[52]far-reaching step which has been taken in respect of Irish industries in the last few years is to be found in the registration, under the Merchandise Marks Act of 1905, of a national trade-mark, the property in which is vested in an association, which, on payment of a fee, grants the right to use it to manufacturers of the nature of whose credentials it is satisfied. The value of this is obvious as giving a guarantee of the country of origin of goods at a time when the increased demand for Irish produce has added to the number of unscrupulous traders who sell as "made in Ireland" goods which are not of Irish manufacture. It is said that twenty years ago most of the tweed which was placed upon the market which had been made in Ireland was sold as Cheviot, and that to-day the rôles are reversed, and it is certain that for many years the great bulk of Irish butter masqueraded in English provision shops as Danish. The income of the association is devoted to the taking of legal action against traders who fraudulently sell as Irish, foreign including English made goods. If an instance is needed of the results which the protection of a national trade-mark gives in the encouragement of industry, by the guarantee of origin which it entails, it is to be found in the success of similar action in the cases of the butter industries of Sweden and Austria. It is a great tribute to the Trade-Mark Association that within two years of its incorporation the Congested Districts Board has applied for the use of the trade-mark for the products of its lace classes and for its homespuns.
The task proposed by Henry Grattan to the Irish Parliament may well be taken to heart by the Irish people to-day:—"In the arts that polish life, the manufactures that adorn it, you will for many years be inferior to some other parts of Europe, but to nurse a growing people, to mature a struggling, though hardy, community, to mould, to multiply, to consolidate, to inspire, and to exalt a young nation, be these your barbarous accomplishments."
CHAPTER IV
THE LAND QUESTION
"I can imagine no fault attaching to any land system which does not attach to the Irish system. It has all the faults of a peasant proprietary, it has all the faults of feudal landlordism, it has all the faults incident to a system under which the landlords spend no money on their property, and under which a large part of the land is managed by a Court; it has all the faults incident to the fact that it is to the tenant's interest to let his farm run out of cultivation as the term for revising the judicial rent approaches."
—A.J. BALFOUR, on the Second Reading of the Land Bill, May 4th, 1903.
The reason for the importance of the system of land tenure in the social conditions of Ireland is to be found in the manner in which the restrictions on Irish commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drove the population to secure a livelihood in the only direction left open to them—namely, agriculture. The results of this are to be seen to-day in the fact that there are 590,000 holdings in the island, and that out of a total population of four and a half million people it is well within the mark to say that three and a half million are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the land for their means of existence.
The system of tenure in Ireland was as different as possible from that existing in Great Britain. The gist of the difference lay in this, that in England and Scotland landlords let farms, while in Ireland they let land. "In Ireland," wrote an English observer more than a hundred years ago, "landlords never erect buildings on their property, nor expend anything in repairs." This feature, which was the result of historical reasons, was due to the fact that Irish land-owners were the descendants of settlers intruded on
[54]Irish land, who brought with them English notions of tenure, but had not the capital to render economic the numerous small holdings situated on their estates. Hence it came about that the provision of capital by an English landlord for the equipment of farms with cottages, outhouses, fencing, and a drainage system, which results in a sort of partnership between landlord and tenant, was, to a large extent, a thing unknown in Ireland, where, as was aptly said, tenants' improvements were landlords' perquisites, and where point was lent to the differences by the fact that the few properties on which the equipment of the holdings was provided by the landlord were known as "English-managed estates," and the number of these, Lord Cowper told the House of Lords in 1887, could be counted on one's fingers.