which personalty was early distinguished, lias been a step in the path of the as- similation of real and personal property law. The process of assimilation may be traced in the invention of uses, the fictions of fines and recoveries, the Statute of Wills, the abolition of military tenures, and (by a long series of piecemeal reforms) the subjection of in- herited land to the debts of its former possessor. "f But, as has already been said, a tendency persistently evinced in the modifications of law in a progressive community carries on its face the proof of its necessity and good policy. The principle of feudal descent, which is the root of the two monstrous anomalies of * 'Ancient Law,' p. 273. f For a remarkable example of the assimilation of real and personal property law, see 27 & 28 Vic., chap. 112 ; as to judgments. 202 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. English jurisprudence the divisions of law and equii^, and of real and personal property law is the root also of the artificial limitation of land ; and at once to reform our jurisprudence, and to set land free from restrictions against national industry and life, we must strike at the root instead of lopping off branches one by one, as has hitherto been done by a territorial and half-feudal legislature. This being done, the remaining steps to facilitate the commercial transfer of land are obvious and easy, and it could be readily shown that history supplies the same argument in their favour which applies to the reforms already suggested. These steps are (in addition to some stated already) first, the compulsory registration of all dealings with land in a registry open to the public at a trifling expense; secondly, a new Statute of Limitations, greatly short- ening the period within which non-claim shall perfect the title of the present possessors, who might otherwise be injuriously affected by registration; and thirdly, the sale of all encumbered estates, or of enough to defray the incumbrances, with a parliamentary title to thejpurchascrs. One more measure is requisite to remove the re- strictions which limit artificially the trade and manu- factures of towns to particular spots namely, to revise and alter the regulations of the Customs, which confine the import and export trade of the country to particular harbours, exclusive of several well adapted by nature for commerce. It is, of course, well to diminish, as far as can be done without injury to trade, the col- lection of duties ; but the present restrictions tin- THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867. 203 doubtedly hurt the revenue as well as the trade of the country. Finally, there is a matter with which, above all, only a Eeformed Parliament can deal effectually the insecurity of tenure, of which the mischief of game may be considered as part. The insecurity of tenure is a public calamity, purposely maintained to deprive tenants of the political power and independence given to them by law ; and if some more direct remedy be not applied to remove it, the makeshift of the ballot will be used. 204 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. THE land systems of England and Ireland, though closely analogous in many respects, as regards both history and structure, present, nevertheless, some features of striking dissimilarity. The prominent Irish land question is one relating to agricultural tenure ; though it is so because the system in its entirety has prevented not only the diffusion of landed property, but also the rise of manufactures, commerce, and other non-agricultural employments. In England, on the other hand, notwithstanding monstrous defects in the system of tenure, the prominent land question is one relating to the labourer, not to the farmer, and to the labourer in the town as well as in the country. The chief causes of this difference are first, the violent conversion of the bulk of the English popu- lation into mere labourers long ago ; and, secondly, the existence of great cities and various non-agri- cultural employments, created by mineral wealth, and a superior commercial situation, but confined to par- ticular spots by the accumulation of land in unpro- ductive hands, by the uncertainty of the law and of titles, and by the scantiness and poverty of the rural population on which country towns depend for a market. An immense immigration into a few great THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 205 cities has accordingly been the movement in England corresponding to emigration from Ireland ; and no less- than 5,153,157 persons, by official estimate, will, in the middle of the present year be gathered into seven large towns London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, and Bristol ; 3,214,707, or one-sixth of the total population, being concentrated in London alone. A twofold mischief has thus been produced by the English land system in the wretched and hopeless condition of the agricultural labourer on one hand, and the precarious employment and crowded dwellings of the working-classes in large towns on the other. There is no lack of considerable writers and poli- ticians to assure us that this situation is the natural result of commerce and economic laws ; but, alarming as it is, it would be much more so, were such a con- clusion generally held ; since no reforms could then be looked for, either to diminish the existing misery, or to avert the future catastrophe it threatens ; and, in fact, the situation must actually become worse with every forward step in industrial progress, if that con- clusion be well founded. It is, therefore, no matter of mere theoretical or historical interest to ascertain its actual causes ; al- though, even from that point of view, it engages the profound attention of economists on the Continent, struck by the contrast which the distribution of both land and population in England presents to what is found in every other part of the civilised world. ' England,' says a distinguished Englishman on the 200 LAXD SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. Continent, referring particularly to the researches of a German economist,* ' is the only Teutonic community, we believe we might say the only civilised community, in which the bulk of the land under cultivation is not in the hands of small proprietors ; clearly, therefore, England represents the exception and not the rule.'f It would surely be strange if the exception were the result, as Mr. Buckle asserted, of ' the general march of affairs;' $ and if industry and commerce, which are peopling the rest of the world with landowners, had, as a more recent writer expresses it, ' severed the people of England from the land.' The present author presumes to affirm that the exceptional situation of England, in place of being the natural consequence * See the work hereafter cited of Ilerr Envin Xasse, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Bonn, on ' Inclosurea of Com- mons in England.' + 'Systems of Land Tenure.' flennany. By K. B. I). Morier, p. 322. J ' The history of the decay of that once most important class, the English yeomanry, is an interesting subject, and one for which I have collected considerable materials; at present, I will only say that its decline was first distinctly perceptible in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and was consummated by the rapidly increasing power of the commercial and manufacturing classes, early in the eighteenth century. . . . Some writers regret this almost total destruction of the yeoman free- holders, overlooking the fact that they are disappearing, not in con- sequence of any violent revolution or stretch of arbitrary power, but simply by the general march of affairs ; society doing away with what it no longer requires.' Hackles History of Cirflization in England, i. AGO. ' I shall now proceed to trace historically what the economic causes were which Jiave severed the ponpV fiom the land. ' It is the commercial and not the feudal spirit which in England has worked against peasant properties. Wipe out the commercial element from English hit-tor}-, and you wipe out those causes which have worked ayainst peasant proprietorship in England. But for the commercial element, the feudal system in England would probably have remained in full force as in other countries, and the English peasants have become peasant proprietors.' 7 'he Land Qneniinn t \t\ Frederic Seebohiu. ' Fort- niirhtlv IN'Mi'w." February. 1^7<>. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 207 of commerce and industry, is the product of a violent and unnatural history on the one hand, and of laws existing at this day most adverse to both commerce and industry on the other. The history of the revolution by which that result has been brought about is so copious and minute that many volumes might be filled with it, though only its principal steps can be presented here. As may be inferred from the two passages just cited,* it has unseated two ancient classes of small landholders, the peasantry and the yeomanry, as, for brevity, we may name the two rural classes below the landed gentry. The encroachment, too, on the domains of both began at the same time and in the same manner, and has been prosecuted to its consummation in a great mea- sure by a similar process. Each, however, of the two classes has had also its own special history of extinction ; and while the poorer class, the peasantry, have never been suffered to recover, even for a generation, the ground from which they have been driven century after century, there was in the case of the wealthier class of yeomanry, along with their dispossession, an opposite movement, which down to the last hundred years continued to recruit their numbers. Briefly enumerated, the chief causes by which the peasantry the really most important class have been dispossessed of their ancient proprietary rights and beneficial interests in the soil are the following : (1.) Confiscation of their ancient rights of common, * See the last two notes. 208 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. which were not only in themselves of great value, but most important for the help they gave towards the maintenance of their sepa- rate lands. (2.) Confiscation to a large extent of their separate lands themselves, by a long course of violence, fraud, and chicane, in addition to forfeitures resulting from deprivation of their rights of common. (3.) The destruction of country towns and villages, and the loss, in consequence, of local markets for the produce of peasant farms and gardens. (4.) The construction of a legal system based on the principle of inalienability from the feudal line, in the interest of great landed families, and incompatible with either the continuance of the ancient or the rise of a new class of peasant landholders. (5.) The loss, with their lands and territorial rights, of all political power and independence on the part of the peasantry ; and, by conse- quence, the establishment and maintenance by the great proprietors of laws most adverse to their interests. (6.) Lastly, the administration by the great land- owners of their own estates in such a manner as to impoverish the peasantry still further, and to sever their last remaining connection with the soil. These different causes have necessarily been men- tioned in succession, but in reality they have often THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 209 operated simultaneously. The one first stated was the first, however, to operate on an extensive scale, and the reader's attention is therefore asked to it first.* Some centuries ago the greater part of England was still uninclosed, and to a large extent subject to common use; the lord of the manor being himself a co-partner, as it were, both in the system of husbandry followed on the arable land and in the pastoral and wood rights enjoyed in common. Eound each village, as a general rule, lay in the first instance a little territory of tillage land, divided into individual shares, but cultivated on a common system, and subject also to ' commonable ' rights on the part of the individual holders rights, that is to say, to pasture in common on the stubble after harvest and on the fallow grass. Beyond this arable territory, thus partly enjoyed in common, lay another territory, used entirely in com- mon ; the pasture rights, however, on the portion nearest the tillage land being usually ' stinted,' or * Professor Nasse begins his treatise, already referred to (' Ueber die mittelalterliche Feldgemeinschaft und die Einhegungen des sechszehu- ten Jahrhunderts in England '), with the following words: 'In the agrarian history of the nations of Central Europe, there is no event of more importance, or vaster in its consequences, than the dissolution of the ancient co-partnership in the use of the soil for husbandry, and the establishment in its stead of separate and independent farms. But this revolution has a special importance in the case of England, contributing largely, as it has done, to the extrusion of small landholders, and to the foundation of that preponderance of large property which in turn has had so great an effect on the constitutional history of that country.' The author is indebted to Ilerr Nasse both for this most instructive treatise, and for oral information on the subject of inclosures. Herr Nasse, it may not be amiss to state, is far from being unfriendly to large estates or large farms, either in his own country or in England. 