Cottiers.

We may now consider the system of land tenure which prevails so widely in Ireland, and which, as we have seen, Mr. Mill declares to be the "very foundation of the economical evils" of that country—namely, the cottier system. In it, the land belongs to a landlord, and is let out to small farmers, or "cottiers," who cultivate it with their own labour and capital; and the rent is settled by competition, so that there is no fixity of tenure beyond the duration of the lease. Until a few years ago, it may be said that nearly the whole agricultural population of Ireland were cottiers, except in so far as the Ulster tenant-right constitutes as exception. There were, indeed, a numerous class of labourers who were unable to obtain any farm, however small, from the landlords, and were obliged therefore to support themselves by working for hire; but even these were usually paid by the cottiers and larger farmers who employed them, not with money, but with a piece of ground called "conacre," which was sublet to them for the season, and for which they nominally agreed to pay a money rent, but in reality worked it out by so many days' labour. In one way or another, therefore, nearly all the peasantry lived by renting small pieces of land, which they cultivated with their own labour and that of their families, with or without the occasional help of others, and of which they had no permanent or secure possession.

In the cottier system, the produce being divided between two parties, the labourer or small farmer and the landlord, it is evident that the share of each must depend upon that of the page 33 other. The condition of the labourer, therefore, depends upon the amount of the rent. Now the rent, being settled by competition, depends on the relation between the demand for land and the supply of it; or (since the demand depends on the number of competitors, and the competitors are the whole rural population) on the proportion between population and land. If population be too numerous, the competition for land will be intense, rents will be forced up, and the people extremely poor; if population bear a due proportion to the land and to the agricultural skill, rents will be low, and the people will enjoy abundance. Even under a cottier system, there could be no poverty if population were sufficiently restrained. "If we could suppose cottier tenancy to exist," says Mr. Mill, "among a people to whom a high standard of comfort was habitual; whose requirements were such, that they would not offer a higher rent for land than would leave them an ample subsistence, and whoso moderate increase of numbers left no unemployed labourers to force up rents by competition, save when the increasing produce of the land from increasing skill would enable a higher rent to be paid without inconvenience: the cultivating class might be as well remunerated, might have as large a share of the necessaries and comforts of life, on this system of tenure as on any other."

It is not, however, under a cottier tenancy that a high standard of comfort is to be looked for. "A cottier system," says Mr. Mill, "has the disadvantages of the worst metayer system, with scarcely any of the advantages by which, in the best form of that tenure, they are compensated." Many causes, indeed, contribute to render this system of tenure in the highest degree ruinous, both to the agriculture and to the condition of the peasantry. Under it there are all the disadvantages of a want of capital and education in the cultivators, and none of the benefits derived from a fixed possession of the soil. The cottier has not, like the metayer, the assistance of his landlord's capital, nor has he the security and independence of the peasant proprietor, or of the metayer to whom custom gives a permanent right to his farm so long as the usual engagements are fulfilled. His motives for exertion and the improvement of his little holding, are far less than theirs; for any increase in the value of the land would only expose him to have his rent raised after the termination of the lease. The only protection against this would be the growth of some custom, which would have the effect of limiting the rent, and preventing any rise in it except such as might happen to be sanctioned by the general feelings of the community. The Ulster tenant-right is a custom of this kind. In Ulster, it is usual for a tenant, even without any lease, to receive a considerable sum, amounting not unfrequently page 34 to as much as from ten to sixteen years' purchase of the rent, or even more, for the goodwill of his farm. This sum is given in the full confidence that the rent will not be raised, and is, in the great majority of cases, not a compensation for improvements, but a mere life insurance or purchase of immunity from outrage; and it is to the want of a similar tenant-right and the settled determination to obtain it, that the agrarian outrages which have so long desolated other parts of Ireland, and from which Ulster has been comparatively free, are mainly to be attributed. "The disorganised state of Tipperary, and the agrarian combination throughout Ireland," says the author of the "Digest of Evidence taken before Lord Devon's Commission," "are but a methodised war to obtain the Ulster tenant-right." "Even in Ulster, if the tenant-right be disregarded, and a tenant be ejected without having received the price of his goodwill, outrages are generally the consequence." A right of this kind, however (which in Ulster is entirely the effect of custom and not of law), has great difficulty in establishing itself: for the interests of the landlords are decidedly opposed to it, since rent, if not restricted, has a constant tendency to increase in a country advancing in wealth and population. Without some such protection for the tenant, cottier agriculture can scarcely fail to be of the poorest kind; and although the peasantry themselves might be in easy circumstances if population were kept within proper bounds, yet there are many things in the system itself, which render it, like the system of hired labour, by no means favourable to prudence in this most important point. In both, there is an uncertainty with regard to the means of providing for children, and a temptation to rely on chance, which are among the most fruitful causes of over-population. Moreover, whilst the peasant proprietor, or the metayer with fixed tenure, cannot be injured except by their own improvident increase, the cottier and the day-labourer are liable to be injured by the improvident increase of other people also, which of course materially diminishes the motives for restraint.

