be so sure of not obtaining a metayer who was an honest man, that the Contract 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 renewing the lease, but go on from generation to generation, on the same terms, without writings or registries.'t § 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 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 * Letters from Italy. I quote from Dr. Rigby's translation (p. 22.) This virtual 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.' (Nouveaux Principes, liv. iii. ch. 5.) A high authority_among French political economists, M. Frédéric Bastiat, affirms that even in France, incontestably the least favourable example of the metayer system, its effect in repressing population is conspicuous. 'Un fait bien constaté, c'est que la tendance à une multiplication désordonnée se manifeste principalement au sein de cette classe d'hommes qui vit de salaires, Типі foreward 8 troves for fage 209, 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. But in this ill-judged measure there was one redeeming point, to which may probably be ascribed all the progress which the Bengal provinces have since made in production and in amount of revenue. The ryots were reduced, indeed, to the rank of tenants of the zemindar; but tenants with fixity of tenure. The rents were left to the zemindars to fix at their discretion; but once fixed, were never more to be altered. This is now the law and practice of landed tenure, in the most flourishing part of the British Indian dominions. 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; but along with the evil, the good also has been left undone. The government has done less for the ryots than it has required to be done for them by the landlords of its creation. In the greater part of India, the immediate cultivators have never yet 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 some places it makes its arrangements with the ryots individually, in others with the village communities, leaving them to apportion the demand according to usage or agreement. Sometimes the rent is fixed only for one year, sometimes for three, or five; but the tendency of recent policy is towards long leases, extending, in the northern provinces of India, to a term of thirty years, with conditional renewal for twenty more. This arrangement has not existed for a sufficient time to have shown by experience, how far the motives which the long lease creates in the minds of the cultivators, fall short of the beneficial influence of a perpetual settlement. But the two plans, of annual settlements 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. CHAPTER X. MEANS OF ABOLISHING COTTIER TENANCY. § 1. THE question, what is to be done with a cottier population? which in any case would have been a fit subject for consideration in a work like the present, is to the English government at this time 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; have at last, by the failure of that lowest quality of food, been plunged into a state in which the alternative is death, or to be permanently supported by other people, or a radical change in the economical arrangements under which it has hitherto been their misfortune to live. Such an emergency has compelled attention to the subject from the legislature and from the nation, but it can hardly as yet be said with much result; for, the evil having originated in a system of land tenancy which withdrew from the people every motive to industry or thrift except the fear of starvation, 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 one year's delay. I presume it is needless 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 diminution of poverty, 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 consideration, 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. Cottiers, therefore, must cease to be. Nothing can be done for Ireland without transforming her rural population from cottier tenants into something else. But into what? 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. I contend that the object should be their transformation, as far as circumstances admit, into landed proprietors. Either, indeed, would be a most desirable exchange from the present nuisance; but as a practical object the latter of the two seems to me preferable in an almost incalculable degree to the former, both as the most desirable in itself, and very much the easiest to effect. § 2. To convert the cottiers into hired labourers is rather a scheme for the improvement 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. It is not necessarily injurious to those qualities where they exist, but it seldom engenders them where they are absent. If the Irish peasantry could be Instantaneously changed into receivers of wages, the wages being no higher than they now are, or than there is any reason to hope that they would be, and the present habits and mental characteristics of the people remaining, we should merely see five or six 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 en masse, 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 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 preservative yet known; and where it failed, any other plan would probably fail much more egregiously; the evil would be beyond the reach of merely economic remedies. Having already insisted so strongly on these topics, I feel it needless to argue any further, that the conversion of the Irish peasantry, or of some considerable portion of them, into small landed proprietors, is a more beneficial object than the transformation of all of them indiscriminately