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 CHAPTERS 
 
 AVB 
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 OS THB 
 
 IRISH LAND QUESTION,
 
 Ex Libria 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 CHAPTERS 
 
 AND 
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 IEISH LAND QUESTION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL 
 
 KBPKINTED FROM "PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY" 
 AND HANSARD'S DEBATES. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 LONDON 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER 
 
 1870
 
 H D 
 
 s J r JJNIVERSTTY OF f!. T TFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 Vn5 
 
 OF PEASANT PEOPEIETOES, 
 
 PART I. 
 
 1. IN the regime of peasant properties, as in that of slavery, 
 the whole produce belongs to a single owner, and the distinction of 
 rent, profits, and wages, does not exist. In all other respects, the 
 two states of society are the extreme opposites of each other. The 
 one is the state of greatest oppression and degradation to the labour- 
 ing class. The other is that in which they are the most uncontrolled 
 arbiters of their own lot. 
 
 The advantage, however, of small properties in land, is one of 
 the most disputed questions in the range of political economy. On 
 the Continent, though there are some dissentients from the prevail- 
 ing opinion, the benefit of having a numerous proprietary population 
 exists in the minds of most people in the form of an axiom. But 
 English authorities are either unaware of the judgment of Conti- 
 nental agriculturists, or are content to put it aside, on the plea of 
 their having no experience of large properties in favourable cir- 
 cumstances : the advantage of large properties being only felt where 
 there are also large farms ; and as this, in arable districts, implies 
 a greater accumulation of capital than usually exists on the Con- 
 tinent, the great Continental estates, except in the case of grazing 
 farms, are mostly let out for cultivation in small portions. There 
 is some truth in this ; but the argument admits of being retorted ; 
 for if the Continent knows little, by experience, of cultivation on 
 a large scale and by large capital, the generality of English 
 writers are no better acquainted practically with peasant pro-
 
 2 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 prietors, and have almost always the most erroneous ideas of 
 their social condition and mode of life. Yet the old traditions 
 even of England are on the same side with the general opinion of 
 the Continent. The " yeomanry" who were vaunted as the glory 
 of England while they existed, and have been so much mourned 
 over since they disappeared, were either small proprietors or small 
 farmers, and if they were mostly the last, the character they b6re 
 for sturdy independence is the more noticeable. There is a part of 
 England, unfortunately a very small part, where peasant proprietors 
 are still common ; for such are the " statesmen" of Cumberland and 
 Westmoreland, though they pay, I believe, generally if not univer- 
 sally, certain customary dues, which, being fixed, no more affect 
 their character of proprietors than the land-tax does. There is 
 but one voice, among those acquainted with the country, on the 
 admirable effects of this tenure of land in those counties. No 
 other agricultural population in England could have furnished the 
 originals of Wordsworth's peasantry.* 
 
 * In Mr. Wordsworth's little descriptive work on the scenery of the Lakes, 
 he speaks of the upper part of the dales as having been for centuries " a perfect 
 republic of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the 
 lands which they occupied and cultivated. The plough of each man was con- 
 fined to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of 
 his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese. 
 The chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme 
 head of this pure commonwealth ; the members of which existed in the midst of 
 a powerful empire, like an ideal society, or an organized community, whose con- 
 stitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it. 
 Neither high-horn nobleman, knight, nor esquire was here ; but many of these 
 humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land which they walked 
 over and tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of 
 their name and blood. . . . Corn was grown in these vales sufficient upon each 
 estate to furnish bread for each family, no more. The storms and moisture of 
 the climate induced them to sprinkle their upland property with outhouses of 
 native stone, as places of shelter for their sheep, where, in tempestuous weather, 
 food was distributed to them. Every family spun from its own flock the wool 
 with which it was clothed ; a weaver was here and there found among them, and 
 the rest of their wants was supph'ed by the produce of the yarn, which they carded 
 and spun in their own houses, and carried to market either under their arms, or 
 more frequently on packhorses, a small train taking their way weekly down the 
 valley, or over the mountains, to the most commodious town." A Description of 
 the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England, 3rd edit. pp. 50 to 53 and 
 63 to 65. "
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 3 
 
 The general system, however, of English cultivation, affording no 
 experience to render the nature and operation of peasant properties 
 familiar, and Englishmen being in general profoundly ignorant of 
 the agricultural economy of other countries, the very idea of 
 peasant proprietors is strange to the English mind, and does not 
 easily find access to it. Even the forms of language stand in the 
 way : the familiar designation for owners of land being " landlords," 
 a term to whicli " tenants" is always understood as a correlative. 
 When, at the time of the famine, the suggestion of peasant proper- 
 ties as a means of Irish improvement found its way into parliamen- 
 tary and newspaper discussions, there were writers of pretension to 
 whom the word "proprietor" was so far from conveying any dis- 
 tinct idea, that they mistook the small holdings of Irish cottier 
 tenants for peasant properties. The subject being so little under- 
 stood, I think it important, before entering into the theory of it, to 
 do something towards showing how the case stands as to matter of 
 fact ; by exhibiting, at greater length than would otherwise be ad- 
 missible, some of the testimony which exists respecting the state of 
 cultivation, and the comfort and happiness of the cultivators, in 
 those countries and parts of countries, in which the greater part of 
 the land has neither landlord nor farmer, other than the labourer 
 who tills the soil. 
 
 2.1 lay no stress on the condition of North America, where, as 
 is well known, the land, wherever free from the curse of slavery, 
 is almost universally owned by the same person who holds the 
 plough. A country combining the natural fertility of America 
 with the knowledge and arts of modern Europe, is so peculiarly 
 circumstanced, that scarcely anything, except insecurity of property 
 or a tyrannical government, could materially impair the prosperity 
 of the industrious classes. I might, with Sismondi, insist more 
 strongly on the case of ancient Italy, especially Latium, that Cam- 
 pagna which then swarmed with inhbitan ts in the very regions 
 which under a contrary regime have become uninhabitable from 
 malaria. But I prefer taking the evidence of the same writer on 
 things known to him by personal observation.
 
 4 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 "It is especially Switzerland," says M. de Sismondi, "which 
 should be traversed and studied to judge of the happiness of peasant 
 proprietors. It is from Switzerland we learn that agriculture, prac- 
 tised by the very persons who enjoy its fruits, suffices to procure 
 great comfort for a very numerous population ; a great independence 
 of character, arising from independence of position ; a great commerce 
 of consumption, the result of the easy circumstances of all the in- 
 habitants, even in a country whose climate is rude, whose soil is 
 but moderately fertile, and where late frosts and inconstancy of 
 seasons often blight the hopes of the cultivator. It is impossible 
 to see without admiration those timber houses of the poorest peasant, 
 so vast, so well closed in, so covered with carvings. In the interior, 
 spacious corridors separate the different chambers of the numerous 
 family ; each chamber has but one bed, which is abundantly fur- 
 nished with curtains, bedclothes, and the whitest linen ; carefully 
 kept furniture surrounds it ; the wardrobes are filled with linen ; 
 the dairy is vast, well aired, and of exquisite cleanness ; under the 
 same roof is a great provision of corn, salt meat, cheese and wood ; 
 in the cow-houses are the finest and most carefully tended cattle in 
 Europe ; the garden is planted with flowers, both men and women 
 are cleanly and warmly clad, the women preserve with pride their 
 ancient costume ; all carry in their faces the impress of health and 
 strength. Let other nations boast of their opulence, Switzerland 
 may always point with pride to her peasants."* 
 
 The same eminent writer thus expresses his opinions on peasant 
 proprietorship in general. 
 
 " Wherever we find peasant proprietors, we also find the comfort, 
 security, confidence in the future, and independence, which assure 
 at once happiness and virtue. The peasant who with his children 
 does all the work of his little inheritance, who pays no rent to any 
 one above him, nor wages to any one below, who regulates his pro- 
 duction by his consumption, who eats his own corn, drinks his own 
 wine, is clothed in his own hemp and wool, cares little for the prices 
 of the market ; for he has little to sell and little to buy, and is never 
 
 * Studies in Political Economy. Essay III.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 5 
 
 ruined by revulsions of trade. Instead of fearing for the future, he 
 sees it in the colours of hope ; for he employs every moment not 
 required by the labours of the year, on something profitable to his 
 children and to future generations. A few minutes' work suffices 
 him to plant the seed which in a hundred years will be a large tree, 
 to dig the channel which will conduct to him a spring of fresh 
 water, to improve by cares often repeated, but stolen from odd 
 times, all the species of animals and vegetables which surround him. 
 His little patrimony is a true savings bank, always ready to receive 
 all his little gains and utilize all his moments of leisure. The 
 ever-acting power of nature returns them a hundred-fold. The 
 peasant has a lively sense of the happiness attached to the condition 
 of a proprietor. Accordingly he is always eager to buy land at any 
 price. He pays more for it than its value, more perhaps than it 
 will bring him in ; but is he not right in estimating highly the ad- 
 vantage of having always an advantageous investment for his labour, 
 without underbidding in the wages -market of being always able 
 to find bread, without the necessity of buying it at a scarcity 
 price ? 
 
 " The peasant proprietor is of all cultivators the one who gets 
 most from the soil, for he is the one who thinks most of the future, 
 and who has been most instructed by experience. He is also the one 
 who employs the human powers to most advantage, because dividing 
 his occupations among all the members of his family, he reserves 
 some for every day of the year, so that nobody is ever out of work. 
 Of all cultivators he is the happiest, and at the same time the land 
 nowhere occupies, and feeds amply without becoming exhausted, so 
 many inhabitants as where they are proprietors. Finally, of all cul- 
 tivators the peasant proprietor is the one who gives most encourage- 
 ment to commerce and manufactures, because he is the richest."* 
 
 * And in another work (New Principles of Political Economy, book iii. 
 chap. 3) he says, " When we traverse nearly the whole of Switzerland, and 
 several provinces of France, Italy, and Germany, we need never ask, in looking 
 at any piece of land, if it belongs to a peasant proprietor or to a farmer. The 
 intelligent care, the enjoyments provided ior the labourer, the adornment which 
 the country has received from his hands, are clear indications of the former. It
 
 6 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 This picture of unwearied assiduity, and what may be called 
 affectionate interest in the land, is borne out in regard to the more 
 intelligent Cantons of Switzerland by English observers. " In 
 walking anywhere in the neighbourhood of Zurich," says Mr. Inglis, 
 " in looking to the right or to the left, one is struck with the ex- 
 traordinary industry of the inhabitants ; and if we learn that a 
 proprietor here has a return of ten per cent, we are inclined to 
 say, ' he deserves it.' I speak at present of country labour, though 
 I believe that in every kind of trade also, the people of Zurich are 
 remarkable for their assiduity ; but in the industry they show in 
 the cultivation of their land I may safely say they are unrivalled. 
 When I used to open my casement between four and five in the 
 morning to look out upon the lake and the distant Alps, I saw the 
 labourer in the fields ; and when I returned from an evening 
 walk, long after sunset, as late, perhaps, as half-past eight, there 
 was the labourer, mowing his grass, or tying up his vines. . . 
 It is impossible to look at a field, a garden, a hedging, scarcely even 
 a tree, a flower, or a vegetable, without perceiving proofs of the 
 extreme care and industry that are bestowed upon the cultivation 
 of the soil. If for example, a path leads through, or by the side of, 
 a field of grain, the corn is not, as in England, permitted to hang 
 over the path, exposed to be pulled or trodden down by every passer- 
 by ; it is everywhere bounded by a fence, stakes are placed at 
 intervals of about a yard, and about two or three feet from the 
 ground, boughs of trees are passed longitudinally along. If you look 
 into a field towards evening, where there are large beds of cauli- 
 
 is true, an oppressive government may destroy the comfort and brutify the 
 intelligence which should be the result of property ; taxation may abstract the 
 best produce of the fields, the insolence of government officers may disturb the 
 security of the peasant, the impossibility of obtaining justice against a powerful 
 neighbour may sow discouragement in liis mind, and in the fine country which 
 has been given back to the administration of the King of Sardinia, the pro- 
 prietor, equally with the day-labourer, wears thelivery of indigence." He was 
 here speaking of Savoy, where the peasants were generally proprietors, and, 
 according to authentic accounts, extremely miserable. But, as M. de Sismondi 
 continues, " it is in vain to observe only one of the rules of political economy ; 
 it cannot by itself suffice to produce good; but at least it diminishes evil."
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 7 
 
 flower or cabbage, you will find that every single plant has been 
 watered. In the gardens, which around Zurich are extremely large, 
 the most punctilious care is evinced in every production that grows. 
 The vegetables are planted with seemingly mathematical accuracy ; 
 not a single weed is to be seen, not a single stone. Plants are not 
 earthed up as with us, but are planted in a small hollow, into each of 
 which a little manure is put, and each plant is watered daily. 
 Where seeds are sown, the earth directly above is broken into the 
 finest powder ; every shrub, every flower is tied to a stake, and 
 where there is wall-fruit a trellice is erected against the wall, to 
 which the boughs are fastened, and there is not a single thing that 
 has not its appropriate resting place."* 
 
 Of one of the remote valleys of the High Alps the same writer 
 thus expresses himself :f 
 
 " In the whole of the Engadine the land belongs to the peasantry, 
 who, like the inhabitants of every other place where this state of 
 things exists, vary greatly in the extent of their possessions. 
 Generally speaking, an Engadine peasant lives entirely upon the 
 produce of his land, with the exception of the few articles of foreign 
 growth required in his family, such as coffee, sugar, and wine. 
 Flax is grown, prepared, spun, and woven, without ever leaving 
 his house. He has also his own wool, which is converted into a blue 
 coat, without passing through the hands of either the dyer or the 
 tailor. The country is incapable of greater cultivation than it has 
 received. All has been done for it that industry and an extreme 
 love of gain can devise. There is not a foot of waste land in the 
 Engadine, the lowest part of which is not much lower than the top 
 of Snowdon. Wherever grass will grow, there it is; wherever 
 a rock will bear a blade, verdure is seen upon it ; wherever an ear 
 of rye will ripen, there it is to be found. Barley and oats have 
 also their appropriate spots ; and wherever it is possible to ripen a 
 little patch of wheat, the cultivation of it is attempted. In no 
 
 * Switzerland, the South of France, and the Pyrenees, in 1830. By H. I). 
 Inglis. Vol. i. ch. 2. 
 
 t Ibid. ch. 8 and 10.
 
 8 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 country in Europe will be found so few poor as in the Engadine. 
 In the village of Suss, which contains about six hundred in- 
 habitants, there is not a single individual who has not wherewithal 
 to live comfortably, not a single individual who is indebted to 
 others for one morsel that he eats." 
 
 Notwithstanding the general prosperity of the Swiss peasantry, 
 this total absence of pauperism and (it may almost be said) of 
 poverty, cannot be predicated of the whole country ; the largest and 
 richest canton, that of Berne, being an example of the contrary ; for 
 although, in the parts of it which are occupied by peasant pro- 
 prietors, their industry is as remarkable and their ease and comfort 
 as conspicuous as elsewhere, the canton is burthened with a nume- 
 rous pauper population, through the operation of the worst regulated 
 system of poor-law administration in Europe, except that of England 
 before the new Poor Law.* Nor is Switzerland in some other 
 respects a favourable example of all that peasant properties might 
 effect. There exists a series of statistical accounts of the 
 Swiss cantons, drawn u mostly with great care and intelligence, 
 containing detailed information, of tolerably recent date, respecting 
 the condition of the land and of the people. From these, the sub- 
 division appears to be often so minute, that it can hardly be supposed 
 not to be excessive : and the indebtedness of the proprietors in the 
 flourishing canton of Zurich " borders," as the writer expresses it, 
 " on the incredible ;" so that " only the intensest industry, frugality, 
 temperance, and complete freedom of commerce eaable them to 
 stand their ground, "f Yet the general conclusion deducible from 
 
 * There have been considerable changes in the Poor Lav administration 
 and legislation of the Canton of Berne since the sentence m the text was written. 
 But I am not sufficiently acquainted with the nature and operation of these 
 changes to speak more particularly of them here. 
 
 t Historical, Geographical and Statistical Picture of Switzerland, Part I. 
 Canton of Zurich. By Gerold Meyer Von Knonau, 1834 (pp. 80-1). There are 
 villages in Zurich, he adds, in which there is not a single property unmortgaged. 
 It does not, however, follow that each individual proprietor is deeply involved 
 because the aggregate mass of incumbrances is large. In the Canton of 
 Schaffhausen, for instance, it is stated that the landed properties are almost all 
 mortgaged, but rarely for more than one-half their registered vilue (Part XII. 
 Canton of Schaffhausen, by Edward Im-Thurn, 1840, p. 52), tnd the mort-
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 9 
 
 these books is that since the beginning of the century, and concur- 
 rently with the subdivision of many great estates which belonged 
 to nobles or to the cantonal governments, there has been a striking 
 and rapid improvement in almost every department of agriculture, 
 as well as in the houses, the habits, and the food of the people. 
 The writer of the account of Thiirgau goes so far as to say, that 
 since the subdivision of the feudal estates into peasant properties, 
 it is not uncommon for a third or a fourth part of an estate to 
 produce as much grain, and support as many head of cattle, as the 
 whole estate did before.* 
 
 3. One of the countries in which peasant proprietors are of 
 oldest date, and most numerous in proportion to the population, is 
 Norway. Of the social and economical condition of that country 
 an interesting account has been given by Mr. Laing. His testimony 
 in favour of small landed properties both there and elsewhere, is 
 given with great decision. I shall quote a few passages. 
 
 " If small proprietors are not good farmers, it is not from the 
 same cause here which we are told makes them so in Scotland 
 indolence and want of exertion. The extent to which irrigation is 
 carried on in these glens and valleys shows a spirit of exertion and 
 co-operation" (I request particular attention to this point), "to 
 which the latter can show nothing similar. Hay being the principal 
 winter support of live stock, and both it and corn, as well as potatoes, 
 liable, from the shallow soil and powerful reflection of sunshine from 
 the rocks, to be burnt and withered up, the greatest exertions are made 
 to bring water from the head of each glen, along such a level as will 
 give the command of it to each farmer at the head of his fields. 
 This is done by leading it in wooden troughs (the half of a tree 
 roughly scooped) from the highest perennial stream among the hills, 
 through woods, across ravines, along the rocky, often perpendicular, 
 sides of the glens, and from this main trough giving a lateral one 
 to each farmer in passing the head of his farm. He distributes 
 
 gages are often for the improvement and enlargement of the estate. (Part 
 XVII. Canton of Thiirgau, by J. A. Pupikofer, 1837, p. 209.) 
 * Thiirgau, p. 72.
 
 10 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 this supply by moveable troughs among his fields; and at this 
 season waters each rig successively with scoops like those used by 
 bleachers in watering cloth, laying his trough between every two 
 rigs. One would not believe, without seeing it, how very large an 
 extent of land is traversed expeditiously by these, artificial showers. 
 The extent of the main troughs is very great. In one glen I walked 
 ten miles, and found it troughed on both sides : on one, the chain 
 is continued down the main valley for forty miles.* Those may be 
 bad farmers who do such things ; but they are not indolent, nor igno- 
 rant of the principle of working in concert, and keeping up esta- 
 blishments for common benefit. They are undoubtedly, in these 
 respects, far in advance of any community of cottars in our High- 
 land glens. They feel as proprietors, who receive the advantage 
 of their own exertions. The excellent state of the roads and 
 bridges is another proof that the country is inhabited by people who 
 have a common interest to keep them under repair. There are no 
 tolls."t 
 
 On the effects of peasant proprietorship on the Continent generally, 
 the same writer expresses himself as follows. J 
 
 " If we listen to the large farmer, the scientific agriculturist, 
 the " [English] " political economist, good farming must perish 
 with large farms ; the very idea that good farming can exist, unless 
 on large farms cultivated with great capital, they hold to be absurd. 
 
 * Reichensperger (The Land Question) quoted by Mr. Kay, (Social Condition 
 and Education of the People in England and Europe) observes, " that tbe parts 
 of Europe where the most extensive and costly plans for watering the meadows 
 and lands have been carried out in the greatest perfection, are those where the 
 lands are very much subdivided, and are in the hands of small proprietors. 
 He instances the plain round Valencia, several of the southern departments of 
 France, particularly those of Vaucluse and Bouches du Rhone, Lombardy, 
 Tuscany, the districts of Sienna, Lucca, and Bergamo, Piedmont, many parts 
 of Germany, &c., in all which parts of Europe the land is very much sub- 
 divided among small proprietors. In all these parts great and expensive 
 systems and plans of general irrigation have been carried out, and are now 
 being supported by the small proprietors themselves ; thus showing how they 
 are able to accomplish, by means of combination, work requiring the expen- 
 diture of great quantities of capital." Kay, i. 126. 
 
 f Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway, pp. 36, 37. 
 J Notes of a Traveller, pp. 299 et seqq.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 11 
 
 Draining, manuring, economical arrangement, cleaning the land, 
 regular rotations, valuable stock and implements, all belong exclu- 
 sively to large farms, worked by large capital, and by hired labour. 
 This reads very well ; but if we raise our eyes from their books to 
 their fields, and coolly compare what we see in the best districts 
 farmed in large farms, with what we see in the best districts farmed 
 in small farms, we see, and there is no blinking the fact, better 
 crops on the ground in Flanders, East Friesland, Holstein, in 
 short, on the whole line of the arable land of equal quality of 
 the Continent, from the Sound to Calais, than we see on the 
 line of British coast opposite to this line, and in the same 
 latitudes, from the Frith of Forth all round to Dover. Minute 
 labour on small portions of arable ground gives evidently, in equal 
 soils and climate, a superior productiveness, where these small 
 portions belong in property, as in Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and 
 Ditmarsch in Holstein, to the farmer. It is not pretended by our 
 agricultural writers, that our large farmers, even in Berwickshire, 
 Roxburghshire, or the Lothians, approach to the garden-like culti- 
 vation, attention to manures, drainage, and clean state of the land, 
 or in productiveness from a small space of soil not originally rich, 
 which distinguish the small farmers of Flanders, or their system. 
 In the best-farmed parish in Scotland or England, more land is 
 wasted in the corners and borders of the fields of large farms, in the 
 roads through them, unnecessarily wide because they are bad, and 
 bad because they are wide, in neglected commons, waste spots, use- 
 less belts and clumps of sorry trees, and such unproductive areas, 
 than would maintain the poor of the parish, if they were all laid to- 
 gether and cultivated. But large capital applied to farming is of 
 course only applied to the very best of the soils of a country. It 
 cannot touch the small unproductive spots which require more time 
 and labour to fertilize them than is consistent with a quick return of 
 capital. But although hired time and labour cannot be applied 
 beneficially to such cultivation, the owner's own time and labour may. 
 He is working for no higher terms at first from his land than a bare 
 living. But in the course of generations fertility and value are pro- 
 duced ; a better living, and even very improved processes of hus-
 
 12 PEASANT PROPKIETORS. 
 
 bandry, are attained. Furrow draining, stall feeding all summer, 
 liquid manures, are universal in the husbandry of the small farms 
 of Flanders, Lombardy, Switzerland. Our most improving districts 
 under large farms are but beginning to adopt them. Dairy husbandry 
 even, and the manufacture of the largest cheeses by the co-operation 
 of many small farmers,* the mutual assurance of property against 
 fire and hail-storms, by the co-operation of small farmers the most 
 scientific and expensive of all agricultural operations in modern times, 
 the manufacture of beet-root sugar the supply of the European 
 markets with flax and hemp, by the husbandry of small farmers the 
 abundance of legumes, fruits, poultry, in the usual diet even of the 
 lowest classes abroad, and the total want of such variety at the 
 tables even of our middle classes, and this variety and abundance 
 essentially connected with the husbandry of small farmers all these 
 are features in the occupation of a country by small proprietor-farmers, 
 which must make the inquirer pause before he admits the dogma of 
 our land doctors at home, that large farms worked by hired labour 
 and great capital can alone bring out the greatest productiveness 
 of the soil, and furnish the greatest supply of the necessaries and 
 conveniences of life to the inhabitants of a country." 
 
 * The manner in which the Swiss peasants combine to carry on cheese- 
 making by their united capital deserves to be noted. " Each parish in Swit- 
 zerland hires a man, generally from the district of Gruyere, in the Canton of 
 Freyburg, to take care of the herd and make the cheese. One cheeseman, one 
 pressman or assistant, and one cowherd are considp/ed necessary for every 
 forty cows. The owners of the cows get credit each of them, in a book daily 
 for the quantity of milk given by each cow. The cheeseman and his assistants 
 milk the cows, put the milk all together, and make cheese of it, and at the end 
 of the season each owner receives the weight of cheese proportionable to the 
 quantity of milk his cows have delivered. By this co-operative plan, instead of 
 the small-sized unmarketable cheeses only, which each could produce out of 
 his three or four cows' milk, he has the same weight in large marketable cheese 
 superior in quality, because made by people who attend to no other business. 
 The cheeseman and his assistants are paid so much per head of the cows, in 
 money or in cheese, or sometimes they hire the cows, :-nd pay the owners in 
 money or cheese." Notes of a Traveller, p. 351. A similir system exists in 
 the French Jura. See, for full details, Lavergne, Rural Economy of France, 
 2nd ed., pp. 139 et seqq. One of the most remarkable points in this interest- 
 ing case of combination of labour, is the confidence which it supposes, and which 
 experience must justify, in the integrity of the persons employed.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 13 
 
 4. Among the many flourishing regions of Germany in which 
 peasant properties prevail, I select the Palatinate, for the advantage 
 of quoting, from an English source, the results of recent personal 
 observation of its agriculture and its people. Mr. Howitt, a writer 
 whose habit it is to see all English objects and English socialities on 
 their brightest side, and who, in treating of the Rhenish peasantry, 
 certainly does not underrate the rudeness of their implements, and 
 the inferiority of their ploughing, nevertheless shows that under the 
 invigorating influence of the feelings of proprietorship, they make 
 up for the imperfections of their apparatus by the intensity of their 
 application. " The peasant harrows and clears his land till it is in 
 the nicest order, and it is admirable to see the crops which he 
 obtains."* " The peasants^ are the great and ever present objects 
 of country life. They are the great population of the country, 
 because they themselves are the possessors. This country is, in 
 fact, for the most part, in the hands of the people. It is parcelled 
 
 out among the multitude The peasants are not, 
 
 as with us, for the most part, totally cut off from property in the 
 soil they cultivate, totally dependent on the labour afforded by 
 others they are themselves the proprietors. It is, perhaps, from 
 this cause that they are probably the most industrious peasantry in 
 the world. They labour busily, early and late, because they feel 
 
 that they are labouring for themselves The German 
 
 peasants work hard, but they have no actual want. Every man 
 has his house, his orchard, his roadside trees, commonly so heavy 
 with fruit, that he is obliged to prop and secure them all ways, 
 or they would be torn to pieces. He has his corn-plot, his plot for 
 mangel-wurzel, for hemp, and so on. He is his own master ; and 
 he, and every member of his family, have the strongest motives to 
 labour. You see the effect of this in that unremitting diligence 
 which is beyond that of the whole world besides, and his economy, 
 which is still greater. The Germans, indeed, are not so active and 
 lively as the English. You never see them in a bustle, or as 
 
 * Bural and Domestic Life of Oermatiy, p. 27. 
 f Ibid. p. 40.
 
 14 PEASANT PROPRIETORS, 
 
 though they meant to knock off a vast deal in a little time. 
 
 They are, on the contrary, slow, but for ever doing. 
 
 They plod on from day to day, and year to year the most patient, 
 untirable, and persevering of animals. The English peasant is so 
 cut off from the idea of property, that he comes habitually to look 
 upon it as a thing from which he is warned by the laws of the large 
 proprietors, and becomes, in consequence, spiritless, purposeless. 
 
 The German bauer, on the contrary, looks on the 
 
 country as made for him and his fellow-men. He feels himself a 
 man ; he has a stake in the country, as good as that of the bulk of 
 his neighbours ; no man can threaten him with ejection, or the work- 
 house, so long as he is active and economical. He walks, therefore, 
 with a bold step ; he looks you in the face with the air of a free 
 man, but of a respectful one." 
 
 Of their industry, the same writer thus further speaks : " There 
 is not an hour of the year in which they do not find unceasing 
 occupation. In the depth of winter, when the weather permits 
 them by any means to get out of doors, they are always finding 
 something to do. They carry out their manure to their lands 
 while the frost is in them. If there is not frost, they are busy 
 cleaning ditches and felling old fruit trees, or such as do not bear 
 well. Such of them as are too poor to lay in a sufficient stock of wood, 
 find plenty of work in ascending into the mountainous woods, and 
 bringing thence fuel. It would astonish the English common 
 people to see the intense labour with which the Germans earn their 
 firewood. In the depths of frost and snow, go into any of their 
 hills and woods, and there you find them hacking up stumps, cutting 
 off branches, and gathering, by all means which the official wood- 
 police will allow, boughs, stakes, and pieces of wood, which they 
 convey home with the most incredible toil and patience."* After 
 a description of their careful and laborious vineyard culture, he 
 continues,! " In England, with its great quantity of grass lands, and 
 its large farms, so soon as the grain is in, and the fields are shut up 
 
 * Rural and Domestic Life of Germany, p. 44. 
 f Ibid. p. 50.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 15 
 
 for hay grass, the country seems in a comparative state of rest and 
 quiet. But here they are everywhere, and for ever, hoeing and 
 mowing, planting and cutting, weeding and gathering. They have 
 a succession of crops like a market-gardener. They have their 
 carrots, poppies, hemp, flax, saintfoin, lucerne, rape, colewort, 
 cabbage, rotabaga, black turnips, Swedish and white turnips, 
 teazles, Jerusalem artichokes, mangel-wurzel, parsnips, kidney-beans, 
 field-beans, and peas, vetches, Indian corn, buckwheat, madder for 
 the manufacturer, potatoes, their great crop of tobacco, millet all, 
 or the greater part, under the family management, in their own; 
 family allotments. They have had these things first to sow, many 
 of them to transplant, to hoe, to weed, to clear off insects, to top ; 
 many of them to mow and gather in successive crops. They have 
 their water-meadows, of which kind almost all their meadows are, to 
 flood, to mow, and reflood ; watercourses to reopen and to make 
 anew : their early fruits to gather, to bring to market with their 
 green crops of vegetables ; their cattle, sheep, calves, foals, most of 
 them prisoners, and poultry to look after ; their vines, as they 
 shoot rampantly in the summer heat, to prune, and thin out the 
 leaves when they are too thick : and any one may imagine what a 
 scene of incessant labour it is." 
 
 This interesting sketch, to the general truth of which any obser- 
 vant traveller in that highly cultivated and populous region can bear 
 witness, accords with the more elaborate delineation by a distin- 
 guished inhabitant, Professor Rau, in his little treatise " On the 
 Agriculture of the Palatinate."* Dr. Rau bears testimony not only 
 to the industry but to the skill and intelligence of the peasantry ; 
 their judicious employment of manures, and excellent rotation of 
 crops ; the progressive improvement of their agriculture for genera- 
 tions past, and the spirit of further improvement which is still active. 
 " The indefatigableness of the country people, who may be seen in 
 activity all the day and all the year, and are never idle, because 
 they make a good distribution of their labours, and find for every 
 
 * On the Agriculture of the Palatinate, and particularly in the territory of 
 Heidelberg. By Dr. Karl Heinrich Rau. Heidelberg, 1830.
 
