Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland

Front matter

IRISH EMIGRATION

AND

THE TENURE OF LAND IN IRELAND.

chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

6

"If Ireland were a thousand miles away from us, all would be changed,—or the landlords would be exterminated by the vengeance of the people."

These are pregnant and comprehensive words: they envelope in the same stern condemnation, both the cultivators and the owners of the soil of Ireland. Their meaning cannot be mistaken: the term vengeance pre-supposes injury,—injury of as deep a dye, as the revenge it has evoked. Yet they express the genuine conviction of one of England's leading politicians, and consequently the opinion of many who confide in his judgment. By some they will be regarded as a rhetorical exaggeration of a partial truth. By others they have been resented as an ignoble calumny.

I do not myself venture to pronounce dogmatically between these conflicting conclusions; no man can hope in a hasty dissertation to determine the opinions of his fellow-countrymen on so vital a question; but, as a member of the obnoxious class referred to, I may be permitted to suggest the propriety of patiently examining the grounds which are supposed to justify these grave denunciations.

Perhaps the simplest method of conducting such an inquiry will be—first, to specify the charges against the landlords of Ireland, as set forth in the public manifestoes of such persons as may be supposed to speak with the greatest authority on the subject, and then to examine, one by one, the truth or falsehood of each. The vehement eloquence with which the wrongs of that country are invariably discussed, affords ample materials for framing the indictment,—a circumstance which relieves me from the invidious expedient of singling out any particular individual as our public prosecutor.

Stripped of all exaggerated phraseology the accusations with which the landlords are assailed may be condensed into the following series of propositions.

1. That the emigration from Ireland has been a curse to that country.

2. That this emigration has been occasioned by the eviction of the rural population by their landlords.

3. That acts of eviction in Ireland are to be attributed rather to the cruelty and injustice of the landlords than to any failure on the part of those evicted to fulfil their legitimate obligations.

4. That the present discontent in Ireland has been chiefly occasioned by the iniquity of the laws affecting the tenure of land.

5. That a change in those laws in a specified direction would pacify discontent and create agricultural prosperity.

A glance at any national newspaper or at the reports of an Irish debate, will show that I have not misrepresented the gist of the remarks to which I refer: "Millions of human beings have been driven across the Atlantic by the landlords of Ireland;" "Landlordism is the curse of the country;" "Emigration and the misery of the people is occasioned by the injustice of Parliament, and the iniquity of the laws which regulate the tenure of land;" "Ireland presents us with the spectacle of a whole nation fleeing from their oppressors;"—are the ordinary phrases in use.

Now, Sir, are these things true? That is the inquiry I propose to prosecute.

First, Has the Irish exodus, as it has been termed, been a calamity or the reverse?

We have to consider this question from two points of view, inasmuch as it has affected the condition of two classes of persons, namely, those who went away, and those who stayed at home.

There is one single fact which will probably be accepted as a safe indication of the effects of emigration on the destinies of those who took part in it. To their immortal honour, within 17 years after their departure they had sent back to Ireland upwards of 13,000,000l. of money, chiefly for the purpose of enabling their friends to follow their example. Now, unless they had prospered, these savings could not have been accumulated; unless their new existence had been full of promise they would not have tempted their brethren to join them. But what if, instead of setting forth to reap the golden harvests of the West, these forlorn multitudes had remained pent up within their rainy valleys, would the existing population, those that have clung to the old country in spite of everything,—would they be now the better or the worse? Two obvious consequences must have followed,—wages would have been lower, rents higher than they are now, while a very large proportion of the peasantry would be occupying farms half the size of those they arc at present cultivating. Now, low wages and high rents may be advantageous in a certain sense to the manufacturer, to the landlord, and to the recruiting sergeant; but how do they affect the masses—the tenant, the labourer, and the mechanic ?

When I was in the west of Ireland some 18 years ago, the rate of agricultural wages varied from half-a-crown to five shillings a week. Ever since, it has gradually advanced—in some places it has doubled—in others it has more than doubled. In the north, the farm servant has become almost master of the market, and is certainly better off than many of the small tenants;—in the south, though still not paid as he should be, his position is much improved, while, all over the country, the navvy, the quarryman, and the drainer are receiving from 10s to 12s a week.

Occasionally complaints are being made of a dearth of hands: it is true this outcry generally means that at particular seasons of pressure, farmers can no longer turn into their fields at a moment's notice the crowd of ill-paid cottiers that used to wait their pleasure in enforced idleness during the slack seasons of the year.