210 LAXD SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. strictly limited in respect of the number and kinds of animals allowed to feed on it, while on the remoter portion each of the commoners might graze, in summer at least, as many animals as he could feed in winter from the produce of his separate fields. These rights are expressly recognised by the early statutes as legally belonging to the commoners, and are said to have often been sufficient to enable each of them to graze not less than forty sheep, besides as many cows as he had winter food for. Taken together, the common and ' commonable ' rights constituted no small part of the villagers' means of living, and it will appear here- after how the loss of them entailed on many of them the further loss of their separate holdings, and con- tributed to thin the ranks even of the wealthier class among them the yeomanry. The first encroachment was made by the Statute of Merton (20 lien. III. c. 1), which stated that many great men of England com- plained that, after affording to the freeholders of the manor the requisite pasture appertaining to their holdings, there was a residue of waste, wood, and pasture, which was unprofitable. The statute granted, therefore, to the lords of the manor the right to inclose such residue, the remedy of a suit for insufficiency of pasture before the judges of assize being reserved to commoners alleging it. This statute was confirmed in the next reign, and extended from the freeholders of the manor to neighbouring commoners ; and the recitals of the second enactment show how unpopular the new inclosures were, the ditches and hedges being destroyed by night. Our legal records show, moreover, that THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 211 many suits were actually brought by commoners for insufficiency of common. But we may judge what were the ordinary chances of success on the part of villagers against ' great men ' in those days of judicial corruption, and how far it was prudent for tenants and poor neighbours, especially when already impoverished by stint of pasture and of fuel, to wage war against the lord of the manor. They must often have been made to feel that a half is more than the whole. The island, too, especially after the great plague, was wide com- pared with the people ; and it was not until the inclosing movement, beginning with the rise in wool at the close of the fifteenth century, that extensive hardship was inflicted on the rural population. In the sixteenth century it spread vagrancy and pauperism throughout the country, and gave the peasantry of England a Poor-law in exchange for their ancient patrimony. Mr. Morier pertinently remarks that the inclosures of the sixteenth century are usually spoken of as though denoting merely the conversion of arable into pasturage, and the consolidation of farms, ' without reference to the primary fact which governs the two, namely, the inclosure, not of arable land as such, but of commonable arable land.' Mr. Morier refers to losses of their separate holdings on the part of the villagers, to which we must presently refer ; but it is important to bear in mind that, along with the ' com- monable ' arable land inclosed, an immense extent of common pasturage and woodland was withdrawn from the peasant and added to the domain of the great landholders. During the minority of Edward YL, the 212 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL Protector Somerset appointed a Royal Commission ' for redress of inclosures,' to inquire into the grievances and usurpations with which the country rang ; and Hales, the most active member of this Commission, while denouncing in the strongest terms the wrongs of which the great proprietors were guilty, expressly limited his invectives to such inclosures as encroached on the common rights of others, observing that inclo- sures of private property were more beneficial than otherwise. ' The miserable and unsatisfactory result of this Commission,' says Professor Nasse, ' originally hailed with intense delight by the rural population, is suffi- ciently well known. The power of the nobility in the country was so great, and the hand of the executive so weak, that in some cases the witnesses summoned did not dare to appear, and in others, those who had given truthful evidence were subjected to ill-treatment by the landlords. If the Protector's extraordinary Royal Com- mission could not effectually resist the power of the ruling class, it may naturally be inferred that the pro- tection of the ordinary courts could not much avail the sufferers. Their rights rested on the customs of each estate, to be proved by the rolls in the hands of the lord of the soil, and they were liable to forfeiture by an indefinite number of acts on the part of the copyholders. The small copyholders were doubtless unable to substantiate their rights in courts of law, opposed by expert lawyers. Latimer, in fact, charges the judges with injustice and receipt of bribes, and says that money was almighty, even in courts of justice. A period of such tremendous revolution in Church and THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 213 State as the reign of Henry VIII. could certainly not have been favourable to the protection of customary rights. Such a sudden change as the secularisation of the Church lands must have shaken the whole tradi- tional order of property. Thus, a pamphlet published in 1546 complains that the new owners of Church property generally declared the ancient rights of the copyholders forfeited. They were compelled either to relinquish their holdings, or accept leases for a short period.' The inclosures of the sixteenth century, violent, unjust, and sweeping as they were, form, as the last sentence from Herr Nasse indicates, no more than one great chapter in the history of the confiscation of the patrimony of the English peasantry. It did not fall within the scope of his essay to pursue the history of the whole movement beyond that period, but he says of it : * Powerful as it was, it then reached its aim but to a limited extent. The small landowners did not all disappear in the sixteenth century. The majority of the freeholders doubtless held their ground, and even the copyholders were not all driven out or converted into tenants for terms of years. Lord Coke could declare in the seventeenth century that one-third of England was copyhold. The revolution thus inaugu- rated has lasted down to our own days. Sometimes the progress has been slower, sometimes faster, until by degrees the close connection in which the two phenomena, inclosure and expulsion of the peasantry, originally stood, has ceased.' 214 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. It lias ceased only with the almost complete ex- pulsion of the peasantry from the soil ; but although the Inclosure Acts of the last century and a half have withdrawn, in addition to what had been lost before (and with hardly any compensation to the sufferers), a further amount of common territory, estimated as equal to one-third of the total area now under cultivation,* the inclosure movement from first to last from the Statute of Merton to the last Inclosure Act has been but one of many processes by which the consummation has been reached. That it is entitled to the promi- nence Professor Nasse gives it, is nevertheless suffi- ciently clear. As he observes, there were two courses which might have been pursued with advantage instead * The first Ileport of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture states: 'According to the estimate made by the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Emigration in 1827, and the calculations of Mr. Porter in 1843, 7,175,520 statute acres had been inclosed in England and Wales since the iirst Inclosure Bill in the year 1710 up to the year 1843. To these since 1843 have been added 4C4,893 acres, as appears by the Annual Report of the In- closure Commissioners for 1807 ; making together 7,000,413 statute acres added to the cultivated area of England and Wales since 1710, or above one-third part of the total of 2*5,451,620 acres in cultivation in 1807. . . . The inclosure to this extent since 1710, in very many cases without any compensation to the smaller commoners, lias withdrawn from the agricul- tural labourer means which would otherwise have been open to him of adding to his resources by the exercise of ancient rights attached to his dwelling, or by the acquisition of new rights and privileges upon the waste in connexion with new dwellings, as new dwellings increased with the increase of the agricultural population.' The amount of compensation given to the smaller commoners may be judged from the statement of Lord Lincoln in the House of Commons in 184o, that in nineteen cases out of twenty the Committees of the House had neglected the rights of the poor. I'oor commoners, he said, could not come to London, appoint highly paid counsel, and produce evidence in support of their claims ; and the Committees of the House had remained in perfect ignorance of them. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 215 of detriment to the commoners. Either the ancient system of joint husbandry (which was unquestionably wasteful) might have been transformed into a system of farming for the common benefit, adapted to the improvements and requirements of the age ; or there might have been an equitable distribution of land, which would have bettered the position of every com- moner. As it was, the peasantry lost not only the benefits derived from rights of commons over the greater part of England, but that loss, in numerous cases, entailed the loss of their separate fields. They had lived on the produce of the two, and their hus- bandry was based on it. They were the more unequal to the augmented rents and fines demanded of them, that they had lost the sustenance of their stock, and the more unequal to defend their lands and holdings in a court of law against injustice. They lost more- over their local markets in villages and country towns, which decayed with the decay of husbandmen, or were violently pulled down for the inclosure of the ground on which they stood within the great proprietor's domain.* This was not all. The small proprietor, the freehold tenant, the copyholder, and the tenant for years were ejected from their own fields as they had been from their commons. ' When some * Sir Thomas More complained : ' Noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, leave no ground for tillage. They inclose all into pastures ; they throw down houses ; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing. And as though you lost no ground by forests, chase lands, and parks, those good holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe lands into desolation and wilderness.' 210 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. covetous man,' says Harrison, ' espies a farther com- modity in their commons, holds, and tenures, he doth find such means as thereby to wipe out many of their occupyings.' * Bishop Gilpin complained that the great landowners scrupled not to drive people from their property, alleging that the land was theirs, and turning them out of their shelter like vermin. Sir Thomas More declared that tenants were ' got rid of by force or fraud, or tired out by repeated injuries into parting with their property.' And Mr. Morier sums up the dealings of the great proprietors with the villagers' fields (with which their own lands lay mixed under the ancient system of common husbandry) as follows : * In the most favourable cases, the withdrawal of one- third or one-half of the land from the " commonable " arable land of a township such half or third portion consisting in many cases of small parcels intermixed with those of the commoners must have rendered the further common cultivation impossible, and thereby compelled the freeholders and copyholders to part with their land and their common rights on any terms. That in less favourable cases the lords of the manor did not look very closely into the rights of their * Is this the species of 'commercial element' to which Mr. Seebohm refers in the sentence ' Wipe out the commercial element from English history, and you wipe out those causes which have worked (tyainst peasant proprietorship in England ' ? ' Fortnightly Review,' February, p. 230. The italics are Mr. Seebohm's. It may be well to call attention to the fact, which Mr. Seebohm in one part of his argument seems to lose sight of, that the terms ' holds ' and ' tenures ' comprehend freeholds, and every form of landed proprietorship, as well as of tenure by lease and copyhold. Every estate in land, as well as even' leasehold, was and is a tenure, although landed proprietors have found it convenient to forget it. