WHY DOES THE ENGLISH PEASANT NEVER SAVE AND THE IRISH
PEASANT HOARD ?
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—There are one or two points in the different conditions of the English and Irish peasant which are perhaps not without signi- ficance at the present time.
The English peasant receives regular wages all his life and saves nothing. His wages barely overtake his weekly needs, next week more will come in, why not spend all ?
The Irish peasant, clinging to his plot of land, has an altogether irregular income ; he has no certainty of wages, but the uncertain- ties of the potato crop and butter market,—uncertainties which afford him a margin for saving and a necessity for self-dependence which his English compeer never has.
The time of the great famine afforded an instance of the steadi- ness of his saving habit, when many families on the verge of starva- tion nevertheless kept next year's seed-potatoes under the floor of their cottages. The large sums which Irish emigrants send home from America while the old ways are still on them, and they have not lost the customs of their fathers, furnish continued proof of their habitual limitation of expenditure. Similarly the Irish labourers who come over to England for harvest work were said to take back their earnings almost intact.
Yet the Irishman lives in discomfort greater, to outward seem- ing, than the Englishman. He has had not only an incentive to save, but also an incentive to hide his savings, owing to the exactions of middle-men and the demands of his Church. The extravagance of landlords and middle-men, and the dependence of the priests on their people, have for generations encouraged a sparse mode of living and the practice of secret hoarding, until they have become a habit which ameliorated relations with the landlords have not yet destroyed.
What the Irish peasant needs now is knowledge, and oppor- tunity of using the capital thence resulting to the further produc- tiveness of his land, instead of hoarding to no effect. What the English peasant needs now is incentive to begin to save. Circumstances do not favour his finding the incentive where the Irishman found it, in precarious living on small plots of land. Where is he to seek for it ? In co-operation.—I am, Sir, &c., H. B.
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