CREATION OF CAPITAL BY COTTIERS, 1837-1865. 163

lative interference to protect the industry of the Irish farmer, and thus largely promote the prosperity and happiness of the whole community.

Let us take another pleasing instance from Arthur Young of the happy results of this wise and humane policy on the part of a few Irish landlords-a policy so rarely adopted at the time, that he censures, in no measured terms, 'the lazy, trifling, inattentive, negligent, slobbering, profligate owners of Irish mountains, who leave them as they received them from the hands of their ancestors, in the possession of grouse and foxes.''

Mr. Bolton (of Ballycanvan, County Waterford) cannot be too much commended for the humane attention with which he encourages his poor cottar tenantry; he gives them all leases, whatever their religion, of twenty-one or thirty-one years, or lives: even the occupier of two acres has a lease. It is inconceivable what an effect this has had; this is the way to give the Catholics right ideas. I was for three weeks a witness of a most spirited industry among them, every scrap of rough rocky land, not before improved, they were at work upon, and overcoming such difficulties as are rarely to be found on common wastes: many spots, not worth 58. an acre, they were reclaiming to be well worth 25s. and 30s. The improvement of this part of Mr. Bolton's estate may be guessed at when I mention, that on only 500 acres of it, there have been built in six years forty new houses, many of them handsome ones of stone and slate. For cabins, barns, &c., he gives timber for the roofs.

To precisely the same effect is the following extract from the evidence of the Right Reverend Dr. Keane, before the Tenure and Improvement of Land in Ireland Committee, a century later:-2

There are three or four tenants on the skirt of what may be called a barren mountain. It is the slope of a hill facing the south, and the whole mountain grows nothing but heath and coarse grass. In 1837 these tenants took about twenty acres each of this mountain from the middleman, who had a long lease, and who was enabled to give them leases. I will now take the case of one of these tenants as an illustra

1 Tour in Ireland,' vol. ii. p. 174.

2 In May 1865.

tion of all. The first two years he had to pay no rent at all. There was not a road within a mile of him. He had to bring lime from a distance of ten or twelve miles, and had then to take it on his own back and the backs of his children for the remainder of the distance. He laboured at his work, and in the course of twenty-one years, to my certain knowledge, that man was able to rear his family in comfort and to convert every spot of those twenty acres into a cultivable condition. They now grow crops and are an excellent farm.

But, unfortunately, there exists a bar to such improvements being general, in the fact that landlords, as a rule, are unwilling to grant adequate leases for the purpose. Nevertheless the improvements are sometimes entered on, even without the security of a lease; but they stop short, very far short indeed, of the point to which they would be carried if the tenant felt that he was working for himself; if, in fact, he was as secure of enjoying the fruits of his labour as the peasant of France, Belgium, and other continental countries. For example:

There are also regions of bog, which have been for centuries, and still are, dismal wastes, but capable of abundantly productive cultivation. In these bogs many hovels are to be seen, surrounded by patches which the squalid inhabitants of these hovels have, by the unaided labour of their hands, reclaimed, and for which they now pay rent, and raise scanty crops barely sufficient to keep them and their children alive. In most instances, these patches were, by sufferance, occupied rent free, for six or seven years, until the poor tenant, by expending his labour upon them, enabled the landlord, at the end of the limited term, to fix a rent upon them, which is invariably done. I ask especial attention to this practice, which is of frequent occurrence, and which, I think, no person will be bold enough to deny.

Extensive tracts of what, in Ireland, is called mountain common have for centuries been, and still are used as poor and scanty pasture for stunted cattle and sheep, the property of tenants who hold the arable and rent-paying portions of the landlord's estate. A right of common of very small value, and often the subject of rancorous disputes, is given, proportionate to the extent of the rented land held by each tenant. In these mountain districts may be seen many rude enclosures of portions of the common, which have been reclaimed and cultivated, and converted into farms with a wretched class of cabins upon them, in which the poor people live who were allowed to enclose

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and reclaim a part of the barren mountain, exonerated from rent for a few years, until the land, by their labour, became able to produce the stunted crops which may now be seen upon it. Here is another instance in which sterile land has been made comparatively fertile by the unaided toil and labour of the poorest class of tenants.

The people who have thus imperfectly reclaimed bog and mountain seldom hold by lease. When they come under rent, they do so, as tenants from year to year, liable to be turned out on a six-months' notice to quit.