 16 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 interval of time a suitable occupation, is as well known as their zeal 
 is praiseworthy in turning to use every circumstance which presents 
 itself, in seizing upon every useful novelty which offers, and even 
 in searching out new and advantageous methods. One easily per- 
 ceives that the peasant of this district has reflected much on his 
 occupation : he can give reasons for his modes of proceeding, even 
 if those reasons are not always tenable ; he is as exact an observer 
 of proportions as it is possible to be from memory, without the aid 
 of figures : he attends to such general signs of the times as appear 
 to augur him either benefit or harm."* 
 
 The experience of all other parts of Germany is similar. " In 
 Saxony," says Mr. Kay, " it is a notorious fact, that during the last 
 thirty years, and since the peasants became the proprietors of the 
 land, there has been a rapid and continual improvement in the 
 condition of the houses, in the manner of living, in the dress of the 
 peasants, and particularly in the culture of the land. I have twice 
 walked through that part of Saxony called Saxon Switzerland, in 
 company with a German guide, and on purpose to see the state of 
 the villages and of the farming, and I can safely challenge contra- 
 diction when I affirm that there is no farming in all Europe superior 
 to the laboriously careful cultivation of the valleys of that part of 
 Saxony. There, as in the cantons of Berne, Vaud, and Zurich, and 
 in the Rhine provinces, the farms are singularly flourishing. They 
 are kept in beautiful condition, and are always neat and well 
 managed. The ground is cleared as if it were a garden. No hedges 
 or brushwood encumber it. ' Scarcely a rush or thistle or a bit of 
 rank grass is to be seen. The meadows are well watered every 
 spring with liquid manure, saved from the drainings of the farm 
 yards. The grass is so free from weeds that the Saxon meadows 
 reminded me more of English lawns than of anything else I had 
 seen. The peasants endeavour to outstrip one another in the 
 quantity and quality of the produce, in the preparation of the 
 ground, and in the general cultivation of their respective portions. 
 All the little proprietors are eager to find out how to farm so as to 
 
 * Rau, pp. 15, 16.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 17 
 
 produce the greatest results; they diligently seek after improve- 
 ments ; they send their children to the agricultural schools in order 
 to fit them to assist their fathers ; and each proprietor soon adopts 
 a new improvement introduced by any of his neighbours."* If this 
 be not overstated, it denotes a state of intelligence very different 
 not only from that of English labourers but of English farmers. 
 
 Mr. Kay's book, published in 1850, contains a mass of evidence 
 gathered from observation and inquiries in many different parts of 
 Europe, together with attestations from many distinguished writers, 
 to the beneficial effects of peasant properties. Among the testi- 
 monies which he cites respecting their effect on agriculture, I select 
 the following. 
 
 " Reichensperger, himself an inhabitant of that part of Prussia 
 where the land is the most subdivided, has published a long and 
 very elaborate work to show the admirable consequences of a system 
 of freeholds in land. He expresses a very decided opinion that not 
 only are the gross products of any given number of acres held and 
 cultivated by small or peasant proprietors, greater than the gross 
 products of an equal number of acres held by a few great proprie- 
 tors, and cultivated by tenant farmers, but that the net products of 
 the former, after deducting all the expenses of cultivation, are also 
 greater than the net products of the latter. . . . He mentions one 
 fact which seems to prove that the fertility of the land in countries 
 where the properties are small, must be rapidly increasing. He 
 says that the price of the land which is divided into small proper- 
 ties in the Prussian Rhine provinces, is much higher, and has been 
 rising much more rapidly, than the price of land on the great estates. 
 He and Professor Rau both say that this rise in the price of the 
 small estates would have ruined the more recent purchasers, unless 
 the productiveness of the small estates had increased in at least an 
 equal proportion ; and as the small proprietors have been gradually 
 
 * The Social Condition and Education of the People in England and 
 Europe ; showing the results of the Primary Schools, and of the division of 
 Landed Property in Foreign Countries. By Joseph Kay, Esq., M.A,, Barrister- 
 at-Law, and late Travelling Bachelor of the University of Cambridge. Vol. i. 
 pp. 138-40. 
 
 C
 
 18 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 becoming more and more prosperous notwithstanding the increasing 1 
 prices they have paid for their land, he argues, with apparent just- 
 ness, that this would seem to show that not only the gross profits of 
 the small estates, but the net profits also have been gradually increas- 
 ing, and that the net profits per acre, of land, when farmed by small 
 proprietors, are greater than the net profits per acre of land farmed 
 by a great proprietor. He says, with seeming truth, that the in- 
 creasing price of land in the small estates cannot be the mere effect 
 of competition, or it would have diminished the profits and the 
 prosperity of the small proprietors, and that this result has not 
 followed the rise. 
 
 " Albrecht Thaer, another celebrated German writer on the 
 different systems of agriculture, in one of his later works (' Prin- 
 ciples of Eational Agriculture ') expresses his decided conviction, 
 that the net produce of land is greater when farmed by small pro- 
 prietors than when farmed by great proprietors or their tenants. . . . 
 This opinion of Thaer is all the more remarkable, as, during the 
 early part of his life, he was very strongly in favour of the English 
 system of great estates and great farms." 
 
 Mr. Kay adds from his own observation, " The peasant farming 
 of Prussia, Saxony, Holland, and Switzerland is the most perfect 
 and economical farming I have ever witnessed in any country."* 
 
 5. But the most decisive example in opposition to the English 
 prejudice against cultivation by peasant proprietors, is the case of 
 Belgium. The soil is originally one of the worst in Europe. " The 
 provinces," says Mr. M'Culloch,-f- " of West and East Flanders, and 
 Hainault, form a far stretching plain, of which the luxuriant vege- 
 tation indicates the indefatigable care and labour bestowed upon its 
 cultivation ; for the natural soil consists almost wholly of barren 
 sand, and its great fertility is entirely the result of very skilful 
 management and judicious application of various manures." There 
 exists a carefully prepared and comprehensive treatise on Flemish 
 Husbandry, in the Farmer's Series of the Society for the Diffusion 
 
 * Kay, i. 116-8. 
 f Geographical Dictionary, art. " Belgium."
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 19 
 
 of Useful Knowledge. The writer observes,* that the Flemish 
 agriculturists " seem to want nothing but a space to work upon : 
 whatever be the quality or texture of the soil, in time they will 
 make it produce something. The sand in the Campine can be com- 
 pared to nothing but the sands on the sea-shore, which they pro- 
 bably were originally. It is highly interesting to follow step by 
 step the progress of improvement. Here you see a cottage and 
 rude cow-shed erected on a spot of the most unpromising aspect. 
 The loose white sand blown into irregular mounds is only kept 
 together by the roots of the heath : a small spot only is levelled 
 aftid surrounded by a ditch : part of this is covered with young 
 broom, part is planted with potatoes, and perhaps a small patch of 
 diminutive clover may show itself :" but manures, both solid and 
 liquid, are collecting, " and this is the nucleus from which, in a few 
 years, a little farm will spread around. ... If there is no manure 
 at hand, the only thing that can be sown, on pure sand, at first, is 
 broom : this grows in the most barren soils ; in three years it is fit to 
 cut, and produces some re turn in fagots for thebakers and brickmakers. 
 The leaves which have fallen have somewhat enriched the soil, and 
 the fibres of the roots have given a certain degree of compactness. 
 It may now be ploughed and sown with buckwheat, or even with 
 rye without manure. By the time this is reaped, some manure may 
 have been collected, and a regular course of cropping may begin. 
 As soon as clover and potatoes enable the farmer to keep cows and 
 make manure, the improvement goes on rapidly ; in a few years the 
 soil undergoes a complete change : it becomes mellow and retentive 
 of moisture, and enriched by the vegetable matter afforded by the 
 decomposition of the roots of clover and other plants. . . . After 
 the land has been gradually brought into a good state, and is culti- 
 vated in a regular manner, there appears much less difference 
 between the soils which have been originally good, and those which 
 have been made so by labour and industry. At least the crops in 
 both appear more nearly alike at harvest, than is the case in soils 
 of different qualities in other countries. This is a great proof of the 
 
 * Pp. 11-14. 
 c2
 
 20 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 excellency of the Flemish system ; for it shows that the land is in 
 a constant state of improvement, and that the deficiency of the soil 
 is compensated by greater attention to tillage and manuring, espe- 
 cially the latter." 
 
 The people who labour thus intensely, because labouring for 
 themselves, have practised for centuries those principles of rotation 
 of crops and economy of manures, which in England are counted 
 among modern discoveries : and even now the superiority of their 
 agriculture, as a whole, to that of England, is admitted by compe- 
 tent judges. " The cultivation of a poor light soil, or a moderate 
 soil," says the writer last quoted,* " is generally superior in Flanders 
 to that of the most improved farms of the same kind in Britain. 
 We surpass the Flemish farmer greatly in capital, in varied imple- 
 ments of tillage, in the choice and breeding of cattle and sheep," 
 (though, according to the same authority, f they are much "before 
 us in the feeding of their cows,") " and the British farmer is in 
 general a man of superior education to the Flemish peasant. But 
 in the minute attention to the qualities of the soil, in the manage- 
 ment and application of manures of different kinds, in the judicious 
 succession of crops, and especially in the economy of land, so 
 that every part of it shall be in a constant state of production, we 
 have still something to learn from the Flemings," and not from an 
 instructed and enterprising Fleming here and there, but from the 
 general practice. 
 
 Much of the most highly cultivated part of the country consists 
 of peasant properties, managed by the proprietors, always either 
 wholly or partly by spade industry. J " When the land is culti- 
 vated entirely by the spade, and no horses are kept, a cow is kept 
 for every three acres of land, and entirely fed on artificial grasses 
 and roots. This mode of cultivation is principally adopted in the 
 Waes district, where properties are very small. All the labour is 
 done by the different members of the family ;" children soon be- 
 ginning " to assist in various minute operations, according to their 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, p. 3. 
 f b d. p. 13. j Ibid. pp. 73 et seq.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 21 
 
 age and strength, such as weeding, hoeing, feeding the cows. If 
 they can raise rye and wheat enough to make their bread, and 
 potatoes, turnips, carrots and clover, for the cows, they do well; 
 and the produce of the sale of their rape-seed, their flax, their 
 hemp, and their butter, after deducting the expense of manure 
 purchased, which is always considerable, gives them a very good 
 profit. Suppose the whole extent of the land to be six acres, 
 which is not an uncommon occupation, and which one man can 
 manage;" then (after describing the cultivation), "if a man with 
 his wife and three young children are considered as equal to three 
 and a half grown up men, the family will require thirty-nine 
 bushels of grain, forty-nine bushels of potatoes, a fat hog, and the 
 butter and milk of one cow : an acre and a half of land will produce 
 the grain and potatoes, and allow some corn to finish the fattening 
 of the hog, which has the extra buttermilk : another acf e in clover, 
 carrots, and potatoes, together with the stubble turnips, will more 
 than feed the cow ; consequently two and a half acres of land is 
 sufficient to feed this family, and the produce of the other three 
 and a half may be sold to pay the rent or the interest of purchase- 
 money, wear and tear of implements, extra manure, and clothes for 
 the family. But these acres are the most profitable on the farm, 
 for the hemp, flax, and colza are included ; and by having another 
 acre in clover and roots, a second cow can be kept, and its produce 
 sold. We have, therefore, a solution of the problem, how a family 
 can live and thrive on six acres of moderate land." After showing 
 by calculation that this extent of land can be cultivated in the most 
 perfect manner by the family without any aid from hired labour, 
 the writer continues, " In a farm of ten acres entirely cultivated by 
 the spade, the addition of a man and a woman to the members of 
 the family will render all the operations more easy ; and with a 
 horse and cart to carry out the manure, and bring home the 
 produce, and occasionally draw the harrows, fifteen acres may be 
 very well cultivated. . . . Thus it will be seen," (this is the 
 result of some pages of details and calculations,*) "that by spade 
 
 * Flemish Husbandry, p. 81.
 
 22 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 husbandry, an industrious man with a small capital, occupying only 
 fifteen acres of good light land, may not only live and bring up a 
 family, paying a good rent, but may accumulate a considerable sum 
 in the course of his life." But the indefatigable industry by which 
 he accomplishes this, and of which so large a portion is expended 
 not in the mere cultivation, but in the improvement, for a distant 
 return, of the soil itself has that industry no connexion with not 
 paying rent? Could it exist, without presupposing, at least, a 
 virtually permanent tenure ? 
 
 As to their mode of living, " the Flemish farmers and labourers 
 live much more economically than the same class in England : they 
 seldom eat meat, except on Sundays and in harvest: buttermilk 
 and potatoes with brown bread is their daily food." It is on this 
 kind of evidence that English travellers, as they hurry through 
 Europe, pronounce the peasantry of every Continental country poor 
 and miserable, its agricultural and social system a failure, and the 
 English the only regime under which labourers are well off. It is, 
 truly enough, the only regime under which labourers, whether well 
 off or not, never attempt to be better. So little are English 
 labourers accustomed to consider it possible that a labourer should 
 not spend all he earns, that they habitually mistake the signs of 
 economy for those of poverty. Observe the true interpretation of 
 the phenomena. 
 
 " Accordingly they are gradually acquiring capital, and their great 
 ambition is to have land of their own. They eagerly seize every 
 opportunity of purchasing a small farm, and the price is so raised 
 by competition, that land pays little more than two per cent, interest 
 for the purchase money. Large properties gradually disappear, and 
 are divided into small portions, which sell at a high rate. But the 
 wealth and industry of the population is continually increasing, 
 being rather diffused through the masses than accumulated in 
 individuals." 
 
 With facts like these, known and accessible, it is not a little 
 surprising to find the case of Flanders referred to not in recom- 
 mendation of peasant properties, but as a warning against them ; 
 on no better ground than a presumptive excess of population, in-
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 23 
 
 ferred from the distress which existed among the peasantry of 
 Brabant and East Flanders in the disastrous year 1846-47. The 
 evidence which I have cited from a writer conversant with the 
 subject, and having no economical theory to support, shows that the 
 distress, whatever may have been its severity, arose from no insuffi- 
 ciency in these little properties to supply abundantly, in any ordi- 
 nary circumstances, the wants of all whom they have to maintain. 
 It arose from the essential condition to which those are subject who 
 employ land of their own in growing their own food, namely, that 
 the vicissitudes of the seasons must be borne by themselves, and 
 cannot, as in the case of large farmers, be shifted from them to the 
 consumer. When we remember the season of 1846, a partial 
 failure of all kinds of grain, and an almost total one of the potato, 
 it is no wonder that in so unusual a calamity the produce of six 
 acres, half of them sown with flax, hemp, or oil seeds, should fall 
 short of a year's provision for a family. But we are not to contrast 
 the distressed Flemish peasant with an English capitalist who farms 
 several hundred acres of land. If the peasant were an Englishman, 
 he would not be that capitalist, but a day labourer under a capitalist. 
 And is there no distress, in times of dearth, among day labourers ? 
 Was there none, that year, in countries where small proprietors and 
 small farmers are unknown ? I am aware of no reason for believing 
 that the distress was greater in Belgium, than corresponds to the 
 proportional extent of the failure of crops compared with other 
 countries.* 
 
 6. The evidence of the beneficial operation of peasant pro- 
 
 * As much of the distress lately complained of in Belgium, as partakes in 
 any degree of a permanent character, appears to be almost confined to the 
 portion of the population who carry on manufacturing lahour, either by itself 
 or in conjunction with agricultural; and to be occasioned by a diminished 
 demand for Belgic manufactures. 
 
 To the preceding testimonies respecting Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium, 
 may be added the following from Niebuhr, respecting the Roman Campagna. In 
 a letter from Tivoli, he says, " Wherever you find hereditary farmers, or small 
 proprietors, there you also find industry and honesty. I believe that a man who 
 would employ a large fortune in establishing small freeholds might put an end 
 to robbery in the mountain districts." Life and Letters of Niebuhr, vol. ii. 
 p. 149.
 
 24 PEASANT PKOPRIETOES. 
 
 perties in the Channel Islands is of so decisive a character, that I 
 cannot help adding to the numerous citations already made, part of 
 a description of the economical condition of those islands, by a 
 writer who combines personal observation with an attentive study 
 of the information afforded by others. Mr. William Thornton, in 
 his "Plea for Peasant Proprietors, "a book which by the excellence 
 both of its materials and of its execution, deserves to be regarded 
 as the standard work on that side of the question, speaks of the 
 island of Guernsey in the following terms : " Not even in England 
 is nearly so large a quantity of produce sent to market from a 
 tract of such limited extent. This of itself might prove that the 
 cultivators must be far removed above poverty, for being absolute 
 owners of all the produce raised by them, they of course sell only 
 what they do not themselves require. But the satisfactoriness of 
 their condition is apparent to every observer. ' The happiest com- 
 munity,' says Mr. Hill, ' which it has ever been my lot to fall in 
 with, is to be found in this little island of Guernsey.' ' No matter,' 
 says Sir George Head, ' to what point the traveller may choose to 
 bend his way, comfort everywhere prevails.' What most surprises 
 the English visitor in his first walk or drive beyond the bounds of 
 St. Peter's Port is the appearance of the habitations with which the 
 landscape is thickly studded. Many of them are such as in his own 
 country would belong to persons of middle rank ; but he is puzzled 
 to guess what sort of people live in the others, which, though in 
 general not large enough for farmers, are almost invariably much 
 too good in every respect for day labourers. . . . Literally, in the 
 whole island, with the exception of a few fishermen's huts, there is 
 not one so mean as to be likened to the ordinary habitation of an 
 English farm labourer. . . . ' Look,' says a late Bailiff of Guernsey, 
 Mr. De L'Isle Brock, ' at the hovels of the English, and compare 
 them with the cottages of our peasantry.' . . . Beggars are utterly 
 unknown. . . . Pauperism, able-bodied pauperism at least, is nearly 
 as rare as mendicancy. The Savings Banks accounts also bear 
 witness to the general abundance enjoyed by the labouring classes 
 of Guernsey. In the year 1841, there were in England, out of a 
 population of nearly fifteen millions, less than 700,000 depositors,
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 25 
 
 or one in every twenty persons, and the average amount of the 
 deposits was 30Z. In Guernsey, in the same year, out of a popula- 
 tion of 26,000, the number of depositors was 1920, and the average 
 amount of the deposits 40Z."* The evidence as to Jersey and 
 Alderney is of a similar character. 
 
 Of the efficiency and productiveness of agriculture on the small 
 properties of the Channel Islands, Mr. Thornton produces ample 
 evidence, the result of which he sums up as follows : " Thus it 
 appears that in the two principal Channel Islands, the agricultural 
 population is, in the one twice, and in the other, three times, as 
 dense as in Britain, there being in the latter country, only one 
 cultivator to twenty-two acres of cultivated land, while in Jersey 
 there is one to eleven, and in Guernsey one to seven acres. Yet 
 the agriculture of these islands maintains, besides cultivators, non- 
 agricultural populations, respectively four and five times as dense 
 as that of Britain. This difference does not arise from any supe- 
 riority of soil or climate possessed by the Channel Islands, for the 
 former is naturally rather poor, and the latter is not better than in 
 the southern counties of England. It is owing entirely to the assi- 
 duous care of the farmers, and to the abundant use of manure, "f 
 " In the year 1837," he says in another place,! "the average yield 
 of wheat in the large farms of England was only twenty-one 
 bushels, and the highest average for any one county was no more 
 than twenty-six bushels. The highest average since claimed for 
 the whole of England is thirty bushels. In Jersey, where the 
 average size of farms is only sixteen acres, the average produce of 
 wheat per acre was stated by Inglis in 1834 to be thirty-six bushels; 
 but it is proved by official tables to have been forty bushels in the 
 five years ending with 1833. In Guernsey, where farms are still 
 smaller, four quarters per acre, according to Inglis, is considered a 
 good, but still a very common crop." " Thirty shillings an acre 
 would be thought in England a very fair rent for middling land ; 
 
 * A Plea for Peasant Proprietors. By William Thomas Thornton, 
 pp. 99-104. 
 
 t Ibid. p. 38. J Ibid. p. 9. Ibid. p. 32.
 
 26 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 but in the Channel Islands, it is only very inferior land that would 
 not let for at least 4Z." 
 
 7. It is from France, that impressions unfavourable to peasant 
 properties are generally drawn : it is in France that the system is 
 so often asserted to have brought forth its fruit in the most 
 wretched possible agriculture, and to be rapidly reducing, if not to 
 have already reduced the peasantry, by subdivision of land, to the 
 verge of starvation. It is difficult to account for the general pre- 
 valence of impressions so much the reverse of truth. The agri- 
 culture of France was wretched and the peasantry in great indigence 
 before the Revolution. At that time they were not, so universally 
 as at present, landed proprietors. There were, however, consider- 
 able districts of France where the land, even then, was to a great 
 extent the property of the peasantry, and among these were many 
 of the most conspicuous exceptions to the general bad agriculture 
 and to the general poverty. An authority, on this point, not to be 
 disputed, is Arthur Young, the inveterate enemy of small farms, 
 the coryphaeus of the modern English school of agriculturists ; who 
 yet, travelling over nearly the whole of France in 1787, 1788, and 
 1789, when he finds remarkable excellence of cultivation, never 
 hesitates to ascribe it to peasant property. " Leaving Sauve," says 
 he,* " I was much struck with a -large tract of land, seemingly 
 nothing but huge rocks ; yet most of it enclosed and planted with 
 the most industrious attention. Every man has an olive, a mulberry, 
 an almond, or a peach tree, and vines scattered among them ; so 
 that the whole ground is covered with the oddest mixture of these 
 plants and bulging rocks, that can be conceived. The inhabitants 
 of this village deserve encouragement for their industry ; and if I 
 were a French minister they should have it. They would soon 
 turn all the deserts around them into gardens. Such a knot of 
 active husbandmen, who turn their rocks into scenes of fertility 
 because I suppose their own, would do the same by the wastes, if 
 animated by the same omnipotent principle." Again rf " Walk to 
 
 * Arthur Young's Travels in France, vol. i. p. 50. -f Ibid. vol. i. p. 88.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 27 
 
 Hossendal," (near Dunkirk,) "where M. le Brun has an improve- 
 ment on the Dunes, which he very obligingly showed me. Between 
 the town and that place is a great number of neat little houses, 
 built each with its garden, and one or two fields enclosed, of most 
 wretched blowing dune sand, naturally as white as snow, but im- 
 proved by industry. The magic of property turns sand to gold." 
 And again :* " Going out of Gange, I was surprised to find by far 
 the greatest exertion in irrigation which I had yet seen in France ; 
 and then passed by some steep mountains, highly cultivated in 
 terraces. Much watering at St. Lawrence. The scenery very in- 
 teresting to a farmer. From Gange, to the mountain of rough 
 ground which I crossed, the ride has been the most interesting 
 which I have taken in France ; the efforts of industry the most- 
 vigorous; the animation the most lively. An activity has been 
 here, that has swept away all difficulties before it, and has clothed 
 the very rocks with verdure. ' It would be a disgrace to common 
 sense to ask the cause ; the enjoyment of property must have done 
 it. Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will 
 turn it into a garden ; give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and 
 he will convert it into a desert." 
 
 In his description of the country at the foot of the Western 
 Pyrenees, he speaks no longer from surmise, but from knowledge. 
 " Takef the road to Moneng, and come presently to a scene which 
 was so new to me in France, that I could hardly believe my own 
 eyes. A succession of many well-built, tight, and comfortable 
 farming cottages built of stone and covered with tiles ; each having 
 its little garden, enclosed by clipt thorn-hedges, with plenty of 
 peach and other fruit-trees, some fine oaks scattered in the hedges, 
 and young trees nursed up with so much care, that nothing but the 
 fostering attention of the owner could effect anything like it. To 
 every house belongs a farm, perfectly well enclosed, with grass 
 borders mown and neatly kept around the corn-fields, with gates to 
 pass from one enclosure to another. There are some parts of 
 England (where small yeomen still remain) that resemble this 
 
 * Arthur Young's Travels in France, p. 51. t Young, p. 56.
 
 28 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 country of Beam ; but we have very little that is equal to what I 
 have seen in this ride of twelve miles from Pau to Moneng. It is 
 all in the hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so 
 small as to occasion a vicious and miserable population. An air of 
 neatness, warmth, and comfort breathes over the whole. It is 
 visible in their new built houses and stables ; in their little gardens; 
 in their hedges ; in the courts before their doors ; even in the coops 
 for their poultry, and the sties for their hogs. A peasant does not 
 think of rendering his pig comfortable, if his own happiness hang 
 by the thread of a nine years' lease. We are now in Beam, within 
 a few miles of the cradle of Henry IV. Do they inherit these 
 blessings from that good prince ? The benignant genius of that 
 good monarch seems to reign still over the country ; each peasant 
 has the fowl in the pot" He frequently notices the excellence of 
 the agriculture of French Flanders, where the farms " are all small, 
 and much in the hands of little proprietors."* In the Pays de 
 Caux, also a country of small properties, the agriculture was 
 miserable; of which his explanation was that it "is a manufacturing 
 country, and farming is but a secondary pursuit to the cotton fabric, 
 which spreads over the whole of it."f The same district is still a 
 seat of manufactures, and a country of small proprietors, and is now, 
 whether we judge from the appearance of the crops or from the 
 official returns, one of the best cultivated in France. In " Flanders, 
 Alsace, and part of Artois, as well as on the banks of the Garonne, 
 France possesses a husbandry equal to our own."| Those countries, 
 and a considerable part of Quercy, " are cultivated more like 
 gardens than farms. Perhaps they are too much like gardens, 
 from the smallness of properties." In those districts the admirable 
 rotation of crops, so long practised in Italy, but at that time gene- 
 rally neglected in France, was already universal. "The rapid 
 succession of crops, the harvest of one being but the signal of 
 sowing immediately for a second," (the same fact which strikes all 
 observers in the valley of the Rhine,) " can scarcely be carried to 
 
 Young, pp. 322-4. f Ibid. p. 325. J Ibid. vol. i. p. 357. 
 
 Ibid. p. 364.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 29 
 
 greater perfection : and this is a point, perhaps, of all others the 
 most essential to good husbandry, when such crops are so justly 
 distributed as we generally find them in these provinces ; cleaning 
 and ameliorating ones being made the preparation for such as foul 
 and exhaust." 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed, that Arthur Young's testimony 
 on the subject of peasant properties is uniformly favourable. In 
 Lorraine, Champagne, and elsewhere, he finds the agriculture bad, 
 and the small proprietors very miserable, in consequence, as he says, 
 of the extreme subdivision of the land. His opinion is thus 
 summed up :* " Before I travelled, I conceived that small farms, 
 in property, were very susceptible of good cultivation ; and that 
 the occupier of such, having no rent to pay, might be sufficiently at 
 his ease to work improvements, and carry on a vigorous husbandry ; 
 but what I have seen in France, has greatly lessened my good 
 opinion of them. In Flanders, I saw excellent husbandry on pro- 
 perties of 30 to 100 acres ; but we seldom find here such small 
 patches of property as are common in other provinces. In Alsace, 
 and on the Garonne, that is, on soils of such exuberant fertility as 
 to demand no exertions, some small properties also are well cultivated. 
 In Beam, I passed through a region of little farmers, whose 
 appearance, neatness, ease, and happiness charmed me ; it was what 
 property alone could, on a small scale, effect ; but these were by no 
 means contemptibly small ; they are, as I judged by the distance 
 from house to house, from 40 to 80 acres. Except these, and a 
 very few other instances, I saw nothing respectable on small pro- 
 perties, except a most unremitting industry. Indeed, it is necessary 
 to impress on the reader's mind, that though the husbandry I met 
 with, in a great variety of instances on little properties, was as bad 
 as can be well conceived, yet the industry of the possessors was so 
 conspicuous, and so meritorious, that no commendations would be 
 too great for it. It was sufficient to prove that property in land is, 
 of all others, the most active instigator to severe and incessant 
 labour. And this truth is of such force and extent, that I know no 
 
 * Young, p. 412.
 
 30 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 way so sure of carrying tillage to a mountain top, as by permitting 
 the adjoining villagers to acquire it in property ; in fact, we see 
 that in the mountains of Languedoc, &c., they have conveyed earth 
 in baskets, on their backs, to form a soil where nature had denied 
 it." 
 
 The experience, therefore, of this celebrated agriculturist, and 
 apostle of the grande culture, may be said to be, that the effect of 
 small properties, cultivated by peasant proprietors, is admirable 
 when they are not too small : so small, namely, as not fully to 
 occupy the time and attention of the family ; for he often complains, 
 with great apparent reason, of the quantity of idle time which the 
 peasantry had on their hands when the land was in very small 
 portions, notwithstanding the ardour with which they toiled to im- 
 prove their little patrimony, in every way which their knowledge 
 or ingenuity could suggest. He recommends, accordingly, that a 
 limit of subdivision should be fixed by law ; and this is by no 
 means an indefensible proposition in countries, if such there are, 
 where division, having already gone farther than the state of 
 capital and the nature of the staple articles of cultivation render 
 advisable, still continues progressive. That each peasant should 
 have a patch of land, even in full property, if it is not sufficient to 
 support him in comfort, is a system with all the disadvantages, and 
 scarcely any of the benefits, of small properties; since he must 
 either live in indigence on the produce of his land, or depend as 
 habitually as if he had no landed possessions, on the wages of hired, 
 labour : which, besides, if all the holdings surrounding him are of 
 similar dimensions, he has little prospect of finding. The benefits 
 of peasant properties are conditional on their not being too much 
 subdivided ; that is, on their not being required to maintain too 
 many persons, in proportion to the produce that can be raised from 
 them by those persons. The question resolves itself, like most 
 questions respecting the condition of the labouring classes, into one 
 of population. Are small properties a stimulus to undue multipli- 
 cation, or a check to it ?
 
 31 
 
 PAET H. 
 
 1. BEFORE examining the influence of peasant properties on 
 the ultimate economical interests of the labouring class, as de- 
 termined by the increase of population, let us note the points 
 respecting the moral and social influence of that territorial arrange- 
 ment, which may be looked upon as established, either by the 
 reason of the case, or by the facts and authorities cited in the 
 preceding chapter. 
 
 The reader new to the subject must have been struck with the 
 powerful impression made upon all the witnesses to whom I have 
 referred, by what a Swiss statistical writer calls the " almost super- 
 human industry" of peasant proprietors.* On this point at least, au- 
 thorities are unanimous. Those who have seen only one country of 
 peasant properties, always think the inhabitants of that country the 
 most industrious in the world. There is as little doubt among ob- 
 servers, with what feature in the condition of the peasantry this pre- 
 eminent industry is connected. It is " the magic of property" which, 
 in the words of Arthur Young, "turns sand into gold." The idea of 
 property does not, however, necessarily imply that there should be 
 no rent, any more than that there should be no taxes. It merely 
 implies that the rent should be a fixed charge, not liable to be 
 raised against the possessor by his own improvements, or by the will 
 of a landlord. A tenant at a quit-rent is, to all intents and purposes, 
 a proprietor ; a copyholder is not less so than a freeholder. What is 
 wanted is permanent possession on fixed terms. " Give a man the 
 secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden ; 
 
 * The Canton Schaffhausen (before quoted), p. 53.
 
 32 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into 
 a desert." 
 