Such are the evils and uncertainties of the cottier system, even in the most favourable circumstances. But in over-peopled countries, there is another evil superadded, which may be looked upon as the grand and characteristic vice of the system, and has the effect of reducing the peasantry to the very lowest depths of poverty and wretchedness. This is, the evil of nominal rents; or, in other words, rents so extravagantly high, that it is impossible for the tenants to pay them, and, therefore, after giving up all they can, they remain habitually indebted to the landlord. Such rents are almost a necessary consequence of the cottier system, where over-population exists and the competition for land page 35 is excessive. "While rents are fixed by competition," says Mr. Mill, "and the competitors are a peasantry struggling for existence, nominal rents are inevitable, unless the population is so thin that the competition itself is only nominal." A large farmer, who farms for profit, will not offer a higher rent for land than will leave him the ordinary rate of profit on his capital; but the labourer, who farms for subsistence, and whose only chance of obtaining it with any certainty is to have a piece of ground, will offer any rent, although quite conscious of his inability to pay it, even by the utmost exertions. If he does not succeed in obtaining a farm, he is ruined, and he cannot be worse than ruined if he does. How naturally and inevitably the evil of nominal rents springs from the cottier system, and how extensively this evil prevailed in Ireland before the thinning of the labour-market by the recent emigration, may be seen by the following passage, quoted by Mr. Mill from a pamphlet on the "Evils of Ireland, their causes and remedy," by Mr. Revans, the Secretary of the Irish Poor Law Commission. "As it may be fairly said of the Irish peasantry," says Mr. Revans, "that every family which has not sufficient land to yield its food has one or more of its members supported by begging, it will easily be conceived that every endeavour is made by the peasantry to obtain small holdings, and that they are not influenced in their biddings by the fertility of the land, or by their ability to pay the rent, but solely by the offer which is most likely to gain them possession. The rents which they promise, they are almost invariably incapable of paying; and consequently they become indebted to those under whom they hold, almost as soon as they take possession. They give up, in the shape of rent, the whole produce of the land with the exception of a sufficiency of potatoes for a subsistence; but as this is rarely equal to the promised rent, they constantly have against them an increasing balance. The peasant remains constantly in debt to his landlord; his miserable possessions—the wretched clothing of himself and of his family, the two or three stools and the few pieces of crockery, which his wretched hovel contains, would not, if sold, liquidate the standing and generally accumulating debt. The peasantry are mostly a year in arrear, and their excuse for not paying more, is destitution. Should the produce of the holding in any year be more than usually abundant, or should the peasant by any accident become possessed of any property, his comforts cannot be increased; he cannot indulge in better food, nor in a greater quantity of it. His furniture cannot be increased, neither can his wife or children be better clothed. The acquisition must go to the person under whom he holds. The accidental addition will page 36 enable him to reduce his arrear of rent, and thus to defer ejectment. But this must be the bound of his expectation." As an extreme instance of the height to which rents are forced up by competition, Mr. Hurley, the Clerk of the Crown for Kerry, mentions the following fact in his evidence before Lord Devon's commission:—"I have known a tenant bid for a farm that I was perfectly well acquainted with, worth £50 a year; I saw the competition get up to such an extent, that he was declared the tenant at £450."