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 217 tenants, and that instead of an equitable repartition of land between the two classes, the result was a general consolidation of tenants' land with demesne land, and the creation of large inclosed farms, with the conse- quent wholesale destruction of agricultural communities or townships, is well known to every reader of history.'* Severed from the village community which had once stood together, however feebly, against invasion of their common rights; impoverished by the loss of pastures for his cattle and sheep, and of fuel for his house, in a time of rising prices ; deprived, too, of a market within reach for what produce remained to him to sell how was either the petty landowner or the small freehold or copyhold tenant to make good de- fence against the tremendous weapons with which English law armed, as it still does, the lord of the manor against the villager? Shakespeare informs us how it was that lawyers had become great landowners in his time : 1 Hamlet. Why may not that be the scull of a lawyer ? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks ? Why does he suf- fer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery ? This fellow might be in 's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognisances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures ? The veiy * 'Cobden Club Volume,' p. 321. 218 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box.'* Not to speak of the risks of ' an action for battery ' against a powerful noble, if he chose to have him knocked on the head, how was the copyholder to produce a box of conveyances in the control of the lord himself? Was it likely that the small proprietor could outwit the lord's sharp lawyer, with ' his cases, his tenures, and his tricks'? The burning hatred which the peasantry of his own time felt towards the ministers of a legal system by which they were op- pressed and ruined, breathes in the language which the great dramatist puts in the mouth of Cade and his followers. f And as the old race of village landholders disappeared before the usurped inclosure, the disseisin, the ejectment, how was a new race to rise in their stead, or to become ' great buyers of land ' like the lawyers ? How was a new race of peasant proprietors to spring up in our own time, once it had become extinct, under perils surrounding the purchase of land thus described by Lord St. Leonards : ' This danger compels every $ purchaser to require a sixty-years' title, by which sellers and buyers of land arc put annually to an enormous expense.' ' Was this ' enormous expense ' likely to be defrayed by a * Hamlet, Act v. Scene 1. t ' Dick. The first thing we do, let's kill nil the lawyers. l Cade. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment ? That parch- ment being scribbled o'er should undo a man ? Some say the bee stings ; but I say 'tis the bee's wax ; for I did but once seal to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.' 2 Henry J'l. Act iv. So. 1. | Italics in original. ' Handy Book ou Property Law.' By Lord St. Leonards. 8th ed, p. 88. TEE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 219 peasantry reduced to the condition of agricultural labourers on the verge of pauperism ? With their lands and their commons, it should be re- membered, the rural population lost all political weight ; the great proprietors could legislate respecting land and the people upon it as they thought fit. While prices were rapidly rising in the sixteenth century, landlords in Par- liament, and landlords in the parish, fixed the rates of wages; and in our own time, landlords in Parliament maintained a Poor-law which made it the direct in- terest of landlords in the parish to turn the peasantry out of their cottages, and to suffer no more cottages to be built. The very poverty to which they had been reduced by centuries of encroachment, became a motive for expelling them altogether. ' The year 1775,' it is stated in the Eeport of the Eoyal Com- mission before cited, ' is noticed as the period from which a marked change for the worse in the condition of the agricultural labourer became visible. The change was attributed to inadequate wages compared with the cost of the necessaries of life, to the con- solidation .of small farms, to the loss of privileges by inclosures of commons, and also to the loss of small portions of land which had contributed to the labourer's resources, and which his necessities compelled him to sell. ... In "The Case of the Labourers in Hus- bandry," published in 1795, it is stated: "Cottages have been progressively deprived of the little land for- merly let with them ; and also their rights of common- age have been swallowed up in large farms by inclosures. Thus an amazing number of people have been reduced 220 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. from a comfortable state of independence to a pre- carious state, as mere hirelings, who, when out of work, immediately come upon the parish."'* When this stage had been reached, parochial policy dic- tated that the cottage should follow the garden, and the peasant's last interest in the soil was extin- guished. The peasantry of England have, in short, been dis- possessed of their ancient connexion with land by a series of confiscations and encroachments by a legal system devised for the sole behoof and to consolidate the power of great proprietors and by proceedings in exercise of this power so acquired, which have resulted in an agrarian economy even more unnatural, more hurtful, and more demoralising than that of Ireland. The dispossession of the English peasantry has not, indeed, like that of the Irish, been aggravated by re- ligious persecution, or by the tyranny of race ; but it has been more complete, and it has left them in a yet lower position in the social scale. The history of the yeomanry presents some different vicissitudes, and also some common features, when re- garded side by side with the history of the peasantry. Yeomen, as well as peasants, were deprived of rights of commons, of great assistance to their husbandry, and of considerable value. They, too, in ages of violent usurpation and legal injustice, lost many members from their ranks ; but their hold on the land was less * ' First Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agri- culture, 1PGO.' pp. xvi., xvii. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 221 easily loosed, and for centuries there was, moreover, an opposite movement. Farmers were enriched by leases, and became buyers of land ; and the ranks of the order were recruited from the towns as well as from the country. Citizens and shopkeepers, and even artisans, sought investment in land ; and a document, ascribed to Edward VI., complained that the grazier, the farmer, the merchant, became landed men, and that the very artificer left the town and lived in the country. M. Guizot justly remarks that the great division of lands, through the ruin of the feudal aristocracy, and the growth of commercial wealth in the sixteenth century, is a social phenomenon which has not attracted suffi- cient attention. And the movement did not entirely cease for two centuries more. It was not, indeed, until after the publication of the ' Wealth of Nations,' that the long leases which, as its author states, com- merce had introduced, and under which the tenant- farmer had frequently risen to become a landowner, disappeared ; and that the farmer sank into the depen- dent of the great proprietor, who was thus enabled to make and maintain such laws relating to land and its tenure, as well as its ownership, as he thought best for his own consequence, profit and pleasure. By the close of the last century, moreover, by far the greater part of the land had come under strict settlement in the feudal line, and comparatively little has ever entered the market since. What little has entered the market has been more and more an article of luxury, not of business sought for the social consequence or the po- litical power attaching to the monopoly of land, or for 222 LAXD SYSTEMS AXD INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the country pursuits of the sportsman, not of the farmer. Landed property has been deprived, by the risks and expenses attending dealings with it, of its natural value for the cultivator, as being naturally the most secure and attractive, the most immediately and cheaply ac- cessible investment for his capital, labour and time, and the most marketable commodity, because of its uni- versal utility, should he wish to raise money on it or sell it ; while, on the other hand, it has been invested with an artificial value for those who seek in it mainly political and social predominance or amusement. Among the causes which the Chief of the Statistical Department in France assigns for the increasing subdivision of landed property, in addition to the increasing wealth of the peasantry, is la suppression da cens electoral* because the larger estates no longer carry with them the mono- poly of political power, which a limited suffrage formerly gave. In England it is precisely the reverse : land for the last hundred years might advantageously be bought for the command of votes,^ or for social rank, or even for pleasure ; but it has been a most perilous investment for farmers for profit, and the more so the more they laid out on the land, and the less they left over for law expenses and litigation. M. de Lavergne, in his ' llural Economy of Great Britain,' correcting a French notion that land in England never changes hands at all, points to the advertisements, and remarks : ' These ad- * ' Statist ique de la France.' Agriculture, 1808. P. cxvii. t No small number of Peerages in the United Kingdom owe their creation to the purchase of lands with borrowed money for the purpose of commanding votes. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 223 vertisements usually run as follows : " For sale, a property of acres in extent, let to a substantial tenant, with an elegant and comfortable residence, a good trouting stream, beautiful lawn, kitchen and flower gardens, in a picturesque county." This is really a fair sample of the sort of land which most fre- quently enters the English market ; by far the greater part never entering it from one century to another. ' A small proprietor,' said Adam Smith, ' who knows every part of his little territory, who views it with all the affection which property, especially small property, naturally inspires, and who, upon that account, takes pleasure in not only cultivating but in adorning it, is generally of all improvers the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful.' ' But,' he added, ' the law of primogeniture and perpetuities of different kinds prevent the division of great estates, and thereby hinder the multiplication of small proprietors. The small quantity, therefore, w^hich is brought to market, and the high price of what is brought thither, prevent a great number of capitals from being em- ployed in its cultivation and improvement, which would otherwise have taken that direction.' It is not, how- ever, a high price that would prevent the purchase of land by the farmer, or even by the labourer, if its transfer were cheap and safe. It does not prevent it in Belgium, Germany, or France ; it is the risk and cost legally attaching to what little is sold, and the un- suitability of that little, which prevent it in England. ' I appeal to your lordships,' said Lord Westbury, 224 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. speaking on the transfer of land in 1862, ' does any of you know anything about your titles to your estates ? Is there not dwelling upon every estate, or rather sitting upon the shoulders of every land proprietor, a solicitor, who guides him in all things, controls him in all things. Talk of a priest-ridden country ! That we are a lawyer-ridden country, with regard to the conditions of real property, is a truth beyond the possibility of denial. What has thrown light upon every subject of knowledge? It has been the in- troduction of printing. Why has riot printing been introduced into legal deeds ? Why is it that you have presented to you a mass of parchment, so repulsive in its character, so utterly forbidding in its condition, its language, and even the style of its writing, that you surrender yourselves in despair ? You do not know what you are signing.'* It is not, however, the lawyer, but the large pro- prietor, seeking to re-establish in a commercial age the territorial system of the middle age, who lias kept hind out of commerce, surrounded it with prohibitions, pit- falls and snares, devoted it to the maintenance of family pride, hidden all his dealings with it in darkness, and committed them to writing in characters symbolical of the period to which in policy and spirit they belong. With such a land system before us, such a history behind it, and such marks of that history in its every detail, is it possible to maintain that ' it is the com- mercial and not the feudal spirit which in England has * Compare with these remarks those of Jack Cade, respecting parch- ments aud signatures, cited xupm. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 225 worked against peasant properties ' ? What is it but the commercial spirit, a commercial jurisprudence, an open land market, the progress of trade, manufactures and mines, the increasing demand for and the in- creasing profits of minute cultivation, together with that natural love of land which every disciple of Adam Smith must include among the economic laws deter- mining human pursuits, that augment every year the number of peasant properties bought in the market in Germany, Belgium, and France ? It is doubtless true that, under a just and natural system, and with perfect free trade in land, there would have been a disappear- ance of some peasant and yeoman properties, and a departure of others from former owners and families. Failures, casualties, deaths, the decline of domestic manufactures, changes in husbandry and in markets, changes in the localities of towns and in trade, both internal and foreign, the attractions of towns, the tastes of particular men, succession to land by women* these and other natural causes would, undoubtedly, under a sound system, have caused a natural and con- tinual flow of small properties, of both yeomen and peasants, into the market. But this outward flow could not have been confined to the small properties, and there would always have been an opposite current. The profits of ground under the master's foot, the natural attractions of agriculture and country life, the love of independence, the accumulation of savings * It deserves remark, however, that women make excellent farmers both in England and on the Continent, when they can devote their time to it. In the dairy districts of England the wife is a more important per- son than her husband. Q 226 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. among a large rural population promoted by the possi- bility of such an investment, the ideas and tastes en- gendered by a numerous class of small proprietors, the diffusion of land by a just law of succession, would have filled many of the vacant places of those who dropped out of the ranks, and added new regiments to the whole number.* But only one current lias been suffered to flow in respect of small estates an outward current, largely swollen in former times by force and fraud, and in * 'Great complaints are made that the class of farmer-owners the old yeomanry has largely diminished. There can be no doubt that this class of people would have been from time to time renewed far more than it has been, had land come more freely into the market. It is obvious that, if not renewed, any such class must gradually disappear through deaths, extravagance, and the countless chances and changes which must occur in every class ' ( Thoughts on Free Trade in Land, by William Fowler, M.P. 1809. Longman). This treatise contains a great amount of information in a very small compass. JJut the present author cnnnot concur in Mr. Fowler's next observation on the foregoing topic, unless limited to England under its present legal system: 'But a more powerful influence has been in operation, inasmuch as it is clear that a man with only a moderate capital can in England use his capital better as a farmer than as a proprietor as well as farmer, because he will thus have all his money free for use in his trade as a cultivator; in short, of having a large sum locked up at a low rato of interest in the price of his land.' Under a good legal system the price of theTand need not be locked up. The owner can either borrow on it easily, safely and cheaply, and either farm more intensively, or take adjoining land and farm more extensively. M. de Laveleye has answered by anticipation Mr. Fowler's argument in his excellent book on the rural economy of Holland : ' M. Reseller pr<5- tend que le fennier appliquera a faire valoir la terre plus d<> capital que le proprie"taire, parce que celui-ci devra consacrer a 1'achat du fonds une somnie considerable, que le premier pent employer a augmenter rintensite" de la culture. Cette remarque est spdcieuse ; je ne la crois cependant pas fondle. En eflfet, celui qui aura achete le fonds petit lever sur hypotheque la sornme udcessairo pour ame'liorer sa culture ; il paiera alors sous forme d'iutt'rets ce qu'il aurait paye" comme fermage, et il aura cet dnorme avnntage, qu'il profitera exclusivement de toutes les ameliorations, en qiialiUS de proprietaire, sans risquer de les voir tourner a son detriment a 1'expiratiou du bail.' La Nferlande. Par Emile de Laveleye, p. 147. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 227 modern times by unjust legislation and a barbarous jurisprudence ; while the number of large estates has been artificially maintained by restraints on their divi- sion and sale, and the current towards them artificially swollen by the political power and the consequence attached to them. In place of a natural selection having determined the extinction of the small pro- prietor, the very struggle for existence would have lent to the peasant powerful aid against his more in- dolent rival. But what trade could survive if, besides being loaded with heavy penalties and restrictions, it were closed against all new comers? What army could outlast a campaign if, while exposed to cruel losses and hardships, the posts only of officers falling could be filled ? A learned writer has lately advanced the proposition that agricultural tenure in England, after passing from the mediseval form of tenure at will into freehold and free copyhold tenure, became and continues to be a hereditary tenure ; and that the main difference be- tween the English and the Irish land systems lies in the permanent tenure established in England and the precarious tenure existing in Ireland.* The truth is, * ' In this country, by force of the old traditions of freehold tenure, and the tendency it had created in favour of permanent occupancy, and by force also of the universal custom of tenant-right, perpetuity of tenancy was practically, though not legally, secured . . . . ; and hence, as a learned author states (Mr. Dixon's Law of the Farm}, the same farms de- scend in the same families generation after generation, sometimes century after century, in some cases for four hundred years .... Had there been no disturbing causes, the English law might have operated in Ireland, as in England, to produce that result. But the ciyil wars, and confiscations which ensued, placed the landlords as a body in opposition to the mass of Q 2 228 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. that the great bulk of the tenants of England, and with them no small body of small proprietors, sank long ago into the condition of agricultural labourers, or migrated to towns such towns as the loss of a country custom and the accumulation of land in uncom- mercial hands did not destroy or prevent from coming into existence. An enormous disproportion of the English popula- tion has thus been forced by the land system into a few large cities, and thrown upon precarious employ- ments for support. Manufactures and trade are not only precarious in being subject to sudden vicissitudes and collapse, but in a more general respect, on which Adam Smith lias emphatically dwelt.* The English the people, and the penal laws which followed prevented the latter from acquiring any desirable interest in land. Thus the relation of landlord and tenant was never, as in England, based upon an inheritable tenure, originally established by law, and then perpetuated by custom, and pro- tected by tenant-right.' History of the Law of Tenures of Land in Eng- land and Ireland. By W. J. Finlason, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, Editor of Reeves' Jfitt^ry of the English Law. * The capital that is acquired to any country by commerce and manu- factures is all a very precarious and uncertain possession till some part of it has been secured and realised in the cultivation and improvement of the land .... No vestige now remains of the great wealth said to have been possessed by the greater part of the Ilanse Towns. The civil wars of Flanders, and the Spanish Government which succeeded them, chased away the great commerce of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges. But Flanders still continues to be one of the richest, best cultivated, and most pros- perous provinces of Europe. The ordinary revolutions of war and go- vernment easily dry up the sources of that wealth which arises from commerce only. That which arises from the more sol'.d improvements of agriculture is much more durable, and cannot be destroyed but by those more violent convulsions occasioned by the depredations of hostile and barbnrous nations, continued for a century or two together, such as those that happened for some time before and after the fall of the Roman empire, iu the western provinces of Europe.' Wealth of Nations, book iii. c. 4. THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870. 229 labourers, too, whom our land system crowds into towns, have not that subsidiary and durable resource which town labourers on the Continent are steadily gaining under their land system ; nor have English labourers that providence and frugality which con- tinental land systems nurture. The Irish land question is of more importance politically than the English for the hour, but it is not so economically even for the hour ; and it is so politi- cally for the hour only. Economically, the emergency is much greater at this moment in this than in the other island ; the main land question here relates to a poorer class than even the Irish tenantry, and there is a much greater amount of material misery and actual destitution in England, traceable mainly to its own land system, though aggravated by that of Ireland and the consequent immigration of poverty. The day is not distant when the supreme question of English, as of Irish politics, will be whether the national territory is to be the source of power and luxury to a few individuals, or of prosperity and happi- ness to the nation at large? and whether those few individuals or the nation at large are to determine the answer ? 230 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN,* 1868-1869. IN few places are the old world and the new, the world of immobility and custom, and the world of change and progress, seen in closer proximity and con- trast than in Westphalia ; a province now heading the rapid march of Prussian industry, yet preserving not a few broad features of the Germany of the past. By the side of the peasant of the olden time, whom the conservative economist Herr Riehl, in his dread of revolution, regards as the emblem of all that is sound in the age, and the sole safeguard of the future of Germany, are the engineer, the miner, and the manu- facturer, whom English economists, unable to boast of their own peasantry, are commonly better inclined to put forward as the types of the age, and the pledges of the future. The Basin of the Ruhr, occupying the middle region of the province, and reaching beyond it to the Rhine, is the chief seat of Westphalian mining and manufacturing enterprise ; the mountains and val- leys of Sauerland and Siegerlandf in the south are the * Reprinted from the ' Fortnightly Review,' March, I860. t Tin- general name of Sauerland is given to the mountainous region of Westphalia south of the Kulir Basin. The country watered by the Sieg bears the name of Siegerland; the greater part of it, however, lying beyond Westphalia in the Rhine Province. WESTPHALIA AND THE EUER BASIN, 1868-1869. 231 strongholds of ancient rural life. But the genuine bauer is not extinct in the Euhr Basin ; and the train glides, the tall chimney rises, and the miner sinks his shafts and drives his adits among the southern hills. The prevailing characteristics, nevertheless, in the south are still those of rustic simplicity, and we may give to antiquity in our description the precedence it will not long survive to claim. The scenery of southern Westphalia is eminently picturesque in the sense to which Mr. Merivale limits the term, as denoting effects due not to the imagination of the spectator bodying forth the forms of things un- seen, but simply to the picture which nature herself puts before the eye. The traveller does not bring, but finds the charm of the landscape in steep wood-clothed hills and winding vales, with cottages and gardens clustering here and there. Most refreshing to the eye of the traveller from parched England last summer was the deep verdure of these valleys, though it was a year of drought also WestphaliajtJ. The perfection of the irrigation, the works for which serve also for draining, is celebrated over the continent of Europe, affording a practical refutation of the doctrine of some insular writers that peasants cannot accomplish such works.