 The details which have been cited, and those, still more minute, 
 to be found in the same authorities, concerning the habitually 
 elaborate system of cultivation, and the thousand devices of the 
 peasant proprietor for making every superfluous hour and odd 
 moment instrumental to some increase in the future produce and 
 value of the land, will explain what has been said elsewhere* 
 respecting the far larger gross produce which, with anything like 
 parity of agricultural knowledge, is obtained, from the same qua- 
 lity of soil, on small farms, at least when they are the property 
 of the cultivator. The treatise on " Flemish Husbandry " is espe- 
 cially instructive respecting the means by which untiring industry 
 does more than outweigh inferiority of resources, imperfection of 
 implements, and ignorance of scientific theories. The peasant cul- 
 tivation of Flanders and Italy is affirmed to produce heavier crops, 
 in equal circumstances of soil, than the best cultivated districts 
 of Scotland and England. It produces them, no doubt, with an 
 amount of labour which, if paid for by an employer, would make 
 the cost to him more than equivalent to the benefit ; but to the 
 peasant it is not cost, it is the devotion of time which he can spare, 
 to a favourite pursuit, if we should not rather say a ruling pas- 
 sion, f 
 
 We have seen, too, that it is not solely by superior exertion that 
 
 * Principles of Political Economy, Book i. ch. ix. 4. 
 
 t Read the graphic description by the historian Michelet, of the feelings of 
 a peasant proprietor towards his land. 
 
 " If we would know the inmost thought, the passion, of the French peasant, 
 it is very easy. Let us walk out on Sunday into the country and follow him. 
 Behold him yonder, walking in front of us. It is two o'clock ; his wife is at 
 vespers j he has on his Sunday clothes ; I perceive that he is going to visit his 
 mistress. 
 
 " What mistress ? His land. 
 
 " I do not say he goes straight to it. No, he is free to-day, and may either 
 go or not. Does he not go every day in the week ? Accordingly, he turns 
 aside, he goes another way, he has business elsewhere. And yet he goes. 
 
 " It is true, he was passing close by ; it was an opportunity. He looks, but 
 apparently he will not go in ; what for ? And yet he enters. 
 
 " At least it is probable that he will not work ; he is in his Sunday dress : he
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 33 
 
 the Flemish cultivators succeed in obtaining these brilliant results. 
 The same motive which gives such intensity to their industry, 
 placed them earlier in possession of an amount of agricultural 
 knowledge, not attained until much later in countries where agri- 
 culture was carried on solely by hired labour. An equally high 
 testimony is borne by M. de Lavergne* to the agricultural skill of 
 the small proprietors in those parts of France to which the petite 
 culture is really suitable. " In the rich plains of Flanders, on the 
 banks of the Rhine, the Garonne, the Charente, the Rhone, all the 
 practices which fertilize the land and increase the productiveness of 
 labour are known to the very smallest cultivators, and practised by 
 them, however considerable may be the advances which they require. 
 In their hands, abundant manures, collected at great cost, repair 
 and incessantly increase the fertility of the soil, in spite of the 
 activity of cultivation. The races of cattle are superior, the crops 
 magnificent. Tobacco, flax, colza, madder, beetroot, in some places ; 
 in others, the vine, the olive, the plum, the mulberry, only yield 
 their abundant treasures to a population of industrious labourers. 
 Is it not also to the petite culture that we are indebted for most of 
 the garden produce obtained by dint of great outlay in the 
 neighbourhood of Paris ?" 
 
 2. Another aspect of peasant properties, in which it is essential 
 that they should be considered, is that of an instrument of popular 
 education. Books and schooling are absolutely necessary to educa- 
 tion ; but not all-sufficient. The mental faculties will be most 
 developed where they are most exercised ; and what gives more 
 
 has a clean shirt and blouse. Still, there is no harm in plucking up this weed 
 and throwing out that stone. There is a stump, too, which is in the way j but 
 he has not his tools with him, he will do it to-morrow. 
 
 " Then he folds his arms and gazes, serious and careful. He gives a long, a 
 very long look, and seems lost in thought. At last, if he thinks himself ob- 
 served, if he sees a passer-by, he moves slowly away. Thirty paces off he stops, 
 turns round, and casts on his land a last look, sombre and profound, but to those 
 who can see it, the look is full of passion, of heart, of devotion." The People, 
 by J. Michelet, Part i. ch. 1. 
 
 * Essay on the Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3rd ed. 
 p. 177.
 
 34 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 exercise to them than the having a multitude of interests, none of 
 which can be neglected, and which can be 'provided for only by 
 varied efforts of will and intelligence ? Some of the disparagers of 
 small properties lay great stress on the cares and anxieties which 
 beset the peasant proprietor of the Rhineland or Flanders. It is 
 precisely those cares and anxieties which tend to make him a 
 superior being to ah English day-labourer. It is, to be sure, 
 rather abusing the privileges of fair argument to represent the con- 
 dition of a day-labourer as not an anxious one. I can conceive 
 no circumstances in which he is free from anxiety, where there is a 
 possibility of being out of employment ; unless he has access to a 
 profuse dispensation of parish pay, and no shame or reluctance in 
 demanding it. The day-labourer has, in the existing state of 
 society and population, many of the anxieties which have not an 
 invigorating effect on the mind, and none of those which have. 
 The position of the peasant proprietor of Flanders is the reverse. 
 From the anxiety which chills and paralyses the uncertainty of 
 having food to eat few persons are more exempt : it requires as 
 rare a concurrence of circumstances as the potato failure combined 
 with an universal bad harvest, to bring him within reach of that 
 danger. His anxieties are the ordinary vicissitudes of more and 
 less ; his cares are that he takes his fair share of the business of 
 life ; that he is a free human being, and not perpetually a child, 
 which seems to be the approved condition of the labouring classes 
 according to the prevailing philanthropy. He is no longer a being 
 of a different order from the middle classes ; he has pursuits and 
 objects like those which occupy them, and give to their intellects 
 the greatest part of sYich cultivation as they receive. If there is a 
 first principle in intellectual education, it is this that the discipline 
 which does good to the mind is that in which the mind is active, 
 not that in which it is passive. The secret for developing the 
 faculties is to give them much to do, and much inducement to do 
 it. This detracts nothing from the importance, and even necessity, 
 of other kinds of mental cultivation. The possession of property 
 will not prevent the peasant from being coarse, selfish, and narrow- 
 minded. These things depend on other influences, and other kinds
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 35 
 
 of instruction. But this great stimulus to one kind of mental 
 activity, in no way impedes any other means of intellectual develop- 
 ment. On the contrary, by cultivating the habit of turning to 
 practical use every fragment of knowledge acquired, it helps to 
 render that schooling and reading fruitful, which without some 
 such auxiliary influence are in too many cases like seed thrown on 
 a rock. 
 
 3. It is not on the intelligence alone, that the situation of a 
 peasant proprietor exercises an improving influence. It is no less 
 propitious to the moral virtues of prudence, temperance, and self- 
 control. Day-labourers, where the labouring class mainly consists 
 of them, are usually improvident : they spend carelessly to the full 
 extent of their means, and let the future shift for itself. This is 
 so notorious, that many persons strongly interested in the welfare 
 of the labouring classes, hold it as a fixed opinion that an increase 
 of wages would do them little good, unless accompanied by at least 
 a corresponding improvement in their tastes and habits. The 
 tendency of peasant proprietors, and of those who hope to become 
 proprietors, is to the contrary extreme ; to take even too much 
 thought for the morrow. They are oftener accused of penurious- 
 ness than of prodigality. They deny themselves reasonable in- 
 dulgences, and live wretchedly in order to economise. In 
 Switzerland almost everybody saves, who has any means of saving ; 
 the case of the Flemish farmers has been already noticed : among 
 the French, though a pleasure-loving and reputed to be a self-in- 
 dulgent people, the spirit of thrift is diffused through the rural 
 population in a manner most gratifying as a whole, and which in 
 individual instances errs rather on the side of excess than defect. 
 Among those who, from the hovels in which they live, and the 
 herbs and roots which constitute their diet, are mistaken by 
 travellers for proofs and specimens of general indigence, there are 
 numbers who have hoards in leathern bags, consisting of sums in 
 five-franc pieces, which they keep by them perhaps for a whole 
 generation, unless brought out to be expended in their most 
 cherished gratification the purchase of land. If there is a moral 
 
 D2
 
 36 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 inconvenience attached to a state of society in which the peasantry 
 have land, it is the danger of their being too careful of their pecu- 
 niary concerns ; of its making them crafty, and " calculating " in 
 the objectionable sense. The French peasant is no simple country- 
 man, no downright " peasant of the Danube ;"* both in fact and in 
 fiction he is now " the crafty peasant." That is the stage which he 
 has reached in the progressive development which the constitution 
 of things has imposed on human intelligence and human emancipa- 
 tion. But some excess in this direction is a small and a passing 
 evil compared with recklessness and improvidence in the labouring 
 classes, and a cheap price to pay for the inestimable worth of the 
 virtue of self-dependence, as the general characteristic of a 
 people : a virtue which is one of the first conditions of excellence 
 in a human character the stock on which if the other virtues are 
 not grafted, they have seldom any firm root ; a quality indispen- 
 sable in the case of a labouring class, even to any tolerable degree 
 of physical comfort ; and by which the peasantry of France, and of 
 most European countries of peasant proprietors, are distinguished 
 beyond any other labouring population. 
 
 4. Is it likely that a state of economical relations so conducive 
 to frugality and prudence in every other respect, should be preju- 
 dicial to it in the cardinal point of increase of population ? That it 
 is so, is the opinion expressed by most of those English political 
 economists who have written anything about the matter. Mr. 
 M'Culloch's opinion is well known. Mr. Jones affirms,f that a 
 " peasant population, raising their own wages from the soil, and 
 consuming them in kind, are universally acted upon very feebly by 
 internal checks, or by motives disposing them to restraint. The 
 consequence is, that unless some external cause, quite independent 
 of their will, forces such peasant cultivators to slacken their 
 rate of increase, they will, in a limited territory, very rapidly 
 approach a state of want and penury, and will be stopped at last 
 
 * See the celebrated fable of La Fontaine, 
 j" Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 146.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 37 
 
 only by the physical impossibility of procuring subsistence." He 
 elsewhere* speaks of such a peasantry, as " exactly in the condition 
 in which the animal disposition to increase their numbers is checked 
 by the fewest of those balancing motives and desires which regulate 
 the increase of superior ranks or more civilized people." The 
 " causes of this peculiarity," Mr. Jones promised to point out in a 
 subsequent work, which never made its appearance. I am totally 
 unable to conjecture from what theory of human nature, and of the 
 motives which influence human conduct, he would have derived 
 them. Arthur Young assiimes the same "peculiarity" as a fact; 
 but, though not much in the habit of qualifying his opinions, he 
 does not push his doctrine to so violent an extreme as Mr. Jones ; 
 having, as we have seen, himself testified to various instances in 
 which peasant populations, such as Mr. Jones speaks of, were not 
 tending to " a state of want and penury," and were in no danger 
 whatever of coming in contact with " physical impossibility of pro- 
 curing subsistence." 
 
 That there should be discrepancy of experience on this matter, is 
 easily to be accounted for. Whether the labouring people live by 
 land or by wages, they have always hitherto multiplied up to the 
 limit set by their habitual standard of comfort. When that stan- 
 dard was low, not exceeding a scanty subsistence, the size of pro- 
 perties, as well as the rate of wages, has been kept down to what 
 would barely support life. Extremely low ideas of what is neces- 
 sary for subsistence, are perfectly compatible with peasant proper- 
 ties ; and if a people have always been used to poverty, and habit 
 has reconciled them to it, there will be over-population, and exces 
 sive subdivision of land. But this is not to the purpose. The true 
 question is, supposing a peasantry to possess land not insufficient 
 but sufficient for their comfortable support, are they more, or less, 
 likely to fall from this state of comfort through improvideht 
 multiplication, than if they were living in an equally comfortable 
 manner as hired labourers ? All ctpriori considerations are in favour 
 of their being less likely. The dependence of wages on population 
 
 * Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, p. 68.
 
 38 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 is a matter of speculation and discussion. That wages would fall 
 if population were much increased is often a matter of real doubt, 
 and always a thing which requires some exercise of the thinking 
 faculty for its intelligent recognition. But every peasant can satisfy 
 himself from evidence which he can fully appreciate, whether his 
 piece of land can be made to support several families in the same 
 comfort in which it supports one. Few people like to leave to their 
 children a worse lot in life than their own. The parent who has 
 land to leave, is perfectly able to judge whether the children can 
 live upon it or not : but people who are supported by wages, see 
 no reason why their sons should be unable to support themselves 
 in the same way, and trust accordingly to chance. "In even the 
 most useful and necessary arts and manufactures," says Mr. Laing,* 
 " the demand for labourers is not a seen, known, steady, and appre- 
 ciable demand : but it is so in husbandry" under small properties. 
 " The labour to be done, the subsistence that labour will produce 
 out of his portion of land, are seen and known elements in a man's 
 calculation upon his means of subsistence. Can his square of land, 
 or can it not, subsist a family ? Can he marry or not ? are questions 
 which every man can answer without delay, doubt, or speculation. 
 It is the depending on chance, where judgment has nothing clearly 
 set before it, that causes reckless, improvident marriages in the 
 lower, as in the higher classes, and produces among us the evils 
 of over-population ; and chance necessarily enters into every 
 man's calculations, when certainty is removed altogether ; as it 
 is, where certain subsistence is, by our distribution of property, 
 the lot of but a small portion instead of about two-thirds of the 
 people." 
 
 There never has been a writer more keenly sensible of the evils 
 brought upon the labouring classes by excess of population, than 
 Sismondi, and this is one of the grounds of his earnest advocacy of 
 peasant properties. He had ample opportunity, in more countries 
 than one, for judging of their effect on population. Let us see his 
 testimony. " In the countries in which cultivation by small pro- 
 
 * Notes of a Traveller, p. 46.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 39 
 
 prietors still continues, population increases regularly and rapidly 
 until it has attained its natural limits ; that is to say, inheritances 
 continue to be divided and subdivided among several sons, as long 
 as, by an increase of labour, each family can extract an equal 
 income from a smaller portion of land. A father who possessed a 
 vast extent of natural pasture, divides it among his sons, and they 
 turn it into fields and meadows ; his sons divide it among their 
 sons, who abolish fallows : each improvement in agricultural know- 
 ledge admits of another step in the subdivision of property. But 
 there is no danger lest the proprietor should bring up his children 
 to make beggars of them. He knows exactly what inheritance he 
 has to leave them ; he knows that the law will divide it equally 
 among them ; he sees the limit beyond which this division would 
 make them descend from the rank which he has himself filled, and 
 a just family pride, common to the peasant and to the nobleman, 
 makes him abstain from summoning into life, children for whom he 
 cannot properly provide. If more are born, at least they do not 
 marry, or they agree among themselves, which of several brothers 
 shall perpetuate the family. It is not found that in the Swiss 
 Cantons, the patrimonies of the peasants are ever so divided as to 
 reduce them below an honourable competence ; though the habit 
 of foreign service, by opening to the children a career indefinite 
 and uncalculable, sometimes calls forth a superabundant popu- 
 lation."* 
 
 There is similar testimony respecting Norway. Though there is 
 no law or custom of primogeniture, and no manufactures to take 
 off a surplus population, the subdivision of property is not carried 
 to an injurious extent. " The division of the land among children," 
 says Mr. Laing,f " appears not, during the thousand years it has 
 been in operation, to have had the effect of reducing the landed 
 properties to the minimum size that will barely support human ex- 
 istence. I have counted from five-and-twenty to forty cows upon 
 farms, and that in a country in which the farmer must, for at least 
 
 * Nouveaux Principes, Book iii. ch. 3. 
 f Residence in Norway, p. 18.
 
 40 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 seven months in the year, have winter provender and houses pro- 
 vided for all the cattle. It is evident that some cause or other, 
 operating on aggregation of landed property, counteracts the 
 dividing effects of partition among children. That cause can be 
 no other than what I have long conjectured would be effective in 
 such a social arrangement ; viz., that in a country where land is 
 held, not in tenancy merely, as in Ireland, but in full ownership, 
 its aggregation by the deaths of co-heirs, and by the marriages of 
 the female heirs among the body of landholders, will balance its 
 subdivision by the equal succession of children. The whole mass 
 of property will, I conceive, be found in such a state of society to 
 consist of as many estates of the class of 1000Z., as many of 100/., 
 as many of 101., a year, at one period as at another." That this 
 should happen, supposes diffused through society a very efficacious 
 prudential check to population ; and it is reasonable to give part of 
 the credit of this prudential restraint to the peculiar adaptation of 
 the peasant-proprietary system for fostering it. 
 
 " In some parts of Switzerland," says Mr. Kay,* " as in the 
 canton of Argovie for instance, a peasant never marries before he 
 attains the age of twenty-five years, and generally much later in 
 life ; and in that canton the women very seldom marry before they 
 have attained the age of thirty. . . . Nor do the division of land 
 and the cheapness of the mode of conveying it from one man to 
 another, encourage the providence of the labourers of the rural dis- 
 tricts only. They act in the same manner, though perhaps in a 
 less degree, upon the labourers of the smaller towns. In the smaller 
 provincial towns it is customary for a labourer to own a small plot 
 of ground outside the town. This plot he cultivates in the evening 
 as his kitchen garden. He raises in it vegetables and fruits for the 
 use of his family during the winter. After his day's work is over, 
 he and his family repair to the garden for a short time, which they 
 spend in planting, sowing, weeding, or preparing for sowing or 
 harvest, according to the season. The desire to become possessed 
 
 * Vol. i. pp. 67-9.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 41 
 
 of one of these gardens operates very strongly in strengthening 
 prudential habits and in restraining improvident marriages. Some 
 of the manufacturers in the canton of Argovie told me that a towns- 
 man was seldom contented until he had bought a garden, or a 
 garden and house, and that the town labourers generally deferred 
 their marriages for some years, in order to save enough to purchase 
 either one or both of these luxuries." 
 
 The same writer shows by statistical evidence* that in Prussia 
 the average age of marriage is not only much later than in 
 England, but " is gradually becoming later than it was for- 
 merly," while at the same time " fewer illegitimate children 
 are born in Prussia than in any other of the European 
 countries." " Wherever I travelled," says Mr. Kay,| " in North 
 Germany and Switzerland, I was assured by all that the desire 
 to obtain land, which was felt by all the peasants, was acting 
 as the strongest possible check upon undue increase of popula- 
 tion.":}; 
 
 In Flanders, according to Mr. Fauche, the British Consul at 
 Ostend, " farmers' sons and those who have the means to become 
 farmers will delay their marriage until they get possession of a 
 farm." Once a farmer, the next object is to become a proprietor. 
 " The first thing a Dane does with his savings," says Mr. Browne, 
 the Consul at Copenhagen, |j "is to purchase a clock, then a horse 
 
 * Vol. i. pp. 75-9. t Ibid. p. 90. 
 
 J The Prussian minister of statistics, in a work (Condition of the People 
 in Prussia) which I am obliged to quote at second hand from Mr. Kay, after 
 proving by figures the great and progressive increase of the consumption of 
 food and clothing per head of the population, from which he justly infers a 
 corresponding increase of the productiveness of agriculture, continues : " The 
 division of estates has, since 1831, proceeded more and more throughout, the 
 country. There are now many more small independent proprietors than 
 formerly. Yet, however many complaints of pauperism are heard among the 
 dependent labourers, we never hear it complained that pauperism is increasing 
 among the peasant proprietors." Kay, i. 262-6. 
 
 In a communication to the Commissioners of Poor Law Enquiry, p. 640 
 of their Foreign Communications, Appendix F to their First Report. 
 
 || Ibid. 268.
 
 42 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 and cow, which he hires out, and which pays a good interest. 
 Then his ambition is to become a petty proprietor, and this class 
 of persons is better off than any in Denmark. Indeed, I know of 
 no people in any country who have more easily within their reach 
 all that is really necessary for life than this class, which is very 
 large in comparison with that of labourers.' ' 
 
 But the experience which most decidedly contradicts the asserted 
 tendency of peasant proprietorship to produce excess of population, 
 is the case of France. In that country the experiment is not tried 
 in the most favourable circumstances, a large proportion of the 
 properties being too small. The number of landed proprietors in 
 France is not exactly ascertained, but on no estimate does it fall 
 much short of five millions ; which, on the lowest calculation of 
 the number of persons of a family (and for France it ought to be 
 a low calculation), shows much more than half the population as 
 either possessing, or entitled to inherit, landed property. A 
 majority of the properties are so small as not to afford a subsistence 
 to the proprietors, of whom, according to some computations, as 
 many as three millions are obliged to eke out their means of support 
 either by working for hire, or by taking additional land, generally 
 on metayer tenure. When the property possessed is not sufficient 
 to relieve the possessor from dependence on wages, the condition of 
 a proprietor loses much of its characteristic efficacy as a check to 
 over-population : and if the prediction so often made in England 
 had been realized, and France had become a " pauper warren," the 
 experiment would have proved nothing against the tendencies of the 
 same system of agricultural economy in other circumstances. But 
 what is the fact ? That the rate of increase of the French population 
 is the slowest in Europe. During the generation which the Revo- 
 lution raised from the extreme of hopeless wretchedness to sudden 
 abundance, a great increase of population took place. But a gene- 
 ration has grown up, which, having been born in improved cir- 
 cumstances, has not learnt to be miserable ; and upon them the 
 spirit of thrift operates most conspicuously, in keeping the increase 
 of population within the increase of national wealth. In a table,
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 43 
 
 drawn up by Professor Rau,* of the rate of annual increase of the 
 populations of various countries, that of France, from 1817 to 182 7, 
 is stated at per cent, that of England during a similar decennial 
 
 * The followin 
 Rau's large work) 
 
 United States . . 
 Hungary (accordii 
 England 
 
 Austria (Rohrer) 
 Prussia 
 
 Netherlands . . . 
 
 g is the table (see p 
 
 Per cent. 
 . 1820-30 . . 2-92 
 g to Rohrer) 2-40 
 . 1811-21 . . 1-78 
 . 1821-31 . . 1-60 
 1-3O 
 
 . 168 of the Belgian translation of Mr. 
 
 Per cent. 
 Scotland 1821-31 . . 1-30 
 Saxony 1815-30 . . 1-15 
 Baden . . . 1820-30 (Heunisch) 1-13 
 Bavaria 1814-28 . . 1-08 
 Naples 1814-24 . . 0'83 
 
 . 1816-27 . 
 . 1820-30 . 
 . 1821-31 . 
 . 1821-28 . 
 
 . 1-54 
 . 1-37 
 . 1-27 
 . 1-28 
 
 France . . . 1817-27 (Mathieu) 0-63 
 and more recently (Moreau de 
 Jonnes) 0'55 
 
 
 But the number given by Moreau de Jonnes, he adds, is not entitled to 
 implicit confidence. 
 
 The following table given By M. Quetelet (On Man and the Development of 
 his Faculties, vol. i. ch. 7), also on the authority of Rau, contains additional 
 matter, and differs in some items from the preceding, probably from the author's 
 having taken, in those cases, an average of different years : 
 Per cent. Per cent. 
 
 Ireland 2-45 Rhenish Prussia . T33 
 
 Hungary 2-40 Austria T30 
 
 Bavaria 1-08 
 
 Netherlands . . . 0'94 
 
 Spain 1'66 
 
 England l - 65 
 
 Per cent. 
 
 Naples 0-83 
 
 France 0*63 
 
 Sweden 0'58 
 
 Lombardy .... 0'45 
 
 A very carefully prepared statement, by M. Legoyt, in the Journal des 
 Economistes for May 1847, which brings up the results for France to the census 
 of the preceding year 1846, is summed up in the following table : 
 
 
 According 
 to the 
 census. 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of births over 
 deaths. 
 
 
 According 
 to the 
 census. 
 
 According to 
 the excess 
 of births over 
 deaths. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 
 per cent. 
 
 per cent. 
 
 Sweden . . 
 
 0-83 
 
 1-14 
 
 Wurtemburg . 
 
 o-oi 
 
 1-00 
 
 Norway . . 
 
 1-36 
 
 1-30 
 
 Holland . . 
 
 0-90 
 
 1-03 
 
 Denmark. . 
 
 ... 
 
 0-95 
 
 Belgium . 
 
 
 076 
 
 Russia . . 
 
 
 0-61 
 
 Sardinia . 
 
 1-08 
 
 
 Austria . . 
 
 0-85 
 
 0-90 
 
 Great Britain 
 
 ) 
 
 
 Prussia . . 
 
 1-84 
 
 MB 
 
 (exclusive 
 
 >T95 
 
 1-00 
 
 Saxony . 
 
 1-45 
 
 0-90 
 
 of Ireland) 
 
 \ 
 
 
 Hanover . . 
 
 
 0-85 
 
 France . . . 
 
 0-68 
 
 0-50 
 
 Bavaria . . 
 
 ... 
 
 0-71 
 
 United States. 
 
 3-27 

 
 44 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 period being 1-^ annually, and that of the United States nearly 3. 
 According to the official returns as analysed by M. Legoyt,* the 
 increase of the population, which from 1801 to 1806 was at the 
 rate of 1'28 per cent annually, averaged only 0'47 per cent from 
 1806 to 1831 ; from 1831 to 1836 it averaged 0'60per cent; from 
 1836 to 1841, 0-41 per cent, and from 1841 to 1846, 0'68 per 
 cent.f At the census of 1851 the rate of annual increase shown 
 was only 1'08 per cent in the five years, or 0'21 annually; and at 
 the census of 1856 only 0'71 per cent in five years, or 0*14 an- 
 nually : so that, in the words of M. de Lavergne, " population has 
 almost ceased to increase in Prance."J Even this slow increase is 
 wholly the effect of a diminution of deaths ; the number of births 
 not increasing at all, while the proportion of the births to the 
 population is constantly diminishing. This slow growth of the 
 
 * Journal des Economistes for March and May 1847. 
 
 f M. Legoyt is of opinion that the population was understated in 1841, and 
 the increase between that time and 1846 consequently overstated, and that the 
 real increase during the whole period was something intermediate between the 
 last two averages, or not much more than one in two hundred. 
 
 J Journal des Economistes for February 1847. In the Journal for January 
 1865, M. Legoyt gives some of the numbers slightly altered, and I presume 
 corrected. The series of percentages is 1-28, 0-31, 0'69, 0-60, 0-41, 0'68, 0-22, 
 and O20. The last census, that of 1861, shows a slight reaction, the percentage, 
 independently of the newly acquired departments, being 0'32. 
 
 The following are the numbers given by M. Legoyt : 
 
 From 1824 to 1828 { annu f a !, " u , mber } 981,914, being 1 in 32-30 { of **?. P' 
 ( of births. ) ( pulation. 
 
 965,444, 1 in 34-00 
 
 972,993, 1 in 34-39 
 
 970,617, 1 in 35-27 
 
 983,573, 1 in 35-58 
 
 In the last two years the births, according to M. Legoyt, were swelled by 
 the effects of considerable immigration. " This diminution of births," he ob- 
 serves, " while there is a constant, though not a rapid increase both of popula- 
 tion and of marriages, can only be attributed to the progress of prudence and 
 forethought in families. It was a foreseen consequence of our civil and social 
 institutions, which, producing a daily increasing subdivision of fortunes, both 
 landed and moveable, call forth in our people the instincts of conservation and 
 of comfort." 
 
 In four departments, among which are two of the most thriving in Nor- 
 mandy, the deaths even then exceeded the births. The census of 1856 exhibits
 
 PEASANT PEOPRIETORS. 45 
 
 numbers of the people, while capital increases much more rapidly, 
 has caused a noticeable improvement in the condition of the labour 
 ing class. The circumstances of that portion of the class who are 
 landed proprietors are not easily ascertained with precision, being 
 of course extremely variable ; but the mere labourers, who derived 
 no direct benefit from the changes in landed property which took place 
 at the Eevolution, have unquestionably much improved in condition 
 since that period.* Dr. Rau testifies to a similar fact in the case 
 
 the remarkable fact of a positive diminution in the population of 54 out of the 
 86 departments. A significant comment on the pauper-warren theory. See M. 
 de Lavergne's analysis of the returns. 
 
 * " The classes of our population which have only wages, and are therefore 
 the most exposed to indigence, are now (1846) much hotter provided with the 
 necessaries of food, lodging, and clothing, than they were at the beginning of 
 the century. This may be proved by the testimony of all persons who can re- 
 member the earlier of the two periods compared. Were there any doubts on tiie 
 subject, they might easily be dissipated by consulting old cultivators and workmen, 
 as I have myself done in various localities, without meeting with a single contrary 
 testimony ; we may also appeal to the facts collected by an accurate obs< rver, 
 M. Villerme, in his Picture of the Moral and Physical Condition of the Working 
 Classes, book ii. ch. 1." (Researches on the Causes of Indigence, by A. Clement, 
 pp. 84-5.) The same writer speaks (p. 118) of " the considerable rise which 
 has taken place since 1789 in the wages of agricultural day-labourers ;" and 
 adds the following evidence of a higher standard of habitual requirements, even 
 in that portion of the town population, the state of which is usually represented 
 as most deplorable. " In t e last fifteen or twenty years a considerable change 
 has taken place in the habits of the operatives in our manufacturing towns : 
 they now expend much more than formerly on clothing and ornament. . . Cer- 
 tain classes of workpeople, such as the canuts of Lyons," (according to all represen- 
 tations, like their counterpart, our handloorn weavers, the very worst paid class 
 of artizans.) " no longer show themselves, as they did formerly, covered with 
 filthy rags." (Page 164.) 
 
 The preceding statements were given in former editions of the " Principles of 
 Political Economy," being the best to which I had at the time access ; but evi- 
 dence, both of a more recent, and of a more minute and precise character, will 
 now be found in the important work of M. Leonce de Lavergne, Rural Economy 
 of France since 1789. According to that pains-taking, well-informed, and most 
 impartial enquirer, the average daily wages of a French labourer have risen, since 
 the commencement of the Revolution, in the ratio of 19 to 30, while, owing to 
 the more constant employment, the total earnings have increased in a still 
 greater ratio, not short of double. The following are the statements of M. de 
 Lavergne (2nd ed. p. 57) : 
 
 " Arthur Young estimates at 19 sous [9|rf.] the average of a day's wages, 
 which must now be about 1 franc 50 centimes [1*. 3c/.], and this increase only
 
 46 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 of another country in which the subdivision of the land is probably 
 excessive, the Palatinate.* 
 
 I am not aware of a single authentic instance which supports the 
 assertion that rapid multiplication is promoted by peasant properties. 
 Instances may undoubtedly be cited of its not being prevented by 
 them, and one of the principal of these is Belgium ; the prospects 
 of which, in respect to population, are at present a matter of con- 
 siderable uncertainty. Belgium has the most rapidly increasing 
 population on the Continent ; and when the circumstances of the 
 country require, as they must soon do, that this rapidity should be 
 checked, there will be a considerable strength of existing habit to 
 
 represents a part of the improvement. Though the rural population has re- 
 mained about the same in numbers, the addition made to the population since 
 1789 having centred in the towns, the number of actual working days has in- 
 creased, first because, the duration of life having augmented, the number of 
 able-bodied men is greater, and next, because labour is better organized, partly 
 through the suppression of several festival-holidays, partly by the mere effect 
 of a more active demand. When we take into account the increased number 
 of his working days, the annual receipts of the rural workman must have 
 doubled. This augmentation of wages answers to at least an equal augmenta- 
 tion of comforts, since the prices of the chief necessaries of life have changed 
 but little, and those of manufactured, for example of woven, articles, have ma- 
 terially diminished. The lodging of tiie labourers has also improved, if not in 
 all, at least in most of our provinces." 
 
