just as good an influence as squires, and it is
to them inherited or bought by its present owners, is a tax that, if the landlords depart, their place among the people which they have a right to appeal to Parliament to will gradually fall. That has been the case in France in remit, or at least materially to reduce. Tithe is just as the peasant districts—for in France there are still con- much one of the revenues of the State as the income siderable proprietors—and we see nothing in the situation derived from public lands, the only difference being that as of Ireland which should prevent so natural an arrangement. no private person ever regarded the latter income as his Every city with commerce in it will send a few of its sons own, no private person has ever grudged any portion of it into the country, and every man who makes money abroad to the State. But in the case of tithe, the mere fact that will return to be one of the new gentry, who will reside in, it is deducted from what the landowner might perhaps though they will not own, the country-side. The moment have called his own, if no tithe had ever been imposed, order is secure in any country, that is the way things settle makes the tithe seem a burden, and all the greater burden themselves ; and there is nothing either in Ireland or the that no single individual appears to be the better for that Irish to keep whole districts bare of men of " light and burden, the whole people being too much of an abstraction leading." Direct power, no doubt, will remain with the and too little present to men's imaginations, to enter into peasantry, and, in a certain degree, the priests ; but then, any effective rivalry with the personal selfishness of the it has passed to them already, and the process will be in landowner. In one of Miss Austen's admirable novels, she no degree accelerated, scarcely even affected, by this Bill, puts into the mouth of a selfish woman a most* moving which does not change tenants at will into proprietors, but complaint of the serious grievance it is to have to pay an tenants who already have every security except the feeling annuity out of property which has descended to you sub- that they are sole owners of their farms. ject to that condition. " An annuity is a very serious Besides—and, after all, this is the true argument—what business. It comes over and over every year; and there is is the alternative ? The present system of dual owner- no getting rid of it. I have known a great deal of the ship cannot endure for ever, and if it could, would do far trouble of annuities, for my mother was clogged with the more to ruin Irish civilisation than any expatriation of payment of three to old superannuated servants by Landlords. It does not extinguish the agrarian war, and my father's will ; and it is amazing how disagreeable that war, with its constant quarrels about money, the she found it. Twice every year these annuities were hatred it breeds to the law, and the indifference it pro- to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting duces to a neighbour's suffering whenever that suffering is it to them ; and then one of them was said to have produced by a breach of the unwritten code of the country- died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such side, is demoralising all Ireland. The best Home-rulers thing. My mother was quite sick of it ; her income was admit this, as well as the best of the priesthood ; and it not her own, she said, with such perpetual claims on it, would be of itself, if we once allow that the origin of the and it was the more unkind of my father, because other- demoralisation is tenure, the full justification of any effort wise the money would have been quite at my mother's to get that tenure changed. Grant that a county could be disposal, without any restriction whatever." That is pre- left, like many an East-End parish, without a resident cisely the state of mind in which the tithe-payer writes such gentleman in it, and still, if the people were fairly con- letters to the Times as those which appeared, for instance, tented, industrious, and peaceful, it would be nearer true in Wednesday's issue, only that such tithe-payers have the civilisation than it is now, with the different classes all excuse which Miss Austen's selfish lady had not, that jarring and suspecting each other, with civil war only kept the revenue which goes to pay services rendered to the down by force, and with the law itself, which ought to be people at large, seems to go to no one in particular, while regarded as the first of benevolent agencies, looked upon the lady who was " quite sick " of paying the annuities by half the people as the instrument by which the specified by her husband's will, did at least know who was cultivation, or has actually thrown it out of cultivation. In cases of that kind, there is just as much reasonableness in remitting the tithe, or so far lowering it as to leave a DEMOCRATIC THRIFTLESSNESS. substantial margin over and above the tithe, out of which rent-charge of the tithe. In such a case, of course it is not only the State's right but the State's duty to with- draw its claim, or to lower it to any point at which it will' become again worth while to cultivate the land. But the arguments which we now hear urged against the tithe go far beyond this point. They really treat the fall in the value of land, which is a calamity to which any class might be liable, as if it were a special injustice produced by the tithe. Those who bought land or inherited land subject to tithe, would, if land had risen in value, have had all the advantage, as many of their ancestors have really had all the advantage, of that rise in the value of land. If they or their ancestors have never proposed to increase a commuted tithe when land has risen in value, it is simply unjust that they should wish to diminish it (except, as we have said, where the value of the land is on the point of disappearing altogether) on the ground that land has fallen in value. The commuted tithe belongs as clearly to the people at large as the margin of rent over and above that tithe belongs to the landowner, and there is something to us very discreditable in the thrift- less way in which the democracy looks after its rightful revenue. What belongs to the community seems to belong to nobody, if the indifference with which attacks upon it are received, is to be any criterion. The tithe-payers shriek when they find their obligations rather more than usually burdensome, and there is nobody to reply to them. It would not be so in the case of any private property. The man who had to provide a yearly annuity out of his property might fret over it as much in private as the selfish woman in Miss Austen's novel ; but if he ceased payinghis due, he would soon find himself in the Law Courts, and no one would feel any pity for him. But just because the tithe is a debt to the nation, no one seems to feel injured at the disposition which shows itself to be so ram- pant in favour of repudiating that debt. A correspondent of our own asks indignantly whether any good is to be done by substituting a rent war for a tithe war. We should say : Yes, this good,—that while the tithe war is a quarrel between that vague abstraction, the people (for the clergy are merely the nominees of the people who discharge a certain number of services for them), and the debtor, the rent war would be a quarrel between two classes who feel very keenly their own interests, and are quite equal to standing up for them, and this, so far as we can judge at present, " the people " do not seem to be.' Till the people learn to be thrifty about that which is their own, they will never learn the secret of efficient administration, or, indeed, of any kind of efficient government.
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