“Apparently the climate and the land are better there than with us; here it is impossible. When one is dealing with the first tenant, one calculates that a family of five or six people can live off the farm; now they want to make it support forty or fifty. There is a limit to the earth’s productiveness, and this limit has been already passed.
“We must always return to the fact that the great misfortune is the lack of manufactures. I have done all in my power to acclimatise them over here, but I have never succeeded. I asked a celebrated geologist to come and examine and ascertain what resources the country might offer. He left at the end of a week, telling me that he should be robbing me if he stayed any longer. There is a little iron, but since we have no coal to work it with we cannot hope to make it profitable.
“I turned to another quarter for help. If we had not the raw material, at least labour was cheap. We thought that we might utilise that by establishing a manufactory which would have for its aim the production of objects that required but little raw material. Our railway companies import all their requisites from England. I wrote to some English capitalists: we had been studying to ascertain if these requisites could not be made in Ireland. Whatever combinations were adopted, even at the lowest calculation, we could never see our way to pay more than 3 per cent. on the capital invested. Another thing, who would be mad enough to establish a manufactory in a country where now every one is at the mercy of an occult and irresponsible power like the Land League, which has often prevented vessels from loading or unloading, solely because the owner of the ship had infringed or not obeyed some of its orders? Imagine a factory suddenly boycotted without warning! What would become of the shareholders?
“It is only too evident that the present state of things cannot last. Is it admissible that a Government should spend 2,000l. per annum for an indefinite period to keep policemen on guard over that castle I have just shown you? It would be easier and more economical to let the Nationalists blow it up, except for the indemnity to which the owner might become entitled. But there are ten others in the same position.
“Where is the remedy? Unhappily, we cannot see any sign of it. Mr. Gladstone has come to an understanding with the Land League, and one plan is now proposed. They wish to dispossess the landlords, and to make the peasants landowners. But let us consider what the practical results of that measure would be. Let us take, for instance, the case of the tenant of whom we were speaking just now. He has not paid one penny of rent for the last three years. Are he and his forty children and grandchildren any richer on that account? They are near dying of hunger; and if they should die of hunger, it is because they insist upon existing on the produce of thirty acres of very middling land. If we imagine him the owner of the thirty acres, in what way will the situation be improved? Will that change make the land any better, or the climate less moist?
“Besides, he would not retain the ownership very long. In every village there is a pawnbroker, on whose premises all the furniture accumulates belonging to the peasants, and who often buys their harvests before they are reaped. They are all in debt to the grocer and to the manure merchant—even the bonnets worn by the women on Sundays are all bought on credit. Three months after the land had been given to them they would have found means to mortgage it, if possible, at double its value.
“More than that, is it quite certain that they wish to become landowners as much as is pretended? It does not seem at all certain to me. As soon as the principles of the Land Act were known, a landlord, whose property I manage, wrote to me, saying that he authorised me to treat with all his tenants on that basis. He has more than eight hundred! I gave them all the opportunity of accepting the arrangement; they all refused, without a single exception.
“However, some of them told me that they were willing to treat with me, but the conditions they proposed were absolutely inadmissible. Judge for yourself.
“They desired that I should accept as a basis, not the reduced rents that had been already fixed by the Land Commissioners, who, however, had already reduced the rentals on an average from 25 to 30 per cent., but that those rents should again be reduced 25 per cent. Then instead of multiplying this figure by 20, according to the provisions of the Land Act, making the price of purchase 20 years’ rent, they wished to multiply it by 12 or 13 only. So that the owner of a property that five years ago brought in 400l., and was then worth about 8,000l. or 9,000l. first saw his rents reduced by 100l., and then by the terms of the Land Act, the price of expropriation or forced sale would have been but 6,000l. (300l. × 20); he had already therefore to submit to a loss of from 2,000l. to 3,000l. of his capital. But I was authorised to accept this valuation.
“They, however, proposed to diminish the original rental by another 25 per cent., which would thereby be reduced to 200l., and then by multiplying the 200l. by 12, the purchase-money would be 2,400l., twelve years’ purchase. They, therefore, would have it inferred that in five years the property had lost more than three-fourths of its value.