 M. de Lavergne's estimate of the average amount of a day's wages is 
 grounded on a careful comparison, in this and all other economical points of 
 view, of all the different provinces of France. 
 
 * In his little book on the Agriculture of the Palatinate, already cited. He 
 says that the daily wages of labour, which during the last years of the war were 
 unusually high, and so continued until 1817, afterwards sank to a lower money- 
 rate, but that the prices of many commodities having fallen in a still greater 
 proportion, the condition of the people was unequivocally improved. The food 
 given to farm labourers by their employers has also greatly improved in quan- 
 tity and quality. " It is now considerably better than about forty years ago, 
 when the poorer class obtained less flesh-meat and puddings, and no cheese, 
 butter, and the like." (p. 20.) " Such an increase of wages " (adds the Pro- 
 fessor) " which must be estimated not in money, but in the quantity of neces- 
 saries and conveniences which the labourer is enabled to procure, is by universal 
 admission, a proof that the mass of capital must have increased." It proves 
 not only this, but also that the labouring population has not increased in an 
 equal degrte; and that in this instance as well as in France, the division of the 
 land, even when excessive, has been compatible with a strengthening of the 
 prudential checks to population.
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 4-7 
 
 be broken through. One of the unfavourable circumstances is the 
 great power possessed over the minds of the people by the Catholic 
 priesthood, whose influence is everywhere strongly exerted against 
 restraining population. As yet, however, it must be remembered that 
 the indefatigable industry and great agricultural skill of the people 
 have rendered the existing rapidity of increase practically inno- 
 cuous ; the great number of large estates still undivided affording 
 by their gradual dismemberment, a resource for the necessary 
 augmentation of the gross produce ; and there are, besides, many 
 large manufacturing towns, and mining and coal districts, which 
 attract and employ a considerable portion of the annual increase of 
 population. 
 
 5. But even where peasant properties are accompanied by an 
 excess of numbers, this evil is not necessarily attended with the 
 additional economical disadvantage of too great a subdivision of the 
 land. It does not follow because landed property is minutely 
 divided, that farms will be so. As large properties are perfectly 
 compatible with small farms, so are small properties with farms ol 
 an adequate size ; and a subdivision of occupancy is not an in- 
 evitable consequence of even undue multiplication among peasanl 
 proprietors. As might be expected from their admirable intelligence 
 in things relating to their occupation, the Flemish peasantry have 
 long learnt this lesson. " The habit of not dividing properties," 
 says Dr. Rau,* "and the opinion that this is advantageous, have 
 been so completely preserved in Flanders, that even now, when a 
 peasant dies leaving several children, they do not think of dividing 
 his patrimony, though it be neither entailed nor settled in trust ; 
 they prefer selling it entire, and sharing the proceeds, considering 
 it as a jewel which loses its value when it is divided." That the 
 same feeling must prevail widely even in France, is shown by the 
 great frequency of sales of land, amounting in ten years to a fourth 
 part of the whole soil of the country : and M. Passy, in his tract 
 
 * Page 334 of the Brussels translation. He cites as an authority, Schwerz, 
 Papers on Agriculture, i. 185.
 
 48 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 " On the Changes in the Agricultural Condition of the Department 
 of the Eure since the year 1800,"* states other facts tending to 
 the same conclusion. " The example," says he, "of this depart- 
 ment attests that there does not exist, as some writers have 
 imagined, between the distribution of property and that of culti- 
 vation, a connexion which tends invincibly to assimilate them. In 
 no portion of it have changes of ownership had a perceptible in- 
 fluence on the size of holdings. While, in districts of small farming, 
 lands belonging to the same owner are ordinarily distributed among 
 many tenants, so neither is it uncommon, in places where the grande 
 culture prevails, for the same farmer to rent the lands of several 
 proprietors. In the plains of Vexin, in particular, many active 
 and rich cultivators do not content themselves with a single farm ; 
 others add to the lands of their principal holding, all those in the 
 neighbourhood which they are able to hire, and in this manner 
 make up a total extent which in some cases reaches or exceeds 
 two hundred hectares" (five hundred English acres). " The more 
 the estates are dismembered, the more frequent do this sort of 
 arrangements become : and as they conduce to the interest of all 
 concerned, it is probable that time will confirm them." 
 
 " In some places," says M. de Lavergne,f " in the neighbourhood 
 of Paris, for example, where the advantages of the grande culture 
 become evident, the size of farms tends to increase, several farms 
 are thrown together into one, and farmers enlarge their holdings 
 by renting parcelles from a number of different proprietors. Else- 
 where farms as well as properties of too great extent, tend to 
 division. Cultivation spontaneously finds out the organization 
 which suits it best." It is a striking fact, stated by the same 
 eminent writer,^ that the departments which have the greatest 
 number of small separate accounts with the tax-collector, are the 
 
 * One of the many important papers which have appeared in the Journal 
 des Economistes, the organ of the principal political economists of Prance, and 
 doing great and increasing honour to their knowledge and ability. M. Passy's 
 essay has heen reprinted separately as a pamphlet. 
 
 j- Rural Economy of France, p. 455. 
 
 J P. 117. See, for Facts of a similar tendency, pp. 141, 250, and other
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 49 
 
 Nord, the Somme, the Pas de Calais, the Seine Inferieure, the Aisne, 
 and the Oise ; all of them among the richest and best cultivated, 
 and the first-mentioned of them the very richest and best culti- 
 vated, in France. 
 
 Undue subdivision, and excessive smallness of holdings, are un- 
 doubtedly a prevalent evil in some countries of peasant proprietors, 
 and particularly in parts of Germany and France. The governments 
 of Bavaria and Nassau have thought it necessary to impose a legal limit 
 to subdivision, and the Prussian Government unsuccessfully proposed 
 the same measure to the Estates of its Rhenish Provinces.. But I do 
 rot think it will anywhere be found that the petite culture is the sys- 
 em of the peasants, and the grande culture that of the great landlords : 
 un the contrary, wherever the small properties are divided among 
 1.00 many proprietors, I believe it to be true that the large properties 
 also are parcelled out among too many farmers, and that the cause 
 is the same in both cases, a backward state of capital, skill, and 
 agricultural enterprise. There is reason to believe that the sub- 
 division in France is not more excessive than is accounted for by 
 this cause ; that it is diminishing, not increasing ; and that the terror 
 expressed in some quarters, at the progress of the morcellement, is 
 one of the most groundless of real or pretended panics.* 
 
 If peasant properties have any effect in promoting subdivision 
 beyond the degree which corresponds to the agricultural practices 
 
 passages of the same important treatise : which, ou the other hand, equally 
 abounds with evidence of the mischievous effect of subdivision when too minute, 
 or when the nature of the soil and of its products is not suitable to it. 
 
 * Mr. Laing, in bis latest publication, "Observations on the Social and 
 Political State of the European People in 1848 and 1849," a book devoted to 
 the glorification of England, and the disparagement of everything elsewhere 
 which others, or even he himself in former works, had thought worthy of 
 praise, argues that " although the land itself is not divided and subdivided " on. 
 the death of the proprietor, " the value of the land is, and with effects almost 
 as prejudicial to social progress. The value of each share becomes a debt or 
 burden upon the land." Consequently the condition of the agricultural popula- 
 tion is retrograde; " each generation is worse off than the preceding one, although 
 the land is neither less nor more divided, nor worse cultivated." And this he 
 gives as the explanation of the great indebtedness of the small landed pro- 
 prietors in France (pp. 97-9). If these statements were correct, tlu-y would 
 invalidate all which Mr. Laing affirmed so positively in other writings, and 
 

 
 50 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 
 
 of the country, and which is customary on its large estates, the cause 
 must lie in one of the salutary influences of the system ; the eminent 
 degree in which it promotes providence on the part of those who, not 
 being yet peasant proprietors, hope to become so. In England, where 
 the agricultural labourer has no investment for his savings but 
 the savings bank, and no position to which he can rise by any 
 exercise of economy, except perhaps that of a petty shopkeeper, with 
 its chances of bankruptcy, there is nothing at all resembling the in- 
 tense spirit of thrift which takes possession of one who, from being 
 a day labourer, can raise himself by saving to the condition of a 
 landed proprietor. According to almost all authorities, the real cause 
 of the minute subdivision is the higher price which can be obtained 
 for land by selling it to the peasantry, as an investment for their 
 small accumulations, than by disposing of it entire to some rich 
 purchaser Avho has no object but to live on its income, without 
 improving it. The hope of obtaining such an investment is the 
 most powerful of inducements, to those who are without land, to 
 practise the industry, frugality, and self-restraint, on which their 
 success in this object of ambition is dependent. 
 
 As the result of this enquiry into the direct operation and indirect 
 influences of peasant properties, I conceive it to be established, 
 that there is no necessary connexion between this form of landed 
 property and an imperfect state of the arts of production ; that it 
 
 repeats in this, respecting the peculiar efficacy of the possession of land in pre- 
 venting over-population. But he is entirely mistaken as to the matter of fact. 
 In the only country of which he speaks from actual residence, Norway, he 
 does not pretend that the condition of the peasant proprietors is deteriorating. 
 The facts already cited prove that in respect to Belgium, Germany, and Switzer- 
 land, the assertion is equally wide of the mark ; and what has been shown 
 respecting the slow increase of population in France, demonstrates that if the 
 condition of the French peasantry was deteriorating, it could not be from the 
 cause supposed by Mr. Laing. The truth I believe to be that in every country 
 without exception, in which peasant properties prevail, the condition of the 
 people is improving, the produce of the land and even its fertility increasing, 
 and from the larger surplus which remains after feeding the agricultural classes, 
 the towns are augmenting both in population and in the well-being of their 
 inhabitants. On this question, as well as on that of the subdivision, so far as 
 regards France, additional facts and observations, brought up to a later date, 
 will be found in the Appendix to the first volume of " Principles of Political 
 Economy."
 
 PEASANT PROPRIETORS. 51 
 
 is favourable in quite as many respects as it is unfavourable, to the 
 most effective use of the powers of the soil ; that no other existing 
 state of agricultural economy has so beneficial an effect on the 
 industry, the intelligence, the frugality, and prudence of the popu- 
 lation, nor tends on the whole so much to discourage an improvi- 
 dent increase of their numbers ; and that no existing state, therefore, 
 is on the whole so favourable, both to their moral and their physical 
 welfare. Compared with the English system of cultivation by hired 
 labour, it must be regarded as eminently beneficial to the labouring 
 class.* We are not on the present occasion called upon to compare 
 it with the joint ownership of the land by associations of labourers. 
 
 * French history strikingly confirms these conclusions. Three times during 
 the course of ages the peasantry have been purchasers of land ; and these times 
 immediately preceded the three principal eras of French agricultural prosperity. 
 
 " In the worst times," says the historian Michelet (The People, Part i. ch. 1), 
 " the times of universal poverty, when even the rich are poor and ohliged to 
 sell, the poor are enabled to buy : no other purchaser presenting himself, the 
 peasant in rags arrives with his piece of gold, and acquires a little bit of land. 
 These moments of disaster in which the peasant was able to buy land at a low 
 price, have always been followed by a sudden gush of prosperity which people 
 could not account for. Towards 1500, for example, when France, exhausted 
 by Louis XI., seemed to be completing its ruin in Italy, the noblesse who went 
 to the wars were obliged to sell : the land, passing into new hands, suddenly 
 began to flourish ; men began to labour and to build. This happy moment, in 
 the style of courtly historians, was called the good Louis XII. 
 
 " Unhappily it did not last long. Scarcely had the land recovered itself when 
 the tax-eollector fell upon it ; the wars of religion followed, and seemed to rase 
 everything to the ground ; with horrible miseries, dreadful famines, in which 
 mothers devoured their children. Who would believe that the country recovered 
 from this ? Scarcely is the war ended, when from the devastated fields, and the 
 cottages still black with the flames, comes forth the hoard of the peasant. He 
 buys ; in ten years, France wears a new face ; in twenty or thirty, all possessions 
 Lave doubled and trebled in value. This moment, again baptized by a royal 
 name, is called the good Henry IV. and the great Richelieu." 
 
 Of the third era it is needless again to speak : it was that of the Revolution. 
 
 Whoever would study the reverse of the picture, may compare these historic 
 periods, characterized by the dismemberment of large and the construction of 
 small properties, with the wide-spread national suffering which accompanied, 
 and the permanent deterioration of the condition of the labouring classes which 
 followed, the " clearing " away of small yeomen to make room for large grazing 
 farms, which was the grand economical event of English history during the 
 sixteenth century. 
 
 E 2
 
 OP METAYERS. 
 
 1. FROM the case in which the produce of land and labour 
 belongs undividedly to the labourer, we proceed to the cases in 
 which it is divided, but between two classes only, the labourers and 
 the landowners : the character of capitalists merging in the one or 
 the other, as the case may be. It is possible indeed to conceive 
 that there might be only two classes of persons to share the produce, 
 and that a class of capitalists might be one of them ; the character 
 of labourer and that of landowner being united to form the 
 other. This might occur in two ways. The labourers, though 
 owning the land, might let it to a tenant, and work under him as 
 hired servants. But this arrangement, even in the very rare cases 
 which could give rise to it, would not require any particular dis- 
 cussion, since it would not differ in any material respect from the 
 threefold system of labourers, capitalists, and landlords. The other 
 case is the not uncommon one, in which a peasant proprietor owns 
 and cultivates the land, but raises the little capital required, by 
 a mortgage upon it. Neither does this case present any important 
 peculiarity. There is but one person, the peasant himself, who 
 has any right or power of interference in the management. He 
 pays a fixed annuity as interest to a capitalist, as he pays another 
 fixed sum in taxes to the government. Without dwelling further on 
 these cases, we pass to those which present marked features of pecu- 
 liarity.
 
 METAYERS. S3 
 
 When the two parties sharing in the produce are the labourer or 
 labourers and the landowner, it is not a very material circumstance 
 in the case, which of the two furnishes the stock, or whether, as 
 sometimes happens, they furnish it, in a determinate proportion, 
 between them. The essential difference does not lie in this, but in 
 another circumstance, namely, whether the division of the produce 
 between the two is regulated by custom or by competition. We 
 will begin with the former case ; of which the metayer culture is 
 the principal, and in Europe almost the sole, example. 
 
 The principle of the metayer system, is that the labourer, or 
 peasant, makes his engagement directly with the landowner, and 
 pays, not a fixed rent, either in money or in kind, but a certain 
 proportion of the produce, or rather of what remains of the produce 
 after deducting what is considered necessary to keep up the stock. 
 The proportion is usually, as the name imports, one-half; but in 
 several districts in Italy it is two-thirds. Respecting the supply of 
 stock, the custom varies from place to place ; in some places the 
 landlord furnishes the whole, in others half, in others some par- 
 ticular part, as for instance the cattle and seed, the labourer provid- 
 ing the implements.*. "This connexion," says Sismondi, speaking 
 chiefly of Tuscany ,f " is often the subject of a contract, to define 
 
 * In France before the Revolution, according to Arthur Young (i. 403) 
 there was great local diversity in this respect. In Champagne "the land- 
 lord commonly finds half the cattle and half the seed, and the metayer, labour, 
 implements, and taxes ; but in some districts the landlord bears a share of these. 
 In Roussillon, the landlord pays half the taxes ; and in Guienne, from Auch to 
 Fleuran, many landlords pay all. Near Aguillon, on the Garonne, the metayers 
 furnish half the cattle. At Nangis, in the Isle of France, I met with an agree- 
 ment for the landlord to furnish live stock, implements, harness, and taxes; the 
 metayer found labour and his own capitation tax : the landlord repaired the 
 house and gates ; the metayer the windows : the landlord provided seed the 
 first year, the metayer the last j in the intervening years they supply half and 
 half. In the Bourbonnois the landlord finds all sorts of live stock, yet the 
 metayer sells, changes, and buys at his will ; the steward keeping an account 
 of these mutations, for the landlord has half the product of sales, and pays 
 half the purchases." In Piedmont, he says, " the landlord commonly pays the 
 taxes and repairs the buildings, and the tenant provides cattle, implements, and 
 seed." (II. 151.) 
 
 f Studies in Political Economy, Essay VI. On the Condition of the Culti- 
 vators in Tuscany.
 
 54 METAYERS. 
 
 certain services and certain occasional payments to which the 
 metayer binds himself; nevertheless the differences in the obliga- 
 tions of one such contract and another are inconsiderable ; usage 
 governs alike all these engagements, and supplies the stipulations 
 which have not been expressed ; and the landlord who attempted to 
 depart from usage, who exacted more than his neighbour, who 
 took for the basis of the agreement anything but the equal division 
 of the crops, would render himself so odious, he would be so sure 
 of not obtaining a metayer who was an honest man, that the con- 
 tract of all the metayers may be considered as identical, at least in 
 each province, and never gives rise to any competition among 
 peasants in search of employment, or any offer to cultivate the 
 soil on cheaper terms than one another." To the same effect 
 Chateauvieux,* speaking of the metayers of Piedmont. " They 
 consider it," (the farm) " as a patrimony, and never think of renew- 
 ing the lease, but go on from generation to generation, on the same 
 terms, without writings or registries."! 
 
 2. When the partition of the produce is a matter of fixed 
 usage, not of varying convention, political economy has no laws of 
 distribution to investigate. It has only to consider, as in the case 
 of peasant proprietors, the effects of the system first on the condition 
 of the peasantry, morally and physically, and secondly, on the 
 efficiency of the labour. In both these particulars the metayer 
 system has the characteristic advantages of peasant properties, but 
 has them in a less degree. The metayer has less motive to exertion 
 than the peasant proprietor, since only half the fruits of his 
 
 * Letters from Italy. I quote from Dr. Rigby's translation (p. 22). 
 f This virtnal fixity of tenure is not however universal even in Italy ; and 
 it is to its absence that Sismondi attributes the inferior condition of the 
 metayers in some provinces of Naples, in Lucca, and in the Riviera of Genoa ; 
 where the landlords obtain a larger (though still a fixed) share of the produce. 
 In those countries the cultivation is splendid, but the people wretchedly poor. 
 " The same misfortune would probably have befallen the people of Tuscany if 
 public opinion did not protect the cultivator ; but a proprietor would not dare 
 to impose conditions unusual in the country, and even in changing one metayer 
 for another he alters nothing in the terms of the engagement." New Prin- 
 ciples of Political Economy, book iii. ch. 5.
 
 METAYERS. 55 
 
 industry, instead of the whole, are his own. But he has a much 
 stronger motive than a day labourer, who has no other interest in 
 the result than not to be dismissed. If the metayer cannot be 
 turned out except for some violation of his contract, he has a 
 stronger motive to exertion than any tenant farmer who has not a 
 lease. The metayer is at least his landlord's partner, and a half- 
 sharer in their joint gains. Where, too, the permanence of his 
 tenure is guaranteed by custom, he acquires local attachments, and 
 much of the feelings of a proprietor. I am supposing that this half 
 produce is sufficient to yield him a comfortable support. Whether 
 it is so, depends (in any given state of agriculture) on the degree 
 of subdivision of the land ; which depends on the operation of the 
 population principle. A multiplication of people, beyond the 
 number that can be properly supported on the land or taken off by 
 manufactures, is incident even to a peasant proprietary, and of 
 course not less but rather more incident to a metayer population. 
 The tendency, however, which we noticed in the proprietary system, 
 to promote prudence on this point, is in no small degree common 
 to it with the metayer system. There, also, it is a matter of easy and 
 exact calculation whether a family can be supported or not. If it is 
 easy to see whether the owner of the whole produce can increase 
 the production so as to maintain a greater number of persons equally 
 well, it is a not less simple problem whether the owner of half the 
 produce can do so.* There is one check which this system seems 
 to offer, over and above those held out even by the proprietary 
 system ; there is a landlord, who may exert a controlling power, by 
 
 * M. Bastiat affirms that even in France, incontestably the least favourable 
 example of the metayer system, its effect in repressing population is conspicuous. 
 " It is a well-ascertained fact that the tendency to excessive multiplication is 
 chiefly manifested in the class who live on wages. Over these the forethought 
 which retards marriages has little operation, because the evils which flow from 
 excessive competition appear to them only very confusedly, and at a considerable 
 distance. It is, therefore, the most advantageous condition of a people to be so 
 organized as to contain no regular class of labourers for hire. In metayer coun- 
 tries, marriages are principally determined by the demands of cultivation ; they 
 increase when, from hate ver cause, the mutairies ofier vacancies injurious to
 
 56 METAYERS. 
 
 refusing his consent to a subdivision. I do not, however, attach 
 great importance to this check, because the farm may be loaded 
 with superfluous hands without being subdivided ; and because, 
 so long as the increase of hands increases the gross produce, which 
 is almost always the case, the landlord, who receives half the 
 produce, is an immediate gainer, the inconvenience falling only 
 on the labourers. The landlord is no doubt liable in the end 
 to suffer from their poverty, by being forced to make advances to 
 them, especially in bad seasons ; and a foresight of this ultimate 
 inconvenience may operate beneficialty on such landlords as prefer 
 future security to present profit. 
 
 The characteristic disadvantage of the metayer system is very 
 fairly stated by Adam Smith. After pointing out that metayers 
 " have a plain interest that the whole produce should be as great as 
 possible, in order that their own proportion may be so," he con- 
 tinues,* "it could never, however, be the interest of this species of 
 cultivators to lay out, in the further improvement of the land, any 
 part of the little stock which they might save from their own share 
 of the produce, because the lord who laid out nothing, was to get 
 one-half of whatever it produced. The tithe, which is but a tenth 
 of the produce, is found to be a very great hindrance to improve- 
 ment. A tax, therefore, which amounted to one-half, must have 
 been an effectual bar to it. It might be the interest of a metayer 
 to make the land produce as much as could be brought out of it by 
 means of the stock furnished by the proprietor ; but it could 
 never be his interest to mix any part of his own with it. In 
 France, where five parts out of six of the whole kingdom are said 
 to be still occupied by this species of cultivators, the proprietors 
 complain that their metayers take every opportunity of employing 
 
 production ; they diminish when the places are filled up. A fact easily ascer- 
 tained, the proportion between the size of the farm and the number of hands, 
 operates like forethought, and with greater effect. We find, accordingly, that 
 when nothing occurs to make an opening for a superfluous population, numbers 
 remain stationary : as is seen in our southern departments." Considerations on 
 Metayage, in the Journal des Economistes for February, 1846. 
 
 * Wealth of Nations, book iii. ch. 2.
 
 METAYERS. 57 
 
 the master's cattle rather in carriage than in cultivation ; because 
 in the one case they get the whole profits to themselves, in the other 
 they share them with their landlord." 
 
 It is indeed implied in the very nature of the tenure, that all im- 
 provements which require expenditure of capital must be made 
 with the capital of the landlord. This, however, is essentially the 
 case even in England, whenever the farmers are tenants-at-will : or 
 (if Arthur Young is right) even on a " nine years lease." If the 
 landlord is willing to provide capital for improvements, the metayer 
 has the strongest interest in promoting them, since half the benefit 
 of them will accrue to himself. As however the perpetuity of 
 tenure which, in the case we are discussing, he enjoys by custom, 
 renders his consent a necessary condition ; the spirit of routine, and 
 dislike of innovation, characteristic of an agricultural people when 
 not corrected by education, are no doubt, as the advocates of the 
 system seem to admit, a serious hindrance to improvement. 
 
 3. The metayer system has met with no mercy from English 
 authorities. " There is not one word to be said in favour of the 
 practice," says Arthur Young,* and a " thousand arguments that 
 might be used against it. The hard plea of necessity can alone be 
 urged in its favour ; the poverty of the farmers being so great, 
 that the landlord must stock the farm, or it could not be stocked 
 at all : this is a most cruel burthen to a proprietor, who is thus 
 obliged to run much of the hazard of farming in the most dangerous 
 of all methods, that of trusting his property absolutely in the hands 
 of people who are generally ignorant, many careless, and some un- 
 doubtedly wicked. ... In this most miserable of all the 
 modes of letting land, the defrauded landlord receives a contemp- 
 tible rent ; the farmer is in the lowest state of poverty ; the land 
 is miserably cultivated ; and the nation suffers as severely as the 
 parties themselves. . . . Whereverf this system prevails, it may 
 be taken for granted that a useless and miserable population is 
 
 * Travels, vol. i. pp. 404-5. f Ibid. vol. ii. 151-3.
 
 58 METAYERS. 
 
 found. . . . Wherever the country (that I saw) is poor and un- 
 watered, in the Milanese, it is in the hands of metayers :" they are 
 almost always in debt to their landlord for seed or food, and " their 
 condition is more wretched than that of a day labourer. . . . 
 There* are but few districts" (in Italy) " where lands are let to 
 the occupying tenant at a money -rent ; but wherever it is found, 
 their crops are greater ; a clear proof of the imbecility of the 
 metaying system." " Wherever it" (the metayer system) " has 
 been adopted," says Mr. M'Culloch,'| > "it has put a stop to all im- 
 provement, and has reduced the cultivators to the most abject 
 poverty." Mr. Jones| shares the common opinion, and quotes 
 Turgot and Destutt- Tracy in support of it. The impression, how- 
 ever, of all these writers (notwithstanding Arthur Young's occasional 
 referencesto Italy) seemsto be chiefly derived from France, and France 
 before the Revolution. Now the situation of French metayers under 
 the old regime by no means represents the typical form of the contract. 
 It is essential to that form, that the proprietor pays all the taxes. 
 But in France the exemption of the noblesse from direct taxation 
 had led the Government to throw the whole burthen of their ever- 
 ^ncreasing fiscal exactions upon the occupiers : and it is to these 
 exactions that Turgot ascribed the extreme wretchedness of the 
 metayers : a wretchedness in some cases so excessive, that in 
 Limousin and Angoumois (the provinces which he administered) 
 
 * Travels, vol. ii. 217. 
 
 j- Principles of Political Economy, 3rd ed. p. 471. 
 j Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, pp. 102-4. 
 
 M. de Tracy is partially an exception, inasmuch as his experience reaches 
 lower down than the revolutionary period ; but he admits (as Mr. Jones has 
 himself stated in another place) that he is acquainted only with a limited dis- 
 trict, of great subdivision and unfertile soil. 
 
 M. Passy is of opinion, that a French peasantry must be in indigence and 
 the country badly cultivated on a metayer system, because the proportion of 
 the produce claimable by the landlord is too high ; it being only in more favour- 
 able climates that any land, not of the most exuberant fertility, can pay half 
 its gross produce in rent, and leave enough to peasant farmers to enable them 
 to grow successfully the more expensive and valuable products of agricul- 
 ture. (On Systems of Culture, p. 35.) This is an objection only to a particular 
 numerical proportion, which is indeed the common one, but is not essential to 
 the system.
 
 METAYERS. 59 
 
 they had seldom more, according to him, after deducting all burthens, 
 than from twenty-five to thirty livres (20 to 24 shillings) per head 
 for their whole annual consumption : "I do not mean in money, 
 but including all that they consume in kind from their own 
 crops."* When we add that they had not the virtual fixity of 
 tenure of the metayers of Italy, (" in Limousin," says Arthur 
 Young,! " * ne metayers are considered as little better than menial 
 servants, removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things 
 to the will of the landlords,") it is evident that their case affords no 
 argument against the metayer system in its better form. A popula- 
 tion who could call nothing their own who, like the Irish cottiers, 
 could not in any contingency be worse off had nothing to restrain 
 them from multiplying, and subdividing the land, until stopped by 
 actual starvation. 
 
 We shall find a very different picture, by the most accurate 
 authorities, of the metayer cultivation of Italy. In the first place, 
 as to subdivision. In Lombardy, according to Chateauvieux,J 
 there are few farms which exceed sixty acres, and few which have 
 less than ten. These farms are all occupied by metayers at half 
 profit. They invariably display " an extent and a richness in 
 buildings rarely known in any other country in Europe." Their 
 plan " affords the greatest room with the least extent of building ; 
 is best adapted to arrange and secure the crop ; and is, at the same 
 time, the most economical, and the least exposed to accidents by 
 fire." The court-yard " exhibits a whole so regular and commo- 
 dious, and a system of such care and good order, that our dirty and 
 ill-arranged farms can convey no adequate idea of." The same 
 
 * See the " Memoir on the Surcharge of Taxes suffered by the Generality of 
 Limoges, addressed to the Council of State in 1786," pp. 260-304 of the fourth 
 volume of Turgot's Works. The occasional engagements of landlords (as men- 
 tioned by Arthur Young) to pay a part of the taxes, were, according to Turgot, 
 of recent origin, under the compulsion of actual necessity. " The proprietor 
 only consents to it when he can find no metayer on other terms ; consequently, 
 even in that case, the metayer is always reduced to what is barely sufficient to 
 prevent him from dying of hunger." (p. 275). 
 f Vol. i. p. 40k 
 
 J Letters from Italy, translated by Kigby, p. 16. Ibid. pp. 19, 20.
 
 60 METAYERS. 
 
 description applies to Piedmont. The rotation of crops is excellent. 
 " I should think* no country can bring so large a portion of its 
 produce to market as Piedmont." Though the soil is not naturally 
 very fertile, " the number of cities is prodigiously great." The 
 agriculture must, therefore, be eminently favourable to the net as 
 well as to the gross produce of the land. " Each plough works 
 thirty-two acres in the season. . . . Nothing can be more 
 perfect or neater than the hoeing and moulding up the maize, when 
 in full growth, by a single plough, with a pair of oxen, with- 
 out injury to a single plant, while all the weeds are effectually 
 destroyed." So much for agricultural skill. " Nothing can be so 
 excellent as the crop which precedes and that which follows it." 
 The wheat " is thrashed by a cylinder, drawn by a horse, and 
 guided by a boy, while the labourers turn over the straw with 
 forks. This process lasts nearly a fortnight; it is quick and 
 
 economical, and completely gets out the grain In 
 
 no part of the world are the economy and the management of the 
 land better understood than in Piedmont, and this explains the 
 phenomenon of its great population, and immense export of pro- 
 visions." All this under metayer cultivation. 
 
 Of the valley of the Arno, in its whole extent, both above and 
 below Florence, the same writer thus speaks :f "Forests of olive- 
 trees covered the lower parts of the mountains, and by their foliage 
 concealed an infinite number of small farms, which peopled these 
 parts of the mountains ; chestnut-trees raised their heads on the 
 higher slopes, their healthy verdure contrasting with the pale tint of 
 the olive-trees, and spreading a brightness over this amphitheatre. 
 The road was bordered on each side with village-houses, not more 
 
 than a hundred paces from each other They are placed at 
 
 a little distance from the road, and separated from it by a wall, and 
 a terrace of some feet in extent. On the wall are commonly placed 
 many vases of antique forms, in which flowers, aloes, and young 
 orange trees are growing. The house itself is completely covered with 
 
 * Letters from Italy, pp. 24-31. 
 f Ibid. pp. 78-9.
 
