“Yes.”
“I thought so. I was there. I am Irish; I had just finished my studies at Juilly, and I had been passing my holidays with the father of one of my comrades, who was a farmer in the neighbourhood. Now I live with my father, who is an architect at Saint Paul, Minnesota. It therefore happens that I am well acquainted with the situation in both the countries we are discussing, and allow me to say that I am certain you are perfectly right.”
The young man’s intervention secured a complete triumph for me. I was particularly pleased, because Mr. George’s partisan himself at once said, in the most pleasant way:
“Well, stranger, I own I never thought of looking at the question from that point of view. I don’t own myself beaten yet, but I’m shaken.”
In justice to the Americans, I must own that they always display the most perfect courtesy and good faith in these discussions.
I am convinced that the thesis I maintain is perfectly correct. If European agriculture, crushed with taxes and burdens of all kinds, has been able to struggle for so long against the competition of new countries, it is simply owing to the abundance of capital placed at its service by the system of renting the land. Particularly now that the struggle, if it is possible at all, is only possible through the aid of large sums of money, it is the worst of follies to believe that in breaking the tie that binds the capitalist and the farmer so closely together, they can ameliorate the situation. This is true of Ireland more than of anywhere else.
This, however, is the aim that the National League proposes to itself. The most curious thing is that, in the end, their success will, in reality, only benefit the landlords.
What, in fact, is now passing all over Europe? Land has lost nearly all its value. The future is so dark that in France, as everywhere else, one cannot find one landowner in a hundred who would not be too happy, if not to sell all that he possesses, at least to ease his position in a great degree, if he could obtain a reasonable price for his land. And this is the time that the League chooses to propose dispossessing the landlords by giving them sums of money equal to their actual income, multiplied at least by fourteen, at most by twenty. How can they procure the necessary money for such an operation, that is to say, several milliards? By borrowing. If the Irish Budget is completely distinct from that of the metropolis, and consequently the moneylenders know that they cannot rely upon England’s guarantee, I doubt whether they will display much eagerness. However, let us admit that this immense undertaking may succeed. What would be the result?
The fifteen or twenty thousand present landowners, of whom a great number are, until now, only retained in the country through the difficulty of leaving it, would hasten to emigrate at once; they would, therefore, no longer pay one penny of the old taxes, nor of the new taxes, which the Government would be forced to raise to meet the interest of the loan. From landowners, they would have all become fund-holders; instead of having the trouble of collecting rents that are very irregularly paid, they would be relieved by the State—which would simply have substituted itself for them—from all these expenses and all this annoyance.