"In such a condition," says Mr. Mill, "what can a tenant gain by any amount of industry or prudence, and what lose by any recklessness? If the landlord at any time exerted his full legal rights, the cottier would not be able even to live. If by extra exertion he doubled the produce of his bit of land, or if he prudently abstained from producing mouths to eat it up, his only gain would be to have more left to pay to his landlord; whilst, if he had twenty children, they would still be fed first, and the landlord could only take what was left. Almost alone amongst mankind, the Irish cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to either labour or self command, imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not substituted. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war. Rockism and Whiteboyism are the determination of a people who have nothing that can be called theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived of that for other people's convenience."

The result of this most miserable of all systems, was a state of poverty, beggary, and degradation, which for its extent and continuance can scarcely find a parallel in the history of civilised nations. It may be worth while to give a few additional facts in order to show more clearly what the state of Ireland was previous to the famine of 1846 and 1847, when the cottier system was almost universal. According to the report of the Irish Census Commissioners in 1841, the subdivision of the land was extremely minute; the number of farms (exclusive of small holdings of less than an acre) being nearly seven hundred thousand, of which about half were between one and five acres in extent, and about five-sixths between one and fifteen acres. Besides the small farmers, there was a still more numerous body, amounting to upwards of a million, of agricultural labourers, who page 37 lived by "conacre," by wages, and not unfrequently by reclaiming small patches of land from the bogs and waste. Altogether the number of families engaged in agriculture was between two and three times as great, in proportion to the arable land, as in England, and the rural inhabitants formed nearly seven-eighths of the whole population. The rate of wages, as ascertained by the Commissioners appointed in 1834 to inquire into the condition of the poor in Ireland, was miserably low, varying from a shilling a day in some parts of Ulster, down to tenpence and eightpence a day in Leinster and Munster, and only sixpence a day in Connaught, in which province, especially in the county of Mayo, the condition of the peasantry was most wretched. "The whole world," says Mr. Thornton, in his work on Over-population and its Remedy, "can scarcely furnish a parallel to the desperate condition of Mayo." Even these miserable wages could be earned, in general, for only about six months of the year, in consequence of the immense over supply of labour in proportion to the demand; so that Mr. Inglis, in a passage quoted by Mr. Buckle, estimated the average wages of agricultural labourers throughout Ireland, as amounting only to fourpence a day. In summer and winter—the seasons when little or no employment was to be had—they subsisted on the produce of their little plot of conacre land, and when that was finished, and there was no employment, as was usually the case in the summer months, they were put to the most desperate straits to obtain a living. Those who could afford it migrated to England in search of harvest work, while the unfortunate poor who remained behind were reduced to the brink of starvation. As there was no poor-law in Ireland until 1838, their only resource was to send out their wives and children to beg, or to support themselves by eating wild plants, such as nettles and corn kale, on which they often lived for weeks together. There were instances in the evidence collected by the Commissioners, of persons who had repeatedly remained without any food at all for twenty-four and even forty-eight hours. In the north-eastern parts of the island, the labourers (or at least those of them who had anything like regular employment) were better off than elsewhere; in the south-eastern and midland counties their condition was decidedly inferior; while the western districts were the worst of all. The state of the small farmers or cottiers was very little better than that of the labourers. "In fact," says Mr. Thornton, "they are only nominally superior to the labourers, and they are constantly falling into the exact position of the latter, when, as happens to numbers of them every year, they are dispossessed of their little holdings." As to the dwellings of the peasantry, they were page 38 usually wretched hovels, built of stone or of mud, and sometimes divided into two compartments, but never having a second story; with a floor consisting merely of the bare ground, a roof of straw without any ceiling, and sometimes a pane or two of glass for a window, but not unfrequently only a square hole which was stuffed with straw at nights and in cold weather. In such cabins or in single rooms of larger houses, about five-sixths of the whole number of Irish families were lodged at the time of the census of 1841. Half of the cottages in the province of Munster had no bedsteads, but the inmates lay on straw spread out on the floor, without blankets or any other covering than the clothes they wore in the day-time. In Connaught the destitution was still greater; indeed in one parish in Mayo it was ascertained that there were only four hundred beds to a population of upwards of ten thousand persons, and in a village containing two hundred and six persons there were just thirty-nine blankets. The clothing of the people was of the poorest and coarsest kind, and often consisted merely of rags and the cast-off garments of others. In one parish of Connaught, there were found to be more than three thousand persons who had not bought a single article of dress worth speaking of for five years. As to their food, it consisted, in some parts of Ulster, of meal, potatoes, and milk; but in Kerry, Connaught, and generally throughout the west of Ireland, it was confined almost solely to the potato.

