sentiment of duty or dignity, pervading the class. From this source, however, he 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 situation than the preceding tenant; or it might be the general custom, as it actually is in some countries, not to marry until a farm was

vacant.

But it is not where a high standard of comfort has rooted itself in the habits of the laboring 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 laborers 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 mere physical necessaries. This is unhappily 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 increase 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," says Mr. Revans, the Secretary to the Irish Poor Law Inquiry Commission, "that every family which has not sufficient

Evils of the State of Ireland, their Causes and their Remedy. Page 10. A pamphlet, containing, among other things, an excellent digest and selection of evidence from the mass collected by the Commission presided over by Archbishop Whately,

land to yield its food has one or more of its members supported by begging, it will easily be conceived that every endeavor 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 invariably incapable of paying; and consequently they become indebted to those under whom they hold, almost as soon as they take possession. They give up, in the shape of rent, the whole produce of the land, with the exception of a sufficiency of potatoes for a subsistence; but as this is rarely equal to the promised rent, they constantly 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 favorable 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 32*

VOL. I.

accumulating debt. The peasantry are mostly a year in arrear, and their excuse for not paying more is destitution. Should the produce of the holding, in any year, be more than usually abundant, or should the peasant by any accident become 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 forces up the nominal rent, we may cite from the evidence taken by Lord Devon's Commission,* a fact attested by Mr. Hurley, 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 £450."

$ 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 producing 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 among mankind, the Irish cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse

Evidence, p. 851.

off by any act of his own. If he was 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 labor 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 fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil Rockism and Whiteboyism are the determination of a people, who have nothing that can 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 conve

war.

nience.

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 grave public instructors imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance 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 insoucient 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 indifference 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 pleasureloving and sensitively organized people like the Irish, should be less addicted to steady routine labor 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, not 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 when they have no motive. No laborers 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 condition sufficiently analogous to the cottier system, and at the same time sufficiently different from it, to render the comparison of the two a source of some instruction. In most parts of India there are, and have always been, only two contracting parties, the landlord and the peasant; the landlord being generally the sovereign, except where he has, by a special instrument, conceded his rights to an individual, who becomes his representative. The payments, 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 existed against the sovereign's will, there was always a rule of some sort, common to a neighborhood; the collector did not make his separate bargain with every 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 possession; and the anomaly arose of a fixity of tenure in the peasant-farmer, coexisting 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 different 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