But any temporary inconvenience of this kind will be more than counterbalanced by the necessity which will be imposed on the landed interest, whether proprietors or tenants, to guarantee to those they wish to retain in their service, com

lodging, fair remuneration, and above all, permanent employment. It is this growing difficulty of obtaining an unlimited amount of casual labour at low rates during summer, that is weaning the embarrassed tenant from his yearning after land. Eventually those only will be able to engage in farming with advantage who can either reduce their need of the labourer to a minimum, or can afford to pay him good wages all the year round. Hitherto the agricultural class has been composed too exclusively of occupiers, who though able to perform the ordinary operations required on their farms during two-thirds of the year, were dependent at seed time and harvest on a half-employed labouring population, who were relegated to idleness and penury, the moment the grain was sown, or stored. A worse distribution of industry could not be imagined. What we want are fewer indigent occupiers and more constant employment for the labourer; for it is quite evident that an area cultivated by 10 farmers and 15 farm servants in constant work, would be better managed than if it were subdivided amongst 15 farmers who gave only occasional employment to 15 labourers.

To those who closely watch the transitional phases of our national life, it is very evident that

the foregoing and other cognate agencies are gradually emancipating the farming classes from the tyranny of competition. During the last few years many a struggling tenant has been tempted by the rise of wages to hand his farm over to his more competent neighbour, and himself to pass from a life of precarious husbandry into the disciplined ranks of labour, where his industry is both better remunerated, and employed to a better purpose than ever it was before: and in proportion as the peasant becomes aware of the existence of a more hopeful theatre for his industry, whether at home or abroad, than that presented to him and his children by the miserable patch he miserably cultivates, that morbid hunger for a bit of land which has been the bane of Ireland will gradually subside; competition will relax something of its suicidal energy; and in the same way as the Irish labourer has already risen from the condition of a serf to an equality of comfort with his employer, will the tenant farmer, relieved from the lateral pressure of his superfluous associates,

be able to treat with his landlord on more independent terms.

But it may be objected by those who deplore emigration, that had these vanished thousands remained among us production would have been stimulated, and the well-being of the whole community proportionately increased. Let us see how far this would be a reasonable expectation.

Had no emigration taken place from Ireland, and had the population continued to multiply at its normal rate, the additional increase to our present numbers would by this time have amounted to three millions of souls, and as there is no reason to suppose that such a circumstance would have materially expanded the restricted manufacturing operations of the country, the larger proportion of these three millions would have had to depend upon the land for their support. Now, it appears from an official Report, drawn up on the conjoint authority of Archbishop Whately, Archbishop Murray, and Mr. Moore O'Farrell, that in 1846 five persons were employed in the cultivation of the soil of Ireland for every two that cultivated the same quantity of land in Great Britain, while the agricultural produce of Great Britain was four times the agricultural produce of Ireland. As a matter of fact, therefore, so far as the past is concerned, the addition to the agricultural produce of Ireland has not been proportionate to the excess of the agricultural population.

It may, however, be pretended that so unsatisfactory a result is to be accounted for by the unintelligent method in which this redundancy of labour has been applied to the soil. But in the Lothians of Scotland, and in certain parts of England, the art of agriculture is neither unintelligently nor unsuccessfully practised, and probably a given space is there made to produce as remunerative a crop as the united efforts of man and nature are destined to accomplish; yet in those localities it has been found that about 18 men, with a small proportion of women, are sufficient to cultivate in the most efficient manner 500 acres of arable land.

Were we to apply this proportion to the 15,832,892 acres of land, under cattle and crops in Ireland, we shall see that some half million of persons would be able to cultivate the entire area. But by the census returns of 1861 the number of adult males engaged in agricultural pursuits in that country are considerably over a million. Consequently, notwithstanding the emigration which has

taken place, the disproportion between the respective amounts of agricultural labour, and the area cultivated in the two countries, which was noted in 1846 by Archbishop Murray and his colleagues as being in the ratio of 5 to 2, may still be taken as about 2 to 1. Of course, as I have already observed in a previous publication, such a comparison can only be regarded as a rough approximation. On the one hand the canon which regulates the proportion of men to acres in a country of large farms, cannot be applied without modification to an area subdivided into such small holdings as prevail in Ireland, while on the other a correction must be made for the predominance of pasture lands in the one kingdom, and of tillage in the other. Making however every allowance for these counter considerations, it is probable that at the date of our last census, some three hundred thousand persons were engaged in the cultivation of the soil in excess of those whose exertions, if directed with greater skill and energy, and accompanied by an adequate expenditure of capital, would be sufficient to ensure us as high a rate of production as is obtained in the sister country.