-. The rainfall is equal to that of Ireland, and it falls with such violence that all the elements of fertility would be washed off the hills but for the care with which they are planted ; while the bas-fonds below would be now soaked into morasses, and now baked into aridity, but for the skill with which the descending streams are collected and distributed. 232 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. It is scenery, however, it must be confessed, which lacks for the most part the charm of variety. Each turn of the road presents a picture of considerable beauty, but generally a repetition of the one just left at the other side of the hill. It is everywhere, too, picturesqueness on a small scale. The eye seldom meets the horizon in those pent-up valleys ; and the mountains which enclose them rarely are high enough to tempt an ascent through the woods and shrubs which impede it, or to reward it with an extensive prospect if made. Now and again they form a fine natural amphitheatre, but even then the panorama is strictly confined. Like the social life of the people, the scenery owes much of its character to geological causes. Devonian rocks emerging in contorted forms from beneath the Ruhr Basin compose the hills ; the main valleys run across the strike, the side valleys parallel to it ; and the country is thus everywhere cut into deep glens en- closed within high narrow ridges. If, however, ' the grandeur of vastness,' which Mr. Merivale describes as the most powerful element in American landscapes, is here totally absent, there is a resemblance to American scenery which a stranger might hardly expect to find so near Rhineland, the country of feudal memorials and tower-crowned heights. Rarely does the ancient castle (more rarely still the modern) look down on the village. tSiegen is an ' antique city,' but is without a rival ; and it occupies the position of a great capital, though it has but seven or eight thousand inhabitants. The peasant proprietor is the chief potentate here ; the wood cottage his cow and pig share with himself may WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 233 be the most sumptuous dwelling beheld in a long day's walk. Country gentlemen there are none ; a few noble proprietors may be heard of, but they are absentees, their castles usually half in ruin, or clumsily patched, and inhabited by an agent or by retainers. The post coach which, like the livery of the post-boy, never is cleaned is, save an occasional cart, the only vehicle one meets along the principal roads ; and, besides carrying the letters it did, until the new Euhr-Sieg Eailway was lately completed, the whole parcel de- livery as well as passenger traffic of the district, though it holds but four passengers. Here and there a new house of stone or brick is now seen it is near a railway station that such an innovation is most likely to appear but as a general rule the village cottages differ only in size, and are constructed as follows : A framework of timber, painted black, is filled in with wattles and clay, white- washed outside, the black stripes of the wood con- trasting effectively with the white walls, and giving an external appearance of ornateness and neatness, by no means sustained by the real condition of things either within or around the house. Seen from without, too, most of these cottages look lofty and spacious ; but the room for the family is really small, the upper part serving as a hay-loft or barn, and half the lower being pig-sty, cow-house, and stable, if a horse is kept. Small, indeed, is the attention to cleanliness or comfort in any part of the dwelling ; the English visitor finds that dirt is not peculiar to the Irishman's cabin. No approach to the drawing-room furniture and luxury, 234 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the piano, &c., of which Heir Riehl deplores the appearance in some parts of Germany, has yet made its way into Westphalia, south of the Coal Basin. Like their cottages, and the hills and valleys around them, the villagers too have a family likeness, at which Eiehl must rejoice, as the very embodiment of primitive custom and unbroken uniformity of life. The artist, he says, who would paint mediaeval German faces with historical truth, must take his models from among the peasants, whose features, in some districts, resemble at this day the effigies of princes and nobles in churches of the thirteenth century. Michelet, interpreting such a phenomenon, might regard the resemblance as a proof of actual consanguinity on the part of the peasant with exalted personages of an earlier age. ' Le serf en moyen age, est-il libre ? Sa femme en pratique n'est pas plus sienne que 1'esclave antique. Les enfants, sont-ils ses enfants ? Old et non. II est tel village oil la race entiere reproduit aujourd'hui les traits des anciens sicgneurs.' If there really is a family resemblance of this kind to mediaeval grandees on the part of the Sauerland peasantry, one must own that it is not more flattering to the beauty than to the morality of the former, for the latter are not a comely race. In plain truth, from the baby (and the villages swarm with babies in a manner formidable for the France of the future, if hopeful for the manufacturer in the Ruhr Basin) to the grown man or woman, there is an all-pervading ugli- ness, which no visitor can fail to remark. Other causes, however, than a common ancestry of oppressors, WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 235 may account for the family likeness, as well as the rude looks and manners of these villagers ; and one seeks some other explanation, the more that there was in Westphalia one class of peasants with peculiar free- dom and rights of self-government ; although there was likewise a large class of serfs, and old men are still to be met who remember being called ' sclaven ' in their childhood. Freemen or serfs, however, they all suffered alike from war, invasion, and rapine ; and the blood of the conqueror and the freebooter may thus be mingled with theirs. But the general likeness comes, doubtless, in part of a legitimate family relation- ship, for some names are so common that their pos- sessors are distinguished by numbers.* The severe out-door labour which all the women undergo, is another cause of coarse-featured resemblance, and is at the same time in all probability the main cause both of the persistent boorishness of the people, and of the uncleanliness of their houses. Captain Burton com- ments with satisfaction on the superior physique of German over both Brazilian and American women, which he traces to out-door labour. ' Not a few,' he says, ' of the (Brazilian) women possess that dainty delicate beauty which strangers remark in the cities of * Speaking of a similar circumstance in his own department of La Creuse, in the centre of France, M. Leonce de Lavergne says : ' Chaque village a du etre a I'origine la residence d'une seule famille, car les habitans portent presque toujours le meme nom.' Economic rrtrale de la France. The present writer was likewise struck, in traversing the villages of La Creuse, by a physical resemblance of the villagers ; but these, unlike the peasantry of Sauerland, are a very good-looking race, due probably to a happier history, and lighter labours in the field on the part of the women. 236 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the Union. The want of out-door labour shows its effect as palpably in the Brazil as in the Uujted States. The sturdy German fraus who land at Rio de Janeiro look like three American women rolled into one. Travellers are fond of recording how they see with a pang girls and women employed in field-work. But they forget that in moderation there is no labour more wholesome, none better calculated to develop the form, or to produce stout and healthy progeny.' * The due moderation, however, is not observed in the mountains of Westphalia, nor in many other parts of Germany ; and Herr Riehl himself is driven to admit that the looks of the women suffer from the severity of their labours. The imposition of heavy field labour upon women is no doubt traceable in part to primitive German life, or the primitive division of employments man, the warrior ; woman, the labourer. But mo- dern causes preserve the custom : the younger men are absent in the army ; and those who have served their time, are tempted from the farm by the mines and manufactures around them. In Siegerland it is not uncommon for peasants to be co-proprietors in a mine which they work at themselves. Female husbandry becomes thus the cardinal feature in the rural economy, and the great extent of ground under meadow and wood makes such husbandry possible, the amount of tillage being small. The rich irrigation of the valleys yields four or five cuttings of grass, from which the cattle get the greater part of their food ; and the hill- * ' Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil,' i. 302. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-^1869. 237 sides are cropped for the most part only in the year after the removal of the wood, which is their main growth ; the ' wood-rights,' like the ' water-rights,' being carefully guarded, and every gemeinde, or com- mune, having both its ' wood-overseer ' and its ' water- overseer.' Several causes combine to make wood here one of the principal objects of husbandry : the infer- tility of the hills, the continued rise for two centuries in the price of wood, and the great demand for bark for tanning, which is one of the chief local industries skins coining for the purpose to S.iegen from all parts of the world. It is the old custom, however, to esti- mate a peasant property by its amount of meadow land, though the hill-side attached to it may be three or four times as large. A plough as old as the time of Arminius is a sign of the tenacity with which ancient custom is still clung to in this hitherto isolated district ; and the introduction of improved agricultural machines will greatly lighten the labours of the women, by enabling the men to get through a much greater amount of work during their periodical visits to the farm. The persistence of ancient custom is doubtless attri- butable in part to the environment of the physical world. Mountains have played a great part in shaping the history of mankind ; they have been staunch guardians of customs, and obstacles to new ideas and arts. There is a literal truth in Shakespeare's phrase, ' mountainous error,' which may perhaps have been present to the fancy of the poet, though the connection between mountains and custom in this literal sense is 238 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the converse of that in his verse.* But higher moun- tains than any in Sauerland or Siegerland can no longer shut out movement or change. Already the manu- facturer's villa rises along the iron road which joins Siegen with the Basin of the Ruhr ; the steam-hammer resounds in the valley of the Lenne ; and long trains laden with sulphur from the Siegena mines leave the station of Grevenbrlick for the markets of all central Europe. It is happy for Westphalia that the future of Germany does not depend, as Ilerr lliehl contends, on the immobility of the peasantry the steadfastness of their adherence to immemorial usage. The order of things which rests on such a basis is apt to give way of a sudden, like the mountain and ' mountainous error ' which the railway removes. It is on peasant property in land, not on peasant custom, that the stability of Germany rests ; and sixty years ago Prussian statesmen arrived at that conviction. ' Prussia saw with terror, in 1808,' says Gustav Freytng, 'how insecure was a State which had so great a claim on the bodies, and so little on the hearts, of its people.' The worst traits of the German bauer his boorislmess, his obstinacy, his laziness at work for another belong to the past ; they are the vestiges of ages of barbarism, servitude, and military oppression ; while his best qualities his so- briety, honesty, and thrift for his family are the offspring of peasant property. That the future of Germany rests on the peasant is * ' What custom wills, in nil things should we do it, The dust on antique time would lay unswept, And mountainous error be too highly honped For truth to over-peer.' Coriohtnus, act ii. sc. 3. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 239 but half true ; and so far as it is true, it is so for a different reason and in a different manner from what Herr Kiehl has in view. It is so because property and education are elevating his condition and enlarging both his understanding and the sphere of his affections. He has gotten a country in the room of a master. But the future of Germany rests also with the miner and the mechanic ; and the region of Westphalia from which we can best augur it is the Basin of the Ruhr,* where the bauer flourishes most, and where mining and manufacturing are carried on on a scale which, for Sauerland and Siegerland, is as yet only a prospect. ' If you would see what Germany is doing,' said M. Emile de Laveleye to the writer, ' go to the Euhr Basin ; ' and during the visit which followed the suggestion (though made chiefly in reference to the intelligence of German enterprise, and the wisdom of Prussian government), he was often reminded of the attention which M. de Laveleye shows in his works to the physical geography, the geology especially, of the countries whose economic condition, productions, and industrial occupations he describes. The mountains of South Westphalia with their mineral wealth, the coal measures of the Euhr Basin, and the diluvial flat to the north, with its rude iapgs and moors, divide West- phalia into three distinct economic, as into three geo- logical, regions. It has been the doctrine of some eminent writers, Auguste Comte at their head, that the influence of nature's powers, and of local conditions, * Called also the ' Westpbalian Coal Field,' though its bounds extend westward far beyond the limits of the modem province of Westphalia. 240 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. such as soil, climate, &c., over human society, decreases as civilisation advances. But the truth is, that the number and force of physical causes operating on the condition of man increase with human progress, and as local resources are brought more and more into play. A new age opened for mankind when iron was discovered, and the influence of iron on the fortunes of nations becomes constantly greater. The gold of Cali- fornia and Australia had no influence on the original inhabitants ; twenty years ago it was still inoperative on mankind ; it would have continued so but for geo- logy and navigation ; it has by their aid created two nations who, it is already evident, must have no small share in shaping the future history of both hemispheres. Coal played no significant part in English history a century ago. It has since trebled the population, shifted the political centre, and produced a social revolution. The coal of the Euhr Basin had no effect on the for- tunes of Westphalia fifty years ago ; fifteen years ago its effect was but trifling ; it has since raised the pro- vince to the first rank of industrial Europe. The whole tendency of increasing physical knowledge is to dis- cover new natural forces and agents, for man's use or abuse, and to bring into action for good or for evil the special resources of every locality. There is, indeed, one class of local physical forces of which the influence on man decreases as his knowledge and power advance, those of which the mountain may be taken as the symbol, the forces of obstruction and isolation. The mine, on the other hand, may be re- garded as the symbol of physical forces which gain WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 241 influence as civilisation advances ; and the railway itself the child of the mine removes the mountain and opens the mine. An analogous distinction applies to the study of nature. Mr. Arnold, writing on German education, argues that ' the study of nature is the study of non-human forces, of human limitation and passivity. The contemplation of human force and activity tends constantly to heighten our own force ; the contempla- tian of human limitation and passivity tends to check it.' The contemplation of natural powers by which man was imprisoned and baffled tended no doubt to reduce him to immobility and stagnation ; it is not so with that study of nature which shows how dominion over nature maybe acquired, and prompts to the acquisition. The mine is the creature of geology, as the steam- engine is of mechanics. This reflection was brought forcibly to the writer's mind on arriving in the Euhr Basin from Sauerland. A few hours after he had been wearily watching one afternoon a set of labourers in the valley of the Lenne, lifting stones lazily one at a time from a roadside quarry into a cart, which half the number of men might have filled in a fourth of the time, he found himself by the side of a coal-mine near Dortmund, from which a steam-engine was pump- ing several thousand feet of water a minute night and day, while around was a colony of miners English, Irish, and Germans all looking the incarnation of activity and force, though with striking differences of physical type, and among them the President of the Prussian Mining and Iron Works Company,* a man * Mr, W. T. Mulvany. To this gentleman, and to his brother Mr. T. J . R 242 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. to whose enterprise, energy, and sagacity the Euhr Basin owes not a little of its extraordinary progress in the last fifteen years. It was like passing from ' a land in which it seemed to be always afternoon,' to one in which there was no night. Forty minutes by express from Dortmund and one is at Essen, in the centre of the coal-field, surrounded by manufactories and foundries, but chiefly remarkable for the great cast-steel works of Mr. Krupp, who may well be regarded as the representative man of the Ruhr Basin. He began business at the age of fifteen, with two workmen and a small local market, and twenty years ago his establishment was still a small one. Now the buildings form in themselves a considerable town ; the steel-works alone give employment to upwards of 8,000 men, who with the families of those who are married, make a population of 25,000 maintained by this single establishment, exclusive of 2,000 men in Mr. Krupp's employment at coal-mines near Essen, at blast furnaces on the Rhine, and at iron-pits on the Rhine and at Nassau. The steel-works included in 1867, 412 melting-furnaces, 195 steam-engines, some of them of a thousand horse-power, 40 steam-hammers, 110 smiths' forges, 675 different machines ; and all these numbers now are exceeded. The works are con- nected by special lines of railway above fifteen miles in length, and the gasworks of the establishment arc equal to those of the city of Cologne. 'The administration,' as Mr. Samuelson says, 'is like that of a small State. Mulvany, the author is under much obligation for information and j_ r uidiuicp in thr Kuhr Ba^-in. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 243 All the heads of the technical departments are pupils of the various polytechnic schools in Germany. The commercial staff includes a jurist, by whom all con- tracts are settled and legal questions determined. The foremen have all risen from the ranks.' Unfortunately Mr. Krupp is not only a representative of the pro- digious progress of industry in the Euhr Basin, but an example of the influence of political causes on its pro- ductions a class of causes which most English econo- mists seem deliberately to ignore, although they are among the chief conditions determining the occupations and wealth of mankind. In 1866 the steel produced at Mr. Krupp's works was valued at nearly a million ; but the greater part was probably material of war. Yet there is good reason to believe that even at his works the amount of production would be greater were this a world of good government and peace ; and what would be the increase in the other manufactories of the Euhr Basin, whose business is dependent on peace ? It may be affirmed as beyond question that the only impediment to Prussian progress is war ; and although the blame hitherto has rested chiefly, not on the govern- ment of Prussia, but on the military despotisms sur- rounding it, Prussia itself is now in a condition to cast the sword into the scale of peace, and is responsible accordingly. In most respects the Prussian govern- ment has, it must be admitted, been for half a century singularly sagacious and beneficent, and there is one point in which its wisdom is specially illustrated in Mr. Krupp's works. He has but few Prussian patents, these, too, only for considerable inventions ; and K 2 244 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. the discrimination with which patents are granted in Prussia is alone sufiicient to enable Prussian manufac- turers to distance before long those of a country in which to make even the slightest change is now at- tended with danger, in which it is perilous in the highest degree either to patent a great invention or to work it without one. Prussia is fast acquiring all the peculiar advantages to which England owed her earlier superiority coal, iron, mechanical invention, and good means of communication and adding to them condi- tions of success, of which England is deprived by her own laws including what Bacon has called ' a law of neglect.' The chief point to be considered in com- paring the prospects of England and Prussia is not their present relative condition, but their relative condition now as compared with what it was twenty years ago. Twenty years ago the Ruhr Basin was nowhere in the industrial race ; now it produces nearly half as much coal as the great northern coal-field of England : twenty years ago it had only just completed a single line of railway ; now the Basin is a network of branches, con- necting, not only the towns, but the principal manu- factories and collieries with the three main lines which traverse it. The following figures show the rate at which the production of coal has advanced : Date Enplish tont* Date English tons Date English tons Date English tons ix.-, 1 1,7/1,454 18.16 :i,. r >lo,r)02 1S81 4,964,621 1R6S 9,276,685 1 852 i,92i,9<-2 1857 3,635,256 , 1862 5.701, '.Mil 1866 !p,:i-jn.:,ii:i 1853 2,146,275 i 1858 3,898,502 1863 6,300,981 1867 10,526,015 1854 2,670,099 1859 8.7!3,356 1864 8,146,4:i3 1868 11,226,747 18.'.5 3,252,323 1860 4,276,254 ! I * The Prussian tonne is a measure of capacity, aud varies therefore in WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 245 The immense increase of production shown in these figures is mainly attributable to the introduction of railways and the low charge for the carriage of coal. Down to 1851 the Euhr and the Ehine were the only means of transport in districts beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the collieries, and the greater part of the coal was of an inferior kind, raised where it came to the surface by small collieries along the Euhr. In 1851 the Cologne-Minden Eailway came into use for the transport of coal, and led not only to deep-pit sinking, and the discovery of seams of superior coal in other parts of the basin, but also to the establishment of iron- works and other manufactures, affording a local market for the coal. To this local market, down to 1859, it was in a great measure confined. In that year the charge for railway carriage of coal for long dis- tances was reduced to one pfennig per centner (a tenth of a penny per cwt.) per German mile,* and the above figures show the subsequent increase of production. The railways and coal-mines render each other reci- procal service ; the carriage of Westphalian coal is now one of the most important branches of traffic on several of the chief Prussian lines, and the low rates at which it is carried enable it to find a distant market. The projected reduction of the rate for the transport of iron ore to the same tariff as that for coal, when carried into effect, will greatly augment the market for coal as weight as applied to different articles coal and iron, for example. The quantity of coal in a tonne is about one-fifth of an English ton. In some of the reports in English blue-books the tonne is translated ' ton/ which may mislead readers. * The German mile in about 4| English. 246 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. well as for manufactures of iron. Until the last few years the Ruhr Basin excelled only in the manufacture of steel ; but its iron manufactures are now of the highest quality. The chief dilliculty with which the iron manufacturer has hitherto had to contend is the great cost of the carriage of the ore from the mines in Siegerland, the Rhine Province, Nassau, Hesse -Darm- stadt, and Hanover. The iron-mines are situated for the most part in mountainous districts, some not yet approached by railways, others without even roads to connect them with railways or rivers, the ore being often drawn by oxen or cows, when dry weather per- mits, across fields or through woods to the nearest road. Nevertheless, under all these disadvantages, the iron manufactures of the Ruhr Basin have trebled in amount in the last ten years ; the improvement in quality is even greater ; and the iron-works of Duisburg may soon become as celebrated as the steel-works of Essen. Of the progress of textile manufactures, Elberfeld affords a striking example. A correspondent of the ' Times,' who recently described it as ' fifteen years ago a manufacturing town, containing 0,500 inhabi- tants,* sinking lower and lower into the slough of pau- perism,' ascribes its emergence to a prudent change in the system of pauper relief. But prevention is better than cure, though many English politicians seem unable to comprehend it. The system of poor-relief has doubt- less had its effect; but the extinction of the causes of poverty, and the increase of employment in manu- * Query, .'!0,r>00 ? The population <>f Elberfeld must have amounted t< at least .'J<;,00<> at the time referred to. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR VASIN, 1868-1869. 