into labourers for hire. But besides being more desirable, it is, above all, more attainable. The other plan, as a measure standing by itself, is wholly impracticable. It involves contradictory conditions. The conversion of the cottiers into hired labourers implies the introduction, all over Ireland, of capitalist farmers, in lieu of the present small tenants. These farmers, or their capital at least, must come from England. But to induce capital to come in, the cottier population must first be peaceably got rid of: in other words, that must be already accomplished, which English capital is proposed as the means of accomplishing. Why is Ireland the only country in the world to which English capital does not go? Because it cannot go to any purpose without turning out the people, and the people refuse to be turned out. I presume it is not seriously proposed that they should be turned out en masse, without being otherwise provided for. With their own consent they never will be dislodged from their holdings until something better is given to them. They will not be got rid of by merely telling them that something better will follow. It is necessary however in the next place to consider, what is the condition of things which would follow. The ineffective Irish agriculture is to be converted into an effective English agriculture, by throwing together the small holdings into large farms, cultivated by combined labour, with the best modern improvements. On the supposition of success, Ireland would be assimilated, in her agriculture, to the most improved parts of England. But what are the most improved parts of England? Those in which fewest labourers are employed, in proportion to the extent of the soil. Taking the number of Irish peasants to the square mile, and the number of hired labourers on an equal space in the model counties of Scotland or England, the former number is commonly computed to be about three times the latter. Two-thirds, therefore, of the Irish peasantry would be absolutely dispensed with. What is to be done with them? Is it supposed that they would find employment in manufacturing labour? They are at present unfit for it; and even if fit, capital would require to be imported for that purpose too; and is it likely that manufacturing capital will resort to Ireland, abandoning Leeds and Manchester? Under a more efficient cultivation of her soil, Ireland would require a greatly increased amount of manufactured goods, but these would still be most advantageously manufactured in Lancashire or Yorkshire; and even if Ireland became, as to agricultural improvement, an English county, she would be but a larger Devonshire, drawing everything which she consumed, except the products of agriculture, from elsewhere. All the excess of Irish population above the Devonshire standard would be a local surplus, which must migrate to England, or to America, or subsist on taxation or charity, or must be enabled to raise its own food from its own soil. The plan therefore of turning the cottiers into labourers for wages, even if it fulfilled its utmost promise, only disposes of a third of the population; with respect to the remaining two-thirds, the original difficulty recurs in its full force. The question, what system of agriculture is best in itself, is, for Ireland, of purely theoretical interest: the people are there, and the problem is not how to improve the country, but how it can be improved by and for its present inhabitants. It is not probable that England will undertake a simultaneous removal of two millions-the smallest number which in the opinion of any person acquainted with the subject would make a clear field for the introduction of English agriculture. But unless she does, the soil of Ireland must continue to employ and feed the people of Ireland: and since it cannot do this on the English system, or on any system whatever of large farming, all idea of that species of agricultural improvement as an exclusive thing must be abandoned: the petite culture in some one of its shapes will continue, and a large proportion of the peasants, if they do not become small proprietors, will remain small farmers. In the few cases in which comprehensive measures of agricultural improvement have been undertaken by large capitals, the capitalists have not, as some might perhaps suppose, employed themselves in creating large farms, and cultivating them by hired labour; their farms are of a size only sufficient for a single family: it was by other expedients that the improvement, which was to render the enterprise profitable, was brought about: these were, advances of capital, and a temporary security of tenure. There is a Company called the Irish Waste Land Improvement Society, of whose operations, in 1845, the following report was made, by their intelligent manager, Colonel Robinson.* 'Two hundred and forty-five tenants, many of whom were a few years since 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 £4,396; £605 having been added during the last year, being at the rate of £17 18s. per tenant for the whole term, and £2 9s. for the past year ; the 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 husbandry, reclaimed and brought into cultivation 1,032 plantation acres of land, previously unproductive mountain waste, upon which they grew, last year, crops valued by competent practical persons at £3,896, being in the proportion of £15 18s., 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 £4,162, of which £1,304 has been added since February, 1844, being at the rate *n the Appendix to the Report of Lord Devon's Commission, p. 84. |