Consequently, even making allowance for the decrease of the agricultural population which has since been going on, it is probable that there is still in Ireland a considerable section of the inhabitants with their wives and children dependent for their support upon the land, whose misapplied industry is as unproductive as if it were devoted to the grinding of a treadmill or the lifting of shot; but though contributing nothing to the producing power of the class with which they are incorporated, they have to be supported out of its profits, of which they diminish by so much the share to the remainder. To deny this is to assert—that you can make a vessel sail faster by doubling the complement of her crew, and that the supernumerary hands will have made no impression on the ship's rations by the end of the voyage. But if, instead of the reduced numbers at present left in this false position, the hundreds of thousands who have emigrated had remained at home to breed and stagnate on the overburdened soil, is it not evident that a state of things would now exist in Ireland such as no man can think of without a shudder? I do not wish, however, to imply that the existing surplus of agricultural labour, need necessarily follow their example. When once the rate of wages in a country has reached a point, which ensures to the labourer the necessaries and decencies of life, emigration ceases to be of such

paramount importance, and no man could contemplate the expatriation of so many brave hearts, and strong right arms with equanimity. The true remedy for the anomaly I have indicated, is to be found in the development of our commercial enterprize, of our mineral resources, of our manufacturing industry: it is not blood-letting to relieve a plethora, but stimulants to restore the balance of a congested circulation that are needed.

Still less would I advocate an attempt to divert, whether by moral pressure or otherwise, any portion of the land-occupying class from their present avocations. Persons of practical experience are aware that even in the most prosperous parts of Ireland, the extension of holdings undesirably diminutive, is continually taking place by a natural process, which need never involve the violent displacement of a single individual, and at a rate which rather exceeds than otherwise, the accumulation of the necessary capital in the hands of those, to whose farms the surrendered scraps of land are annexed. Death, bankruptcy, failing health, and the hundred casualties which diversify the current of human affairs, annually place at the disposal of the landlord a number of vacated tenancies, more than sufficient to carry out any amount of judicious consolidation. To hasten, therefore, the transition which the agricultural system of Ireland is gradually undergoing, is neither his interest nor his practice. It is true the slower the absorption of the surplus agricultural labour of the country into other pursuits, the worse for the general body of cultivators, but each year is improving their situation, and it is better the conviction of what is for their true advantage should penetrate their intelligence of its own accord, than that their prejudices should be shocked by any extraneous influences, however well intentioned.

But to imagine that even the most scrupulous observance of this rule, by every landlord in Ireland, could ever have prevented, or can now check the departure of a large proportion of the people is a delusion. The increase of every nation must be limited by the extent and capabilities of the area it occupies, and the amount of capital it possesses.

This law is of universal application, though one race from its more sordid habits, or lower civilization, may be more compressible than another. But, the appointed limits once reached, either the procreative energies of the people will be artificially restricted, as has been the case in France, or

the surplus population will emigrate, as they have done from Germany, from Ireland, and to a lesser degree from England.

Up to the year 1846 the soil of Ireland retained the capacity of producing, to an almost unlimited extent, a certain root, containing all the elements necessary for the support of human life. The ex

of the population was proportionate to the facilities it enjoyed for obtaining sustenance. Suddenly, by the visitation of God, those facilities were withdrawn; the potato failed; no other product of the soil existed to take its place; corn crops neither supplied the same amount of nutriment, nor could they be grown in successive years on the same spot. The life-sustaining power of the soil, had become restricted; as an inevitable consequence the population of the island has become proportionately restricted; and; exactly in the same way as the working classes of Manchester would have been obliged to remove to other centres of industry had the cotton famine continued, has the surplus population of Ireland been compelled to emigrate to a more fertile soil.

Though acting with diminished energy, the same causes may be expected for some time to come to produce similar results. The natural expansion of a prolific nation, still numbering upwards of five millions and a half, must be considerable. Did this increase maintain its normal rate, we might calculate on a net annual addition of 60,000 souls to our population; but as a large proportion of those who emigrate are men and women in their first youth, we must presume it has been considerably checked: putting however the excess of births over deaths at a minimum of 40,000 per annum, we shall confront a very formidable figure. How are these successive waves of fresh arrivals to be accommodated?

Even those who most deplore emigration would not recommend a resubdivision for their benefit of holdings whose size at this moment is perhaps below the desirable average: the labour market is only too amply supplied: agitation has succeeded in burking everywhere, except in Ulster, our nascent manufacturing enterprise;what other alternative have you to offer, if you shut up their path across the sea? During the last five or six years, the emigration from Ireland has been a little over 90,000 a year; nearly one half of that emigration, therefore, has merely harmonized with the mechanical law, which only permits the introduction of water at one end of a pipe by the expulsion of a corresponding volume at the other.

