THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 372, 4 June 1880, Page 5

THE IRISH LAND QUESTION.

We (Pilot) summarise the exhaustive article by Mr. Parnell, which appears in the April number of the North American Review. So much light has been already thrown upon the land question in Ireland, by the combined exertions of the New York daily press and the Irish landlords, that this brief article might seem almost superfluous. It sometimes happens, however, that the light thrown on a subject is coloured to suit the chromatic tasteß of the illuminator. I propose, in writing this article, to bring the plain daylight of fact to bear on the question under consideration. Is emigration the remedy ? Let us first look at emigration in its practical and then in its sentimental bearings. It is, of course, quite impossible to transport five millions of people in a body to America. But what are the practical effects of emigration as exemplified in Ireland after the famine of '47. The first effect is the throwing out of cultivation of vast areas of land. The landlords turn the farms into pastures, and raise cattle and sheep for export to England ; the money they receive they spend for the most part out of the country. You roam over miles and miles of fertile land, or land that might be made fertile, without seeing a house or a human being. Now. facts have shown that the system of turning all the fertile lands of Ireland into grazing-fields has failed in the very object for which it was instituted. The amount of cattle and sheep raised in Ireland has, of late years, been steadily decreasing, as well as the amount of cereal crops. The reason lies close at hand : Ireland is a damp country, and in many parts, the soil holds rain like a cup. When kept properly drained, there is no land in the world more fertile than the great uninhabitated grazing plains of Ireland ; but, left as they are year after year, undrained and unfertilised, unsown with new grass seed, quite neglected, in fact, every farmer in America will understand that they must gradually become unfit for grazing. The consequence is, that recently less cattle have been raised every year, and that the proportion of waste land increases instead of diminishing. The second effect of the emigration of 1848 has been, strange to say, to increase the competition for land. The landlords took advantage of the emigration to effect immense clearances of land, which have never since been put under cultivation. Those of the peasantry ■who did not emigrate were driven' to the bogs and the barren hillsides. In course of time the population naturally increased ; with this increase'eame greater competition for land ; but the fertile lands of the country were no longer open to competitors. The area of ground left to agriculturists was greatly lessened, and the competition, of course, became fiercer than ever, though the chances of the peasant to better his condition by renting land were also fewer than ever, owing to the inferior quality of the land. The effect of emigration on wages and the price of produce, as compared with rents has been peculiar. When I was a child, twentyfive years ago, the day-labourer's wages averagei from Bix to nine shillings a week. Now they average from seven to ten. The prices of produce have risen in a slightly larger proportion, but rents of land have risen a hundred, two hundred, and in some cases five hundred per cent. This is an unnatural condition of things, and is owing, I believe, to general under-population of the country, taken as a whole, with over-population in spots. The industries of the country have been rendered stagnant by the constant drain of able-bodied labour to the United States and elsewhere, and so wages have risen but little. The supply of labour is very small in Ireland, but the demand is very small also, and so labour is cbeap though scarce. Here is an artificial state which must obviously have been brought about by some artificial cause. We consider that forced emigration is this cause. The practical worthlessness of emigration as a permanent remedy has been thoroughly proved by the history of Ireland from '48 to '80. A certain amount of the population was removed by emigration, and a steady flow of emigration, on a smaller scale, has been going on ever since. Still, here we are, in pretty much the same position as we were in '46. It needs only one more bad harvest to produce a famine like that of '47. What good, then, I ask, has all our emigration done us? Supposing there should be a bad harvest next autumn, and that the result should be the death or emigration of three millions of people. Would it benefit the two millions left behind 1 Would it raise the wages of labour, with no industries to give employment to labour? Would it lower the rents of the tenants, with still larger quantities of land turned into sheep-walks ? Or, again, even supposing that the peasantry were temporarily benefitted by the departure of so many competitors, what is to prevent the two millions increasing in the course of nature till another famine came along to scatter them again to the winds ? From all this it is plain that emigration, unaccompanied by other remedies, only causes a ceaseless repetition of the same vicious circle of events in Ireland. Ireland is not over populated. To prove that Ireland is as a whole immensely under-populated, I will give some comparisons between its acreage and population and those of other countries ■where a peasant proprietary prevails, and where the pcr.sants are, as a rule, comfortable and contented. Ireland bag an area of 20,819,829 statute acres, or 31,874 square miles. She has a population of 5,411,416. Guernsey (including adjacent islands), which is entirely divided up into small agricultural holdings, and which is quite as damp and rainy as Ireland, has an area of 19,605 statute acres, and a population of 33,969. Ireland has thus, in rough numbers, a population of one person to every four acres, while Guernsey has a population of nearly two persons tn every acre. Yet Guernsey is prosperous, and Ireland is miserable. Guernsey's peasants are proprietors ; Ireland's peasants are tenants-at-will. If Ireland had a population in proportion to that of Guernsey, she would have 45,000,000 inhabitants. Germany has an area in English square miles of 212,091 ; a population of 41,058,641, giving a density of population per square mile of 193, while that of Ireland is only 169.

