Britain and Ireland, who have brought a pestilence into our seaports, and are now crowding our almshouses and hospitals: - will England consent to receive and maintain as many negroes from Virginia and Carolina, if we will emancipate them, and land them upon her shores, fat, shining, and in good condition? Yet a large number of the dissenting ministers of Ireland, with the awful pictures of Irish destitution and famine constantly before their eyes, have recently been much exercised in conscience on account of the two and a half millions of slaves now living in brutal and lazy contentment in our Southern States, and bave addressed a plaintive and affecting remonstrance on the subject to their brethren here in New England, who have about as much to do with these slaves as with the English House of Lords! We are no apologists for slavery, nor for any form of civil oppression; but there is something more hideous and revolting in the present irretrievable helotism of the working classes in Great Britain, in the barbarous exercise of the power of the land-owners, than in the worst forms of political servitude that are recorded in history. But this is a digression; we come back to the subject of the aggregation of landed estates and the proper size of farms. It may be said that the abolition of the corn laws has broken up the monopoly of the land-owners; so it has to this extent, that they cannot raise the price of food beyond the cost of importing it from other countries. But the charges of transportation and the profits of the importer must still be added to the price, and as the risk is great in dealing in corn, from its rapid and immense fluctuations in value, this enhancement of price must be considerable. Wheat which can be obtained for 45s. in Poland and Galicia is 50s. a quarter in Dantzic, and must sell for 56s. in London; the cost to the consumer, therefore, is one fourth greater than if it were raised at home, and to this extent the monopoly of the land-owners still operates. The home supply in ordinary years being sufficient for the national consumption, a very moderate increase of that supply would cause the price to fall to 45s. in England. If 11 bushels were raised where only 10 grew before, there would be this diminution of price. But it is not the interest of the landowner that the price should fall, as the 10 quarters at 56s. would give him 281., while 11 at 45s. would amount only to 241. 15s. The difference between these sums is the profit which he makes out of the hunger and misery of one half of the population; it is the inducement for him to change arable lands into sheep-pastures, to drive off his tenantry, and consolidate his farms. To this extent, he is still in the situation of the Dutch merchant who burnt his pepper. But is it possible thus to increase the gross product by the introduction of the system of small farms? In the isle of Guernsey, the average size of farms is a little over 11 acres, the agricultural population is thrice as dense as in England, and the average wheat crop is at least 32 bushels to an acre, while the average English crop-with all the advantages arising from the application of immense capital, scientific husbandry, and agricultural machines, on which Mr. McCulloch lays so much stress- is but 21 bushels. An English cultivator with his family consumes one fifth of the product which he raises; then, if there were three cultivators where there is now but one, and if their united exertions should make the crop only two fifths greater than it was before, there would still be as great a surplus to send to market as before, though the number of families supported by the land. is three times as great. And this is the case in Guernsey, where the average crop exceeds what it is in England by more than two fifths. There is abundant testimony that the small allotments of land, from one eighth to one fourth of an acre in size, which the laborers in some English parishes are still permitted to hire, and to which only those hours are given by himself and his family which would be otherwise unoccupied, yield more largely than highly cultivated farms. Tilled only by the spade, abundantly manured, weeded and watched with minute care, these patches of land produce enormous crops, while the moral effect which they have on the laborer is very happy. In Saffron Walden, Essex, where the experiment was commenced in 1830 of parcelling out some land in this manner, the effect on the habits and comfort of the laborers was most beneficial, and the cost of supporting the parish poor was greatly diminished. The Commissioners on the Poor Laws, in 1833, obtained this testimony as to the result of the experiment : "In November of the year 1830, in which the system commenced, when fires and riots were prevalent in many of the - No. 140. VOL. LXVII. 14 adjoining parishes, this altogether escaped the infection. There are now 138 allotments, of from 20 to 40 rods each, and it may be considered that each of their occupiers is a special constable, ready to protect public order in moments of difficulty, because he has an interest in maintaining it. The produce has infinitely exceeded that of farming lands. The profit of the laborer on each allotment, after charging rent and seed, may very reasonably be calculated at 31. [from 127. to 247. an acre], making 4147. in all. Thus there is a constant creation of capital which would not otherwise have existed. The attachment of the laborers to their small occupations is increasing. Many spend their hours of leisure, and sometimes a whole day, there. They have now something they may call their own. Since the abolition of small farms, it has been observed that there is nothing between 10s. a