In all parts of the world similar processes are occurring, and it is absurd to talk of Ireland, as the only country from which an extensive emigration has proceeded. From Germany alone, and principally from the North and West of Germany, as many as 250,000 persons have emigrated in a single year, while between 1851 and 1861, even from

Great Britain, the emigration has averaged as high as 74,000 a year.

Still more unreasonable is it to describe the "ruling classes" as standing alone in their opinion, an opinion, most unjustly ascribed to "their stupidity and selfishness," that emigration has been no calamity to Ireland.

In the first place, to call emigration a calamity, implies a confusion of ideas.

Emigration may be occasioned by a calamity: it maybe followed by disastrous consequences: but it is in itself a curative process: and to confound it with the evils to which it affords relief, would be as great a blunder as to mistake the distressing accidents of suppuration for symptoms of mortification. Plans for the express purpose of stimulating emigration have been devised and advocated from time to time by such men as Mr. Smith O'Brien, Sir Thomas Wyse, Mr. Sharman Crawford, Sir George C. Lewis, and Mr. Cobden; while, did space permit, I might furnish dozens of quotations to show how common this conviction has been to every school of politics and class of society.

To attribute such a view to landlord stupidity and selfishness is even more gratuitous. When did a tradesman ever complain of the multitude of his customers, or a manufacturer of the easiness of the labour-market? And what is the owner of an estate other than a trader in land? His tenants are his customers; the more strenuous their competition, the higher his rents, and the denser their number, the more keenly will they compete; emigration has a tendency to diminish rather than to increase his rental, and if it has not done so already it is because the number of those who seek to obtain their living by the land, are still out of proportion to the area capable of maintaining them.

Again, the landlord is very often a large employer of labour. Within the last 15 years I myself have paid away upwards of £60,000 in wages alone. During the last half of that period, in consequence of the rise in wages, I have got much less for my money than I did during the first half, and my consequent loss, comparing one period with another, would amount to several thousand pounds, and this has been a direct consequence of emigration. But, though a dealer in land, and a

payer of wages, I am, above all things, an Irishman, and as an Irishman I rejoice at any circumstance which tends to strengthen the independence of the tenant farmer, or to add to the comforts of the labourer's existence.

But it is said, that though as yet no inconvenient diminution of the agricultural population has occurred, as is proved by the still inadequate rate of wages in the rural districts, emigration is acquiring a momentum which will carry it for beyond all reasonable limits. This I admit to be a contingency deserving serious attention: but the first precaution to be taken is to fix those classes most exposed to the current, in a position of such comfort and stability as will enable them to resist its influence. Such an object will be far more surely promoted by whatever tends to abate the tyranny of competition, than by offering those who are now hustling one another off the land any artificial inducements to continue the seramble.

Others suggest that the great works of irrigation and reclamation which still require to be executed in Ireland, would more than absorb all the redundant population. To this I reply, in the first place, that during the very period which has witnessed the greatest emigration, larger areas have been reclaimed, than have ever been before; that the productive powers of the soil have been increasing in a ratio nearly corresponding to that at which the population has diminished; and that as we still have one adult cultivator to every six acres of land under crops, it is not any want of hands which hinders the island being converted into a garden from one end to the other. In the next place, the very thing I desire, is to see our surplus labour power, now frittered away in the desultory cultivation of fields which ought to produce twice as much with one-third fewer hands, intelligently applied to the development of the country's resources. All that I contend for is, that while you are collecting your capital, and organizing your plans, for the intro of that millenium of enterprise which has already disappointed the hopes of previous generations, you have no right to keep the men, whose grand-children you may perhaps eventually provide with employment, standing idle and starving in the market-place.

Again, it is asked, what is to become of the manufacturing industry of Great Britain if the normal flow of Irish labour should suddenly run dry? How are the armies of England to be recruited if the magic shilling no longer has attractions for the Irish peasant?

With such ill-omened surmises as these I have no sympathy. However serious the contingencies suggested, it is very certain the solution must be sought elsewhere than in the maintenance of a fourth of the population of Ireland at starving point. A perennial flow of cheap labour into Lancashire and of broken Irishmen into the Queen's service, means perennial indigence and discontent in Munster and Connaught;—and discontent in her Southern provinces means the perpetual abstraction from the available forces of the Empire of a garrison nearly as large as the military contingent furnished by all Ireland. To foster, therefore, an excess of population with the intention of forcing the most desperate of their numbers to

embrace an existence which the gradual improvement in his condition has taught the Highland gillie and the Kentish yokel to disdain, is hardly a remunerative speculation. Of the humanity of regarding the sister kingdom as a reservoir of impoverished war material, and stagnant labour-power, to be turned on as the convenience of England may require, I will say nothing. Even the butcher fattens his sheep before he drives them to the shambles, and to speculate on Irish destitution to man the looms of Manchester for all eternity, seems to me hardly more excusable than to advocate the continuance of slavery in the tropics, for the sake of fine cotton and cheap sugar.