France has an area of 201,900 English square miles, and a population of 36,102,921, or an average of about 178 to the square mile. The land is more subdivided ;in than in any other country. The cultivated part of it consists of about 90,000,000 acres. This is divided into 5,550,000 properties. Of .these, the properties averaging 600 acres number 50,000 ; those averaging 60 acres 500,000; while there are 5,000,000 holdings under six acres. The peasants are well off, conservative, and contented, though a hundred years ago they were just the reverse ; and nobody has ever thought of saying that France is over-populated. Belgium has an area of 11,267 English square miles, and a populotion of 5,087,105, or 451 persons to the square mile. Italy has an area of 112,677 English- square miles, and a populatien of 26,796,258, being 237 inhabitants to the square mile. The great mass of the people of Italy are agriculturists. We see that in every instance these countries are more densely populated than Ireland, yet there is no cry of over-population, and the emigration from them, except in the case of Germany, is slight. In Germany it is not the land system that causes emigration, but the conscription and the attractions afforded by the free institutions of America. It is, in fact, not an emigration from Ireland to America, but an emigration from the barren hills of Connaught to the fertile, lands of Leinster and Munster that we want. The old cry in Cromwellian days, "To hell or Connaught 1" has been virtually the cry ever since in Ireland. The landlords have been occupied without ceasing in driving the peasantry from the best parts to the worst parts of the country. One of our principal aims is to cause a return movement, and this can only be produced by causing large quantities of grazing* land in the eastern and middle counties ,to be throwu upon the market, and by facilitating the purchase of it by the western peasantry. Here, therefore, we find two classes co-operating to impoverish Ireland. It is undoubtedly the duty of the English Government to foster, by liberal pecuniary aid, the industries it so long suppressed. The English Government has never done this, and is not likely to do it. On the contrary, for every six million pounds sterling that it takes out of Ireland in revenue, it returns but four millions and a ! half. If the Government did its duty, and extended to Ireland the financial help in her industries which it owes her as a mere debt of honesty, the effect on agricultural interests would show itself at once. The immense number of cottier tenants in the west who cultivate one or two acres of sterile ground, and pay their rents by going over to England to work in the spring and autumn, leaving their women to attend Jto their own little patches, would be drawn off this land, which in England would rent at about one shilling per acre, but which in Ireland rents all the way from five shillings to ten shillings the acre, and their labor would be directed into channels profitable to Ireland. The artifically high rents of these barren mountain holdings would then fall to their proper level. I Again, a change in the land laws, such as an act compelling the sale on reasonable terms of lands held by absentees, or by corporaj tions, would soon react most favorably on Irish manufactures, by increasing the buying power of the agricultural classes, who form nearly two-thirds of the population. In either case, however, England would have to supply the money. She would have to put hor hands in her own pockets and re-transfer to Ireland the money she has stolen from her. Here is England's dilemma. She must give money to help Irish industries, or she must give money to reform Ireland's land-tenure. It is very plain that she will do neither, if she [ can help it. As time goes by, however, it may be possible to bring such gentle extraneous pressure to bear upon her as may materially alter her present intentions. I said above that the expropriation of absentees and of corporations would have a most beneficial effect on Irish trade. I believe no .system of land reform will be of much use to Ireland which does not include the expropriation of both these classes of owners. There is no use in any scheme that- has been proposed, unless such, colossal bloodsuckers as these absentee landlords and corporations be summarily abolished. Here is a drain of £6,000,000 going on every year which, if it existed in America in the same proportion to the population, would amount to the sum of £54,000,000, or, in round numbers, 270,000,000 dols. It wojild be impossible for the Irish Land Leaguers to entertain the idea of any programme that did not at any rate disestablish the absentee landlord and the absentee corporation. We therefore demand first the expropriation of the absentees. Eesident corporations and non-improving resident landlords might follow in due order. By that time the rest of the landlords might have become willing to sell, and no further compulsion might be needed. Having thus touched generally upon two or three of the principal points connected with the land-tenure, I should like to go a little into the details of the agitation commenced over a year ago by the Land League. The objects of the league, as announced at the public meeting at which it was first formed, are : 1. To promote organisation among the tenant farmers. 