week and a large occupation; and a familiar metaphor has been used, that all the intermediate staves on the ladder have been removed." The following, from Mr. Thornton's former work, on Over-Population, is taken from the evidence given in 1843 before the Committee on Allotments of Land. "300 bushels of potatoes per acre are commonly considered a very good crop; but a cottager will obtain at least 100 bushels from one fourth of an acre, besides turnips and cabbages enough to pay his rent. 8 quarters of wheat would be thought a very large quantity for a farmer to get from an acre, but 14 quarters an acre have been got from land dug with the spade. The average profit derived from cottage allotments is at the rate of 201. an acre, and an instance has occurred of a man growing a crop worth 51. on the eighth part of an acre of very indifferent land." But why multiply evidence, when a single fact, mentioned by Mr. Thornton, suffices to answer the question? Flemish farmer of six acres of moderate land obtains from two acres and a half as much grain, potatoes, butter, pork, and milk, as are required for the consumption of himself, his wife and three children, and sells the produce of the remaining three acres and a half.” Take the extreme case, then, the most destitute and miserable population in all Europe, that of unhappy Ireland. There are less than 1,500,000 families in the island, and nearly fourteen millions of acres of cultivated land of greater natural fertility than that in the Netherlands. Parcelled out into estates of six acres each, this land would support 2,300,000 families engaged exclusively in agriculture, and at least 3,000,000 of other families in trade and other occupations; that is, it would furnish an abundance for a population exceeding twenty-six millions, instead of maintaining with difficulty, as it now does, less than a third part of that number. Abolish rent there to-morrow, declare that every agricultural laborer shall be the owner of as much land as he and his family can cultivate with their own hands, and from being the most wretched and famine-stricken nation in the world, they would at once become as prosperous and easy in their circumstances as the people of our own republic, whither they are now flocking for a refuge from starvation. The only losers by this operation would be some 20,000 wealthy proprietors, one third of whom are residents in England, and do not visit their Irish estates once a year; the gainers by it would be six millions of unhappy beings, who are now starving in the midst of plenty, - whose labor produces the whole yearly value of Ireland, while scores of them are daily perishing of hunger and fever in the midst of that abundance which their own hands have created. Well may we ask the landholders, as Carlyle does, "Infatuated mortals, into what questions are you driving every thinking man in England?" The idea of a general confiscation and re-partition of the land is a rude shock to our notions of the sacredness of property. Yet two centuries have not elapsed since nine tenths of all the real estate in Ireland was forcibly taken from its ancient proprietors without an equivalent, and divided among those of whom the present holders are the descendants. The famished, half-savage proletaries, who now form the bulk of the Irish population, are the children of the former owners of the soil. Persecuted solely for their attachment to their ancient monarch and their ancient religion, they were driven out en masse from their homes in the northern province to starve among the mountains and bogs of the west and south. Would it be robbery or restitution, then, to give back to this people the land of their fathers? Here is the secret of the continued agitation of this wretched country; the cry for repeal of the union means nothing but confiscation of the English estates in Ireland, and is kept alive only by the intolerable burden of poverty and hunger which rests upon the people. We have no sympathy with such wretched agitators and demagogues as O'Brien, Mitchell, and Meagher, who seek only their own aggrandizement in their vociferations about the wrongs of the people; they are guilty of intentional deceit, when they hold up a merely political measure, a political separation from England, as the sufficient remedy for Irish destitution. Neither would we advocate so violent a course as the general confiscation here spoken of; for the shock occasioned by an agrarian division would probably plunge the people into barbarism irretrievable for a century to come. But a plain statement of the whole merits of the case was necessary to refute the absurd clamor of the landholders about the rights of property, raised whenever a measure is proposed sufficiently broad to cover the enormous extent of the present evil. The discussion has far exceeded our limits, and we must stop here, though with the hope of recurring to the subject in a future number. We need not apologize to our readers for the repeated consideration of a theme which seems at first sight to be interesting only to British subjects; its bearings upon many of the great questions in civil polity and political economy are so numerous and important, that it deserves attention and study everywhere, and especially among those who live under a free government and enjoy a widely extended national prosperity. Those who seek a thorough knowledge of the subject will find a skilful guide in Mr. Thornton, who in the volume now before us has well sustained the reputation he acquired by his former work on Over-Population and its Remedy, the most complete, dispassionate, and satisfactory view that we have yet seen of the social condition of the English and Irish people. |