 METAYERS. 61 
 
 vines Before these houses we saw groups of peasant 
 
 females dressed in white linen, silk corsets, and straw-hats, orna- 
 mented with flowers These houses being so near each 
 
 other, it is evident that the land annexed to them must be small, and 
 that property, in these valleys, must be very much divided ; the 
 extent of these domains being from three to ten acres. The land 
 lies round the houses, and is divided into fields by small canals, or 
 rows of trees, some of which are mulberry-trees, but the greatest 
 number poplars, the leaves of which are eaten by the cattle. Each 
 
 tree supports a vine These divisions, arrayed in 
 
 oblong squares, are large enough to be cultivated by a plough with- 
 out wheels, and a pair of oxen. There is a pair of oxen between 
 ten or twelve of the farmers ; they employ them successively in 
 
 the cultivation of all the farms Almost every farm 
 
 maintains a well-looking horse, which goes in a small two-wheeled 
 cart, neatly made, and painted red ; they serve for all the purposes 
 of draught for the farm, and also to convey the farmer's daughters to 
 mass and to balls. Thus, on holidays, hundreds of these little carts 
 are seen flying in all directions, carrying the young women, deco- 
 rated with flowers and ribbons." 
 
 This is not a picture of poverty; and so far as agriculture is con- 
 cerned, it effectually redeems metayer cultivation, as existing in 
 these countries, from the reproaches of English writers ; but with 
 respect to the condition of the cultivators, Chateauvieux's testimony 
 is, in some points, not so favourable. " It is* neither' the natural 
 fertility of the soil, nor the abundance which strikes the eye of the 
 traveller, which constitute the well-being of its inhabitants. It is 
 the number of individuals among whom the total produce is divided, 
 which fixes the portion that each is enabled to enjoy. Here it is 
 very small. I have thus far, indeed, exhibited a delightful country, 
 well watered, fertile, and covered with a perpetual vegetation ; I have 
 shown it divided into countless enclosures, which, like so many 
 ""aeds in a garden, display a thousand varying productions ; I 
 have shown, that to all these enclosures are attached well-built 
 
 * Letters from Italy, pp. 73-6.
 
 62 METAYERS. 
 
 houses, clothed with vines, and decorated with flowers ; but, on 
 entering them, we find a total want of all the conveniences of life, 
 a table more than frugal, and a general appearance of privation." 
 Is not Chateauvieux here unconsciously contrasting the condition of 
 the metayers with that of the farmers of other countries, when the 
 proper standard with which to compare it is that of the agricultural 
 day-labourers ? 
 
 Arthur Young says,* " I was assured that these metayers are 
 (especially near Florence) much at their ease ; that on holidays they 
 are dressed remarkably well, and not without objects of luxury, as 
 silver, gold, and silk ; and live well, on plenty of bread, wine, and 
 legumes. In some instances this may possibly be the case, but the 
 general fact is contrary. It is absurd to think that metayers, upon 
 such a farm as is cultivated by a pair of oxen, can live at their ease; 
 and a clear proof of their poverty is this, that the landlord, who 
 provides half the live stock, is often obliged to lend the peasant 
 money to procure his half. .... The metayers, not in the 
 vicinity of the city, are so poor, that landlords even lend them corn 
 to eat : their food is black bread, made of a mixture with vetches ; 
 and their drink is very little wine, mixed with water, and called 
 aquarolle ; meat on Sundays only ; their dress very ordinary." 
 Mr. Jones admits the superior comfort of the metayers near Florence, 
 and attributes it partly to straw-platting, by which the women of 
 the peasantry can earn, according to Chateau vieux,f from fifteen to 
 twenty pence a day. But even this fact tells in favour of the 
 metayer system ; for in those parts of England in which either straw- 
 platting or lace-making is carried on by the women and children of 
 the labouring class, as in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, the 
 condition of the class is not better, but rather worse than elsewhere, 
 the wages of agricultural labour being depressed by a full equivalent. 
 
 In spite of Chateauvieux' s statement respecting the poverty of the 
 metayers, his opinion, in respect to Italy at least, is given in favour 
 of the system. " It occupies^ and constantly interests the proprietors, 
 
 * Travels, vol. ii. p. 156. f Letters from Italy, p. 75. 
 
 J Ibid. pp. 295 -6.
 
 METAYERS. 63 
 
 which is never the case with great proprietors who lease their 
 estates at fixed rents. It establishes a community of interests, and 
 relations of kindness between the proprietors and the metayers ; a 
 kindness which I have often witnessed, and from which result 
 great advantages in the moral condition of society. The proprietor, 
 under this system, always interested in the success of the crop, 
 never refuses to make an advance upon it, which the land promises 
 to repay with interest. It is by these advances and by the hope 
 thus inspired, that the rich proprietors of land have gradually 
 perfected the whole rural economy of Italy. It is to them that it 
 owes the numerous systems of irrigation which water its soil, as 
 also the establishment of the terrace culture on the hills : gradual 
 but permanent improvements, which common peasants, for want of 
 means, could never have effected, and which could never have been 
 accomplished by the farmers, nor by the great proprietors who let 
 their estates at fixed rents, because they are not sufficiently inte- 
 rested. Thus the interested system forms of itself that alliance 
 between the rich proprietor, whose means provide for the improve- 
 ment of the culture, and the metayer whose care and labours are di- 
 rected, by a common interest, to make the most of these advances." 
 
 But the testimony most favourable to the system is that of Sig- 
 mondi, which has the advantage of being specific, and from accu- 
 rate knowledge ; his information being not that of a traveller, but 
 that of a resident proprietor, intimately acquainted with rural life. 
 His statements apply to Tuscany generally, and more particularly to 
 the Val di Nievole, in which his own property lay, and which is 
 not within the supposed privileged circle immediately round 
 Florence. It is one of the districts in which the size of farms 
 appears to be the smallest. The following is his description of the 
 dwellings and mode of life of the metayers of that district. * 
 
 " The house, built of good walls with lime and mortar, has always 
 at least one story, sometimes two, above the ground floor. On the 
 ground floor are generally the kitchen, a cowhouse for two horned 
 
 * From his Sixth Essay, formerly referred to.
 
 64 METAYERS. 
 
 cattle, and the storehouse, which takes its name, tinaia, from the 
 large vats (tint) in which the wine is put to ferment, without any 
 pressing : it is there also that the metayer locks up his casks, his 
 oil, and his grain. Almost always there is also a shed supported 
 against the house, where he can work under cover to mend his tools, 
 or chop forage for his cattle. On the first and second stories are 
 two, three, and often four bedrooms. The largest and most airy of 
 these is generally destined by the metayer, in the months of May 
 and June, to the bringing up of silkworms. Great chests to contain 
 clothes and linen, and some wooden chairs, are the chief furniture 
 of the chambers ; but a newly-married wife always brings with her 
 a wardrobe of walnut wood. The beds are uncurtained and un- 
 roofed, but on each of them, besides a good paillasse, filled with the 
 elastic straw of the maize plant, there are one or two mattresses of 
 wool, or, among the poorest, of tow, a good blanket, sheets of strong 
 hempen cloth, and on the best bed of the family a coverlet of silk 
 padding, which is spread on festival days. The only fireplace is in 
 the kitchen ; and there also is the great wooden table where the 
 family dines, and the benches ; the great chest which serves at once 
 for keeping the bread and other provisions, and for kneading ; a 
 tolerably complete though cheap assortment of pans, dishes, and 
 earthenware plates : one or two metal lamps, a steelyard, and at 
 least two copper pitchers for drawing and holding water. The 
 linen and the working clothes of the family have all been spun by 
 the women of the house. The clothes, both of men and of women, are 
 of the stuff called mezza lana when thick, mola when thin, and made 
 of a coarse thread of hemp or tow, filled up with cotton or wool ; it 
 is dried by the same women by whom it was spun. It would hardly 
 be believed what a quantity of cloth and of mezza lana the peasant 
 women are able to accumulate by assiduous industry ; how many 
 sheets there are in the store ; what a number of shirts, jackets, 
 trowsers, petticoats, and gowns are possessed by every member of 
 the family. By way of example I add in a note the inventory of 
 the peasant family best known to me : it is neither one of the richest 
 nor of the poorest, and lives happily by its industry on half the pro-
 
 METAYERS. 65 
 
 duce of less than ten arpents of land.* The young women had a 
 marriage portion of fifty crowns, twenty paid down, and the rest by 
 instalments of two every year. The Tuscan crown is worth six 
 francs [4s. 10c?.]. The commonest marriage portion of a peasant 
 girl in the other parts of Tuscany, where the metairies are larger, 
 is 100 crowns, 600 francs." 
 
 Is this poverty, or consistent with poverty ? When a common, 
 M. de Sismondi even says the common, marriage portion of a 
 metayer's daughter is 24Z. English money, equivalent to at least 50Z. 
 in Italy and in that rank of life ; when one whose dowry is only 
 half that amount, has the wardrobe described, which is represented 
 by Sismondi as a fair average ; the class must be fully comparable, 
 in general condition, to a large proportion even of capitalist farmers 
 in other countries ; and incomparably above the day labourers of 
 any country, except a new colony, or the United States. Very little 
 can be inferred, against such evidence, from a traveller's impression 
 of the poor quality of their food. Its inexpensive character may 
 be rather the effect of economy than of necessity. Costly feeding is 
 not the favourite luxury of a southern people ; their diet in all 
 classes is principally vegetable, and no peasantry on the Continent 
 has the superstition of the English labourer respecting white bread. 
 But the nourishment of the Tuscan peasants } according to Sis- 
 mondi, " is wholesome and various : its basis is an excellent 
 wheaten bread, brown, but pure from bran and from all mixture." 
 In the bad season, they take but two meals a day : at ten in 
 the morning they eat their pollenta, at the beginning of the night 
 
 * Inventory of the trousseau of Jane, daughter of Valente Papini, on her 
 marriage with Giovacchino Landi, the 29th of April 1835, at Porta Veccbia, 
 near Pescia : 
 
 " 28 shifts, 7 best dresses (of particular fabrics of silk), 7 dresses of printed 
 cotton, 2 winter working dresses (mezza land), 3 summer working dresses and 
 petticoats (mold), 3 white petticoats, 5 aprons of printed linen, 1 of black silk, 
 
 1 of black merinos, 9 coloured working aprons (mold), 4 white, 8 coloured, and 
 3 silk, handkerchiefs, 2 embroidered veils and one of tulle, 3 towels, 14 pairs 
 of stockings, 2 hats (one of felt, the other of fine straw) ; 2 cameos set in gold, 
 
 2 golden earrings, 1 chaplet with two Roman silver crowns, 1 coral necklace 
 
 with its cross of gold All the richer married women of the class have, 
 
 besides, the veste di seta, the great holiday dress, which they only wear four 
 or five times in their lives."
 
 66 METAYERS. 
 
 their soup, and after it bread with a relish of some sort (companatico). 
 In summer they have three meals, at eight, at one, and in the even- 
 ing ; but the fire is lighted only once a day, for dinner, which con- 
 sists of soup, and a dish of salt meat or dried fish, or haricots, or 
 greens, which are eaten with bread. Salt meat enters in a very 
 small quantity into this diet, for it is reckoned that forty pounds of 
 salt pork per head suffice amply for a year's provision ; twice a 
 week a small piece of it is put into the soup. On Sundays they 
 have always on the table a dish of fresh meat, but a piece which 
 weighs only a pound or a pound and a half suffices for the whole 
 family, however numerous it may be. It must not be forgotten 
 that the Tuscan peasants generally produce olive oil for their own 
 consumption : they use it not only for lamps, but as seasoning to all 
 the vegetables prepared for the table, which it renders both more 
 savoury and more nutritive. At breakfast their food is bread, and 
 sometimes cheese and fruit; at supper, bread and salad. Their 
 drink is composed of the inferior wine of the country, the vinella 
 or piquette made by fermenting in water the pressed skins of the 
 grapes. They always, however, reserve a little of their best wine 
 for the day when they thrash their corn, and for some festivals 
 which are kept in families. About fifty bottles of vinella per annum, 
 and five sacks of wheat (about 1000 pounds of bread) are considered 
 as the supply necessary for a full grown man." 
 
 The remarks of Sismondi on the moral influences of this state of 
 society are not less worthy of attention. The rights and obligations 
 of the metayer being fixed by usage, and all taxes and rates being 
 paid by the proprietor, " the metayer has the advantages of landed 
 property without the burthen of defending it. It is the landlord to 
 whom, with the land, belong all its disputes : the tenant lives in peace 
 with all his neighbours ; between him and them there is no motive 
 for rivality or distrust, he preserves a good understanding with 
 them, as well as with his landlord, with the tax-collector, and with 
 the church : he sells little, and buys little ; he touches little money, 
 but he seldom has any to pay. The gentle and kindly character of 
 the Tuscans is often spoken of, but without sufficiently remarking 
 the cause which has contributed most to keep up that gentleness ;
 
 METAYERS. 67 
 
 the tenure, by which the entire class of farmers, more than three- 
 fourths of the population, are kept free from almost every occasion 
 for quarrel." The fixity of tenure which the metayer, so long as 
 he fulfils his own obligations, possesses by usage, though not by law, 
 gives him the local attachments, and almost the strong sense of per- 
 sonal interest, characteristic of a proprietor. " The metayer lives on 
 his metairie as on his inheritance, loving it with affection, labour- 
 ing incessantly to improve it, confiding in the future, and making 
 sure that his land will be tilled after him by his children and his 
 children's children. In fact, the majority of metayers live from 
 ;eneration to generation on the same farm ; they know it in its 
 <letailswith a minuteness which the feeling of property can alone 
 jive. The plots terrassed up, one above the other, are often not 
 above four feet wide ; but there is not one of them, the qualities of 
 which the metayer has not studied. This one is dry, that other is 
 cold and damp : here the soil is deep, there it is a mere crust which 
 hardly covers the rock ; wheat thrives best on one, rye on another : 
 here it would be labour wasted to sow Indian corn, elsewhere the 
 soil is unfit for beans and lupins, further off flax will grow admi- 
 rably, the edge of this brook will be suited for hemp. In this way 
 one learns with surprise from the metayer, that in a space of ten 
 arpents, the soil, the aspect, and the inclination of the ground 
 present greater variety than a rich farmer is generally able to dis- 
 tinguish in a farm of five hundred acres. For the latter knows 
 that he is only a temporary occupant ; and moreover, that he must 
 conduct his operations by general rules, and neglect details. But 
 the experienced metayer has had his intelligence so awakened by 
 interest and affection, as to be the best of observers; and with 
 the whole future before him, he thinks not of himself alone, but of 
 his children and grandchildren. Therefore, when he plants an 
 olive, a tree which lasts for centuries, and excavates at the bottom 
 of the hollow in which he plants it, a channel to let out the water 
 by which it would be injured, he studies all the strata of the earth 
 which he has to dig out."* 
 
 * Of the intelligence of this interesting people, M. de Sismondi speaks in the 
 most favourable terms. Few of them can read ; but there is often one member of 
 
 F 2
 
 68 METAYERS. 
 
 4. I do not offer these quotations as evidence of the intrinsic 
 excellence of the metayer system ; but they surely suffice to prove 
 that neither " land miserably cultivated" nor a people in " the most 
 abject poverty" have any necessary connexion with it, and that the 
 unmeasured vituperation lavished upon the system by English 
 writers, is grounded on an extremely narrow view of the subject. 
 I look upon the rural economy of Italy as simply so much additional 
 evidence in favour of small occupations with permanent tenure. It 
 is an example of what can be accomplished by those two elements, 
 even under the disadvantage of the peculiar nature of the metayer 
 contract, in which the motives to exertion on the part of the 
 tenant are only half as strong as if he farmed the land on the same 
 footing of perpetuity at a money -rent, either fixed, or varying ac- 
 cording to some rule which would leave to the tenant the whole 
 benefit of his own exertions. The metayer tenure is not one which 
 we should be anxious to introduce where the exigencies of society 
 had not naturally given birth to it ; but neither ought we to be 
 eager to abolish it on a mere ck priori view of its disadvantages. If 
 the system in Tuscany works as well in practice as it is represented 
 to do, with every appearance of minute knowledge, by so competent 
 an authority as Sismondi ; if the mode of living of the people, and 
 the size of farms, have for ages maintained, and still maintain them- 
 selves* such as they are said to be by him, it were to be regretted 
 
 the family destined for the priesthood, who reads to them on winter evenings. Their 
 language differs little from the purest Italian. The taste for improvisation in 
 verse is general. " The peasants of the Vale of Nievole frequent the theatre in 
 summer on festival days, from nine to eleven at night : their admission costs them 
 little more than five French sous [2^d.]. Their favourite author is Alfieri j the 
 whole history of the Atridse is familiar to these people who cannot read, and who 
 seek from that austere poet a relaxation from their rude labours." Unlike most 
 rustics, they find pleasure in the beauty of their country. " In the hills of the 
 vale of Nievole there is in front of every house a threshing-ground, seldom of 
 more than 25 or 30 square fathoms ; it is often the only level space in the 
 whole form : it is at the same time a terrace which commands the plains and 
 the valley, and looks out upon a delightful country. Scarcely ever have I stood 
 still to admire it, without the metayer's comivg out to enjoy my admiration, 
 and point out with his finger the beauties which he thought might have escaped 
 my notice." 
 
 * " We never," ajs Sibiuondi, " find a family of metayers proposing to theft
 
 METAYERS. 69 
 
 that a state of rural well-being so much beyond what is realized in 
 most European countries, should be put to hazard by an attempt 
 to introduce, under the guise of agricultural improvement, a system 
 of money rents and capitalist farmers. Even where the metayers 
 are poor, and the subdivision great, it is not to be assumed as of 
 course, that the change would be for the better. The enlargement 
 of farms, and the introduction of what are called agricultural im- 
 provements, usually diminish the number of labourers employed on 
 the land ; and unless the growth of capital in trade and manufactures 
 affords an opening for the displaced population, or unless there are 
 reclaimable wastes on which they can be located, competition will 
 so reduce wages, that they will probably be worse off as day- 
 labourers than they were as metayers. 
 
 Mr. Jones very properly objects against the French Economists 
 of the last century, that in pursuing their favourite object of in- 
 troducing money-rents, they turned their minds solely to putting 
 farmers in the place of metayers, instead of transforming the 
 existing metayers into farmers ; which, as he justly remarks, can 
 scarcely be effected, unless, to enable the metayers to save and 
 become owners of stock, the proprietors submit for a considerable 
 time to a diminution of income, instead of expecting an increase of 
 it, which has generally been their immediate motive for making the 
 attempt. If this transformation were effected, and no other change 
 made in the metayer's condition ; if, preserving all the other rights 
 which usage ensures to him, he merely got rid of the landlord's 
 claim to half the produce, paying in lieu of it a moderate fixed 
 rent ; he would be so far in a better position than at present, as 
 the whole, instead of only half the fruits of any improvement he 
 made, would now belong to himself: but even so, the benefit 
 would not be without alloy ; for a metayer, though not himself a 
 
 landlord to divide the metairie, unless the work is really more than they can 
 do, and they feel assured of retaining the same enjoyments on a smaller piece 
 of ground. We never find several sons all marrying, and forming as many new 
 families : only one marries and undertakes the charge of the household : none 
 of the others marry unless the first is childless, or unless some one of them has 
 the oiler of, a new metairie." 2feio Principles of lolitical Economy, book iii. 
 ch. 5.
 
 70 METAYERS. 
 
 capitalist, has a capitalist for his partner, and has the use, in Italy 
 at least, of a considerable capital, as is proved by the excellence of 
 the farm buildings : and it is not probable that the landowners 
 would any longer consent to peril their moveable property on the 
 hazards of agricultural enterprise, when assured of a fixed money 
 income without it. Thus would the question stand, even if the 
 change left undisturbed the metayer's virtual fixity of tenure, and 
 converted him, in fact, into a peasant proprietor at a quit-rent. But 
 if we suppose him converted into a mere tenant, displaceable at 
 the landlord's will, and liable to have his rent raised by competition 
 to any amount which any unfortunate being in search of subsis- 
 tence can be found to offer or promise for it ; he would lose all the 
 features in his condition which preserve it from being deteriorated ; 
 he would be cast down from his present position of a kind of half 
 proprietor of the land, and would sink into a cottier tenant.
 
 OF COTTIERS, 
 
 1. BY the general appellation of cottier tenure I shall 
 designate all cases without exception in which the labourer makes 
 his contract for land without the intervention of a capitalist 
 farmer, and in which the conditions of the contract, especially the 
 amount of rent, are determined not by custom but by competition. 
 The principal European example of this tenure is Ireland, and it is 
 from that country that the term cottier is derived.* By far the 
 greater part of the agricultural population of Ireland might until 
 very lately have been said to be cottier-tenants ; except so far as 
 the Ulster tenant-right constituted an exception. There was, in- 
 deed, a numerous class of labourers who (we may presume through 
 the refusal either of proprietors or of tenants in possession to 
 permit any further subdivision) had been unable to obtain even 
 the smallest patch of land as permanent tenants. But, from the 
 deficiency of capital, the custom of paying wages in land was so 
 universal, that even those who worked as casual labourers for the 
 cottiers or for such larger farmers as were found in the country, 
 were usually paid not in money, but by permission to cultivate for 
 the season a piece of ground, which was generally delivered to them 
 
 * In its original acceptation, the word " cottier " designated a class of sub- 
 tenants, who rent a cottage and an acre or two of land from the small farmers, 
 But the usage of writers has long since stretched the term to include those 
 small farmers themselves, and generally all peasant farmers whose rents are 
 determined by competition.
 
 72 COTTIERS. 
 
 by the farmer ready manured, and was known by the name of 
 conacre. For this they agreed to pay a money rent, often of 
 several pounds an acre, but no money actually passed, the debt 
 being worked out in labour, at a money valuation. 
 
 The produce, on the cottier system, being divided into two 
 portions, rent, and the remuneration of the labourer ; the one is 
 evidently determined by the other. The labourer has whatever 
 the landlord does not take : the condition of the labourer depends 
 on the amount of rent. But rent, being regulated by competition, 
 depends upon the relation between the demand for land, and the 
 supply of it. The demand for land depends on the number of com- 
 petitors, and the competitors are the whole rural population. The 
 effect, therefore, of this tenure, is to bring the principle of popula- 
 tion to act directly on the land, and not, as in England, on capital. 
 Rent, in this state of things, depends on the proportion between 
 population and land. As the land is a fixed quantity, while popu- 
 lation has an unlimited power of increase ; unless something 
 checks that increase, the competition for land soon forces up rent 
 to the highest point consistent with keeping the population alive. 
 The effects, therefore, of cottier tenure depend on the extent to 
 which the capacity of population to increase is controlled, either by 
 custom, by individual prudence, or by starvation and disease. 
 
 It would be an exaggeration to affirm, that cottier tenancy is 
 absolutely incompatible with a prosperous condition of the labour- 
 ing class. If we could suppose it to exist among a people to whom 
 d. high standard of comfort was habitual ; whose requirements were 
 such, that they would not offer a higher rent for land than would 
 ieave them an ample subsistence, and whose moderate increase of 
 numbers left no unemployed population to force up rents by com- 
 petition, save when the increasing produce of the land from increase 
 of skill would enable a higher rent to be paid without inconvenience ; 
 the cultivating class might be as well remunerated, might have as 
 large a share of the necessaries and comforts of life, on this system 
 of tenure as on any other. They would not, however, while their 
 rents were arbitrary, enjoy any of the peculiar advantages which 
 metayers on the Tuscan system derive from their connexion with.
 
 COTTIERS. 73 
 
 the land. They would neither have the use of a capital belong- 
 ing to their landlords, nor would the want of this be made up by 
 the intense motives to bodily and mental exertion which act upon 
 the peasant who has a permanent tenure. On the contrary, any 
 increased value given to the land by the exertions of the tenant, 
 would have no effect but to raise the rent against himself, either the 
 next year, or at farthest when his lease expired. The landlords 
 might have justice or good sense enough not to avail themselves of 
 the advantage which competition would give them ; and different 
 landlords would do so in different degrees. But it is never safe to 
 expect that a class or body of men will act in opposition to their 
 immediate pecuniary interest ; and even a doubt on the subject 
 would be almost as fatal as a certainty, for when a person is con- 
 sidering whether or not to undergo a present exertion or sacrifice 
 for a comparatively remote future, the scale is turned by a very 
 small probability that the fruits of the exertion or of the sacrifice 
 would be taken away from him. The only safeguard against these 
 uncertainties would be the growth of a custom, insuring a per- 
 manence of tenure in the same occupant, without liability to any 
 other increase of rent than might happen to be sanctioned by the 
 general sentiments of the community. The Ulster tenant-right is 
 such a custom. The very considerable sums which outgoing 
 tenants obtain from their successors, for the goodwill of their 
 farms,* in the first place actually limit the competition for land to 
 persons who have such sums to offer : while the same fact also 
 proves that full advantage is not taken by the landlord of even that 
 more limited competition, since the landlord's rent does not amount 
 to the whole of what the incoming tenant not only offers but 
 actually pays. He does so in the full confidence that the rent will 
 
 * " It is not uncommon for a tenant without a lease to sell the bare privilege 
 of occupancy or possession of his farm, without any visible sign of improvement 
 having been made by him, at from ten to sixteen, up to twenty and even forty 
 years' purchase of the rent." (Digest of Evidence taken by Lord Devon's 
 Commission, Introductory Chapter.) The compiler adds, " the comparative 
 tranquillity of that district " (Ulster) " may perhaps be mainly attributable to 
 this tact."
 
 74 COTTIERS. 
 
 not be raised ; and for this he has the guarantee of a custom, not 
 recognised by law, but deriving its binding force from another 
 sanction, perfectly well understood in Ireland.* Without one or 
 other of these supports, a custom limiting the rent of land is not 
 likely to grow up in any progressive community. If wealth and 
 population were stationary, rent also would generally be stationary, 
 and after remaining a long time unaltered, would probably come to 
 be considered unalterable. But all progress in wealth and popula- 
 tion tends to a rise of rents. Under a metayer system there is an 
 established mode in which the owner of land is sure of participating 
 in the increased produce drawn from it. But on the cottier system 
 he can only do so by a readjustment of the contract, while that 
 readjustment, in a progressive community, would almost always be 
 to his advantage. His interest, therefore, is decidedly opposed to 
 the growth of any custom commuting rent into a fixed demand. 
 
 2. Where the amount of rent is not limited, either by law or 
 custom, a cottier system has the disadvantages of the worst metayer 
 system, with scarcely any of the advantages by which, in the best 
 forms of that tenure, they are compensated. It is scarcely possible 
 that cottier agriculture should be other than miserable. There is 
 not the same necessity that the condition of the cultivators should 
 be so. Since by a sufficient restraint on population competition 
 for land could be kept down, and extreme poverty prevented, 
 habits of prudence and a high standard of comfort, once established, 
 would have a fair chance of maintaining themselves : though even 
 in these favourable circumstances the motives to prudence would 
 be considerably weaker than in the case of metayers, protected by 
 
 * " It is in the great majority of cases not a reimbursement for outlay 
 incurred, or improvements effected on the land, but a mere life insurance or 
 purchase of immunity from outrage." (Digest, ut supra.) "The present 
 tenant-right of Ulster" (the writer judiciously remarks) "is an embryo copy- 
 hold." "Even there, if the tenant-right be disregarded, and a tenant be ejected 
 without having received the price of his good-will, outrages are generally the 
 consequence." (Ch. viii.) "The disorganized state of Tipperary, and the 
 agrarian combination throughout Ireland, are but a methodized war to obtain 
 the Ulster tenant-right."
 
 COTTIERS. 75 
 
 custom (like those of Tuscany) from being deprived of their 
 farms : since a metayer family, thus protected, could not be im- 
 poverished by any other improvident multiplication than their own, 
 but a cottier family, however prudent and self-restraining, may 
 have the rent raised against it by the consequences of the multipli- 
 cation of other families. Any protection to the cottiers against 
 this evil could only be derived from a salutary sentiment of duty 
 or dignity, pervading the class. From this source, however, they 
 might derive considerable protection. If the habitual standard of 
 requirement among the class were high, a young man might not 
 choose to offer a rent which would leave him in a worse condition 
 than the preceding tenant ; or it might be the general custom, as it 
 actually is in some countries, not to marry until a farm is vacant. 
 
 But it is not where a high standard of comfort has rooted itself 
 in the habits of the labouring class, that we are ever called upon 
 to consider the effects of a cottier system. That system is found 
 only where the habitual requirements of the rural labourers are the 
 lowest possible ; where as long as they are not actually starving, 
 they will multiply : and population is only checked by the diseases, 
 and the shortness of life, consequent on insufficiency of merely 
 physical necessaries. This was the state of the largest portion of 
 the Irish peasantry. When a people have sunk into this state, and 
 still more when they have been in it from time immemorial, the 
 cottier system is an almost insuperable obstacle to their emerging 
 from it. When the habits of the people are such that their in- 
 crease is never checked but by the impossibility of obtaining a bare 
 support, and when this support can only be obtained from land, all 
 stipulations and agreements respecting amount of rent are merely 
 nominal ; the competition for land makes the tenants undertake to 
 pay more than it is possible they should pay, and when they have 
 paid all they, can, more almost always remains due. 
 
 " As it may fairly be said of the Irish peasantry," said Mr. 
 Revans, the Secretary to the Irish Poor Law Enquiry Commission,* 
 
 * Evils of ill e State of Ireland, their Causes and their Remedy. Page 10. 
 A pamphlet containing, among other things, an excellent digest and selection
 
 76 COTTIERS. 
 
 " that every family which has not sufficient land to yield its food 
 has one or more of its members supported by begging, it will easily 
 be conceived that every endeavour is made by the peasantry to 
 obtain small holdings, and that they are not influenced in their 
 biddings by the fertility of the land, or by their ability to pay the 
 rent, but solely by the offer which is most likely to gain them 
 possession. The rents which they promise, they are almost inva- 
 riably incapable of paying ; and consequently they become indebted 
 to those under whom they hold, almost as soon as they take pos- 
 session. They give up, in the shape of rent, the whole produce of 
 the land with the exception of a sufficiency of potatoes for a sub- 
 sistence ; but as this is rarely equal to the promised rent, they con- 
 stantly have against them an increasing balance. In some cases, 
 the largest quantity of produce which their holdings ever yielded, 
 or which, under their system of tillage, they could in the most 
 favourable seasons be made to yield, would not be equal to the rent 
 bid ; consequently, if the peasant fulfilled his engagement with his 
 landlord, which he is rarely able to accomplish, he would till the 
 ground for nothing, and give his landlord a premium for being 
 allowed to till it. On the sea-coast, fishermen, and in the northern 
 counties those who have looms, frequently pay more in rent than 
 the market value of the whole produce of the land they hold. It 
 might be supposed that they would be better without land under 
 such circumstances. But fishing might fail during a week or two, 
 and so might the demand for the produce of the loom, when, did 
 they not possess the land upon which their food is grown, they 
 might starve. The full amount of the rent bid, however, is rarely 
 paid. The peasant remains constantly in debt to his landlord ; his 
 miserable possessions the wretched clothing of himself and of his 
 family, the two or three stools, and the few pieces of crockery, 
 which his wretched hovel contains, would not, if sold, liquidate the 
 standing and generally accumulating debt. The peasantry are 
 mostly a year in arrear, and their excuse for not paying more is 
 
 of evidence from the mass collected by the Commission presided over hy Arch- 
 bishqp Whatoly.
 
 COTTIERS. 77 
 
 Institution. Should the produce of the holding, in any year, be more 
 <han usually abundant, or should the peasant by any accident be- 
 come possessed of any property, his comforts cannot be increased ; 
 he cannot indulge in better food, nor in a greater quantity of it. 
 His furniture cannot be increased, neither can his wife or children 
 be better clothed. The acquisition must go to the person under 
 whom he holds. The accidental addition will enable him to reduce 
 his arrear of rent, and thus to defer ejectment. But this must be 
 the bound of his expectation." 
 
