Ireland and Poland: A Comparison

by T. W. Rolleston

That was the Ireland of fifty years ago. It is an Ireland which at the present day lives only on the lips of anti-British orators and journalists. It is an Ireland as dead as the France of Louis XIV. Of the abuses and disabilities just recounted not one survives to-day. The measures by which they have been removed place to the credit of the United Kingdom a record of reform the details of which, for the benefit of friends or foes, may be here very briefly set down.

Religious Equality

In 1869 the Protestant Episcopal Church was disestablished and disendowed, and is now—many Churchmen believe to its great spiritual advantage—on the same level as regards its means of support as every other denomination in Ireland. It may be mentioned that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was long in the enjoyment of a State subsidy for the education of its clergy, a subsidy commuted in 1869 for a capital sum of £370,000.

Land Reform

As comparisons have been drawn between the systems of government in Ireland and in Poland, let us consider for a moment the condition of the Polish rural population under German rule. It must be noted that the recent promises of Polish autonomy made by Germany—obviously for military and temporary reasons—refer only to those portions of Polish territory held by other States. No change is to be made in the position of Prussian Poland. Here, for many years, it has been, and still is, the avowed object of the Prussian Government either to extirpate or forcibly Teutonise this Slavonic population, and to replant the country with German colonists. The German Chancellor in 1900, Prince von Bülow, defended this anti-Polish policy in the cynical saying that "rabbits breed faster than hares," and the meaner animal, the Pole, must therefore be drastically kept down in favour of the German. Between 1886 and 1906 the Prussian Government was spending over a million sterling a year in buying out Polish landowners, great and small, and planting Germans in their stead. The measure proved futile; the "rabbits" still multiplied, for the Poles bought land from German owners faster than the Government did from them. In 1904, in order to check the development of Polish agriculture and land-settlement, the Government took the extreme step of forbidding Poles to build new farmhouses without a licence. A still more oppressive measure came in 1908, when, in clear defiance of the German Constitution, the Prussian Government actually took powers and were voted funds—from taxation paid by Poles and Germans alike—for the compulsory expropriation of Polish owners against whom nothing whatever could be alleged except their non-German nationality. These powers have been put into operation, and every Pole in Prussia now holds his patrimony on his own soil on the sufferance of a Government which regards his very existence as a nuisance, because he occupies a place which a German might otherwise fill.

During precisely the same period the British Government in Ireland has been bending the wealth and credit of the United Kingdom to objects precisely the reverse. Ireland, owing to the wars and confiscations of the seventeenth century, had come to have a land-owning aristocracy mainly of English descent with a Celtic peasantry holding their farms as yearly tenants. The object of British land-legislation has been to expropriate the landlords, so far as their tenanted land is concerned, and to establish the Irish peasant, as absolute owner of the land he tills. The Irish tenant is now subject only to rents fixed by law; he can at any time sell the interest in his farm, which he has, therefore, a direct interest in improving; he is also assisted by a great scheme of land-purchase to become owner of his land on paying the price by terminable instalments, which are usually some 20 per cent. less than the amount he formerly paid as rent. Under this scheme about two-thirds of the Irish tenantry have already become owners of their farms, while the remainder enjoy a tenure which is almost as easy and secure as ownership itself. It is not surprising, then, that a German economist who has made a special study of this subject should declare that "the Irish tenants have had conditions assured to them more favourable than any other tenantry in the world enjoy"; adding the dry comment that in Ireland the "magic of property" appears to consist in the fact that it is cheaper to acquire it than not.[*] That magic has been worked for Ireland by the British Legislature and by British credit. As in Prussia, compulsory powers (limited by certain conditions and to certain districts) stand behind the schemes of the Government; but the compulsion is exercised not against the Irishman in favour of the English settler, but against the (usually) English landlord in favour of the Irish tenant. The State is now pledged to about £130,000,000 for the furtherance of this scheme, the instalments and sinking fund to the amount of about £5,000,000 a year being paid with exemplary regularity by the farmers who have taken advantage of it.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [*] Professor M. Bonn, of Munich University. "Modern Ireland and her Agrarian Problem," pp. 151, 162, translated from "Die irische Agrarfrage." Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft; Mohr, Tübingen.

The Congested Districts Board

In the poorer and more backward regions of the West it has been felt that the above measures are not enough, and a special agency has been constituted with very wide powers to help the Western farmer, and not only the farmer, but the fisherman, the weaver, or anyone pursuing a productive occupation there, to make the most of his resources and to develop his industry in the best possible way. This Board commands a statutory endowment of £231,000 a year. A system of light railways which now covers these remote districts has given new and valuable facilities for the marketing of fish and every kind of produce.