THE AUSTRIAN IRELAND.
NINE years ago an insurrection of Bosnian peasants, which Lord Derby, with the proverbial blindness of statesmen, declared to be of no account, reopened the Eastern Question, and was one of the primary causes of a war which brought a Russian army within eight of Constantinople, per- manently altered the map of Europe, and affected the destinies of millions of men. And yet by one of those fantasies of fate of which history is full, the unfortunate rayahs, on whose behalf the strife began, whom a European Wittanagemot freed from the Ottoman yoke and placed under the protection of a Christian Power, seem to be not a whit better off than before. In one respect they are worse off ; for whereas under the old re'ginze they could rebel, and so inform the world of their woes, 'under the present they dare not. It is true they are quiet, but .quietness is not always a sign of content. It may be the calm of despair. So much, at least, is to be inferred from a petition lately _presented to the Austrian Empire from the occupied provinces, and the interesting letters of a well-informed correspondent of a Swiss paper, whose testimony is all the more valuable that .11e is evidently not ill disposed towards the Imperial Govern- ment. Austria, he says, has restored order ; but, so far
as the Bosnian peasant is concerned, the occupation has wrought no change for the betters and the petition of the fifty-two Bosnian communes implores the Emperor, "in the name of the Christian people," to consider their misery, and *vise means for rendering their lot more tolerable.
It speaks ill for Austrian statesmen that, save on the one point of maintaining order, they have not been able to improve on the rule of the Turk ; yet, though they have shown little either of energy or resource in their management of the mu- Tied provinces (which they are beginning to call New Austria), it is only fair to remark that the difficulties they have had to encounter are many and serious, and resemble in some re- spects those with which English statesmen have so long been struggling in Ireland. For the trouble in Bosnia now, as in the time of the Ottoman domination, is in a great measure agrarian, and the insurrections of the past were provoked more by landlord tyranny than Turkish misrule. With the excep- tion of a few villages, the entire population of Bosnia and Herzegovina are engaged in agriculture ; but the soil belongs to a territorial aristocracy, descendants of the Bosniak nobles -who at the time of the Ottoman conquest abjured their faith to preserve their fiefs. Some of the estates are extensive ; there are men—Begs they are called—who own entire villages and whole mountains, and possess all the water privileges of a district. Cultivating owners there are none : the population is divided into two classes—great lords and small farmers; and, to make the parallel with Ireland more complete, they are of different religions, the Begs being Mahommedans and their tenants either Catholics or Greek Christians. The conditions • of tenure are generally either the provision by the landowner of buildings, cattle, instruments, and seed, in return for which he receives from a half to two-thirds of the crops, or the payment by the tenant—the latter finding everything- -of a rent in kind, equal to about a ninth of the entire pro- -duce of the farm. But of cheese, vegetables, and fruits, the proprietor, even in this case, often takes a half, some- times two-thirds. The Bosnian farmer is, moreover, in some sense a serf, and almost as much the creature of his lord as was the English " villain " of the Middle Ages, or the French peasant of pre-Revolutionary times. He has to cut and carry the Spahi's (seigneur) firewood, harvest his crops, horse his carts, and work in his garden ; and not very long ago he was compelled, whenever his landlord condescended to visit him, to keep him and his family in food, and place his house entirely at the great man's disposal. And his plight used to be still worse if the owner, pressed for money or tempted by a good offer, sold his estate to some Greek of the Feuer, or Moorish Jew of Sarajevo. The Spahi might be indolent or indulgent, buil these gentry knew no pity; arrears were ruthlessly exacted, and defaulting tenants put to the torture. Another abuse was the valuation of the crops by the seigneur's steward, who, unless heavily bribed, exacted a greater proportion of the produce than was rightly the landlord's due.
The Porte was fully aware of this state of things, and made many attempts to improve the lot of the Christian culti- vator ; but, like all Turkish reforms, they generally came to nothing, or worse. In 1848, it was decided at Constantinople that the landlords should provide their tenants with buildings, beasts, seeds, and tools, and take in return no more than one- third of the crops of whatever sort. This solution of the diffi- culty was refused by those Begs who were receiving more than a third, and accepted by the proprietors of Lower Bosnia, who had been drawing only a ninth, but who now, without fur- nishing anything whatever, insisted on a third. The second condition of the peasants was thus worse than the first. In 1850 there was a rebellion of the Spahis • and after its suppression Osman Pasha profited by the occasion to abolish, on paper, all their feudal privileges. Nine years afterwards the Sultan promulgated a series of decrees for the radical reform of the Bosnian land system, which if they had been carried out would probably have had the desired effect. But the Begs, as usual, only adopted such of them as suited their own purpose ; and, the Pashas of Serajevo being too in- dolent and too Turkish to insist on obedience to the law, things went on as before,—for the farmers probably rather
worse,—and in 1875 there occurred the last rayah rebellion against Ottoman rule. Its objects were, however, much more social than political. The cry of the peasants was not "Down with the Sultan," but "Down with the Mahommedan Begs ; no more compulsory labour ; no more rents." And these ends they thought they could best attain by killing all the land- lords. Then followed a desultory yet cruel and murderous war, which lasted until 1879.
When the Austrians took possession of the country after the Congress of Berlin, the Christians thought that their time was come, and that they would be able to avenge on their oppressors the wrongs of centuries. But so far was this hope from being realised, that when the Begs yielded to the conquerors they were allowed to sue their tenants for the arrears of rent which had accumulated during the war And then the Austrians introduced the conscription, which even the hated Turk had spared the unfortunate rayahs. The measure was both cruel and impolitic ; for the peasants, utterly impoverished by the war, had pressing need of all possible help for the cultivation of their farms. They rebelled again ; but the rising was ruthlessly put down, and they are now prostrate at the feet of their saviours. Instead of shooting their landlords they are compelled to appeal to the Emperor,—which is so far an improvement.
On the other hand, the task of reform is far from easy. To every proposal of conciliation the Begs oppose a passive yet effectual resistance. They refuse all compromise, even tliough it may be proposed in their own interest. The Govern- ment have offered to buy up for a fixed annual sum the rights of corth. The Begs reply that this would be interest, that interest is usury, and that usury is forbidden by the Koran. Compulsion, in most cases, is out of the question ; for nearly all the Begs, in order to escape the Turkish land tax, made nominal sales of their estates to the mosques, and. the Austrian Government is under an engagement to respect the property of the Mahommedan Church. Hence, all the old evils, except torture—and for that has been substituted the conscription—continue to flourish. The only strong measure which the new administration has found it expedient or possible to adopt, is a temporary prohibition of the sale of land. This has been done to prevent the acquisition of estates by money-lenders, who would be even more rapacious, and worse to deal with, than the Begs. But, so far as we have been able to gather, absolutely nothing has been done
to improve the lot of the tillers of the soil. They still pay their rent in kind (the amount of which is fixed by the seigneur's steward), still cut the owner's wood, horse his carts, and harvest his crops. Various methods of re- form have been proposed—the total abolition of rents for three years ; the institution of Land Courts for the fixing of fair rents and the settlement of disputes between landlords and tenants ; the buying of estates from the Begs and their sale to the farmers on easy terms, so as to create a peasant proprietary. If the Austrians are wise, this is the remedy they will adopt ; for no fact is better established than that culti- vating ownership is the only sure care for agrarian troubles ; and where whole populations are engaged in the cultivation of the soil, as in Ireland and Bosnia, landlordism is almost necessarily a disastrous failure.
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