 As an extreme instance of the intensity of competition for land, 
 and of the monstrous height to which it occasionally forced up the 
 nominal rent ; we may cite from the evidence taken by Lord 
 Devon's Commission,* a fact attested by Mr. Hurly, Clerk of the 
 Crown for Kerry : "I have known a tenant bid for a farm that I 
 was perfectly well acquainted with, worth 50/. a year : I saw the 
 competition get up to such an extent, that he was declared the tenant 
 at 450J." 
 
 3. In such a condition, what can a tenant gain by any amount 
 of industry or prudence, and what lose by any recklessness ? If 
 the landlord at any time exerted his full legal rights, the cottier 
 would not be able even to live. If by extra exertion he doubled the 
 produce of his bit of land, or if he prudently abstained from pro- 
 ducing mouths to eat it up, his only gain would be to have more 
 left to pay to his landlord ; while, if he had twenty children, they 
 would still be fed first, and the landlord could only take what 
 was left. Almost alone amongst mankind the cottier is in this con- 
 dition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any 
 act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but 
 his landlord would gain ; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at 
 his landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to 
 either labour or self-command, imagination itself cannot conceive. 
 The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those 
 of a slave not substituted. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to 
 
 * Evidence, p. 851.
 
 78 COTTIERS. 
 
 fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he 
 protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. 
 Rockism and Whiteboyism were the determination of a people 
 who had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal of the 
 lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived of that 
 for other people's convenience. 
 
 Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are 
 formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, 
 to find public instructors of the greatest pretension, imputing the 
 backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish 
 people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and 
 recklessness in the Celtic race ? Of all vulgar modes of escaping 
 from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences 
 on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the 
 diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences. 
 What race would not be indolent and insouciant when things 
 are so arranged, that they derive no advantage from forethought 
 or exertion ? If such are the arrangements in the midst of which 
 they live and work, what wonder if the listlessness and indiffe- 
 rence so engendered are not shaken off the first moment an 
 opportunity offers when exertion would really be of use? It 
 is very natural that a pleasure-loving and sensitively organized 
 people like the Irish, should be less addicted to steady routine 
 labour than the English, because life has more excitements for 
 them independent of it; but they are not less fitted for it than 
 their Celtic brethren the French, nor less so than the Tuscans, 
 or the ancient Greeks. An excitable organization is precisely 
 that in which, by adequate inducements, it is easiest to kindle 
 a spirit of animated exertion. It speaks nothing against the 
 capacities of industry in human beings, that they will not exert 
 themselves without motive. No labourers work harder, in England 
 or America, than the Irish ; but not under a cottier system. 
 
 4. The multitudes who till the soil of India, are in a condi- 
 tion sufficiently analogous to the cottier system, and at the same 
 time sufficiently different from it, to render the comparison of the
 
 COTTIERS. 79 
 
 ivo a source of some instruction. In most parts of India there are, 
 and perhaps have always been, only two contracting parties, the 
 landlord and the peasant : the landlord being generally the sove- 
 reign, except where he has, by a special instrument, conceded his 
 rights to an individual, who becomes his representative. The pay- 
 ments, however, of the peasants, or ryots as they are termed, have 
 seldom if ever been regulated, as in Ireland, by competition. 
 Though the customs locally obtaining were infinitely various, and 
 though practically no custom could be maintained against the sove- 
 reign's will, there was always a rule of some sort common to a 
 neighbourhood ; the collector did not make his separate bargain 
 with the peasant, but assessed each according to the rule adopted 
 for the rest. The idea was thus kept up of a right of property 
 in the tenant, or at all events, of a right to permanent pos- 
 session; and the anomaly arose of a fixity of tenure in the 
 peasant-farmer, co-existing with an arbitrary power of increasing 
 the rent. 
 
 When the Mogul government substituted itself throughout the 
 greater part of India for the Hindoo rulers, it proceeded on a diffe- 
 rent principle. A minute survey was made of the land, and upon 
 that survey an assessment was founded, fixing the specific payment 
 due to the government from each field. If this assessment had 
 never been exceeded, the ryots would have been in the compara- 
 tively advantageous position of peasant-proprietors, subject to a 
 heavy, but a fixed quit-rent. The absence, however, of any real 
 protection against illegal extortions, rendered this improvement in 
 their condition rather nominal than real ; and, except during the 
 occasional accident of a humane and vigorous local administrator, 
 the exactions had no practical limit but the inability of the ryot to 
 pay more. 
 
 It was to this state of things that the English rulers of India 
 succeeded ; and they were, at an early period, struck with the im- 
 portance of putting an end to this arbitrary character of the land 
 revenue, and imposing a fixed limit to the government demand. 
 They did not attempt to go back to the Mogul valuation. It has 
 been in general the very rational practice of the English Govern-
 
 80 COTTIERS. 
 
 ment in India, to pay little regard to what was laid down as the 
 theory of the native institutions, but to inquire into the rights 
 which existed and were respected in practice, and to protect and 
 enlarge those. For a long time, however, it blundered grievously 
 about matters of , fact, and grossly misunderstood the usages and 
 rights which it found existing. Its mistakes arose from the ina- 
 bility of ordinary minds to imagine a state of social relations funda- 
 mentally different from those with which they are practically fami- 
 liar. England being accustomed to great estates and great landlords, 
 the English rulers took it for granted that India must possess the 
 like ; and looking round for some set of people who might be taken 
 for the objects of their search, they pitched upon a sort of tax- 
 gatherers called zemindars. " The zemindar," says the philosophical 
 historian of India,* "had some of the attributes which belong 
 to a landowner ; he collected the rents of a particular district, he 
 governed the cultivators of that district, lived in comparative splen- 
 dour, and his son succeeded him when he died. The zemindars, 
 therefore, it was inferred without delay, were the proprietors of the 
 soil, the landed nobility and gentry of India. It was not considered 
 that the zemindars, though they collected the rents, did not keep 
 them ; but paid them all away, with a small deduction, to the 
 government. It was not considered that if they governed the ryots, 
 and in many respects exercised over them despotic power, they did 
 :not govern them as tenants of theirs, holding their lands either at 
 will or by contract under them. The possession of the ryot was 
 an hereditary possession ; from which it was unlawful for the 
 zemindar to displace him ; for every farthing which the zemindar 
 drew from the ryot, he was bound to account ; and it was only by 
 fraud, if, out of all that he collected, he retained an ana more than 
 the small proportion which, as pay for the collection, he was per- 
 mitted to receive." 
 
 " There was an opportunity in India," continues the historian, 
 " to which the history of the world presents not a parallel. Next 
 after the sovereign, the immediate cultivators had, by far, the 
 greatest portion of interest in the soil. For the rights (such as 
 
 * Mill's History of British India, book vi. ch. 8.
 
 COTTIERS. 81 
 
 they were) of the zemindars, a complete compensation might have 
 easily been made. The generous resolution was adopted, of sacri- 
 ficing to the improvement of the country, the proprietary rights of 
 the sovereign. The motives to improvement which property gives, 
 and of which the power was so justly appreciated, might have been 
 bestowed upon those upon whom they would have operated with a 
 force incomparably greater than that with which they could operate 
 upon any other class of men : they might have been bestowed upon 
 those from whom alone, in every country, the principal improve- 
 ments in agriculture must be derived, the immediate cultivators of 
 the soil. And a measure worthy to be ranked among the noblest 
 that ever were taken for the improvement of any country, might 
 have helped to compensate the people of India for the miseries of 
 that misgovernment which they had so long endured. But the 
 legislators were English aristocrats ; and aristocratical prejudices 
 prevailed." 
 
 The measure proved a total failure, as to the main effects which its 
 well-meaning promoters expected from it. Unaccustomed to estimate 
 the mode in which the operation of any given institution is modified 
 even by such variety of circumstances as exists within a single 
 kingdom, they nattered themselves that they had created, through- 
 out the Bengal provinces, English landlords, and it proved that they 
 had only created Irish ones. The new landed aristocracy dis- 
 appointed every expectation built upon them. They did nothing 
 for the improvement of their estates, but everything for their own 
 ruin. The same pains not being taken, as had been taken in 
 Ireland, to enable the landlords to defy the consequences of their 
 improvidence, nearly the whole land of Bengal had to be seques- 
 trated and sold, for debts or arrears of revenue, and in one genera- 
 tion most of the ancient zemindars had ceased to exist. Other 
 families, mostly the descendants of Calcutta money-dealers, or of 
 native officials who had enriched themselves under the British 
 government, now occupy their place ; and live as useless drones 
 on the soil which has been given up to them. Whatever the 
 government has sacrificed of its pecuniary claims, for the creation 
 of such a class, has at the best been wasted. 
 
 G
 
 82 COTTIERS. 
 
 In the parts of India into which the British rule has been more 
 recently introduced, the blunder has been avoided of endowing a 
 useless body of great landlords with gifts from the public revenue. 
 In most parts of the Madras and in part of the Bombay Presidency, 
 the rent is paid directly to the government by the immediate culti- 
 vator. In the North- Western Provinces, the government makes its 
 engagement with the village community collectively, determining 
 the share to be paid by each individual, but holding them jointly 
 responsible for each other's default. But in the greater part of 
 India, the immediate cultivators have not obtained a perpetuity of 
 tenure at a fixed rent. The government manages the land on the 
 principle on which a good Irish landlord manages his estate : not 
 putting it up to competition, not asking the cultivators what they* 
 will promise to pay, but determining for itself what they can afford 
 to pay, and defining its demand accordingly. In many districts a 
 portion of the cultivators are considered as tenants of the rest, 
 the government making its demand from those only (often a nume- 
 rous body) who are looked upon as the successors of the original 
 settlers or conquerors of the village. Sometimes the rent is fixed 
 only for one year, sometimes for three or five ; but the uniform 
 tendency of present policy is towards long leases, extending, in the 
 northern provinces of India, to a term of thirty years. This 
 arrangement has not existed for a sufficient time to have shown by 
 experience how far the motives to improvement which the long 
 lease creates in the minds of the cultivators, fall short of the influ- 
 ence of a perpetual settlement. But the two plans, of annual set- 
 tlements and of short leases, are irrevocably condemned. They 
 can only be said to have succeeded, in comparison with the unlimited 
 oppression which existed before. They are approved by nobody, 
 and were never looked upon in any other light than as temporary 
 arrangements, to be abandoned when a more complete knowledge 
 of the capabilities of the country should afford data for something 
 more permanent.
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY, 
 
 1. WHEN the first edition of the Principles of Political Eco- 
 lomy was written and published, the question, what is to be done 
 with a cottier population, was to the English Government the most 
 urgent of practical questions. The majority of a population of eight 
 millions, having long grovelled in helpless inertness and abject 
 poverty under the cottier system, reduced by its operation to mere 
 food of the cheapest description, and to an incapacity of either doing 
 or willing anything for the improvement of their lot, had at last, by 
 the failure of that lowest quality of food, been plunged into a state 
 in which the alternative seemed to be either death, or to be per- 
 manently supported by other people, or a radical change in the 
 economical arrangements under which it had hitherto been their 
 misfortune to live. Such an emergency had compelled attention 
 to the subject from the legislature and from the nation, but it 
 could hardly be said, with much result ; for, the evil having ori- 
 ginated in a system of land tenancy which withdrew from the 
 people every motive to industry or thrift except the fear of star- 
 vation, the remedy provided by Parliament was to take away 
 even that, by conferring on them a legal claim to eleemosynary 
 support : while, towards correcting the cause of the mischief, 
 nothing was done, beyond vain complaints, though at the price to 
 the national treasury of ten millions sterling for the delay. 
 
 " It is needless," (I observed) " to expend any argument in 
 proving that the very foundation of the economical evils of Ireland 
 is the cottier system ; that while peasant rents fixed by competition 
 are the practice of the country, to expect industry, useful activity, 
 any restraint on population but death, or any the smallest diminu- 
 
 G 2
 
 84 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 tion of poA'erty, is to look for figs on thistles and grapes on thorns. 
 If our practical statesmen are not ripe for the recognition of this 
 fact ; or if, while they acknowledge it in theory, they have not a 
 sufficient feeling of its reality, to be capable of founding upon it any 
 course of conduct ; there is still another, and a purely physical con- 
 sideration, from which they will find it impossible to escape. If the 
 one crop on which the people have hitherto supported themselves 
 continues to be precarious, either some new and great impulse 
 must be given to agricultural skill and industry, or the soil of 
 Ireland can no longer feed anything like its present population. 
 The whole produce of the western half of the island, leaving 
 nothing for rent, will not now keep permanently in existence the 
 whole of its people : and they will necessarily remain an annual 
 charge on the taxation of the Empire, until they are reduced either 
 by emigration or by starvation to a number corresponding with the 
 low state of their industry, or unless the means are found of making 
 that industry much more productive." 
 
 Since these words were written, events unforeseen by any one 
 have saved the English rulers of Ireland from the embarrassments 
 which would have been the just penalty of their indifference and 
 want of foresight. Ireland, under cottier agriculture, could no 
 longer supply food to its population : Parliament, by way of remedy, 
 applied a stimulus to population, but none at all to production ; 
 the help, however, which had not been provided for the people of 
 Ireland by political wisdom, came from an unexpected source. 
 Self-supporting emigration the Wakefield system, brought into 
 effect on the voluntary principle and on a gigantic scale (the expenses 
 of those who followed being paid from the earnings of those who 
 went before) has, for the present, reduced the population down to 
 the number for which the existing agricultural system can find em- 
 ployment and support. The census of 1851, compared with that 
 of 1841, showed in round numbers a diminution of population of a 
 million and a half. The subsequent census (of 1861) shows a 
 further diminution of about half a million. The Irish having thus 
 found the way to that flourishing continent which for generations 
 will be capable of supporting in undiminished comfort the increase
 
 MEANS OP ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 85 
 
 of the population of the whole world ; the peasantry of Ireland 
 having learnt to fix their eyes on a terrestrial paradise beyond the 
 ocean, as a sure refuge both from the oppression of the Saxon and 
 from the tyranny of nature ; there can be little doubt that how- 
 ever much the employment for agricultural labour may hereafter be 
 diminished by the general introduction throughout Ireland of 
 English farming or even if, like the county of Sutherland, all Ire- 
 land should be turned into a grazing farm the superseded people 
 would migrate to America with the same rapidity, and as free of 
 cost to the nation, as the million of Irish who went thither during 
 the three years previous to 1851. Those who think that the land 
 of a country exists for the sake of a few thousand landowners, and 
 that as long as rents are paid, society and government have ful- 
 filled their functions, may see in this consummation a happy end 
 to Irish difficulties. 
 
 But this is not a time, nor is the human mind now in a condition, 
 in which such insolent pretensions can be maintained. The land 
 of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people of that 
 country. The individuals called landowners have no right, in 
 morality and justice, to anything but the rent, or compensation 
 for its saleable value. With regard to the land itself, the para- 
 mount consideration is, by what mode of appropriation and of 
 cultivation it can be made most useful to the collective body of its 
 inhabitants. To the owners of the rent it may be very convenient 
 that the bulk of the inhabitants, despairing of justice in the country 
 where they and their ancestors have lived and suffered, should 
 seek on another continent that property in land which is denied to 
 them at home. But the legislature of the empire ought to regard 
 with other eyes the forced expatriation of millions of people. 
 When the inhabitants of a country quit the country en masse 
 because its Government will not make it a place fit for them to 
 live in, the Government is judged and condemned. There is no 
 necessity for depriving the landlords of one farthing of the pecu- 
 niary value of their legal rights ; but justice requires that the actual 
 cultivators should be enabled to become in Ireland what they will 
 become in America -proprietors of the soil which they cultivate.
 
 86 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 Good policy requires it no less. Those who, knowing neither 
 Ireland nor any foreign country, take as their sole standard of social 
 and economical excellence English practice, propose as the single 
 remedy for Irish wretchedness, the transformation of the cottiers 
 into hired labourers. But this is rather a scheme for the improve- 
 ment of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people. 
 The status of a day-labourer has no charm for infusing forethought, 
 frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them. If the 
 Irish peasantry could be universally changed into receivers of wages, 
 the old habits and mental characteristics of the people remaining, 
 we should merely see four or five millions of people living as day- 
 labourers in the same wretched manner in which as cottiers they 
 lived before ; equally passive in the absence of every comfort, 
 equally reckless in multiplication, and even, perhaps, equally listless 
 at their work ; since they could not be dismissed in a body, and if 
 they could, dismissal would now be simply remanding them to the 
 poor-rate. Far other would be the effect of making them peasant 
 proprietors. A people who in industry and providence have 
 everything to learn who are confessedly among the most backward 
 of European populations in the industrial virtues require for their 
 regeneration the most powerful incitements by which those virtues 
 can be stimulated : and there is no stimulus as yet comparable to 
 property in land. A permanent interest in the soil to those who 
 till it, is almost a guarantee for the most unwearied laboriousness : 
 against over-population, though not infallible, it is the best preser- 
 vative yet known, and where it failed, any other plan would pro- 
 bably fail much more egregiously ; the evil would be beyond the 
 reach of merely economic remedies. 
 
 The case of Ireland is similar in its requirements to that of 
 India. In India, though great errors have from time to time been 
 committed, no one ever proposed, under the name of agricultural im- 
 provement, to eject the ryots or peasant farmers from their posses- 
 sion ; the improvement that has been looked for, has been through 
 making their tenure more secure to them, and the sole difference of 
 opinion is between those who contend for perpetuity, and those who 
 think that long leases will suffice. The same question exists as to
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 87 
 
 Ireland : and it would be idle to deny that long leases, under such 
 landlords as are sometimes to be found, do effect wonders, even in Ire- 
 land. But then they must be leases at a moderate rent. Long leases 
 are in no way to be relied on for getting rid of cottierism. During 
 the existence of cottier tenancy, leases have always been long ; 
 twenty-one years and three lives concurrent, was a usual term. 
 But the rent being fixed by competition, at a higher amount than 
 could be paid, so that the tenant neither had, nor could by any 
 exertion acquire, a beneficial interest in the land, the advantage of 
 a lease was merely nominal. In India, the government, where it 
 has not imprudently made over its proprietary rights to the zemin- 
 dars, is able to prevent this evil, because, being itself the landlord, 
 it can fix the rent according to its own judgment ; but under 
 individual landlords, while rents are fixed by competition, and the 
 competitors are a peasantry struggling for subsistence, nominal rents 
 are inevitable, unless the population is so thin, that the competi- 
 tion itself is only nominal. The majority of landlords will grasp at 
 immediate money and immediate power ; and so long as they find 
 cottiers eager to offer them everything, it is useless to rely on them 
 for tempering the vicious practice by a considerate self-denial. 
 
 A perpetuity is a stronger stimulus to improvement than a long 
 lease : not only because the longest lease, before coming to an end, 
 passes through all the varieties of short leases down to no lease at 
 all ; but for more fundamental reasons. It is very shallow, even 
 in pure economics, to take no account of the influence of imagina- 
 tion : there is a virtue in " for ever" beyond the longest term of 
 years ; even if the term is long enough to include children, and all 
 whom a person individually cares for, yet until he has reached that 
 high degree of mental cultivation at which the public good (which 
 also includes perpetuity) acquires a paramount ascendancy over his 
 feelings and desires, he will not exert himself with the same ardour 
 to increase the value of an estate, his interest in which diminishes 
 in value every year. Besides, while perpetual tenure is the general 
 rule of landed property, as it is in all the countries of Europe, a 
 tenure for a limited period, however long, is sure to be regarded as 
 something of inferior consideration and dignity, and inspires less of
 
 88 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 ardour to obtain it, and of attachment to it when obtained. But 
 where a country is under cottier tenure, the question of perpetuity 
 is quite secondary to the more important point, a limitation of the 
 rent. Rent paid by a capitalist who farms for profit, and not for 
 bread, may safely be abandoned to competition ; rent paid by 
 labourers cannot, unless the labourers were in a state of civilization 
 and improvement which labourers have nowhere yet reached, and 
 cannot easily reach under such a tenure. Peasant rents ought 
 never to be arbitrary, never at the discretion of the landlord : either 
 by custom or law, it is imperatively necessary that they should be 
 fixed ; and where no mutually advantageous custom, such as the 
 metayer system of Tuscany, has established itself, reason and ex- 
 perience recommend that they should be fixed by authority : thus 
 changing the rent into a quit-rent, and the farmer into a peasant 
 proprietor. 
 
 For carrying this change into effect on a sufficiently large scale 
 to accomplish the complete abolition of cottier tenancy, the mode 
 which most obviously suggests itself is the direct one of doing the 
 thing outright by Act of Parliament ; making the whole land of 
 Ireland the property of the tenants, subject to the rents now really 
 paid (not the nominal rents), as a fixed rent charge. This, under 
 the name of " fixity of tenure," was one of the demands of the 
 Repeal Association during the most successful period of their agita- 
 -ion ; and was better expressed by Mr. Conner, its earliest, most 
 enthusiastic, and most indefatigable apostle,* by the words, " a 
 valuation and a perpetuity." In such a measure there would not 
 have been any injustice, provided the landlords were compensated 
 for the present value of the chances of increase which they were 
 prospectively required to forego. The rupture of existing social 
 relations would hardly have been more violent than that effected 
 by the ministers Stein and Hardenberg when, by a series of edicts, 
 
 * Author of numerous pamphlets, entitled " True Political Economy of 
 Ireland," "Letter to the Earl of Devon," "Two Letters on the Rackrent 
 Oppression of Ireland," and others. Mr. Conner has been an agitator on the 
 subject since 1832.
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 89 
 
 in the early part of the present century, they revolutionized the 
 state of landed property in the Prussian monarchy, and left their 
 names to posterity among the greatest benefactors of their country. 
 To enlightened foreigners writing on Ireland, Von Raumer and 
 Gustave de Beaumont, a remedy of this sort seemed so exactly and 
 obviously what the disease required, that they had some difficulty 
 in comprehending how it was that the thing was not yet done. 
 
 This, however, would have been, in the first place, a complete 
 expropriation of the higher classes of Ireland : which, if there is 
 any truth in the principles we have laid down, would be perfectly 
 -warrantable, but only if it were the sole means of effecting a great 
 public good. In the second place, that there should be none but 
 peasant proprietors, is in itself far from desirable. Large farms, 
 cultivated by large capital, and owned by persons of the best edu- 
 cation which the country can give, persons qualified by instruction 
 to appreciate scientific discoveries, and able to bear the delay and 
 risk of costly experiments, are an important part of a good agricul- 
 tural system. Many such landlords there are even in Ireland ; and 
 it would be a public misfortune to drive them from their posts. A 
 large proportion also of the present holdings are probably still too 
 small to try the proprietary system tinder the greatest advantages ; 
 nor are the tenants always the persons one would desire to select as 
 the first occupants of peasant-properties. There are numbers of 
 them on whom it would have a more beneficial effect to give them 
 the hope of acquiring a landed property by industry and frugality, 
 than the property itself in immediate possession. 
 
 There are, however, much milder measures, not open to similar 
 objections, and which, if pushed to the utmost extent of which they 
 are susceptible, would realize in no inconsiderable degree the object 
 sought. One of them would be, to enact that whoever reclaims 
 waste land becomes the owner of it, at a fixed quit-rent equal to a 
 moderate interest on its mere value as waste. It would of course 
 be a necessary part of this measure, to make compulsory on land- 
 lords the surrender of waste lands (not of an ornamental character) 
 whenever required for reclamation. Another expedient, and one 
 in which individuals could co-operate, would be to buy as much as
 
 90 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 possible of the land offered for sale, and sell it again in small por- 
 tions as peasant- properties. A Society for this purpose was at one 
 time projected (though the attempt to establish it proved unsuc- 
 cessful) on the principles, so far as applicable, of the Freehold Land 
 Societies which have been so successfully established in England, not 
 primarily for agricultural, but for electoral purposes. 
 
 This is a mode in which private capital may be employed in re- 
 novating the social and agricultural economy of Ireland, not only 
 without sacrifice but with considerable profit to its owners. The 
 remarkable success of the Waste Land Improvement Society, which 
 proceeded on a plan far less advantageous to the tenant, is an 
 instance of what an Irish peasantry can be stimulated to do, by a 
 sufficient assurance that what they do will be for their own advan- 
 tage. It is not even indispensable to adopt perpetuity as the rule; long 
 leases at moderate rents, like those of the Waste Land Society, would 
 suffice, if a prospect were held out to the farmers of being allowed 
 to purchase their farms with the capital which they might acquire, 
 as the Society's tenants were so rapidly acquiring under the in- 
 fluence of its beneficent system.* When the lands were sold, the 
 
 * Though this society, during the years succeeding the famine, was forced to 
 wind up its affairs, the memory of what it accomplished ought to be preserved. 
 The following is an extract in the Proceedings of Lord Devon's Commission 
 (page 84), from the report made to the society in 1845, by their intelligent 
 manager, Colonel Robinson : 
 
 " Two hundred and forty-five tenants, many of whom were a few years sincS 
 in a state bordering on pauperism, the occupiers of small holdings of from ten to 
 twenty plantation acres each, have, by their own free labour, with the society's 
 aid, improved their farms to the value of 4396Z. ; 6051. having been added 
 during the last year, being at the rate of 17. 18*. per tenant for the whole term, 
 and 21. 9s. for the past year ; tjie benefit of which improvements each tenant 
 will enjoy during the unexpired term of a thirty-one years' lease. 
 
 " These 245 tenants and their families have, by spade industry, reclaimed 
 and brought into cultivation 1032 plantation acres of land, previously unpro- 
 ductive mountain waste, upon which they grew last year, crops valued by 
 competent practical persons at 3896J., being in the proportion of 151. 18*. each 
 tenant ; and their live stock, consisting of cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, now 
 actually upon the estates, is valued, according to the present prices of the 
 neighbouring markets, at 4:1621., of which 1304?. has been added since February 
 1844, being at the rate of 161. 19s. for the whole period, and 51. 6s. for the last 
 year ; during which time their stock has thus increased in value a sum equal to 
 their present annual rent ; and by the statistical tables and returns referred to
 
 MEANS OF ABOLISHINO COTTIER TENANCY. 9i 
 
 funds of the association would be liberated, and it might recom- 
 mence operations in some other quarter. 
 
 2. Thus far I had written in 1856. Since that time the great 
 crisis of Irish industry has made further progress, and it is necessary 
 to consider how its present state affects the opinions, on prospects 
 or on practical measures, expressed in the previous part of this 
 chapter. 
 
 The principal change in the situation consists in the great 
 diminution, holding out a hope of the entire extinction, of cottier 
 tenure. The enormous "decrease in the number of small hold- 
 ings, and increase in those of a medium size, attested by the 
 statistical returns, sufficiently proves the general fact, and all 
 testimonies show that the tendency still continues.* It is 
 
 in previous reports, it is proved that the tenants, in general, improve their little 
 farms, and increase their cultivation and crops, in nearly direct proportion to 
 the number of available working persons of both sexes, of which their families 
 consist." 
 
 There cannot be a stronger testimony to the superior amount of gross, and 
 even of net produce, raised by small farming under any tolerable system of 
 landed tenure ; and it is worthy of attention that the industry and zeal were 
 greatest among the smaller holders; Colonel Robinson noticing, as exceptions 
 to the remarkable and rapid progress of improvement, some tenants who were 
 " occupants of larger farms than twenty acres, a class too often deficient in 
 the enduring industry indispensable for the successful prosecution of mountain 
 improvements." 
 
 * There is, however, a partial counter-current, of which I have not seen any 
 public notice. " A class of men, not very numerous, but sufficiently so to do 
 much mischief, have, through the Landed Estates Court, got into possession of 
 land in Ireland, who, of all classes, are least likely to recognise the duties of a 
 landlord's position. These are small traders in towns, who by dint of sheer 
 parsimony, frequently combined with money-lending at usurious rates, have 
 succeeded, in the course of a long life, in scraping together as much money as 
 will enable them to buy fifty or a hundred acres of land. These people never 
 think of turning farmers, but, proud of their position as landlords, proceed to 
 turn it to the utmost account. An instance of. this kind came under my notice 
 lately. The tenants on the property were, at the time of the purchase, some 
 twelve years ago, in a tolerably comfortable state. Within that period their 
 rent has been raised three several times ; and it is now, as I am informed by the 
 priest of the district, nearly double its amount at the commencement of the 
 present proprietor's reign. The result is that the people, who were formerly 
 in tolerable comfort, are now reduced to poverty : two of them have left the
 
 92 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 probable that the repeal of the corn laws, necessitating a change 
 in the exports of Ireland from the products of tillage to those of 
 pasturage, would of itself have sufficed to bring about this revolu- 
 tion in tenure. A grazing farm can only be managed by a 
 capitalist farmer, or by the landlord. But a change involving so 
 great a displacement of the population, has been immensely faci- 
 litated and made more rapid by the vast emigration, as well as by 
 that greatest boon ever conferred on Ireland by any Government, 
 the Encumbered Estates Act ; the best provisions of which have 
 since, through the Landed Estates Court, been permanently incor- 
 porated into the social system of the country. The greatest part of 
 the soil of Ireland, there is reason to believe, is now farmed either 
 by the landlords, or by small capitalist farmers. That these farmers 
 are improving in circumstances, and accumulating capital, there is 
 
 property and squatted near an adjacent turf bog, where they exist trusting for 
 support to occasional jobs. If this man is not shot, he will injure himself 
 through the deterioration of his property, but meantime he has been getting 
 eight or ten per cent on his purchase-money. This is by no means a rare case. 
 The scandal which such occurrences cause, casts its reflection on transactions of 
 a wholly different and perfectly legitimate kind, where the removal of the tenants 
 is simply an act of mercy for all parties. 
 
 " The anxiety of landlords to get rid of cottiers is also to some extent neu- 
 tralized by the anxiety of middlemen to get them. About one-fourth of the 
 whole land of Ireland is held under long leases ; the rent received, when the 
 lease is of long standing, being generally greatly under the real value of the 
 land. It rarely happens that land thus held is cultivated by the owner of 
 the lease : instead of this, he sublets it at a rack rent to small men, and lives on 
 the excess of the rent which he receives over that which he pays. Some of these 
 leases are always running out ; and as they draw towards their close, the 
 middleman has no other interest in the land than, at any cost of permanent 
 deterioration, to get the utmost out of it during the unexpired period of the 
 term. For this purpose the small cottier tenants precisely answer his turn. 
 Middlemen in this position are as anxious to obtain cottiers as tenants, as the 
 landlords are to be rid of them; and the result is a transfer of this sort of tenant 
 from one class of estates to the other. The movement is of limited dimensions, 
 but it does exist, and so far as it exists, neutralizes the general tendency. 
 Perhaps it may be thought that this system will reproduce itself; that the 
 same motives which led to the existence of middlemen will perpetuate the 
 class ; but there is no danger of this. Landowners are now perfectly alive to 
 the ruinous consequences of this system, however convenient for a time; and a 
 clause against sub-letting is now becoming a matter of course in every lease." 
 (Private Communication from Professor Cairnes.)
 