2. To defend those threatened with eviction for refusing to pay extortionate rents. 3. To facilitate the working of the Bright clauses of the Land Act. 4. To obtain such a reform of the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become the owner of his holding, by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years. "It only remains, then," says O'Connor Power, in his article on the " Land Agitation," in the Nineteenth Centiiry, for December, 1879, "to push forward with the utmost energy those minor refoims framed to mitigate the evils of the existing 83 stem, such as the abolition of all artificial restrictions on the sale and transfer of land, the abolition of the laws of primogeniture and entail, the more efficient working of the Bright clauses of the Land Act, and the reclamation and distribution of the waste lands, while keeping steadily in view the main object of emancipating the entire agricultural -population from the power of landlordism." This " main object," with which O'Connor Power winds up, the Land- Leaguers contemplate bringing about in much the same manner as the emancipation of the Prussian peasantry was brought about by

Hardenberg. Hardenberg had to abolish feudalism and landlordism both at one blow. This he did by the famous edict of 1811, entitled "An Edict for the Regulation of the Belations between Landlord and Tenant." * I have said thus much to show the direction of the objects and .deas of the Land -Leaguers. I must now add that the cause which almost immediately gave birth to the Land League, as it at present stands, was the refusal of the majority of Irish landlords to reduce their rents, spite of the rapidly approaching famine. The English landlords, always less grasping than Irish landlords, had quietly reduced their rents in England all round, months before, thus avoiding any complications with their tenants. Not so the Irish landlords. They saw, of course, as well as the English ones did that the harvest would be a failure, but, having always been accustomed to take the last pound of flesh, they thought they could do it again. This time, however, thanks to the manly attitude taken by the tenants, they have been disappointed. It was well known in Ireland, last July, that a famine was inevitable. Members of Parliament dinned it into the ears of the Government. Professors of political economy declared it could not fail to come. As time went on, the pitiless rains destroyed the last faint hopes of saving at least something. Then it was that we asked the landlords what they intended to do. The answer was not a tardy one. They intended to collect their rents as usual, and if the people could not pay, to evict. Undoubtedly, if they had been left to woik their own sweet will, if the tenant-farmers had not been organised for the purpose of selfpreservation, their programme — their foolish, short-sighted programme, looking at it merely from the point of view of their own interests — would have been carried out. On the part of the people, there would have been a resort to assassination ; some landlords, agents, and bailiffs, would probably have been shot ; the Irish would have been overwhelmed with torrents of denunciation ; and an immense tide of emigration would have already set in, sweeping away all the best and most vigorous of our people ; while the scene? of starvation in Ireland itself, bad as they are, would have been intensified a hundredfold. If these disasters have been in a great measure averted, we think we can claim that it has been owing, directly and indirectly, to the Land League. This body has, from the beginning, taken up the position that, with the certain prospect of famine before him, the duty of the tenant was first to preserve the lives of himself and his family. It was, therefore, necessary for him to keep as much money as would support him and his family till the next harvest, and only pay to the landlord, as rent, what he had left after doing so. After teaching the tenant that he must save his own life and the lives of his children, the next object of the Land League was to show him how to do this. Its advice to the farmer — " Keep a firm grip on your homesteads," — has become proverbial. How did it propose that the farmer should obey ? The League calculated on the landlords at last perceiving that their best chance lay in keeping their tenants, even at h?lf rents, rather than in evicting them, and going into the unprofitable business of grazing ; for, not being able to get any tenants to fill the places of those evicted, that was the only resource left for them. The action of such a large majority of the landlords, in reducing their rents, after the League had been formed, and the system of passive resistance fairly established, shows that they did finally recognise the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it. In fact, American competition has entirely altered the channel of landlord interests. It does not pay the Irish landlord any longer to fill the places of his tenants with cattle ; and, as American competition increases, and grazing-land in Ireland deteriorates from neglect, the cattle-raising business will soon scarcely pay expenses. It