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§ 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

prietor, "the metayer has the advan- | the inclination of the ground present tages of landed property without the greater variety than a rich farmer is burthen of defending it. It is the generally able to distinguish in a farm landlord to whom, with the land, be- of five hundred acres. For the latter long all its disputes: the tenant lives knows that he is only a temporary in peace with all his neighbours; be- occupant; and moreover, that he must tween him and them there is no motive conduct his operations by general rules, for rivality or distrust, he preserves a and neglect details. But the expegood understanding with them, as well rienced metayer has had his intellias with his landlord, with the tax- gence so awakened by interest and collector, and with the church: he affection, as to be the best of observers; sells little, and buys little; he touches and with the whole future before him, little money, but he seldom has any to he thinks not of himself alone, but of pay. The gentle and kindly character his children and grandchildren. Thereof the Tuscans is often spoken of, but fore, when he plants an olive, a tree without sufficiently remarking the which lasts for centuries, and excacause which has contributed most to vates at the bottom of the hollow in keep up that gentleness; the tenure, which he plants it, a channel to let out by which the entire class of farmers, the water by which it would be inmore than three-fourths of the popula- jured, he studies all the strata of the tion, are kept free from almost every earth which he has to dig out."'* 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 personal interest, characteristic of a proprietor. "The metayer lives on his metairie as on his inheritance, loving it with affection, labouring 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 generation to generation on the same farm; they know it in its details with a minuteness which the feeling of property can alone give. 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 admirably, 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

people, M. de Sismondi speaks in the most * Of the intelligence of this interesting favourable terms. Few of them can read; but there is often one member of 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]. Their favourite author is Alfieri; the whole history of the Atride 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 farm: it is at the same and the valley, and looks out upon a delightful country. Scarcely ever have I stood still to admire it, without the metayer's coming with his finger the beauties which he thought out to enjoy my admiration, and point out might have escaped my notice."

time a terrace which commands the plains

extremely narrow view of the subject. | 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 introducing moneyrents, 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 conside

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 according 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 à priori view of its dis-rable time to a diminution of income, advantages. 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 themselves such as they are said to be by him, it were to be regretted that a state of rural well-being so much beyond what is realised 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 improvements, usually diminish the

"We never," says Sismondi, "find a family of metayers proposing to their 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

offer of a new metairie." New Principles of Political Economy, book iii, ch. 5.

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 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 | deteriorated: he would be cast down being in search of subsistence can be from his present position of a kind of found to offer or promise for it; he half proprietor of the land, and would would lose all the features in his con- sink into a cottier tenant. dition which preserve it from being

CHAPTER IX.

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 tenantright constituted an exception. There was, indeed, 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 by the farmer ready manured, and was known by the name

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.

P. E.

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 competitors, and the competitors are the whole rural population. The effect, therefore, of this tenure, is to bring the principle of population 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 population 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 labouring class. If we could suppose it to exist among a

people to whom a high standard of
comfort was habitual; whose require-
ments were such, that they would not
offer a higher rent for land than would
leave them an ample subsistence, and
whose moderate increase of numbers
left no unemployed population to force
up rents by competition, save when
the increasing produce of the land
from increase of skill would enable a
higher rent to be paid without incon-
venience; 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 arbi-
trary, enjoy any of the peculiar ad-
vantages which metayers on the Tuscan
system derive from their connexion
with the land. They would neither
have the use of a capital belonging 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 per-
manent 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 land-
lords would do so in different degrees.
But it is never safe to expect that a
class or body of men will act in opposi-
tion to their immediate pecuniary in-
terest; 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 com-
paratively remote future, the scale is
turned by a very small probability
that the fruits of the exertion or
of the sacrifice would be taken from
him. The only safeguard against
these uncertainties would be the
growth of a custom, insuring a perma-
nence of tenure in the same occupant,
without liability to any other increase
of rent than might happen to be sanc-
tioned 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 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 population 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

"It is not uncommon for a tenant with

out 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.) compiler adds, "the comparative tranquillity of that district" (Ulster) "may perhaps be mainly attributable to this fact."

The

"It is in the great majority of cases not a reimbursement for outlay incurred, or im

provements 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 copyhold." "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.) disorganized state of Tipperary, and the agrarian combination throughout Ireland, are but a methodized war to obtain the

Ulster tenant-right."

"The

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contract, while that readjustment, in a | found only where the habitual requireprogressive community, would almost ments of the rural labourers are the always be to his advantage. His lowest possible; where, as long as interest, therefore, is decidedly opposed they are not actually starving, they to the growth of any custom commuting will multiply: and population is only rent into a fixed demand. 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 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.

§ 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 custom (like those of Tuscany) from being deprived of their farms since a metayer family, thus protected, could not be impoverished 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 multiplication 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 classes, that we are ever called upon to consider the effects of a cottier system. That system is

"As it may fairly be said of the Irish peasantry," said Mr. Revans, the Secretary to the Irish Poor Law Enquiry Commission,* "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 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,

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.

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