THE COMING CONFISCATION IN IRELAND.
IT will be no surprise to our readers that a sweeping social revo- lution should take place in Ireland : they have long since been made aware that this was as inevitable as the crisis of a fever before convalescence. The question is not how to avoid it, which would be the idle discussion of an impossibility ; but how it can be made safest and most effectual for a healthy reaction. An able contemporary writer in the Morning Chronicle points out in detail one process by which the extensive shifting of social rela- tions in Ireland will probably begin, at no distant day ; but by the same exposition it is apparent that the Government has com- pleted no preparations for aiding the process so as to turn it to the best account.
By the operation of the newly-enacted Poor-laws, our contem- porary shows, large tracts of land in Ireland are already confis- cated. This is made out by calculations based on the actual expen- diture for the relief of the destitute. In five unions of Mayo—Bal- ]ina, Ballinrobe, Castlebar, Stoneford, and Westport—the present aggregate rate of expenditure is 908,2001.; the annual value of
e rateable property is 316,6001.; the population of these five unions is 418,000, more than half of whom seem to be receiving daily rations. Now it would be impossible to collect rates to re- pay that expenditure—or one third of it—or even one sixth ; for the payment on account of the destitute is not the only charge to which the property is liable : there are other parochial charges, besides the claims of mortgagees. The Guardians, of course, will not confiscate their own property by assessing and levying the requisite rates ; of course they will abdicate their Poor-law functions ; the Poor-law Commissioners will be obliged to enforce the law, and the landlords will be swept away. The case of Mayo is extreme ; but the difference between a small dividend and a large does not help the insolvent. Taking in twenty-five other unions besides those already mentioned, we have an area of 5,766,600 statute acres; the present rate of expenditure is 3,446,2104 the annual value of the property only 2,163,7101. A fourth part of Ireland, therefore, is unable to pay its present poor-rates, and has no prospect of being able to make good the outlay within any reasonable time : its landlords must give up their tenure.
The Globe points out circumstances for consolation. The pres- sure is due to a temporary emergency—the failure of the potato crop ; a more economical administration of the poor-relief will prevail ; other processes—of employing labour, and so forth, will mitigate the distress. True in the abstract; but the pressure is too extreme and imperative to allow much time for counter- active processes, especially as Irish landlords have not the most rinlimited credit in the world,—witness their inability to make up railway capital without applying for Government aid..
Nor are these counteractions the only other processes at work. Lord John Russell's reason for withdrawing the bill to facilitate the sale of encumbered estates lays bare another active process of confiscation. Lord John understood that if the bill passed into a law, divers insurance companies would call in money on mort- gages to the amount of 1,000,000l.; in other words, Lord John understood that the bill would work briskly, and for that reason he withdrew it He seems to think that the withdrawal is merely an act of prudence. It might be so if the revolutionary crisis could be prevented ; but that is impossible : simply to defer the process only prolongs its pain; and it seems likely enough that confiscation under the Poor-law would have been usefully relieved through a simultaneous confiscation by another process ; especially as the peculiar mode of confiscating to a mortgagee would probably facilitate the transfer of the land to more efficient owners.
But the very fact that such an apprehension induces Lord John Russell to withhold the bill, illustrates the precarious tenure by which Irish lands are held, not merely in individual cases, but in large classes. Here, we see lands to the value of 1,000,000/. threatened with instant confiscation by the mortgage process ; there, thirty unions threatened with the same result by the still more powerful poor-assessment process. The undermining of proprietary rights is widespread, an explosion is imminent. The measures of Government should be of proportionate breadth and vigour—in a word, the very reverse of what they are. Lord John Russell has entered upon "a system" of subsidizing petty Irish interests with small bounties for the "encouragement" of commercial activity. Coaxing railways into existence, enticing fisheries to be, and such small slow results, will not serve for the vast and sudden upturn which is impending. It is not retail trade, but wholesale national measures of statesmanship, that are demanded at the moment. Whole communities are about to be dissolved from great social relations ; whole districts of land are about to be thrown into the market. Who will buy ? Not the Irish, for they are destitute. Nor the English, while the market is glutted ; while the land Jis crowded, not with a labouring but with a pauper population ; not while property is to be held under the rule of Ribandism or open revolution. If our statesmen were equal to the task which Fate has allotted to them,—if they were really determined to render this mighty overturning of the present order of things comparatively safe—which they might do,—they would bestir themselves to adopt such measures as should supply for the time the want of those spontaneous processes by which society is usually regulated. A state assumption of lands, with some intelligible and trust- worthy method of administration during. the transition, would relieve the glutted land market. A measure of national and sys- tematic transplanting would relieve the land of its hordes of paupers, converting the residue into a real labouring population. An efficient machinery for defence would be a visible and pal-. pable gage for the safety of the purchaser and his investment under a state guarantee. Were such measures at once adopted and enforced with activity, the process of redemption might go on in Ireland concurrently with confiscation and revolution.
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