 MEANS OP ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 93 
 
 considerable evidence, in particular the great increase of deposits in 
 the banks of which they are the principal customers. So far as 
 that class is concerned, the chief thing still wanted is security of 
 tenure, or assurance of compensation for improvements. The means 
 of supplying these wants are now engaging the attention of the 
 most competent minds ; Judge Longfi eld's address, in the autumn 
 of 1864, and the sensation created by it, are an era in the subject, 
 and a point has now been reached when we may confidently expect 
 that within a very few years something effectual will be done. 
 
 But what, meanwhile, is the condition of the displaced cottiers, 
 so far as they have not emigrated ; and of the whole class who 
 subsist by agricultural labour, without the occupation of any land ? 
 As yet, their state is one of great poverty, with but slight prospect 
 of improvement. Money wages, indeed, have risen much above the 
 wretched level of a generation ago : but the cost of subsistence has 
 also risen so much above the old potato standard, that the real im- 
 provement is not equal to the nominal ; and according to the best 
 information to which I have access, there is little appearance of an 
 improved standard of living among the class. The population, in 
 fact, reduced though it be, is still far beyond what the country can 
 support as a mere grazing district of England. It may not, perhaps, 
 be strictly true that, if the present number of inhabitants are to be 
 maintained at home, it can only be either on the old vicious system 
 of cottierism, or as small proprietors growing their own food. The 
 lands which will remain under tillage would, no doubt, if sufficient 
 security for outlay were given, admit of a more extensive employ- 
 ment of labourers by the small capitalist farmers ; and this, in the 
 opinion of some competent judges, might enable the country to 
 support the present number of its population in actual existence. 
 But no one will pretend that this resource is sufficient to maintain 
 them in any condition in which it is fit that the great body of the 
 peasantry of a country should exist. Accordingly the emigration, 
 which for a time had fallen off, has, under the additional stimulus 
 of bad seasons, revived in all its strength. It is calculated that 
 within the year 1864 not less than 100,000 emigrants left the Irish 
 shores. As far as regards the emigrants themselves and their pos-
 
 94 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 terity, or the general interests of the human race, it would be folly 
 to regret this result. The children of the immigrant Irish receive 
 the education of Americans, and enter, more rapidly and completely 
 than would have been possible in the country of their descent, into 
 the benefits of a higher state of civilization. In twenty or thirty 
 years they are not mentally distinguishable from other Americans. 
 The loss, and the disgrace, are England's : and it is the English 
 people and government whom it chiefly concerns to ask themselves, 
 how far it will be to their honour and advantage to retain the mere 
 soil of Ireland, but to lose its inhabitants. With the present feel- 
 ings of the Irish people, and the direction which their hope of im- 
 proving their condition seems to be permanently taking, England, 
 it is probable, has only the choice between the depopulation of 
 Ireland, and the conversion of a part of the labouring population 
 into peasant proprietors. The truly insular ignorance of her public 
 men respecting a form of agricultural economy which predominates 
 in nearly every other civilized country, makes it only too probable 
 that she will choose the worse side of the alternative. Yet there 
 are germs of a tendency to the formation of peasant proprietors on 
 Irish soil, which require only the aid of a friendly legislator to 
 foster them ; as is shown in the following extract from a private com- 
 munication by my eminent and valued friend, Professor Cairnes : 
 " On the sale, some eight or ten years, ago, of the Thomond, 
 Portarlington, and Kingston estates, in the Encumbered Estates 
 Court, it was observed that a considerable number of occupying 
 tenants purchased the fee of their farms. I have not been able to 
 obtain any information as to what followed that proceeding 
 whether the purchasers continued to farm their small properties, or 
 under the mania of landlordism tried to escape from their former 
 mode of life. But there are other facts which have a bearing on 
 this question. In those parts of the country where tenant-right 
 prevails, the prices given for the goodwill of a farm are enormous. 
 The following figures, taken from the schedule of an estate in the 
 neighbourhood of Newry, now passing through the Landed Estates 
 Court, will give an idea, but a very inadequate one, of the prices 
 which this mere customary right generally fetches.
 
 MEANS OP ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 95 
 
 " Statement showing the prices at which the tenant-right of 
 certain farms near Newry was sold : 
 
 
 Acres. 
 
 Rent. 
 
 Purchase-money 
 of tenant-right. 
 
 Lot 1 
 
 23 
 
 74 
 
 33 
 
 2 
 
 24 
 
 77 
 
 240 
 
 3 
 
 13 
 
 39 
 
 110 
 
 4 
 
 14 
 
 34 
 
 85 
 
 5 
 
 10 
 
 33 
 
 172 
 
 6 
 
 5 
 
 13 
 
 75 
 
 7 
 
 8 
 
 26 
 
 130 
 
 8 
 
 11 
 
 33 
 
 130 
 
 9 
 
 2 
 
 5 
 
 5 
 
 110 334 980 
 
 " The prices here represent on the whole about three years' pur- 
 chase of the rental : but this, as I have said, gives but an inadequate 
 idea of that which is frequently, indeed of that which is ordinarily, 
 paid. The right, being purely customary, will vary in value with 
 the confidence generally reposed in the good faith of the landlord. 
 In the present instance, circumstances have come to light in the 
 course of the proceedings connected with the sale of the estate, 
 which give reason to believe that the confidence in this case was 
 not high ; consequently, the rates above given may be taken as 
 considerably under those which ordinarily prevail. Cases, as I am 
 informed on the highest authority, have in other parts of the 
 country come to light, also in the Landed Estates Court, in which 
 the price given for the tenant-right was equal to that of the whole 
 fee of the land. It is a remarkable fact that people should be 
 found to give, say twenty or twenty-five years' purchase, for 
 land which is still subject to a good round rent. Why, it will 
 be asked, do they not purchase land out and out for the same, or a 
 slightly larger, sum ? The answer to this question, I believe, is 
 to be found in the state of our land laws. The cost of transferring 
 land in small portions is, relatively to the purchase money, 'very 
 considerable, even in the Landed Estates Court ; while the goodwill 
 of a farm may be transferred without any cost at all. The cheapest 
 conveyance that could be drawn in that Court, where the utmost 
 economy, consistent with the present mode of remunerating legal 
 services, is strictly enforced, would, irrespective of stamp duties,
 
 96 MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. 
 
 cost Wl. a very sensible addition to the purchase of a small 
 peasant estate : a conveyance to transfer a thousand acres might 
 not cost more, and would probably not cost much more. But in 
 truth, the mere cost of conveyance represents but the least part of 
 the obstacles which exist to obtaining land in small portions. A 
 far more serious impediment is the complicated state of the owner- 
 ship of land, which renders it frequently impracticable to sub- 
 divide a property into such portions as would bring the land within 
 the reach of small bidders. The remedy for this state of things, 
 however, lies in measures of a more radical sort than I fear it is at 
 all probable that any House of Commons we are soon likely to see 
 would even with patience consider. A registry of titles may succeed 
 in reducing this complex condition of ownership to its simplest 
 expression ; but where real complication exists, the difficulty is not 
 to be got rid of by mere simplicity of form ; and a registry of titles 
 while the powers of disposition at present enjoyed by landowners 
 remain undiminished, while every settler and testator has an almost 
 unbounded licence to multiply interests in land, as pride, the pas- 
 sion for dictation, or mere whim may suggest will, in my opinion, 
 fail to reach the root of the evil. The effect of these circumstances 
 is to place an immense premium upon large dealings in land 
 indeed in most cases practically to preclude all other than large 
 dealings ; and while this is the state of the law, the experiment of 
 peasant proprietorship, it is plain, cannot be fairly tried. The facts, 
 however, which I have stated, show, I think, conclusively, that there 
 is no obstacle in the disposition of the people to the introduction of 
 this system."
 
 SPEECH 
 
 ON ME CHICHBSTER FOETESCUE'S 
 
 LAND BILL 
 
 MAY 17 1866 
 
 IT was in an auspicious hour for the futurity of Ireland, and of the 
 Empire of which Ireland is so important a part, that a British Ad- 
 ministration has introduced this Bill into Parliament. I venture to 
 express the opinion that nothing which any Government has yet 
 done, or which any Government has yet attempted to do, for Ire- 
 land not even Catholic Emancipation itself has shown so true a 
 comprehension of Ireland's real needs, or has aimed so straight at 
 the very heart of Ireland's discontent and of Ireland's misery. It 
 is a fulfilment of the promise held out by the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer at the beginning of the Session, when, in discharging the 
 painful duty of calling on Parliament to treat Ireland once more 
 let us hope for the last time as a disaffected dependency, he de- 
 clared his purpose, and that of the Government of which he is a 
 Member, to legislate for Ireland according to Irish exigencies, and 
 no longer according to English routine. To have no better guide 
 than routine is not a safe thing in any case ; but to make the rou- 
 tine of one country our guide in legislating for another, is a mode 
 of conduct which, unless by a happy accident, cannot lead to good. 
 It is a mistake which this country has often made not perhaps so 
 much from being more liable to it than other countries, as from 
 having more opportunities of committing it : having been so often 
 called on to legislate, and to frame systems of administration, for 
 
 H
 
 98 SPEECH ON 
 
 dependencies very unlike itself. Sir, it is a problem of this sort which 
 we still have before us when we attempt to legislate for Ireland. 
 Not that Ireland is a dependency those days are over ; she is an 
 integral part of a great self-governing nation : but a part, I venture 
 to say, very unlike the remaining parts. I am not going to talk 
 about natural differences, race and the like the importance of 
 which, I think, is very much exaggerated ; but let any hon. gentle- 
 man consider what a different history Ireland has had from either 
 England or Scotland, and ask himself whether that history must 
 not have left its impress deeply engraven on Irish character. Con- 
 sider again how different, even at this day, are the social circum- 
 stances of Ireland from those of England or Scotland ; and whether 
 such different circumstances must not often require different laws 
 and institutions. People often ask it has been asked this evening 
 why should that which works well in England not work well in 
 Ireland ? or why should anything be needed in Ireland which is 
 not needed in England ? Are Irishmen an exception to all the rest 
 of mankind, that they cannot bear the institutions and practices 
 which reason and experience point out as the best suited to promote 
 national prosperity ? Sir, we were eloquently reminded the other 
 night of that double ignorance against which a great philosopher 
 warned his cotemporaries ignorance of our being ignorant. But 
 when we insist on applying the same rules in every respect to Ire- 
 land and to England, we show another kind of double ignorance, 
 and at the same time disregard a precept older than Socrates the 
 precept which was inscribed on the front of the Temple of Delphi : 
 we not only do not know those whom we undertake to govern, but 
 we do not know ourselves. No, Sir, Ireland is not an exceptional 
 country ; but England is. Irish circumstances and Irish ideas 
 as to social and agricultural economy are the general ideas and 
 circumstances of the human race ; it is English circumstances 
 and English ideas that are peculiar. Ireland is in the main stream 
 of human existence and human feeling and opinion ; it is England 
 that is in one of the lateral channels. If any hon. gentleman 
 doubts this, I ask, is there any other country on the face of the 
 earth in which, not merely as an occasional fact, but as a general
 
 MR CHICHESTER FORTESCUE'S LAND BILL. 99 
 
 rule, the land is owned in great estates by one class, and farmed by 
 another class of capitalist farmers at money rents fixed by contract, 
 while the actual cultivators of the soil are hired labourers, wholly 
 detached from the soil, and receiving only day wages ? Parts of 
 other countries may be pointed out where something like this 
 state of things exists as an exceptional fact, but Great Britain is the 
 only country where it is the general rule. In all other places in 
 which the cultivators have emerged from slavery, and from that 
 modified form of slavery, serfage, and have not risen into the 
 higher position of owning land in their own right, the labourer 
 holds it, as in Ireland, directly from the landowner, and the inter- 
 mediate class of well-to-do tenant-farmers has, as a general rule, 
 no existence. Ireland is like the rest of the world, and England is 
 the exceptional country. Then, if we are making ruks for the 
 common case, is it reasonable to draw our precedents from the ex- 
 ceptional one ? If we are to be guided by experience in legislating 
 for Ireland, it is Continental rather than English experience that we 
 ought to consider, for it is on the Continent, and not in England, 
 that we find anything like similarity of circumstances. And this 
 explains why so much has been said in Ireland about tenant-right 
 and fixity of tenure. For what does Continental experience tell 
 us, as a matter of historical fact? It tells us that where this 
 agricultural economy, in which the actual cultivator holds the land 
 directly from the proprietor, has been found consistent with the 
 good cultivation of the land or with the comfort and prosperity 
 of the cultivators, the rent has not been determined, as it is in 
 Ireland, merely by contract, but the occupier has had the protec- 
 tion of some sort of fixed usage. The custom of the country 
 has determined more or less precisely the rent which he should 
 pay, and guaranteed the permanence of his tenure as long as he 
 paid it. Such a social and agricultural system as exists in Ireland 
 has never, or next to never, succeeded without tenant-right 
 and fixity of tenure. Do I therefore ask you to establish cus- 
 tomary rents and fixity of tenure as the rule of occupancy in 
 Ireland ? Certainly not. It is perhaps a sufficient reason that 
 I know you will not do it ; but I am also aware that what may 
 
 H2
 
 100 SPEECH ON 
 
 be very wholesome when it grows up as a custom, approved 
 and accepted by all parties, would not necessarily have the same 
 success if, without having ever existed as a custom, it were to 
 be enforced as a law. Only I warn you of this. Peasant farming, 
 as a rule, never answers without fixity of tenure. If Ireland is 
 ever to prosper with peasant farming, fixity of tenure is an indis- 
 pensable condition. But you do not want to perpetuate peasant 
 farming ; you want to improve Ireland in another way. You pre- 
 fer the English agricultural economy, and desire to establish that. 
 The only mode of cultivation which seems to you beneficial is cul- 
 tivation by well-to-do tenant-farmers and hired labourers. Well, 
 Sir, there is a good deal to be said against this doctrine it is very 
 disputable, but I am not going to dispute it now. I accept this as 
 the thing you have got to do, and assuming it to be desirable, I 
 ask, how is it to be brought about ? This is not the first time that 
 a problem of this sort has been propounded. The French Econo- 
 mists of the 18th century on the whole the most enlightened 
 thinkers of their time tried to deal with a state of things not un- 
 like what you have to deal with ; and they wanted exactly what 
 you want. They had a wretched, down-trodden, half-starved race 
 of peasant cultivators, and they wanted to have, instead of these, 
 comfortable farmers. Some of the more enlightened of the great 
 landlords of France adopted the doctrines of the Economists, and 
 would gladly have carried them into practice ; but nothing came of 
 it, and the reform of the agricultural economy of France had to 
 wait for a revolution. Now, to what do the best writers attribute 
 the failure of these agricultural reformers? To this that they 
 aimed at putting farmers in the place of the peasants, when they 
 should have aimed at raising the peasants into farmers. If you are 
 going to succeed where they failed, it can only be by avoiding their 
 error. Instead of bringing in capitalist farmers over the heads of 
 the tenants, you have got to take the best of the present tenants, 
 and elevate them into the comfortable farmers you want to have. 
 You cannot evict a whole nation the country would be too hot to 
 hold you and your new tenants if you attempted it. And suppos- 
 ing even that things could be made smooth for the successors of
 
 MR CHICHESTER FORTESCUE'S LAND BILL. 101 
 
 the existing peasantry by means of emigration, are you going to ex- 
 patriate a whole people ? Would any hon. gentleman desire to do 
 that ? Would he endure the thought of doing it ? Supposing even 
 that you sought to use the right of landed property for such a pur- 
 pose, is there any human institution which could have such a strain 
 put upon it and not snap ? Well, then, how are the present te- 
 nantry, or the best of them, to be raised into a superior class of far- 
 mers ? There is but one way, and this Bill which is before you 
 affords the means. Give them what you can of the encouraging 
 influences of ownership. Give them an interest in improvement. 
 Enable them to be secure of enjoying the fruits of their own labour 
 and outlay. Let their improvements be for their own benefit, and 
 not solely for those whose land they till. There is no parallel pro- 
 blem to be resolved on this side of St. George's Channel. The sys- 
 tem of tenancy in England is found to be at least not incompatible 
 with agricultural improvement. In England and Scotland a large 
 proportion of the landowners either give leases to their tenants 
 which afford them sufficient time for reaping the benefit of what- 
 ever improvements they may make, or, wnen there are no leases, 
 there is generally such a degree of confidence and mutual under- 
 standing between landlord and tenant, that they make their im- 
 provements in concert ; or at all events the tenant, as a general 
 rule, has no fear that the landlord will take an unfair advantage of 
 him, and, by accepting a higher offer over his head, will possess 
 himself without compensation of the increased value which the 
 tenant has given to the land. This is the case in England : but 
 how is it in Ireland ? The reverse in all respects. There are few 
 leases, except old and expiring ones, and no confidence at all be- 
 tween landlords and tenants. One-half of the landlords, or 
 some other proportion of them, do not deserve confidence, and 
 the consequence is that the tenants dare not trust the other 
 half. If a tenant does trust his landlord, he does not trust, 
 for he does not know, the next heir, or the stranger who 
 may buy the property in the Landed Estates Court. The extent 
 to which this want of confidence reaches is really one of the most 
 remarkable facts in all history. There have been incontestable 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BARBARA
 
 102 SPEECH ON 
 
 proofs of late years that the tenant farmers of Ireland often possess 
 a considerable amount of savings. Where do these savings go to ? 
 They go into banks of deposit ; they go into the English funds ; 
 they go under the thatch ; everywhere but to their natural invest- 
 ment, the farm. There is something, to my mind, almost tragical 
 in this state of things. For the fact is decidedly honourable to Irish 
 landlords that these savings have been made by their tenants ; it 
 exculpates a large proportion of them from the indiscriminate 
 charges often brought against the entire class ; it proves that a 
 much greater number of them than has often been supposed are 
 neither greedy nor grasping, do not rack-rent their tenants, or 
 take the last farthing in payment of rent ; and in spite of this, the 
 tenants are so absolutely without confidence in them, that even the 
 sums which the landlord's forbearance has enabled them to accu- 
 mulate are sent away everywhere are employed for any purpose 
 except the most obvious and natural purpose, the improvement 
 of their farms. Now, are you going to let this state of things con- 
 tinue ? If we all deplore it if we all are ashamed of it what re- 
 medy is there but one ? Give the tenant compensation, awarded 
 by an impartial tribunal, for whatever increased value and only 
 for the increased value he has given to the land. Do not use the 
 fruits of his labour or of his outlay without paying for them, or 
 without giving him assurance of being paid for them. The Bill 
 appoints an impartial tribunal. When the parties do not agree, 
 the case is to be adjudged by authorities who even in Ireland de- 
 serve and possess the confidence alike of landlords and tenants. 
 Valuers appointed by the Government Board of Works will decide 
 in the first instance, and the assistant barrister, the stipendiary 
 Chairman of Quarter Sessions, is the Judge in appeal. I believe 
 no one doubts that such arbitrators as these would be impartial, 
 and would be trusted by the Irish people. But the right hon. 
 gentleman who spoke last (Mr. Lowe) said it was not so much the 
 giving compensation he objected to, as to the fact that im- 
 provements might be made under the Bill, to which the consent 
 of the landlord had not been previously obtained. That pro- 
 vision, however, if we consider the matter, is the very essence of
 
 MR CHICHESTER FORTESCUE'S LAND BILL. 103 
 
 the Bill, and is indispensable to its operation. If improvements 
 are only to be made by the landlord's permission, and on his 
 voluntary promise of an indemnity, that can be done now ; 
 saving, indeed, some insufficiency in the legal power of a limited 
 owner to bind his successors. But experience proves that when 
 there is a want of confidence between landlords and tenants, 
 improvements which require the previous consent of the landlord are 
 not made at all. The tenant is afraid to serve a notice on his land- 
 lord. He is afraid to announce beforehand to the landlord that he 
 is in a condition to make improvements, lest, being mostly a tenant- 
 at-will, he should be thought to be also in a condition to pay a 
 higher rent. Or he fears that the landlord will do what some 
 landlords have been known to do withhold his assent, on the 
 speculation that the tenant may make the improvement not- 
 withstanding, and the landlord may be able to profit by it without 
 paying any indemnity. Or he thinks that the landlord may dis- 
 like an improving tenant, from a mere wish to keep his tenantry in 
 a state of dependence. And what does the landlord sacrifice by 
 renouncing the condition of previous consent ? Nothing whatever 
 but the power of taking for himself the fruits of the labour of 
 others. He will still be free to improve the estate himself, if he 
 can and will. But if he does not, and his tenant does, he will be 
 prevented from appropriating the value which the tenant has 
 created, without paying him an equivalent. What he will have to 
 pay, will be determined not by the outlay of the tenant, but by 
 value actually added to the farm by the tenant's labour or outlay, 
 in the opinion of an impartial tribunal. It is of no consequence 
 how much the tenant may have expended ; unless he has made the 
 land worth more money to the landlord for the landlord's uses, he 
 will receive nothing. Even in such a case as that to which the 
 right hon. gentleman alluded, and to which reference was frequently 
 made before the Committee the case of a landlord wishing to 
 consolidate his farms, and the buildings erected by the tenant not 
 being required when such consolidation takes place this circum- 
 stance would be taken into consideration by the valuer, and the 
 tenant would have to bear the loss. Indeed, in no case would the
 
 104 SPEECH ON 
 
 landlord sustain any pecuniary loss. He would simply have to 
 pay for value received. The objection is what would be called, 
 on almost any subject but the present, a purely abstract objection. 
 The Bill is thought to violate a certain abstract right of property 
 in land. I call it an abstract right, meaning that it is of no 
 value to the possessor though it is hurtful to other people. Of 
 what earthly use to any landed proprietor is the right of pre- 
 venting improvement ? It is the right of the dog in the 
 manger. Yet, wonderful to relate, even this the Bill does not 
 take away ; it leaves to the landlord the power of preventing 
 the tenant's improvements by a previous stipulation. But it does 
 this in the confidence I believe the well-grounded confidence 
 that the power will seldom be used, except when there is something 
 to justify it in the special circumstances of the case. The framers 
 of the Bill place a just reliance in the influence of a sound moral 
 principle when once embodied in the law. They know that there 
 is a great difference between requiring the tenant to ask permission 
 from the landlord to make improvements, and throwing the onus 
 on the landlord of prohibiting by anticipation a public benefit, 
 which the law, if this Bill passes, will have declared its purpose of 
 encouraging. I maintain, Sir, that the claim of the improver to 
 the value of his improvements, so far from conflicting with the right 
 of property in land, is a right of the very same description as landed 
 property, and rests on the same foundation. What is the ground 
 and justification of landed property ? I am afraid some hon. 
 Members think that I am going to give utterance to some grave 
 heresy on this subject. At least, those hon. gentlemen who have 
 been so obliging as to advertise my writings on an unexampled 
 scale, and entirely free of expense either to myself or the publisher, 
 seemed to be much scandalized by some passages they had dis- 
 covered, to the effect that landed property must be more limited in 
 its nature than other proprietary rights, because no man made 
 the land. Well, Sir, did any man make the land ? If not, did 
 any man acquire it by gift, or by bequest, or by inheritance, or by 
 purchase, from the maker of it? These, I apprehend, are the 
 foundations of the right to other property. Then what is the
 
 MR CHICHESTER FORTESCUE'S LAND BILL. 105 
 
 foundation of the right to property in land ? The answer com- 
 monly made to this question is enough for me, and I agree in it. 
 Though no man made the land, men, by their industry, made the 
 valuable qualities of it; they reclaimed it from the waste, they brought 
 it under cultivation, they made it useful to man, and so acquired 
 as just a title to it as men have to what they have themselves 
 made. Very well : I have nothing to say against this. But why, 
 I ask, is this right, which is acquired by improving the land, to be 
 for ever confined to the person who first improved it ? If it 
 requires improving again, and some one does improve it again, does 
 not this new improver acquire a kind of right akin to that of the 
 original improver ? Of course I do not pretend that when one 
 person has acquired a right to land by improving it, another, by 
 improving it again, can oust the first man of his right. But 
 neither do I admit that the man who has once improved a piece of 
 land, acquires thereby an indefeasible right to prevent any one else 
 from improving it for the whole remainder of eternity ; or a right 
 to profit, without cost to himself, by improvements which some one 
 else has made. Landed property in its origin had nothing to rest 
 upon but the moral claim of the improver to the value of his im- 
 provement ; and unless we recognise on the same ground a kindred 
 claim in the temporary occupier, we give up the moral basis on 
 which landed property rests, and leave it without any justification 
 but that of actual possession a title which can be pleaded for every 
 possible abuse. We have heard a good deal lately about " thoughtful 
 Reformers." It seems there are a great many thoughtful Re- 
 formers in this House some of them very thoughtful ones indeed. 
 I wish there were as many thoughtful Conservatives ; but I am 
 afraid they keep most of their thoughtfulness for Reform. How- 
 ever, we know there are thoughtful Conservatives, and they cannot 
 be all on this side of the House. Let me remind them of a writer 
 with whose works they must all of them be familiar the most 
 thoughtful mind that ever tried to give a philosophic basis to English 
 Conservatism the late Mr. Coleridge. In his second Lay Sermon, 
 this eminent Conservative propounds a theory of property in land, 
 compared with which anything which I ever hinted at is the merest
 
 106 SPEECH ON 
 
 milk and water. His idea of landed property is, that it is a kind 
 of public function a trust rather than a property which the 
 owner is morally justified in using for his own advantage, only after 
 certain great social ends, connected with the cultivation of the country 
 and the well-being of its inhabitants, have been amply fulfilled. I 
 am not claiming anything comparable to this. All I ask is, that 
 the improvement of the country and the well-being of the people 
 may be attended to, when they are proved not to be inconsistent 
 with the pecuniary interest of the landowners. This modest de- 
 mand is the only one I make ; because I believe, and because 
 it is believed by those who are better judges of the condition 
 of Ireland than I can pretend to be, that no more than this 
 is necessary to cure the existing evils. Sir, the House has now a 
 golden opportunity. When I think how small a thing it is which 
 is now asked of us, and when I hear, as I have heard, Members of 
 this House, usually classed as of extreme opinions men who are 
 Irish of the Irish, who have the full confidence of what is called the 
 National party when such men assure us that the tenantry, who 
 have been scarcely touched by any of the things you have hitherto 
 done for the benefit of Ireland, will, as they hope, and as they think 
 there is ground to believe, be reconciled to their lot, and changed 
 from a discontented, if not disloyal, to a hopeful and satisfied part of 
 the nation, by so moderate I had almost said so minute a con- 
 cession as that which is now proposed ; I confess I am amazed that 
 those who have suffered so long and so bitterly are able to be con- 
 ciliated or calmed by so small a gift ; and deplorable would it 
 indeed be if so small a gift were refused to them. Even if we 
 ourselves had not full confidence in this remedy, there is nothing in 
 it so alarming that we need be afraid to try, as an experiment, 
 what is so ardently wished for by a country to which we owe 
 so much reparation that she ought to be the spoilt child of this 
 country for a generation to come to be treated not only with jus- 
 tice but with generous indulgence. I am speaking in the presence 
 of many who listened, like myself, to that touching speech which 
 was delivered on the last night of the Reform debate, by the hon. 
 Member for Tralee (The O'Donoghue) when he, who is so well
 
 MR CHICHESTER FORTESCUE'S LAND BILL. 107 
 
 entitled to speak in the name of the Irish people, and of that portion 
 of them of whom we have had the hardest thoughts, and who have 
 had the hardest thoughts of us, held out his hand to us and declared 
 that if there is even one party in this House and in this country who 
 reciprocate the feeling he then showed, and really regard the Irish 
 as fellow- countrymen, they will be fellow-countrymen to us they 
 will labour and contend by our side, have the same objects with us, 
 look forward to the same and not to a different future, and let the 
 dream of a separate nationality remain a dream. Many, I am sure, 
 must have felt as I felt while I listened to his eloquent and feeling 
 words, that if this House only wills it, that speech is the beginning 
 of a new era. Let us not fling away in want of thought for it is 
 not want of heart the reconciliation so frankly tendered. His- 
 tory will not say that we of the present generation are unwilling to 
 govern Ireland as she ought to be governed : let us not go down to 
 posterity with the contemptible reputation of being unable to do so. 
 Let it not be said of us that, with the best possible intentions towards 
 Ireland, no length of time or abundance of experience could teach 
 us to understand her whether it is insular narrowness, making us 
 incapable of imagining that Ireland's exigencies could be in any way 
 different from England's ; or because the religious respect we 
 cherish for everything which has the smallest savour of a right of 
 property, has degenerated, as is sometimes the case with other 
 religions, into a superstition. Let us show that our principles of 
 government are not a mere generalization from English facts ; but 
 that in legislating for Ireland we can take into account Irish cir- 
 cumstances : and that our care for landed property is an intelligent 
 regard for its essentials, and for the ends it fulfils, and not a servile 
 prostration before its mere name.
 