The above description may help to convey an idea of the miserable condition of Ireland previous to 1846, and of the sufferings and disorders which made that country for so many years the chief difficulty of the British Government. Nothing, however, was done by Parliament to remedy the system of land tenure which lay at the root of the evils, but an attempt was made to palliate its effects and to alleviate the worst cases of destitution, by means of a poor law, enacted in 1838. The help, however, which government was unwilling to afford, came from another and an unexpected source. After the potato failure and famine of 1846 and 1847, in which such miseries were endured, the people, hopeless of better things in their own country, began to emigrate in vast numbers to America, those who went before sending over money to pay the passages of their friends at home; and to such an extent did this emigration proceed, that the census of 1851, as compared with that of 1841, showed a diminution of the Irish population amounting in round numbers to a million and a half. It is 110 doubt possible that the stream might continue to flow, and that, however much the employment for agricultural labour may hereafter be diminished by the general introduction throughout Ireland of the large farming page 39 system, the superseded people might seek a refuge in other lands as so many of their countrymen have done before them. "Those," says Mr. Mill, "who think that the land of a country exists for a few thousand landowners, and that as long as rents are paid, society and government have fulfilled their function, may see in this consummation a happy end to Irish difficulties.

"But this," he continues, "is not a time, nor is the human mind in a condition, in which such insolent pretensions can be maintained. The land of Ireland, the land of every country, belongs to the people of that country. The individuals called landowners have no right, in morality and justice, to anything but the rent, or compensation for its saleable value. With regard to the land itself, the paramount consideration is, by what mode of appropriation and of cultivation it can be made most useful to the collective body of its inhabitants. To the owners of the rent it may be very convenient that the bulk of the inhabitants, despairing of justice in the country where they and their ancestors have lived and suffered, should seek on another continent that property in land which was denied to them at home. But the legislature of the empire ought to regard with other eyes the forced expatriation of millions of people. When the inhabitants of a country quit the country en masse, because its government will not make it a place fit for them to live in, the government is judged and condemned. It is the duty of Parliament to reform the landed tenure of Ireland. There is no necessity for depriving the landlords of one farthing of the pecuniary value of their legal rights; but justice requires that the actual cultivators should be enabled to become in Ireland what they will become in America—proprietors of the soil which they cultivate."