Notwithstanding therefore all that has been said to the contrary, I still consider that not only has emigration been an infinite blessing to Ireland, but that for some years to come a considerable portion of the nation will continue to profit by its advantages. I am aware that this is an unpopular opinion, and I may be told that I am rejoicing in the ex-patriation of my countrymen, but to those who can attach such a meaning to the foregoing sentences, it would be idle to address further explanation. Both in Parliament and elsewhere I have recorded my conviction that were it not for the agitation which now scares capital from her shores, and prevents the development of her industrial resources, Ireland might be rendered capable of sustaining a population far larger than any she has ever borne, and no one has deplored in more emphatic terms than myself the circumstances which compel so many noble-hearted Irishmen to leave the land of their birth. But to lament an emigration you are unable to arrest, and which is composed of those you cannot employ, is a useless waste of feeling. There are few human passions with which I have greater sympathy, or which I can better understand, than the love of home; but in this life no one can arrange his destiny altogether to his taste; and to sally forth and battle with the world is one of the most universal conditions of existence. It is all very well to talk pathetically of the hardship endured by the Irish peasant in quitting the home of his childhood, but to dwell for ever in the home of one's childhood is almost the rarest earthly luxury which can be mentioned; not one man in ten thousand expects to enjoy it; no woman desires it. Law in France, custom in America discourage such permanent arrangements, while in England they are only within the reach of a comparatively small minority.

Expatriation is undoubtedly a great calamity, but emigration does not necessarily imply expatriation. Hundreds of those who go, return, and if the greater number stay it is only because they prefer to do so. Nor, when Providence spread out the virgin prairies of the New World, or stored up the golden treasures of Australia, can it have been intended that attachment to the natal soil should become so predominant a passion as to deter man from taking possession of the new territories prepared for his reception. Far then from being in itself a calamity, emigration is an essential element in the future progress of the United Kingdom, and our fellow countrymen who depart, even if absorbed by an alien community, often minister to our prosperity more effectually than when they dwelt amongst us. The transformation of an indigent and disaffected subject into a prosperous foreign customer is a change not wholly disadvantageous, and the industry which has gone forth to till the prairies of the West cheapens the loaf to millions in the old country.

One thing at all events is certain. In the progress of every civilized community, the period must arrive when the natural increase of population overtakes the normal rate of production. The true remedy may be to communicate additional fertility to the soil: but this is seldom an immediate possibility: as a consequence the rate of increase of the population must be checked; or its standard of comfort must deteriorate; or its accruing surplus must remove. But the first necessitates an artificial and often an unnatural social system, as is said to prevail in France; and the next is an alternative which entails the physical degradation we have seen supervene in Ireland. There remains therefore the third,—a course in perfect harmony with the laws of nature, and one which has already established the religion, the language, and the freedom of England, over one-fourth of the habitable globe. To lament the exhibition of so much enterprise, vital energy, and colonising power, in the race to which we belong, seems to me more

perverse than to stigmatize as a curse the blessing originally pronounced on those who were first bidden "to go forth and multiply and replenish the earth"

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Chapter 1 Appendix

APPENDIX.

Vital Statistics.—France. (See supra, p. 18.)

"The slow rate of increase of population in France compared with that of England may, therefore, be chiefly attributed to a low ratio of births, the result of late marriages and of hindrances to fecundity. Early marriages have the effect of shortening the interval between generations, and tend in that way to increase the population. The spirit and character of a nation alone determine the limit to its numbers; and the increasing power and prosperity of England and her colonies, resulting from a high rate increase of population, have proved the fallacy of the doctrine "that the increase of the human race should be restricted, so that it may not outstrip the means of subsistence." The proportion of deaths to 1,000 persons living in each of the two countries, France and England, was 21·96 and 22·88 in 1853; 23·57 and 21·80 in 1857; 23·18 and 21·63 in 1861; and 21·72 and 23·86 in 1864. In France, in 1854 and 1855, the deaths exceeded the births. The mean after-lifetime, or expectation of life in England, is 40·9 years. In France it is 39·7 years."