As soon as the poor tenant has brought his farm to that degree of fertility which enables him to pay a rent and live, all further improvement is studiously avoided, as a thing which the tenant believes will only increase his labour and produce a larger rent for the sole benefit of the landlord, whom he regards as a vigilant spy upon every symptom of ability to pay more rent. The tenant dreads an increase of rent, even though it should be only half the increased value of the land. The value of further improvement, he thinks, will be a subject of dispute between him and his landlord, and may entice his neighbours to outbid him. He therefore avoids every exhibition of prosperity and comfort, in his dwelling, in his dress, and in the condition of his wife and children. He believes that his safety lies in the deplorable appearance of his hovel, his family, and his rags.

This feeling is not confined to the poor reclaimers of bog and mountain, it pervades the great majority of tenants from year to year of all the land so held in the country. This is the feeling which makes tenants hostile to improvement, even when the landlord proposes to bear the cost of it. This is the feeling which suggests to the tenant the exhausting process of repeated corn crops, by which the condition of the farm and the farmer is constantly deteriorated, until it arrives at the lowest stage of wretchedness.'

This is but too true a description, in every particular, of the existing state of things. Such evidence is entitled to the more weight that it comes from a distinguished lawyer, much of the business of whose court is conversant with matters connected with the tenure of land and the management of landed property in Ireland.

I conclude this chapter with the following extract from

The Land Difficulty of Ireland, with an effort to solve it,' p. 26. By Gerald Fitz Gibbon, Esq., Master in Chancery. Longmans, 1869.

the evidence of Judge Longfield, before the Committee of 1865:

I do not know what capital is possessed by the Irish tenants, but I have reason to believe they have much hoarded. For instance, the Marquis of Thomond's estate in Clare was sold in small lots, and in many cases tenants were the purchasers.

CHAPTER XLI.

IT IS NOT CAPITAL IRELAND SO MUCH WANTS, AS THE REMOVAL OF THE EXISTING IMPEDIMENTS TO THE CREATION AND FREE USE OF CAPITAL-IF REMOVED, INDUSTRIAL ENERGY AND HABITS OF INDUSTRY WOULD RAPIDLY GROW-THESE QUALITIES, IN A CERTAIN SENSE, THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF A NATION'S WEALTH-THE ABSENCE OF THESE QUALITIES AND OF THE RESERVE FUND THEY CREATE, PAINFULLY ILLUSTRATED IN THE IRISH FAMINE YEARS.

It is not capital, therefore, that Ireland so much wants as the removal of the existing impediments to the creation and free use of capital. While these impediments remain, the country cannot employ her present capital, small as it is. Remove them, and, as we have seen in the exceptional cases where this has been done, her industrial resources will be thoroughly developed, and her sons, no longer listless and hopeless, will rapidly acquire those qualities which characterize the masses in other civilized countries-that untiring industry, that effective desire of accumulation, by which capital is created, kept in existence, and steadily increased. Perhaps there is no civilized nation so deficient in these qualities as Ireland. England, on the contrary, possesses them in a high degree. They constitute her chief wealth. And it is obvious that one million sterling earned by these qualities is really more beneficial to a country than would be ten millions (as in the case supposed) contributed by another country. The greater part of the wealth so earned is sure to be usefully employed-that is, to become capitalwithin the country.

VALUE OF HABITS OF INDUSTRY TO A NATION. 167

A man who has accumulated 10,000l. by his own hard labour whether of hand or brain, will value and husband his earnings and turn them to the best account for himself and the community; whereas a man who inherits or receives a gift of a similar sum, who has never had to work for his bread, whose industrial powers and faculties have never been exercised, and are consequently undeveloped, will, as a rule, act very differently. He has not the habits, nor the capacity, nor the inclination for useful industry. The former not only labours himself, but he sets others to labour, at reproductive work; for his capital (as is the case with all capital) is nearly all expended in the wages of labour. The latter doubtless may lend his money to others who will employ it as capital, but probably not within the country, at least in the case of Ireland, as, owing to the low state of her productive industry, money is in more demand elsewhere. In any event, he is himself a drone in the hive, an unproductive consumer. Let us multiply these instances by thousands, let us carry the analogy from individuals to communities, and it must be evident to us that any amount of money poured into Ireland could not compensate for the deficiency of those qualities by which alone capital is created and kept in existence-that is, productively employed.

In a certain sense, these qualities are the most important part of a nation's wealth; far more important indeed than the mere material wealth they create. This is evidenced by the amazing rapidity with which well-ordered states recover from great public calamities, such as wars, blights and famines, the gaps made by which are almost immediately repaired by the energy of the inhabitants, combined of course with the reserve fund of capital at their disposal. But these qualities cannot be developed in the presence of such bars to productive industry as exist in Ireland.

In conclusion then, if a country would possess capital she must create it herself. If she would create capital she must labour-inasmuch as capital is but past labour laid by to aid