Mr. Mill, accordingly, in the four earlier editions of his work, recommended in the strongest terms that immediate steps should be taken by Government to convert the cottier tenantry of Ireland into peasant proprietors, with a fixed possession of their farms. "Rent paid by a capitalist," he says, "who farms for profit, and not for bread, may safely be abandoned to competition; rent paid by labourers cannot, unless the labourers were in a state of civilisation and improvement, which labourers have nowhere yet reached, and cannot easily reach under such a tenure. Peasant rents ought never to be arbitrary, never at the discretion of the landlord; either by custom or by law, it is imperatively necessary that they should be fixed; and where no mutually advantageous custom, such as the metayer system of Tuscany, has established itself, reason and experience recommend that they should be fixed by authority; thus changing the rent into a quit- page 40 rent and the farmer into a peasant proprietor." The most direct and obvious way of doing this would have been by an Act of Parliament, fixing the rents throughout Ireland at a fair valuation, and thus converting the tenants into copyholders—who are virtually equivalent to freeholders; a proposal which formed one of the demands of the Repeal Association and of the Tenant Right League, and was long and zealously advocated by Mr. Conner, under the name of "a valuation and a perpetuity." Such a measure, however, although it would have been no violation of property, if the landlords had been allowed the option of giving up their lands at the full market-value, was open to serious objections in various respects, as it would have dispossessed of their estates the whole body of Irish landlords, the good as well as the bad, and, moreover, it is not desirable either for the agriculture or the people themselves, that all the land of a country should belong to peasant proprietors, without any large farms or wealthy capitalists to lead the way in improvements; and accordingly Mr. Mill recommends that the object in view should rather be sought by other and milder measures. Of these he proposes the two following. One is, to enact that any person in Ireland who reclaims a piece of waste land shall become its possessor, at a quitrent calculated on its mere value as waste: a necessary part of which enactment would be, that the landlords should be obliged to give up any portion of waste land (not of an ornamental character) which was required for the purpose of reclamation. The other measure (which is of particular value and importance, as it might be carried out by private individuals or societies, not only with immense advantage to the people, but with profit to themselves) is to buy up as much as possible of the land offered for sale, and sell it again in small portions. The operation might be repeated as often as the funds were set free. A Society with this object was at one time projected under the auspices of the Tenant Right League, on similar principles to those Freehold Land Societies which have been so successfully established in England, with a view chiefly to electoral purposes.

After making the foregoing remarks and proposals, Mr. Mill adds in the fifth edition of his work—"Thus far I had written in 1856; I have not changed any of the opinions I then expressed. But I feel that they are no longer susceptible of practical application. The new state of things created in Ireland by the vast decrease of her population, and by the effects of that greatest of boons ever conferred on her by any government, the Encumbered Estates Act, has rendered the introduction, on a large scale, of the English agricultural system page 41 for the first time possible in that country. The present population of Ireland is now not greater than can be supported on that system in a state of comfort probably equal to the average lot of English farm labourers. The general improvement in agriculture is already most striking; and the improved scale of subsistence which is now becoming habitual to the people, together with the familiarity they have now acquired with the resource of expatriation, will probably prevent them for a considerable time from relapsing, through improvident multiplication, into their former degraded state. Ireland therefore is not in a condition to require what are called heroic remedies. The benefits to that country of peasant proprietorship would be as great as ever; but they are no longer indispensable; a prospect has opened to her of making a great advance in civilisation without that aid. But though she can now do without peasant proprietors, she cannot do without the total extinction of cottier tenancy. Unless that is rooted out, the whole fruits of the improvement now in course of being effected, will be and remain precarious. The lapse of another generation will show, whether the landlords of Ireland, now weeded of the reckless and bankrupt portion who formerly held so much of the land, and recruited by the substitution of a more moral and intelligent class, will improve the opportunity by the successful accomplishment of this the only real, permanent, and radical reform in the social economy of that long suffering country."

In the sixth edition of his work, and in the people's edition taken from it, Mr. Mill modifies the opinion here expressed. He observes that, notwithstanding the improvement which has taken place in Ireland of late years, the agricultural labourers and displaced cottiers are still extremely poor, the cost of living having increased as well as the rate of money wages; and he strongly urges the necessity for creating a class of peasant proprietors. In his powerful pamphlet lately published, on "England and Ireland," Mr. Mill goes much further than this; the crisis in Ireland appears to him so exceedingly grave, and the embitterment of feeling towards this country, arising from the long continuance of the iniquitous land system, so full of danger, that he thinks the strongest measures necessary, and proposes at once to bring the whole soil into the possession of the tenantry in the manner above described—namely, by commuting the present variable into a fixed rent. ^*