is, therefore, rather political motives than pecuniary ones that make a certain number of Irish landlords, who are also Tory politicians, anxious for the emigration of their tenantry. The next general election is imminent, and if the emigration of a sufficient number of electors of Nationalistic politics to insure a Tory victoiy could be brought about, the Irish Conservative landlord would willingly submit \o temporary financial loss. Emigration, they know, would injure their pockets for the time being, but they think it would be their salvation, by eliminating from the country all the young, fiery element which will not lie down quietly under misery. It will be observed that, in all the offers made by Irish landlords to send emigrants over here — if their passage- tickets be paid by benevolent Americans— they do not offer to send children or old people, but young men and women, the brain, blood, and sinews of the country, the very poor people who, under natural conditions, would be conthe greatest possible loss to the country. W The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate. It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families ; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads ; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted. By compliance with this advice twelve millions of dollars have been kept in the pockets of the tenantry, and the famine has been diminished by that amount. The simple piece of advice, " Keep a good grip on your homesteads," has thus done more in staving off the famine than all thejrelief funds put together. It has also saved the lives of landlords and agents ; it has roused the people to a true sense of the power they can wield by peaceable means ; it has brought many landlords to their senses ; it will end, we believe, by bringing them all to their senses. Finally, it has brought the two greatest statesmen of England, Gladstone and John Bright, to a perception of how much yet remains to be done to Ireland. And not only these two, but innumerable minor thinkers now acknowledge that an immense deal must yet be done before Ireland can he satisfied. Is the Land League Communistic ? It is useless to say that telling the tenants to pay no rents in a famine year, unless they get a

sufficient reduction to enable them to live, is communistic and revolutionary. It is no more communistic than to compel the owner of a private hoard of provisions on board a wreck to share it with his Btarvingr companions. The preservation of property is secondary to the preservation of life. Where a whole community is in danger from the selfish action of a small minority, this axiom applies with full force. An able letter that appeared a short time ago, in the Boston Glole, on the subject of the compulsory expropriation of the landlords of the Prince Edward's Island, with the iull consent of Her British Majesty, furnishes us here with an apt illustration, more recent than the action of Hardenberg. Prince Edward's Island is not a very large place, but it is the 'principle that weighs, not the size of the country. •' In 1875," says the writer, " the Legislature of Prince Edward's Island passed an act compelling the landlords of that province to sel their estates to their tenants, upon ' terms just and equitable to the tenants, as well as to the proprietor.' This act received the royal and formal assent of Her Majesty, through her representative, the Governor-General of Canada, and under its provisions the value of the land was irrevocably settled, and the landlord was paid the price set upon it by the commission. . . . For a century the province of Prince Edward's Island was under the vicious system of landlordism. . . . The evil, as in the case of Ireland, originated with the Imperial Government ; and it, too, was responsible for the continuance of the evil. Nearly the whole land, we are told, was alienated in one day by the Crown, by very large grants, chiefly to absentees, just as millions of acres in Ireland were taken from the rightful owners and given to the followers of Cromwell and others. The people of the island never admitted the rights of the proprietors to hold the land, and they kept up the agitation of the land question from the day it was originally granted in 1767. No means were left untried to get rid of the incubus. Petition after petition was laid at the foot of the throne. The people met in masses, and prayed for relief ; but the official ear was deaf, though always open to the complaints and representations of landholders and their satellites, who were ever sensitive to their imaginary rights, bat totally oblivious of the groans of an oppressed people." So similar was their condition to that of the people of Ireland, that it was seriously proposed at one time to have the name of the island changed to that of " New Ireland." " Frequently, as in Ireland to-day, the people forcibly resisted the collection of rents ; and on one occasion troops were transported to the island to suppress th« disturbance. Thus, for a century almost, did the struggling people protest against the wrongs under which they were suffering. . . . the landlords frustrated every attempt at redress. . . . But the end came in the compulsory land-purchase act of 1875." Leaving the subject of the temporary