 SPEECH 
 
 ON ME MAGDIEE'S MOTION 
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND 
 
 MAKCH 12 1868 
 
 IT was with a feeling, I will not say of disappointment because 
 there can be no disappointment where there has not previously been 
 hope but of regret, that I witnessed the " beggarly account of 
 empty boxes" which the Government has laid before us, instead of 
 an Irish policy. My dissatisfaction was not so much with what 
 they did, or what they refused to do, on the subject of the land 
 although I look upon that question as outweighing all the rest put 
 together, and I believe that without a satisfactory dealing with it, 
 nothing can be done which will be at all effectual. I am afraid the 
 time is far distant when it would be fair to expect that a Govern- 
 ment, and especially a Conservative Government, should be found 
 in advance of public opinion which I cannot deny that the present 
 Government would be, if they were to propose such a measure on 
 the Irish Land question as I conceive would alone be effectual to 
 settle it. But what we have a right to expect even from a Con- 
 servative Government, at all events from a Conservative Government 
 which professes a Liberal policy even with the qualifying adjunct, 
 " truly Liberal" is that they shall be on a level with the opinion 
 of the people : and this they most assuredly are not, on the subject 
 of the Irish Church. If there ever was a question on which I might 
 say the whole human race has made up its mind, it is this. I concur 
 in every word that was said, and every feeling that was expressed,
 
 SPEECH ON THE STATE OP IRELAND. 109 
 
 by my right hon. friend the Member for Calne (Mr. Lowe) on this 
 subject : and I thank him from my heart for his manly and out- 
 spoken declaration in reference to that great scandal and iniquity, 
 which was so well described by the right hon. gentleman now at the 
 head of the Government (Mr. Disraeli), in a speech which, although 
 last year he endeavoured to explain away, I am not aware that 
 he has ever disavowed. It is an institution which could not 
 be submitted to by any country, except at the point of the 
 sword. Now, on this subject the Government have not shown 
 themselves altogether inflexible. The noble Lord the Chief 
 Secretary for Ireland has expressed his willingness in some 
 degree to entertain the principle of religious equality, and 
 I thank him for it ; but, as has been remarked by my hon. friend the 
 Member for Manchester (Mr. Jacob Bright), he proposed to do it 
 if at all by levelling up instead of levelling down. The noble 
 Lord is willing that every valley should be exalted ; but he does not 
 go on to the succeeding clause, and say that every mountain and hill 
 shall be laid low. So long as the national property which is 
 administered by the Episcopal Church of Ireland is not diverted 
 from its present purpose, the noble Lord has no objection at all to 
 this country's saddling itself with the endowment of another great 
 hierarchy, which, if effected on the principle of religious equality, 
 would be a great deal more costly than even that which now exists. 
 Does the noble Lord really think it possible that the people of 
 England will submit to this ? I may be permitted, as one who, 
 in common with many of my betters, have been subjected to the 
 charge of being Utopian, to congratulate the Government on having 
 joined that goodly company. It is, perhaps, too complimentary 
 to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, 
 or cacotopians. What is commonly called Utopian is something 
 too good to be practicable ; but what they appear to favour is too 
 bad to be practicable. Not only would England and Scotland 
 never submit to it, but the Eoman Catholic clergy of Ireland refuse 
 it. They will not take your bribe. As in many other things I 
 differ from the hon. and learned Member for Oxford (Mr. Neate), 
 who moved the Amendment, so my opinion on the subject of Irish
 
 110 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 remedies is directly contrary to his. Whereas the hon. and 
 learned Member thinks that the real obstacle to the peace and 
 prosperity of Ireland is the proposal of extravagant and impossible 
 remedies, my opinion, on the contrary, is that the real obstacle is 
 not the proposal of extravagant and impossible remedies, but the 
 persistent unwillingness of the House even to look at any remedy 
 which they have pre-judged to be extravagant and impossible. 
 When a country has been so long in possession of full power over 
 another, as this country has over Ireland, and still leaves it in the 
 state of feeling which now exists in Ireland, there is a strong pre- 
 sumption that the remedy required must be much stronger and 
 more drastic than any which has yet been applied. All the pre- 
 sumption is in favour of the necessity of some great change. Great 
 and obstinate evils require great remedies. If the House does not 
 think so if it still has faith in small remedies, I exhort it to make 
 haste and adopt them. It has already lost a great deal of time. 
 Counting from 1829, which was the time when this country first 
 began to govern Ireland, or even to profess to govern Ireland, for the 
 sake of Ireland, thirty-nine years have elapsed, and during that time, 
 although there may have been some material progress, as there has 
 been everywhere else, moral progress, in reconciling Ireland to our 
 Government, and to the Union with us, has not been made, and 
 does not seem likely soon to be made, unless we change our policy. 
 Hon. gentlemen prefer to soothe themselves with statistics, flatter- 
 ing themselves with the idea that Ireland is improving, and that 
 the evil was greater at some former time than it is now. My 
 right hon. friend the Member for Calne has told us that we have 
 no occasion to care for Fenianism, and that it is not of any conse- 
 quence. I do not suppose my right hon. friend thinks that the 
 remedies proposed by me or any one else for the benefit of Ireland 
 are intended to conciliate the Fenians. I know very little of the 
 Fenians. I do not pretend to know what their opinions are, nor do 
 I believe my right hon. friend knows them a bit better. We do 
 know, however, that they desire what I greatly deprecate a violent 
 separation of Ireland from this country ; and they desire this with 
 such bitterness and animosity that there is no chance of conciliating
 
 ON THE STATE OP IEELAND. Ill 
 
 them. But the peculiar and growing danger in the state of Ireland 
 is this that there is nearly universal discontent, and very general 
 disaffection. Hon. gentlemen need not flatter themselves that this 
 is an evil which can be safely disregarded. Ireland has had rebellions 
 before. As a rebellion this recent one is nothing it is contemptible. 
 A great deal has been said about the circumstance that no person 
 of consequence, personally or socially, has put himself at the head 
 of it. It was not likely that any one who had anything to lose 
 would do so. Is it within the range of possibility that an insurrec- 
 tion could be successful in Ireland at this particular time ? What does 
 Mitchel himself say of it ? This is the reason why every one who 
 has something to lose (and every one who is an occupant of land has 
 something to lose) will not, until he sees a greater chance of suc- 
 cess, countenance rebellion, or throw any other difficulty in the way 
 of suppressing it than by sheltering from the police those who are in- 
 volved in it. That is not the danger. The danger is one of which there 
 is the strongest evidence. My own information is derived from many 
 trustworthy persons, not of extreme opinions, persons whose idea of 
 remedial measures for Ireland falls far short of mine, but who are 
 unanimously of opinion that the state of Ireland is more dangerous at 
 this moment than at any former period, and that the feeling of the 
 people is one of general discontent and wide disaffection. 
 Gentlemen who hold land in Ireland do not think so ; but they 
 would be the last persons to find it out. Persons in possession of 
 power are usually the last to find out what is thought of them by 
 their inferiors. They awake from their dream and find it out when 
 they little expect it. There are two circumstances which make the 
 disaffection more alarming at this time than at any former period 
 since the rebellion of 1798. One is a circumstance which has 
 never existed before. For the first time, the discontent in Ireland 
 rests on a background of several millions of Irish across the Atlan- 
 tic. This is a fact which is not likely to diminish. The number 
 of Irish in America is constantly increasing. Their power to 
 influence the political conduct of the United States is increasing, 
 and will daily increase ; and is there any probability that the 
 American-Irish will come to hate this country less than they do at
 
 112 SPEECH ON ME MAGUIRE J S MOTION 
 
 the present moment ? The noble Lord the Chief Secretary for 
 Ireland said truly that many Irish go to our colonies, and that they 
 remain loyal. But why ? The Irish who go to those colonies find 
 everything there which they seek in vain here. They have the 
 land ; they have no sectarian church ; they have even a separate 
 Legislature. All this they have under the British Crown and the 
 British flag. If you gave all this to Ireland the people would be 
 tranquil enough there. They will be so with much less than that ; 
 but those who go to America, on the contrary, will be loyal only 
 to the American Government, while their feeling towards England 
 is, and must be, directly opposite to that of the Irish who go to 
 Australia and the other English Colonies. That is one most 
 serious cause of danger in Ireland. Another is that the disaffection 
 has become, more than at any former period, one of nationality. The 
 Irish were taught that feeling by Englishmen. England has only 
 even professed to treat the Irish people as part of the same nation 
 with ourselves, since 1800. How did we treat them before that 
 time ? I will not go into the subject of the penal laws, because it 
 may be said that those laws affected the Irish not as Irish but as 
 Catholics. I will only mention the manner in which they were 
 treated merely as Irish. I grant that, for these things, no man now 
 living has any share of the blame ; we are all ashamed of them ; 
 but " the evil that men do lives after them." First of all, this 
 House declared the importation of Irish cattle a public nuisance. 
 When we refused to receive Irish cattle, the Irish thought they 
 would slaughter and salt them, to try whether we would receive 
 them in that shape. But that was not allowed. Then they thought 
 that if they could not send the cattle or the flesh, they might send 
 the hides in the form of leather. No ; that was not allowed either. 
 Being thus denied admission for cattle in any shape, they tried if 
 they might be allowed to do anything with respect to sheep ; and 
 they commenced exporting wool to this country. No ; we would 
 not take their wool. Then they began to manufacture it, and 
 tried if we would take the manufactured article. This was worst 
 of all, and we compelled our deliverer, William III., of " pious and 
 immortal memory," to promise his Parliament that he would put
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 113 
 
 down the Irish woollen manufacture. This was not, I think, a 
 brotherly course, or at all like treating Ireland as a part of the 
 same nation. If we had been determined to impress upon Ireland 
 in the strongest manner that she was regarded as a totally different 
 and hostile nation, that was exactly the course to pursue. In fact, 
 Ireland was treated in that thoroughly heathenish manner in 
 which it was then customary for nations to treat other nations 
 whom they had conquered with the feeling that the dependent 
 nation had no rights which the superior nation was bound to respect. 
 It is unjust, however, to call that feeling heathenish, since it 
 belonged only to the worst times of heathenism, before the Stoic 
 philosophy before the great, the immortal Marcus Antoninus pro- 
 claimed the kinship of all mankind. From the year 1800, these 
 things began to change ; but down to 1829 it may be said that 
 though in some sense we treated Ireland as a sister, it was as 
 sister Cinderella. Dust and ashes were good enough for her ; pur- 
 ple and fine linen were reserved for her sisters. From 1829, how- 
 ever, we ceased to govern* Ireland in that way. From that time 
 there has been no feeling in this country with respect to Ireland, but 
 a continuance of the really sisterly feeling which then commenced. 
 Since that time it has been the sincere desire of all parties in Eng- 
 land to govern Ireland for her good ; but we have grievously failed 
 in knowing how to set about it. Let me take a brief review of the 
 things done for Ireland during that time. They may be easily 
 counted. First, we made the landlord the tithe-proctor. That 
 was a right thing to do ; it prevented a great deal of bloodshed, 
 and an enormous amount of annoyance and disaffection. I only 
 wish it had been done before it had become practically impossible 
 to collect the tithes in the old way. But, after all, this was merely 
 changing the mode of taking something from the Irish people : it 
 was not taking less. Next, we gave to Ireland a really unsectarian 
 education. Ireland, long before England, received from us an 
 elementary education which came down to the lowest grade of the 
 people ; and by degrees she also obtained unsectarian education in 
 the higher branches. This is the most solid, and by far the greatest 
 benefit we have yet conferred upon Ireland : and this, if the pro-
 
 114 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 posal of the Government is adopted, we are going in a great measure 
 to give up. In your difficulties, this is what you are going to throw 
 over. You are going, in a great measure, to sacrifice the best 
 thing you have done for Ireland, to save the bad things. The 
 third thing did more credit to our kindness and generosity than to 
 our wisdom. It was the 8,000,000 ultimately amounting to 
 10,000,000 that we gave at the time of the Irish famine, for the 
 relief of the destitution in that country. Nobody will say that it 
 was not right to give it ; but I do not think that a people ever 
 laid out 8,000,000 or 10,000,000 to meet an immediate emer- 
 gency, in a manner calculated to do so very minute a quantity of 
 permanent good. We were lavish in the amount that we expended. 
 We certainly saved many lives though there were probably a 
 greater number that we could not save and for that we are entitled 
 to all credit. In a case of desperate distress there is in this country 
 no grudging of money. All parties are united in that respect. But 
 when circumstances obliged us to lay out this great sum, we had an 
 opportunity of doing permanent good, by reclaiming the waste lands 
 of Ireland for the benefit of the people of Ireland ; and if we had 
 done that, we should probably never have heard anything about fixity 
 of tenure in the shape in which we hear of it now. At that time there 
 was a sufficient quantity of waste land in Ireland to have enabled us 
 to establish alarge portion of the Irish population, by their own labour, 
 in the condition of peasant proprietors of the land which they would 
 themselves have reclaimed. We lost that opportunity, and we lost 
 it for ever : because since that time fully one half of all the reclaimable 
 waste land which existed at the time of Sir Richard Griffith's survey 
 has been reclaimed ; that is, it has been got hold of by the landlords ; 
 it has been reclaimed for the landlords, mainly, or very largely, by 
 the aid of public money lent to them for the purpose. Therefore, 
 it is no longer possible to produce these great results in Ireland 
 merely by reclaiming the waste lands. The opportunity lost never 
 can be regained ; and now, therefore, you are asked to do much 
 larger, and, as it appears to you, 'much more revolutionary things. 
 There is only one more thing that we have done which is worth 
 mentioning, and that is the Encumbered Estates Act. The Encum-
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 115 
 
 bered Estates Act was a statesmanlike measure ; it was a measure 
 admirably conceived, and excellent, provided it had been combined 
 with other measures. Even as it was, it was in many respects a 
 very valuable measure. In the first place, it effected a very great 
 simplification of title. In the next, it to a great extent liberated 
 Ireland from the great evil of needy landlords. But there is another 
 side to the matter. The Act has had another effect, which was not, 
 I believe, anticipated by anybody, at least to the extent to which it 
 has been realized. It has shown to Ireland that there might be a 
 still greater evil than needy landlords namely, grasping landlords. 
 Those who have bought estates under the Act are, I believe, in the 
 great majority of cases, much harder landlords than their prede- 
 cessors ; and naturally so, because they had no previous connexion 
 with the localities in which the estates they have purchased are 
 situated. They were strangers I do not mean to Ireland but 
 to the neighbourhood of their new properties. Many of them 
 came from the towns. At all events, they had no connexion with 
 the tenants, and did not feel that the tenants had any moral claim 
 upon them, beyond the claim a claim they ought to have recognised 
 which all who are dependent on us have upon us. They bought 
 the land as a mere pecuniary speculation, and have very generally ad- 
 ministered it as a mere speculation. Not unfrequently the first step 
 they took was to raise the rents to the utmost possible amount, and 
 in many cases they have ejected tenants because they could not pay 
 those rents. These, then, are the things that we have done, since 
 we began to do the best we could, the best we knew how to do, for 
 Ireland ; and I do not think they are well calculated to remove from 
 the minds of the Irish people the bitterness which had been pro- 
 duced by our previous mode of government. If you say that there 
 was nothing better to be done, you confess your incompetency to 
 govern Ireland. I maintain that there is no country under heaven 
 which it is not possible to govern, and to govern in such a way 
 that it shall be contented. If there was anything better to be done, 
 and you would not do it, your confession is still worse. But I do 
 you more justice than you do yourselves. I believe that if small 
 measures would have sufficed you would have granted them ; and 
 
 i 2
 
 116 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 it is because small measures will not suffice, because you must have 
 large measures, because you must look at the thing on a much 
 larger scale than you now do, because you must be willing to take 
 into consideration what you think extravagant proposals it is 
 because of that, and not from any want of good intentions, that you 
 have failed. The present state of Ireland is, I hope, gradually con- 
 vincing you, if it does not do so all at once, that you must do 
 something on a much larger scale than you have ever acted upon 
 before, whether the particular things proposed to you are the right 
 things or not. It is under this conviction that I have thought it 
 my duty not to keep back three-fourths of what I believe to be the 
 truth in regard to Ireland, for fear of prejudicing minor measures 
 which the very people who propose them do not expect to produce 
 any very large results. As to the plan which I have proposed and 
 whether hon. gentlemen think that it is right or wrong, surely they 
 will admit that it is good to have it discussed as to that plan, it seems 
 necessary that I should in the first place state what it is ; for it does 
 not appear to have been at all correctly understood by most of those 
 who have attacked it, and least of all by the noble Lord the Chief 
 Secretary for Ireland. When I listened to his speech, I did not 
 recognise my own plan. It is evident that the arduous duties of 
 his important position had not left him time to read my pamphlet, 
 and that he had been compelled to trust to the representation of some 
 one who had given him a very unfaithful account of it. The noble 
 Lord seemed to think that my plan was that the State should buy 
 the land from the present proprietors, and re-sell or re-let it to the 
 tenants. Now, I have said nothing whatever about buying the land. 
 I should think it extremely objectionable to make that a part of the 
 plan. I do not want the rent-charge to be bought up by the tenants, 
 because that would absorb the capital which I Jiope to see them 
 employ in the improvement of the land. There is another mistake 
 which seems to have been made pretty generally. Those who have 
 objected to my proposal have always argued as if I was going to 
 force perpetuity of tenure on unwilling tenants. I propose nothing of 
 the sort. There are at present in Ireland a very great number of 
 tenants who do not pay a full rent. The most improving landlords
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 117 
 
 are precisely those who are the most moderate in their exactions. 
 Now, it is an indispensable part of my plan that perpetuity should 
 only be granted at a full rent a fair rent, not an excessive, but still a 
 full rent ; and probably, therefore, many of these tenants will prefer 
 to remain as they are. They might not do so if they were never to 
 have another chance of gaining a perpetuity ; but as according to 
 my plan they would retain the power of claiming a perpetuity at 
 any future time, on a valuation to be then made, I think it extremely 
 likely that many would wish to go on as they are. Many landlords, 
 too, might prefer to arrange amicably with their tenants at something 
 less than a full rent, in order to retain the present relations with 
 them : and these, I believe, would be the best landlords, the most 
 improving landlords, those who are on the best terms with their 
 tenants, and whom it is most important to retain in the country. 
 Many practical objections have been raised to the plan, to all 
 of which I believe that I have answers; but there is a pre- 
 liminary question that I should like to ask. Does the House 
 really wish that these difficulties should be met ? Because 
 it is very possible that in the minds of hon. gentlemen the question 
 may be concluded and closed by a preliminary objection ; such, for 
 instance, as that it is an interference with the rights of property. 
 If hon. gentlemen are determined by this single circumstance 
 if this is enough to make them absolutely resist and condemn the 
 plan it is probable that they would be rather sorry than glad if it 
 is possible to answer the practical objections, and show that the 
 plan would work ; and in that case I cannot expect to have a very 
 favourable or very unprejudiced audience when I attempt to 
 answer them. And then there is another sort of preliminary 
 objection : that which was made by my right hon. friend the 
 Member for Calne, in the name of political economy. In my right 
 hon. friend's mind political economy appears to stand for a particular 
 set of practical maxims. To him it is not a science, it is not an 
 exposition, not a theory of the manner in which causes produce 
 effects : it is a set of practical rules, and these practical rules are 
 indefeasible. My right hon. friend thinks that a maxim of political 
 economy if good in England must be good in Ireland. But that is
 
 118 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 like saying that because there is but one science of astronomy, and the 
 same law of gravitation holds for the earth and the planets, therefore 
 the earth and the planets do not move in different orbits. So far from 
 being a set of maxims and rules, to be applied without regard to 
 times, places, and circumstances, the function of political economy is to 
 enable us to find the rules which ought to govern any state of circum- 
 stances with which we have to deal circumstances which are never 
 the same in any two cases. I do not know in political economy, more 
 than I know in any other art, a single practical rule that must be 
 applicable to all cases ; and I am sure that no one is at all capable ol 
 determining what is the right political economy for any country 
 until he knows its circumstances. My right hon. friend perhaps 
 thinks that what is good political economy for England must be 
 good for India or perhaps for the savages in the back woods of 
 America. My right hon. friend has been very plain spoken, and I 
 will be plain spoken too. Political economy has a great many 
 enemies ; but its worst enemies are some of its friends, and I do 
 not know that it has a more dangerous enemy than my right hon. 
 friend. It is such modes of argument as he is in the habit of em- 
 ploying that have made political economy so thoroughly unpopular 
 with a large and not the least philanthropic portion of the people 
 of England. In my right hon. friend's mind, political economy 
 seems to exist as a bar even to the consideration of anything that 
 is proposed for the benefit of the economic condition of any people 
 in any but the old ways : as if science was a thing not to guide 
 our judgment, but to stand in its place a thing which can dis- 
 pense with the necessity of studying the particular case, and de- 
 termining how a given cause will operate under its circumstances. 
 Political economy has never in my eyes possessed this character. 
 Political economy in my eyes is a science by means of which we 
 are enabled to form a judgment as to what each particular case 
 requires ; but it does not supply us with a ready-made judgment 
 upon any case, and there cannot be a greater enemy to political 
 economy than he who represents it in that light. I will presume, 
 therefore, that the House will not be unwilling to allow me to 
 state what answer I can make to the practical objections to my plan.
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 119 
 
 First, there is the objection founded upon the sacredness of property. 
 That is a feeling which I respect. But the sacredness of property is 
 not violated by taking away property for the public good, if full 
 compensation is given ; and the interference that I propose is not 
 more an interference, it is m>t even so much an interference, with 
 property, as taking land for public improvements. Then, too, a 
 man's right to his property is sacred ; but is not a man's right to 
 his person still more sacred ? And yet no man is allowed to dispose 
 of his person in marriage, for instance except in such way as the 
 law provides ; nor will it allow him to relieve himself from the 
 contract, except on very special grounds, to be decided on by a 
 Court of Justice. To those hon. gentlemen who are fond of apply- 
 ing the term confiscation to the plan that I propose, I will say that 
 I recal them to the English language. I assure them that it is 
 possible to argue against any proposition, if need be, and to refute 
 what we think wrong, without altering the meaning of words, by 
 doing which people only succeed in imposing upon themselves and 
 others. How can that be confiscation in which the "fisc" instead 
 of receiving anything, has only to pay ; by which no individual 
 will te the poorer, but many, I hope, a good deal richer ? It may 
 be objectionable, but that is a matter of argument ; it may be un- 
 desirable, because the case may not be deemed strong enough to 
 require it : but let us fight against opinions from which we differ 
 without extending the war to the English language. I recommend 
 to hon. gentlemen to be always strictly conservative of the English 
 tongue. I will now come to arguments of a more practical kind. 
 I will first mention the strongest argument I have ever heard, either 
 in tlis House or elsewhere, against my plan namely, that if we 
 substitute the Government in the place of the present proprietors, 
 we shall expose the Government to great difficulties, and make it 
 still more unpopular than it has ever yet been. I have 
 tw:> answers to make to this objection, and if hon. gentlemen are 
 net impressed by the one they may perhaps be convinced by 
 the other. Undoubtedly, if the proposal is not received by the 
 tenants as a great boon if they do not think that perpetuity of 
 tenure on the terms I have suggested is a gift worth accepting, then
 
 120 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 I admit that there is nothing to say in favour of my plan ; it would 
 be idle to propose it. If, when we offer to the tenantry of Ireland 
 that which they desire more than anything else in the world a 
 perfect security of tenure the certainty that they will never have 
 more to pay than they pay at first 'that everything which their 
 industry produces shall belong to them alone if they do not think 
 that a boon worth having, I have nothing more to say. But this is 
 a most improbable supposition. A similar prediction was made 
 about the serfs of Russia. Many people said and believed that the 
 emancipated serfs would never consent to pay rent, especially to 
 the Government, for land which they had been accustomed to receive 
 gratis when in their servile condition. That was the general pre- 
 diction ; but we do not hear that the prediction has been 
 fulfilled. Everything seems to be going on smoothly, and the serfs, 
 as far as is knoAvn, pay their rents regularly. This, then, is one 
 answer. I have another which is more decisive. If it is thought 
 that it will not do to make the Government a substitute for the land- 
 lord, I answer that this is an objection affecting only the smalles; part 
 of my plan an additional provision, not for the benefit of the tenant, 
 but for the convenience and consolation of the landlords that they 
 should be allowed to receive their rents from the public Treasury. 
 If, after the rent is converted into a rent-charge, it be thought that 
 the landlords should, like other rent-chargers, be left to the ordinary 
 law of the country to collect their dues, by all means leave th?m to 
 the ordinary legal remedies. If it be thought injurious tc the 
 public interest to give the proposed consolation to the landlords, 
 then do not give it. So falls to the ground a full half of the dis- 
 sertation of the right hon. Member for Calne on the fatal conse- 
 quences of the plan. But I must say that I do not believe the Und- 
 lords as a body would wish to exchange their present condition for 
 that of being mere receivers of dividends from the State. I observe 
 that those who argue against any plan supposed to be contrary to 
 the interest of landlords, invariably assume that the landlords are 
 destitute of every spark of patriotic feeling. I do not think so. I 
 believe that a large proportion of the landlords would prefer to 
 retain their connexion with the land ; that they would make private
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 121 
 
 arrangements with their tenants on terms more favourable to them 
 than my plan would give, and that so Ireland would retain a large 
 proportion of the best class of landlords. Another objection made 
 against my plan is, that many of the holdings are too small. But 
 Lord Dufferin states in his pamphlet that the consolidation of small 
 holdings has ceased that the number of separate holdings has not 
 diminished in the last fifteen years. We may conclude from this 
 that the holdings, generally speaking, are as large as is required by 
 the present state of the industry and capital of Ireland ; because, if 
 that were not so, I cannot but believe that the movement of con- 
 solidation would still be going on. 1 perfectly admit that a great 
 many tenants hold smaller holdings than could be desired. But if 
 the holdings are so small that the tenants cannot live on them, and, 
 at the same time, pay the amount of rent that would be required, 
 they will soon fall into arrears ; and, if they fall into arrears, it is a 
 necessary part of my plan that they should be ejected. This would 
 enable the landlord, if he thought fit, in every case of eviction, to con- 
 solidate farms ; and whether he did so or not, the consequence would 
 be the substitution of a better class of tenants. It is part of my plan 
 that the landlord, if the holding were forfeited by non-payment of the 
 rent-charge, should choose the tenant's successor, and that the con- 
 sent of the landlord should be necessary to any sale of the occupier's 
 interest. Another objection which has been urged is, that in Ireland 
 lands held on long leases are always the worst farmed. Now, these are 
 almost always old leases, granted to middlemen. These middlemen 
 hold the farms at low rents ; but I never heard that they granted 
 leases at low rents to the sub-tenants ; and who on earth would or 
 could improve under competition rents ? What interest has a 
 man in improving, who has promised a rent he can never pay, and 
 who therefore knows that, lease or no lease, he may be turned out 
 at any moment ? If the farmers have undertaken to pay a rent 
 equal to double Avhat they make from the land, is it likely that they 
 will exert themselves to double the produce, merely for the benefit 
 of the landlord ? One of the most extraordinary circumstances con- 
 nected with the attack made on my plan by my right hon. friend 
 the Member for Calne, is that he went on ascribing all manner of
 
 122 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 evil effects to peasant proprietorship, and yet from the beginning 
 to the end of his speech he never made allusion to any of the argu- 
 ments in their favour. One would have thought that he had never 
 heard the common and principal argument, that the sentiment of 
 property, the certainty that they are working for themselves, is the 
 most powerful of all incentives to labour and frugality. This is the 
 universal experience of every country where peasant proprietorship 
 exists. And this brings me to the noble Lord the Chief Secretary 
 for Ireland, who gave three reasons why peasant proprietorship is 
 not desirable. These reasons were, that it does not prevent revo- 
 lution, that it does not obviate famine, and that it leads to great 
 indebtedness on the part of the holders. In regard to the first of 
 these reasons, the case which the noble Lord appealed to, that of 
 France, is certainly not in his favour ; for in France the revolutions 
 have not been made by the peasant proprietors, but by the artizans ; 
 all that the peasant proprietors have had to do with them being to 
 put them down. Whether it was right or wrong whether it was for 
 good or evil to substitute the present Government of France for the 
 Republic, it was the peasant proprietors who did it. As to the co- 
 existence of great famines and small properties, the noble Lord was 
 rather unhappy in the instance he gave of East Prussia, for it so 
 happens that East Prussia is not a country of peasant proprietors, 
 there being next to no small properties there. It is the Rhine Pro- 
 vinces of Prussia that are a country of small proprietors, and the 
 noble Lord did not tell us of any famine there. With reference to 
 the argument as to the indebtedness of the small proprietors, I 
 rather think the noble Lord is indebted to me for one instance he 
 gave that of the canton of Zurich; but in adducing that in- 
 stance he omitted to mention the testimony given, by the same 
 author, to the " superhuman" industry of the peasant proprietors 
 there. If we take the instance generally appealed to on this subject, 
 that of France ; M. L6once de Lavergne stated some ten years ago 
 that the mortgages on the landed property of France did not on the 
 average exceed '10 per cent of its value, and on the rural property 
 did not exceed five per cent ; and he estimated the burthen of in- 
 terest at 10 per cent of the income. He added that these burthens
 
 ON THE STATE OP IRELAND. 123 
 
 were not increasing, but diminishing. It is true that this average 
 is taken from all the landed properties in France, and not solely 
 from the small properties ; but the large proprietors must be very 
 unlike other large landed proprietors if their estates are not gene- 
 rally burthened to a.t least this extent, so that the average is pro- 
 bably fairly applicable to the small properties. With regard to the 
 danger of sub-letting, what motive would a tenant have to sub-let ? 
 He could only sub-let at the rent he himself paid, unless he had in 
 the meantime improved his holding, and if he had done so he would 
 have a good right to be allowed to realize his improvements, if he 
 pleased, by sub-letting at an increased rent. It is thought that 
 even if he did not sub-let, he would subdivide. But to suppose 
 that subdivision would be general, is to ignore altogether one of 
 the strongest motives that can operate on the mind. There is 
 nothing like the possession of a property in the land by the actual 
 cultivator, for inspiring him with industry and a desire to accumu- 
 late. It is not necessary to suppose that this influence would 
 operate on the whole body of tenant proprietors. If it acted only 
 on one-half, a great deal would be gained. Let hon. gentlemen 
 consider what an accumulation of savings there is in the hands of 
 Irish farmers. I must say that it reflects great credit on the land- 
 lords of Ireland, taken as a body, that the tenants should have been 
 able to accumulate such almost incredible sums as it is admitted that 
 they have. Well, what is done with these savings ? The farmer 
 carries them anywhere but to the farm. They are invested in 
 everything but the improvement of his holding ; showing that the 
 very landlords through whose forbearance these sums have been 
 accumulated, are not trusted by the tenants ; or, if they trust the 
 landlord himself, they do not trust his heir, whom they do not know, 
 or his creditor who may come into possession, or the stranger to 
 whom he may be obliged to sell. But under the small proprietary 
 system, these sums would be brought out and applied to the farms, 
 and there is enough of them to make all Ireland blossom like the 
 rose. Tenants who had given such proof of forethought would be 
 more likely to provide for their younger sons by buying more land 
 than by subdividing their own holdings. Moreover, it must be re-
 
 12 1 SPEECH ON MR MAGUIRE'S MOTION 
 
 inembered that a bridge has now been built to America, over which 
 the younger sons might cross. According to the testimony of Lord 
 Dufferin, marriages are already less early in Ireland than they used 
 to be, and many fanners have become sensible of the disadvantage 
 of subdividing the small holdings. It may be thought that owing 
 to the competition which exists for land, those who hold at a full 
 rent might sub-let at an increase, even if they could not sell their in- 
 terest for a large sum of money. But even if this worst result should 
 happen, the purchaser would, even then, be in as good a condition 
 as the Ulster tenant would be in, if the tenant right, which he 
 enjoys by a precarious custom, were secured to him by law : and 
 this tenant right, even while resting only on custom, has been 
 found to give a considerable feeling of security, and some encourage- 
 ment to improvement. Then I am asked, what my scheme would 
 do for the agricultural labourers of Ireland ? It would give to 
 them what is found most valuable in all .countries possessing peasant 
 proprietors the hope of acquiring landed property. This hope is 
 what animates the wonderful industry of the peasantry of Flanders, 
 most of whom have only short leases, but who, because they may 
 hope, by exertion, to become owners of land, set an example of 
 industry and thrift to all Europe. My plan is called an extreme 
 one, but if its principle were accepted, the extent of its application 
 would be in the hands of the House. Let the House look at the 
 question in a large way, and admit that rights of property, subject 
 to just compensation, must give way to the public interest. If the 
 Commission which I propose were appointed, it would soon find out 
 what temperaments might be applied in practice. I could myself 
 suggest many. I would not undertake that I myself would sup- 
 port them, but the House might. For instance, if it were thought 
 that the holdings were too small, the holders of all farms below a 
 certain extent might receive, not a perpetuity at once, but only the 
 hope of it. Leases might be given to them, and the claim to a 
 perpetuity might be made dependent on their, in the meantime, 
 improving the land. Again, such a change as I propose is less 
 required in the case of grazing than of arable land : confine it 
 then, if you choose, in the first instance, to arable land, dealing
 
 ON THE STATE OF IRELAND. 125 
 
 with the purely grazing farms on some other plan, such as that of 
 buying up such of them as might advantageously be converted into 
 arable, and re-selling them in smaller lots. It is not an essential 
 part of the scheme that every tenant should have an actual perpe- 
 tuity, but only that every tenant who actually tills the soil should 
 have the power of obtaining a perpetuity on an impartial valuation. 
 I believe that as the plan comes to be more considered, its difficul- 
 ties will, in a great measure, disappear, and the House will be more 
 inclined to view it with favour than at present. 
 
 THE END.
 
 LONDOir : 
 
 BATILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STSBBT, 
 COTXNI GiBDliN.
 
 JAN 21 195 
 REC'D LD-Uffi 
 
 .DEC 04
 
 A 000714278 9
 
 Unive 
 
 Soi 
 
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