Frederick Temple Blackwood

“ If all instruments of production were held in joint property by the whole people, and the produce divided with perfect equality among them, and if in a society thus constituted, industry were as energetic and the produce as ample as at present, there would be enough to make all the existing population extremely comfortable but when that population had doubled itself, as, with the existing habits of the people, under such an encouragement, it undoubtedly would in little more than twenty years, what would then be their condition? ”

“ Both in Parliament and elsewhere I have recorded my conviction that were it not for the agitation which now scares capital from her shores, and prevents the development of her industrial resources, Ireland might be rendered capable of sustaining a population far larger than any she has ever borne, and no one has deplored in more emphatic terms than myself the circumstances which compel so many noble-hearted Irishmen to leave the land of their birth. [31] But to lament an emigration you are unable to arrest, and which is composed of those you cannot employ, is a useless waste of feeling. ”

“ To hasten, therefore, the transition which the agricultural system of Ireland is gradually undergoing, is neither his interest nor his practice. It is true the slower the absorption of the surplus agricultural labour of the country into other pursuits, the worse for the general body of cultivators, but each year is improving their situation, and it is better the conviction of what is for their true advantage should penetrate their intelligence of its own accord, than that their prejudices should be shocked by any extraneous influences, however well intentioned. ”

“ From this results the important corollary, that the necessity of restraining population is not peculiar to a condition of great inequality of property. A greater number of people cannot, in any given state of civilization, be collectively so well provided for as a smaller. The niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is the cause of the penalty attached to over-population. It is in vain to say, that all mouths which the increase of mankind calls into existence, bring with them hands. The new mouths require as much food as the old ones, and the hands do not produce as much. ”

“ It is amusing to observe that the same persons who are anxious to mitigate the effects of competition by imposing on the owner of the land a rent fixed by Act of Parliament, always contend that the person in whose favour this beneficial interest is to be created should have the right to dispose of it to the highest bidder: [17] that is to say, though I am to be precluded from receiving the market value of my land,—my tenant is to be allowed to do so, by extracting a fine from whoever may be induced to make the most extravagant offer for his goodwill. ”

“ In a country in which farms are in general too small to afford employment for hired labour, a peasant has scarcely a chance of being able to gain a livelihood, unless he obtain possession of land; and in Ireland the competitors for land are so numerous that the price paid for the use of it has reached a degree of exorbitancy unheard of elsewhere: such keen competition clearly shows that population is excessive, that is to say that the labouring class is too numerous in proportion to the amount of employment for it ”

“ A glance at any national newspaper or at the reports of an Irish debate, will show that I have not misrepresented the gist of the remarks to which I refer: "Millions of human beings have been driven across the Atlantic by the landlords of Ireland;" "Landlordism is the curse of the country;" "Emigration and the misery of the people is occasioned by the injustice of Parliament, and the iniquity of the laws which regulate the tenure of land;" "Ireland presents us with the spectacle of a whole nation fleeing from their oppressors;"—are the ordinary phrases in use. ”

“ I have no intention of discussing whether the landlords of Ireland, as a class, are good men or bad men, kind or cruel. In all probability they are as selfish, as interested, and as unscrupulous as any other collection of human beings possessing the same amount of education and intelligence. ”

“ In fact the middlemen of Ireland were rather the exponents than the cause of the people's misery, and, though piled ten deep one above the other, on a single tenancy, they no more occasioned rack rents than the degrees on a barometer occasion the atmospheric pressure they record. Derivative tenancies, cottier allotments, potato cultivation, low wages, emigration have been the rude alleviations—not the origin—of the country's destitution; just as half-rations are the alternative for short provisions,—or any wages are preferable to starvation—a patch of ground, at a rack rent, to serfdom and 3d. ”

“ The demand for land depends on the number of competitors, and the competitors are the whole rural population. The effect, therefore, of this tenure (cottier tenancies) 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. ”