247 factures, have been the principal cause of the diminu- tion of pauperism in Elberfeld-Barmen, now a town of 100,000 inhabitants. The descent of peasant lands by custom to the eldest son in several of the provinces of Prussia Westphalia for example* was formerly a source of constant pauperism in the towns, which, before the great recent development of manufactures, were unable to absorb in industrial employment the immigration of the younger members of the family. But the extension of industry of late years has been such, that, but for war and rumours of war, it is pro- bable that pauperism (which has, in fact, greatly de- creased, notwithstanding a great increase of population) would be extinct in the Euhr Basin. The relation between capital and labour is naturally one of the points to which an English economist's attention turns in contemplating a region which has so * The present province of Westphalia, being composed of a number of different districts, formerly under different sovereign princes, lay and ec- clesiastical, had formerly a great variety of laws and customs, some of which are still retained in particular towns and districts. By a law passed in 1860, and not retrospective in its operation on prior marriages, the law of descent is as follows. A community of property is established between man and wife, unless otherwise stipulated by marriage contract, respecting which also there are certain restrictions and stipulations. On the death of either, the survivor is entitled to a fixed proportion, and the children to other fixed proportions, depending on the number of children ; but no actual division of the property takes place until the death or second mar- riage of the surviving parent, unless a previous division has been provided for by a disposition made by both parents. The surviving parent has also a right to retain the whole property on paynient,to the children of the value of their shares ; and other provisions respecting the distribution are laid down to prevent the necessity of parcelling lands. Usually the parents settle during their lifetime which of the children is to take the land, and how the shares of the others are to be paid off', and the family property is very rarely divided. 248 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. great an industrial future before it. Since the recent change in the Prussian law permitting combinations of workmen, there have been a few strikes, but regular trade-unions have not yet been organised in this part of Prussia. Nevertheless the younger employers and they are probably more en rapport with the spirit of the times than their seniors, whose ideas on the subject are based on experience of the past seemed to the writer, wherever he had opportunities of inquiry on the subject, strongly impressed with a conviction that the relations of employer and employed are about to assume a new phase throughout Germany. It is a remarkable fact, however and one which proves that the former state of the law was not by any means the only cause of the amicable relations between capitalists and workmen that Mr. Krtipp in business for forty years, and with not less than 10,000 men for some years in his employment has never had a dispute with a workman ; a fact doubtless ascribable in a great measure to the admirable institutions and regulations for the benefit of the workmen, of which an account will be found in a pamphlet published in Paris, in 18G7, entitled ' Acierie de M. Fried. Krupp, a Essen : Institutions et Dispositions etablies dans le but d'ame- liorer la situation morale et physique de scs ouvriers.' By one of the provisions of the establishment, every workman becomes entitled, after twenty years' work, to a retiring annual pension of half his last year's salary, and after thirty-five years he may retire on full pay. Such regulations, however, effective as they must be, do not appear to explain the extraordinary concord WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 249 and order perpetually maintained in this enormou establishment. From 1,000 to 1,400 men are fre- quently engaged at one operation, such as casting an ingot ; they work as one man ; and the same harmony and regimental order prevail throughout. It is doubt- less traceable in part to the military training which every Prussian receives. But even at coal-mines, where the same regimental order is not required, and where the upper miners were English, I was assured that they preferred to have Germans to work with ; the prefer- ence being founded on the superior docility and sobriety of the Germans. It is curious to find local prejudices stronger than national ones among English miners in the Westphalian coal-field. A north-countryman who works amicably with the Germans, will resent the intrusion of a Cornishman. ' They are not English- men, they are Cornishmen,' said an English miner to me of two poor fellows who had come over on an unsuccessful expedition for work. On the other hand, as regards the effect of Prussian military training and State supervision on the national character, there are occasions on which the superior individuality of the Englishman is conspicuous. A very large coal pro- prietor in the Ruhr Basin, employing many English as well as Germans, assured me that when an accident occurs the Englishman will do on the moment the best thing to be done, while the Germans stand at attention waiting for orders, probably given to them promptly by their English comrade. As an individual, the Eng- lishman Z6-, if I may venture to express such an opinion, naturally superior to the German. His history down 250 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOirY. to the last fifty years was a much happier one, his personality was more respected, and, what is no small matter, he was and still is (leaving out the agricultural labourer) better fed. Among the Germans at the West- phalian mines the type of the Englishman appeared to me by comparison heroic and majestic. Germany has only had sixty years of emancipation from serfdom, little more than forty of deliverance from perpetual war ; her military training (useful as it would be for a short period) is beyond measure oppressive when pro- tracted for three years ; and peasant property has not yet had time to produce its best results. ' Les Alle- mands sont trop gouvernes,' says M. Emile de Lave- leye, ' mais bien gouvernes les Frai^ais trop gouvernes et mal gouvernes.' If, however, there are institutions in Prussia which impair in certain respects the free action of the indivi- dual man, and the spirit of self-reliance, there are others which tend eminently to foster self-control, intelligence, providence, and several of the best essen- tials of true individuality.* The superior sobriety of the German is one constant manifestation of self-com- mand of a self-command which accompanies him throughout his day's work as well as in his leisure, * As regards the effect of education upon the capabilities of the work- man, I have been told by some English employers that an English work- man who has been engaged about a part of a machine for a year, though very likely more handy than any of his German comrades, will probably have no conception of it as a whole, while the Germans have it all in their heads, and can draw it, so that they arc more ripe for promotion, or to set up for themselves. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 251 rendering him much less liable to make careless blun- ders or to run reckless and useless risks. The infe- riority of the Englishman, in this respect, arises not only from the want of intellectual education, but still more from the absence of that motive for general thrift and forethought, the prospect of succeeding to, or of buying, a piece of land and a house, which is the ma- terial basis of much that* is best in the continental nations. The workman in the town does not feel him- self severed from the country, or doomed to remain a mere day-labourer so long as he can work. It is characteristic of the difference between England and Germany that a good means in the latter an estate in land, a bauer-gut a peasant property in land, while in England the only goods in popular thought are perish- able articles. In the Euhr Basin the wealth of the peasantry has, like that of the manufacturers and miners, and in a great measure in consequence of that of the latter, enormously increased in the last twenty years, and the so-called bauer is sometimes a man worth above 15,000/. The daughter of one of these men, near Dortmund, married the other day, and received 20,000 thalers (3,000/.) down as her marriage portion, besides which she will become entitled to 4,000/. more on her father's death. In the houses of such wealthy farmers, the modern furniture, the piano, and the ' female accomplishments ' of which Herr Eiehl deplores the introduction, may be found : though the farming is still generally rough, and the uncourteous manners of a time 252 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. when the bauer hated the gentleman as an oppressor survive like the moat round the countiy gentleman's house. Among the peasantry, the smaller class of proprietors here, as in Sauerland and Siegerlaud, are for the most part dirty and slovenly in their houses and farmyards ; and an Irish gentleman living amongst them remarked to me, ' They seem of the Irish small farmer's opinion, that, " where there is muck, there is luck." ' Cleanli- ness has no nationality, it is the growth of freedom, self-respect, and prosperity ; and it will rapidly grow in Westphalia with the development of its resources, the ingress of knowledge and change, and the increase of general wealth. Not long ago the same plough referred to before as of the age of Arminius was still in use in the Kuhr Basin, and all the implements of the farm were of a primitive kind. Now steam threshing- machines are common, lent or hired from one farm to another ; though we are often positively assured in England by writers who seem to affect never to have been out of it, that peasant properties, small farms, and machinery are incompatible. Westphalia, the Euhr Basin in particular, may be regarded as the type of Germany, of its unhappy early history, its recent good government and rapid progress, the vast future before it, and the formidable competi- tion before England. ' If you would see what Ger- many is doing,' said M. do Laveleye, ' go to the Kulir Basin ; ' but the chief lesson to be learned regards what Germany is about to do. What will the Kuhr Basin be in another twenty years ? All the elements WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1868-1869. 253 of England's earlier industrial superiority, coal, iron, mechanical power, are, as 'before said, rapidly becoming the common property of Germany, which brings with them to the development of its great natural resources, moral and intellectual advantages due to no national superiority on the part of the Germans, but to greater sagacity and foresight on the part of their statesmen. Of England, moreover, though not of Germany, Herr Eiehl's maxim is true, that the custom of the peasant is the sole foundation of present order, the sole safe- guard against future anarchy. And the peasant is driven to the town. 254 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL WESTPHALIA AND THE RUIffi BASIN, 18G9-1870. THE marks of South Westphalian progress, since the previous year, which met the eye last autumn in the valley of the Lenne the increase of houses of brick and stone, of people, carts, public conveyances and private carriages on the roads, of new faces of a different type near the stations, of villas and factories by the river- side made a scene so changed that the first impression conveyed was that the truer a description of the south of the province, as it appeared a twelvemonth before, the farther from truth was it now. Such, however, was soon seen not to be the case beyond the immediate vicinity of the great thoroughfare of the new business and life of the region, the railway. Not far from it were roads even more lonely and silent than the year before ; and the very new highway of progress which had so transformed and augmented the industry of the valley through which it winds its own course, had ex- tinguished altogether the simple industries of valleys adjacent. Eivers formerly determined in a great mea- sure the economy of the whole district; its metal ma- nufactures were carried on by the aid of water-power, and planted themselves in the river valleys ; the men congregating there, while the dry valleys were left WESTPHALIA AND THE EUHR BASIN, 1869-1870. 