A FORGOTTEN ELEMENT IN THE LAND QUESTION. AI R. COURTNEY, in
his excellent speeeh of Wednes- day at Plymouth, let fall some sentences which have on us a dispiriting effect. They indicate that even he, who has made such a profound study of the Irish Land Question, forgets one element in it of the first importance, —namely, the peasant imagination. The Irish peasant, like the peasant everywhere else outside England, dreads rent, not only because it reduces his earnings most heavily when he is earning least—that is the drawback to every form of leasehold—but because it threatens his first enjoy- ment in life, his sense of perpetual and, so to speak, im- movable security. The English labourer, who is compara- tively without imagination, is not afraid of the future, and dares, as one of them boasted, to "spend his last penny with a easy mind ;" but every other peasant, including first of all the Celtic Irishman, who is by nature gloomy and pessimistic, regards eviction as a kind of sentence involving hopeless misery. His imagination pictures to him all misfortunes, shames, and sufferings coming on him if he loses his land, and all occurring at once, till he reaches a stage when he would, if he could, save his holding by suicide,—or at least by encountering any danger, even the risk of his soul. He craves a guarantee against Fate itself, and can see only one, the possession of a bit of soil which will secure his family the means of living by itself, and in the dignity which to his mind the possession of a cottage imparts. Nothing short of absolute freehold will still the appre- hensions always fermenting in his mind, and no plan will conciliate him which does not offer that freehold at the end of a measurable distance in years. Mr. Courtney's plan, which is to lend the peasant money through a Land Bank on a mortgage of his farm, will not meet the ease at all. It is perfectly sensible in itself, and succeeded in Prussia, where the peasants are Teutons ; but it would not succeed in Asia or in Ireland. It leaves the peasant still at the mercy of the contingency that, having eoin to pay, he may not be able to pay it, and so may lose his farm. His passionate hope, his one ideal, is to be so situated some day or other that he cannot lose it, that he will be independent of any creditor or any owner, or even any market-price. What do low prices matter when one can eat up all one grows ? Mr. Goschen may rely upon it that no plan enfranchising the Irish small farmer will meet his grievance unless it stills this fear ; and consequently, that no plan of purchase which does not end payments by a fixed date will ever secure the political quiet which is the first object of the coming scheme.
It has always struck us as surprising that the devotees of association—the co-operative men, for instance, who believe that their scheme would. produce a Millennium— have never been a little daunted by the unvarying experi- ence of mankind in relation to land. There is no depart- ment of human effort in which association is so necessary as in agriculture, or would pay so well. The small-plot owner cannot drain effectively, or plough at the cheapest cost, or stand up against the drought, or sow and reap at the best time and. in the quickest way. In a situation of all others demanding most help from many hands, he is of all men the most isolated. Even landlordism, if wisely organised, would be better for him than such helplessness ; and, indeed, if the landlord took little, and would lend. intelligence in return, as well as do all the general work required, as he does in England, landlordism would be a most effective form, perhaps the most effective form, of association for the cultivation of the soil. The cultivators know their own weakness quite well, ex- perience forcing it on them every day, and they being much abler as to their own affairs than towns- folk imagine ; but they never, out of England, will accept any remedy. From the earliest ages, and in almost all countries, through thousands of years and among succes- sive millions of people, all human races, whether advanced or backward, have, when not coerced by superior force, rejected association in agriculture, and deliberately pre- ferred the harder work and poorer return resulting from isolation. Peasant-ownership was the plan adopted when China and India were settled, far away in the dun past ; and peasant-ownership is the goal towards w. hich Western democracy, which thinks itself so wise, is everywhere tending now. It has established itself in Russia, Germany, and France—for even in Russia the Mir does not cultivate though it distributes land—it is the universal system in the American Union, and but for the troops it would. be the system in Spain, Italy, and. Ireland. Everywhere landlordism is denounced, and everywhere it is found that the peasants will not combine, not even to keep up irrigation works. The usual reason assigned is that they are fools ; but they show little folly in any other part of their management. Their plan of culture is usually, their resources being considered, a very clever one, unim- provable, in fact, except by an expenditure of capital,— that is, by the very expedient of buying labour which they absolutely reject. They will improve only so far as is consistent with their isolation. That decision is so uni- versal, and has continued so long, that it operates like an instinct, and baffles the philanthropists as it defeats the dreamers and drives back the capitalists ; and its ex- planation is, we believe, this. Each family is determined, as regards ultimate means of subsistence, to be outside of any control, or interference, or coercion from anything of any kind except the forces of Nature. Argument about the results of this system makes no difference whatever. Tell an Indian ryot, or a French peasant, or an American farmer all the arguments Lady Verney has collected in her nutritive papers against peasant-proprietorship, and he will admit half of them to be true and the rest worth con- sideration,—and then go on as before. He is seeking, and will have, something which Lady Verney and everybody else not actually a, peasant forgets, but which the peasant considers to be, like health, or air, or a covering from the sky, the necessary antecedent condition of a happy life. He wants a certainty of his family's food. The peasants of the world are overworked everywhere, ex- cept on the best land of France ; they are underfed everywhere, except in Normandy and the Channel Islands ; they are everywhere melancholy about their position ; but there is not a Sovereign however despotic, or a Parliament however popular, able to break up their isolation without the direct and unsparing use of the bayonet. It seems to us that, in presence of such an instinct, to legislate on land and yet neglect it is pure folly, almost as foolish as it is to write so much about the idiotcy of the people who obey it. We might as well write about the way the beavers wear their teeth in cutting down material for their dams. The impulse is, with all races but the English, who are secured. from starvation by their Poor-Law, as much beyond reason as the impulse which makes the bees store honey.
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