“ No one will benefit more than they from an improvement in the condition of their labourers. We believe that, in many cases, they will even pay less. What the farmer has hitherto refused to pay in wages he has had to pay in rates, and the poor-rate will assuredly be diminished as the rate of wages increases. In one way or another, a labourer and his family must receive enough to live upon. A half-starving man has neither the will nor the power to work, and there can be no doubt that the proverbial sleepiness and sloth of agricultural work are in a great degree due to sheer lack of vital force. ”

“ It is all very well to talk pathetically of the hardship endured by the Irish peasant in quitting the home of his childhood, but to dwell for ever in the home of one's childhood is almost the rarest earthly luxury which can be mentioned; not one man in ten thousand expects to enjoy it; no woman desires it. Law in France, custom in America discourage such permanent arrangements, while in England they are only within the reach of a comparatively small minority.
Expatriation is undoubtedly a great calamity, but emigration does not necessarily imply expatriation. ”

“ In the same way, there must be a point beyond which the increase of produce obtained by the application of additional labour to the soil will be less than sufficient to cover the cost of that labour. To adopt the rate of the gross produce as an unfailing test of the prosperity of the cultivators is therefore fallacious; a high rate of production is quite compatible with small profits and low wages. ”

“ The ordinary wages of our agricultural labourers are not more than nine or ten shillings a week; many of them live in dwellings which do not deserve the name of human habitations. . . . It seems wonderful that men who are in this condition do not emigrate en masse." Again, he says, "The truth, therefore, becomes irresistibly brought home to our minds, that if a man finds his labour is not wanted in one country he ought not to stagnate there in hopeless poverty. ”

“ Early marriages have the effect of shortening the interval between generations, and tend in that way to increase the population. The spirit and character of a nation alone determine the limit to its numbers; and the increasing power and prosperity of England and her colonies, resulting from a high rate increase of population, have proved the fallacy of the doctrine "that the increase of the human race should be restricted, so that it may not outstrip the means of subsistence." ”

“ It has been rather the custom of late to represent the landed interest of Great Britain as the sole inventors and patentees of protection. The experience of Ireland does not confirm this theory. During the course of the last 250 years we have successively tasted the tender mercies of every interest in turn—whether landed, trading, or commercial—and have little reason to pronounce one less selfish than another. ”

“ Far then from being in itself a calamity, emigration is an essential element in the future progress of the United Kingdom, and our fellow countrymen who depart, even if absorbed by an alien community, often minister to our prosperity more effectually than when they dwelt amongst us. The transformation of an indigent and disaffected subject into a prosperous foreign customer is a change not wholly disadvantageous, and the industry which has gone forth to till the prairies of the West cheapens the loaf to millions in the old country. ”

“ If it is true, as is asserted, that the emigration has been principally confined to a class which cultivates the soil— the only class, in fact, which can be directly affected by the tyranny and injustice of the landed proprietor—it must necessarily follow that the number of emigrants must bear a very close proportion to the number of persons who have been so ruthlessly dealt with. Now the reductions of the holdings in Ireland between 1841 and the present date is, of course, the measure of the limits within which the consolidation of farms has been effected and evictions have been possible. ”

“ With respect to subletting, a tenant-at-will cannot subdivide his farm so easily as a tenant by lease, and such never takes place on a well-regulated estate; but a tenant by lease most frequently subdivides by his last will and testament amongst his children, thereby leaving all not sufficient land to support their families, and in a short time none can pay their rent, consequently the landlord loses his rent and they lose their farms."—Ibid. ”

“ The evil grows to an extent that threatens the annihilation of the landlord's income a clearance of the tenants, or consolidation of farms, is resorted to, and forms the climax of tyrannical landlordism, from which a sacrifice equal to the fee value of his estate could not cleanse him. Nor would his granting their holdings to such tenants free of rent, materially mend their case, as although it might raise the annual means of support for a family from £3 to £4, or from £6 to £8, it must be recollected that from £15 to £24 would be required to supply them even with the necessaries of life. ”