255 during most of the year to the husbandry of women, or to nature. Iron and copper works of a primitive kind, together with charcoal-burning, gave formerly a considerable amount of employment in places where they are now dying out before coal and steam in the distance. In the valley of the Bigga, a river adjacent to the Lenne, there was a few years ago a good deal of metal pro- duction which the Euhr-Sieg Bailway has arrested, but which a branch line is expected soon to resuscitate on a grander scale. Even in the Lenne valley itself, al- though many tall chimneys have risen, though the steam-cylinder is fast driving out the water-wheel, and the steam-hammer the old tilt-hammer, the production of textiles by power has not yet begun ; and a good part of the clothing business is done as it was in the middle ages. The shoemaker still goes round the farmhouses and the mines in the neighbourhood with the implements of his trade ; the owner of the premises supplying the leather, and the stock of shoes being made on the spot, as the author has had ocular proof. The weaver, too, makes his periodical call at the cottage, and works up the thread which the housewife has spun from her own flax, dried in the sun the process here substituted for steeping. But if the manufacturing side of South Westphalian industry is far as yet in degree, if not in time, from the complete revolution that awaits it, the agricultural side is altogether unaltered. It is not here that M. Emile de Laveleye can find evidence of the superiority of the German over the Celt as a cnltivateur d'elite ; unless, 256 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. indeed, for his admirable irrigation and draining, which are however of no modern date. All along the Euhr-Sieg line itself, as poor oat crops were seen last August as one could wish never again to behold in Ireland. In fact, the only tolerable crop the author saw, turned out on inquiry to be the produce of seed imported from Ireland. The snow is seldom off the ground before the end of February, when all the labour of the family is needed to put in at once the more important rye and potatoes, so the oats are sown too late. The rye itself is not a magnificent success ; and most of the wheat consumed in the valley is imported from Hungary. The harvest returns for the year 1869, recently published by the Prussian Minister of Agriculture, place Westphalia lowest but one among the departments for the yield of the principal grain crops, wheat, rye, barley, and oats ; Schleswig-Holsteiri coming first, and the other provinces ranking in order as follows Pomerania, Prussia, Hanover, Rhine Pro- vince, Brandenburg and Saxony, Silesia, Hesse, Posen, Westphalia and Hohenzollern. In some of the pro- vinces, the seasons doubtless in a great measure deter- mined this order ; but in the South Westphalian hills, the sterility of the soil and the system of husbandry together, must ensure feeble cereal returns. Above the left bank of the Bigga an isolated plateau of De- vonian limestone appears like a geological island surrounded by rocks of Lenne-schiefer ; * and here * Under this plateau lies in the Biggathal the smart little town of Attendorn, overlooked by the ancient schloss of a wealthy nobleman who never cornea near it, and whose wife, it is said, has never seen it. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1869-1870. 257 much heavier grain crops were to be seen than any- where else around, just before the last harvest. But although the immediate cause of the light harvests of Sauerland is the general sterility of the soil, it is certain that Flemish husbandry would produce very different results. The ultimate cause is that the women have to do almost all the farm work, including the feeding of cattle, in addition to the work of the house, which includes the spinning of thread and the mending of clothes ; and, considering all they have to do, they do it surprisingly well. Besides their ordinary labours in and out of doors, the women do likewise the extraordinary work of the place when a sudden emergency arises, such as a fire. They run to the house and form in double line, one side handing up buckets of water, while the other side hands down rescued articles. Even in the town of Siegen, this is the usual course when a fire takes place ; the women supplying the water and removing property, while the men, save those working the en- gine, stand by looking on. Fires are of frequent and destructive occurrence in the villages, from the number of thatched roofs separated only by small gardens. Every cottage seems to be insured ; but if fire insurance has its economical side, it does not consist in a ten- dency to diminish the number of fires. Slated roofs are now increasing under a law prohibiting new thatches within a certain distance of other houses, and by degrees the old incendiary will disappear altogether. In spite of the scanty harvests and the indifferent husbandry of South Westphalia, it would be a serious s 258 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOZfY. mistake to suppose that its rural economy offers an argument against a system of property which doubles the income of the family by the addition it makes to the earnings of the man at his trade, more than doubles the happiness of the whole family, notwith- standing the hard work it throws on the women. It would be better for the man to give up his trade than his land. He has indeed to import his wheat from Hungary, but he is able to pay for it ; and the high prices of meat, butter, milk, vegetables, and house- rent, which are such grievous calamities to the English labourer, are to him sources of profit. Although the German nation is not one remarkable for attention to personal appearance, the children in these villages are all comfortably clothed, and are never seen bare-footed, as both children and adults too often arc in the plain of the Khine, where so many families are without a bauer-gut. In these villages, too, it should be remem- bered that many of the people are themselves the children of serfs of sclaven, as the author has heard them say ; a term which, though not the correct one, for their legal status was not that of slavery, shows how abject their condition really was, and from what prostration they have risen under their land system to independence and comfort, in a period during which the peasantry of a great part of England have socially and economically sunk. The rate of wages in Sauerland and Siegerland varies considerably in different places, and is generally lower than in the IJuhr Basin. One employer has for several years, to the author's knowledge, paid 30 per cent. WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1869-1870. 259 more for labour at one mine than at another about five-and-twenty miles off; the reason being that he cannot buy out the small proprietors round the mine where the rate is highest, and many of them, on the other hand, object to receiving his labourers as lodgers no bad evidence of the independence of their posi- tion. Another cause of inequality of wages as com- pared with the rates at the coal-mines in the Euhr Basin, lies in the cost of carriage from the iron-mines in the southern hills to the railway stations, and again the much higher railway tariff for iron ore than for coal. Coal comes out of the mine ready for use ; iron ores on the contrary contain only a variable per- centage of iron, and are valueless until after a costly process of smelting. The inferior ores, therefore, which are necessarily extracted along with the higher qual- ities, would not repay the present cost of transport to the place of manufacture, and therefore do not even repay the cost of extraction. An iron-mine so situated cannot pay the same rate of wages as a coal-mine in the .Ruhr Basin, with its own branch line to a railway, or to an iron factory in connection with it. Whatever conclusions Eicardo's hypotheses may lead to, the real economic conditions of production and distribution have nowhere equalised wages, profits, or rent ; they have, in fact, in recent times produced new inequalities through the different rates at which industrial develop- ment has proceeded in different localities, the different natural advantages of different localities, and the rise of such a multitude of special industries and such continual change in their conditions, that omniscience 260 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. only could estimate their prospects, or enable com- petition to equalise them. In the case of the iron- mines of Sauerland and Siegerland, however, the pro- jected reduction of the railway freight for iron ore and the construction of good roads to the mines, may raise wages to the rates at the coal-mines in the Ruhr Basin ; but migration to the latter, although some takes place, does not do so, and cannot, because the iron-mine cannot afford it, yet is not abandoned. Admirable maps are published from year to year showing every mine and railway in the region over Avhich the clastic name of the Ruhr Basin continues to stretch, with the extension of mining industry north and south of the Ruhr. But only a map indicating every new house and factor}-, and all the new preparations for building, mining, and manufacture, could give a representation on paper of the gigantic growth of this young industrial world since the author described it but a year ago. Villages grown into towns ; towns spreading to meet one another ; embryo towns and villages emerging; the population increasing under one's eyes with the immigration of workmen from more distant parts of Prussia, from Bohemia, from these islands themselves; miners from Cornwall, Wales, and the north ; weavers from Lancashire and Ulster; capitalists coming even from France; every- thing save that long unworkmanlike pipe which disgraces the German nation displaying a rapidity of industrial movement which we are accustomed to asso- ciate with the pace of America only. The causes of this WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN, 1869-1870. 261 prodigious advance are partly mechanical doubtless ; cheap and abundant coal and a good system of railways must soon change the face of any region. And the industry of this district appears to derive considerable advantage from the combination in some of the largest establishments of the business of coal-mining with that of iron and steel manufacture, contrary as that may appear to the division of labour. The iron-works are supplied with coal coming straight from the mine at very little additional cost, and the coal-mine in turn has an immediate demand for its produce. The rail- way again which brings iron ore to the factories from the Ehine Province and the south of Westphalia carries back coal and coke and gets a return traffic for the same waggons. The textile manufactures again of the Basin have a steady demand from a great mining and 1 o O iron-factory population around them, as well as from a considerable rural population deriving great profits from the large market for agricultural produce. To the mechanical causes of the rapid progress of this part of Prussia must be added political, legal, and moral causes ; the confidence in peace springing up with the decline of despotism in France, the education, intelligence, and sober and orderly character of the German people, with a land system superior to any other in its facilities of transfer, and securing (as happily many others do) a wide distribution of landed property. Coal-mines and steam locomotion, however well combined, cannot raise costly factories and build- ings on ground which entails, obscure titles, and a tortuous technical and dilatory jurisprudence mark out 202 LAND SYSTEMS AND INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. as feudal territory ; nor will even aii extensive foreign trade, with its changes and chances, supply the place of a brisk and increasing home market afforded by a large, contented, and well-to-do pop illation in both town and country around. The Prussian land system, resembling the French and the Belgian in respect of the simplicity and security by which a transfer is effected a signature in the pre- sence of a notary, followed by an entry in a local registry, being all that is requisite is superior to either the French or Belgian in point of economy ; the duty being but one per cent., and the notary's fee a mere trifle. Some idea of the impediment the Eng- lish system of conveyancing puts in the way of indus- trial progress may be gathered from the fact that the capitalist in the Eulir Basin grumbles at having to pay one per cent, in addition to his purchase-money for an absolutely safe and marketable title ; and that, after all, one per cent, is a considerable tax. Suppose a manufacturer pays 10,000/. for an advantageous site for a factory, with ground for his workmen's houses and his own residence, he is not in a better position to pay 100/. to the Government for having so many other hundreds to pay to the vendor, and being called on im- mediately for heavy additional disbursements to com- plete his operations before he can get any return. In France, in a similar case, he would have above GOO/, to pay to the State instead of but IOO/. ; he would, how- ever, then be as sale as in I'rusMa. In England, sup- pi iiin trouve pen d'aussi inTiites. Le sol tient prc-que toute sa valcur mm dc la nature, inais du travail de riionnne. (''ot dans crtte rc^inu pen favorise'e que 1'nM tmuvf 1 a jriculi iir'- flamande avcc tons Irs curactrres qui la distin- guent.' F.i-iituunir rural/-