remedies which the agitation of the Land League has procured for Ireland's distress, we will now examine the permanent remedy which the League desires to apply. This, in brief, is that the Government should lend money to the farmers at low interest, to be repaid by instalments extending over a period of thirty-five years, to enable them to buy up their farms. Mr. Brigb't's plan for creating a peasant proprietary is good, so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough to be of any use except to quite a small section of the Irish peasantry. He falls into the same mistakes as he made in the Land Act clauses. To prove this statement, the best thing I can do is to examine the results of thesa Bright clauses, and endeavour to point out how they have failed. Mr. Parnell then examines the Bright law in detail, and clearly shows the causes of its failure. Havine given this brief sketch of the Bright clauses, and the reasons that have made them a failure, I would point out certain remedies that at least would make them workable, though these remedies would by no means be an adequate settlement of the Irish land question. 1. A Board of Commissioners should be established in Dublin, whose duty it would be to buy entire estates in the Landed Estates Court, and then take their own time to sell these estates in lots to the occupying tenants. ' 2. The Judge of the Landed Estates Court should be empowered to sell the estate to the Board, notwithstanding any objection by the owner, not only when they bid the highest price, but also when they bid as high a price as any other bidder. 3. Provisions should be made for advancing to the tenants a sum not to exceed (say) five-sixths of the purchase money to be paid by them, such advance to be repaid by them in instalments, in a manner similar to that provided by the Bright clauses. It will be seen, by the foregoing examination of the Bright clauses, that the same errors which made them abortive have been incorporated by John Bright in his present scheme for establishing a peasant proprietary. He does not make it compulsory on any landlords except the English corporations to sell their lands to their tenants, and he makes no provision for advancing the whole of the purchase money to those who, from causes beyond their control, are unable to pay down in a lump the one-fourth purchase money which his scheme would oblige them to pay. He says in his very admirable speech at Manchester : " Well, then, remember that all these tenants, having all these traditions, are flocking about the country, that they are all tenants-at-will nearly, that they are subject to the fiercest competition for land, and that there is no other industry for them except in the north of Ireland, in the linen country. There is no other industry for them or almost none, and therefore they struggle for the bit of land they hold as being their only chance of living." And yet he proposes that these poverty-stricken, famine-stricken people should be compelled to pay down in a lump one-fourth of the entire purchase money of their holdings 1 "If a farmer rents a holding worth £400," he says, " let the Government advance him £300, and let him pay down the remaining £100." But where, in the name of common sense, is the average Connaught or Munster farmer, crippled by season after season of hard times, high rents, and low prices for farm produce, to find this £100, unless he borrows it at usurious interest 1 No j Mr, Bright must go two steps further, be-

fore the Irish can accept his plan, excellent as the principle of it is. He must make it compulsory on certain classes of landlords, already specified, and including by far the greater portion of the landlords of the country, to sell to their tenants ; and he mußt make provision for advancing to the tenant, who has been unable to save enough to j»ay bis one-fourth of the purchase money, the whole of the purchase money, if need be. While criticising Mr. Bright's clauses and his present scheme, we df sire to pay all due honor to him for his great liberal mindedness and impartiality toward Ireland, and his evident intense desire to do her justice. It may seem strange to Americans that England should prefer to k ep L eland poor and miserable, rather than to make her prosperous. But Ireland prosperous would mean Ireland populous and strong ; and Ireland populous and strong would mean a great nation by no means satisfied to remain a mere province of England governed by an English Parliament. Therefoie, though England would find such a splendid market for her goods in Ireland, if she were wealthy, and though her revenues from Ireland would be increased to an enormous extent, she prefers to lose this market and thischance of increased revenues, because she fears that Irish independence would be the first fruits of Irish prosperity. In that dreadful contingency, of course, England would not get any revenues at all from Ireland ; so, perhaps she understands her own businees, and it is her best policy, as far as her pockets are concerned, to keep Ireland weak and poor. We fear that the Scripture saying would be fulfilled in the case of Ireland, if her internal resources were developed, and her agricultural system put on a natural basis : " Now, when Jeshurun waxed fat, he kit-lted."