“ Of one thing alone can we be certain—that in dealing with his property he pursued his own advantage with more or less intelligence, and in doing so exercised a right not only legitimate in itself, but which has been universally recognized as the mainspring of human progress. But it is objected that the practical results of his proceedings have been over-population, rack-rents, and an exodus of 2,000,000 souls. ”

“ But whatever were the causes of early degradation of Ireland, there can be no doubt that England has, during the last two centuries, by discouraging the commerce of Ireland, — thus striking at the very root of civilization—rendered herself responsible for much of the barbarisms that afflicts it. ”

“ The equitable and legal rights of a proprietor in his land, as well as the equitable rights of a tenant to a fair return for his judiciously-invested labour and capital, are alike outraged by the existing practice in Ireland. ”

“ His only safe rule will be to take it for granted that every class, and every individual in every class, will pursue his own advantage with unflinching pertinacity; and, having meted out as justly as the clumsiness of human legislation may admit, the boundaries which are to circumscribe the respective rights of each, he must be content to accept as economically legitimate whatever does not overpass them. ”

“ How powerfully the development of manufactures in the North of Ireland has contributed to the relief of the agricultural classes of Ulster, by giving the tenant-farmer an opportunity of apprenticeing some of his sons to business instead of subdividing among them his diminutive holding, by enabling the cottier tenant to supplement his
agricultural earnings with hand-loom weaving, and by a general alleviation of the pressure upon the land, I need not describe. These and many other considerations of the sort are too patent to need suggestion. ”

“ Persons of practical experience are aware that even in the most prosperous parts of Ireland, the extension of holdings undesirably diminutive, is continually taking place by a natural process, which need never involve the violent displacement of a single individual, and at a rate which rather exceeds than otherwise, the accumulation of the necessary capital in the hands of those, to whose farms the surrendered scraps of land are annexed. ”

“ Has there been any consolidation of farms in the district? I am doing it in every way I can. I am getting the tenants wherever I can to buy adjoining land when it is vacant; but if you refer to consolidation by the ejectment of whole villages, in order to make large farms, there is nothing of the sort; but where there is a beggarman, and he is inclined to go away, or one man is inclined to buy of another, I have made both into one holding, and have always assisted the party by lending him money, and in every way I could. ”

“ The first restrictions put upon the Irish trade were in the reign of Charles II.; and from that time, down to the era when the united volunteers of Ireland stepped forward to rescue their country from its oppressors, (the only incident, by the way, in the Chronicles of Ireland, deserving the name of a really national effort) our policy was directed, incessantly to the destruction of the foreign trade with that country. Every attempt at manufacturing industry, with one exception, was likewise mercilessly nipped in the bud. ”

“ Indeed, if we believe so much, there is a great deal more we must believe. We must believe that all those general incentives to emigration which I have already enumerated, and which have told with such effect upon England, upon Scotland, and upon Germany, have had no influence in Ireland, although the peculiar circumstances of Ireland were so well calculated to intensify their operation. ”

“ Now, as by law every tenant must receive at the least eight or nine months' notice before he can be forced to surrender possession of his holding, the first case proves nothing against the laws regulating the relation of landlord and tenant, while in the second story the hero, not having been an Irish proprietor at all, can scarcely be paraded as a type of the class. That many acts of harshness and cruelty have been perpetrated in Ireland, more particularly during the time of the famine, I have no doubt. ”

“ If a landlord gives a large farm, there is no doubt, as soon as a son marries and the daughter-in-law is brought in, the son gets a part, and the second and third son the same, so that it is cut up into small bits, and when it comes into the landlord's hands it is over-populated. He goes upon the sweeping system, and he is held up as a cruel man; but a landlord cannot help doing it. If there was a law passed of a strict nature to prevent subletting, it would be a great advantage to the country. ”