Why is it that ten men in Ireland produce no more than four men produce in England?
Henry George says (Social Problems, p. 150):
A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from which these government-aided emigrants come. What surprises an American at first, even in Connaught, is the apparent sparseness of population, and he wonders if this can indeed be that over-populated Ireland of which he has heard so much. There is plenty of good land, but on it are only fat beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you at first think that they must be washed and combed every morning. Once, this soil was tilled and was populous, but now you will find only traces of ruined hamlets, and here and there the miserable hut of a herd, who lives in a way that no Terra del Fuegan could envy. For the 'owners' of this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them having never seen their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so the men have been driven off. It is only when you reach the bog and the rocks in the mountains and by the sea shore, that you find a dense population. Here they are crowded together on land on which nature never intended men to live. It is too poor for grazing, so the people who have been driven from the better lands are allowed to live upon it—as long as they pay their rent. If it were not too pathetic, the patches they called fields would make you laugh. Originally the surface of the ground must have been about as susceptible of cultivation as the surface of Broadway. But at the cost of enormous labor the small stones have been picked off and piled up, though the great boulders remain, so that it is impossible to use a plow; and the surface of the bog has been cut away and manured by seaweed, brought in from the shore on the backs of men and women, till it can be made to grow something.
Sir Thomas Brassey writes from a capitalist's standpoint, while Mr. George writes from the standpoint of a philosopher who not only sees gross social wrongs but boldly applies the remedy. But let us see if the same fester which irritates the body of Irish society has not also a parasitical existence in our own land, where society is yet in its infancy, where the people are supposed to enjoy all the advantages of the competitive system, and where all are, measurably, free to take and to use the opportunities offered the pioneers, or him who gets first his grip upon the three natural elements absolutely essential to man's existence, viz.: air, water, and land.
Wm. Goodwin Moody says (Land and Labor in the United States, p. 77):
Instead of being able to boast, as could our fathers, that every man who tilled the soil was lord of the manor he occupied, owning no master, the last census report made a return of 1,024,701 tenant farms in our country in 1880.
A comparison of this showing with the land-holdings of Great Britain and Ireland will help to a better understanding of what these things import. The very latest statistics give the total number of holdings in England and Wales at 414,804; in Ireland, at 574,222; in Scotland, at 80,101; total, 1,069,127. Showing that in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, counting all the holdings as tenant occupations, which they are not, there are 200,000 less tenant farms than in the United States.
Again:
Among the owners of the tenant farms in our country are English, French, and German capitalists, non-residents, who have bought immense tracts of the railroad lands, and seized upon the alternate government sections lying within their railroad purchases, and on those tracts have commenced their bonanza operations, or planted their tenants on the American system.
When it is remembered that the entire network of railroads in the United States is practically under the absolute control of five or six men who, having derived their valuable franchises and more than princely land grants from the people, show the utmost disregard of the comfort, convenience or rights of the donors; when it is remembered that one family in the city of New York controls enough land with enough tenants to constitute an overgrown village; and that what they do not claim as their own is held by one-fourth of the rest of the population; when it is remembered that nearly every article which has become a household necessity has been seized upon and can be obtained only through some corporation, in the manufacture of which the government has virtually granted a monopoly, as Charles granted to the Duke of Buckingham a monopoly in the sale of gold lace; when it is remembered that, even in this new country, three-fourths of the population rent their homes and cannot buy them[14]; when these things are remembered, as they should be, it will be readily seen that the condition of our work-people is fast becoming no better than that of the people of Europe, where a thousand years of false social adjustments, of usurpation and of tyranny, have reduced the proletariat class to the verge of starvation and desperation.
True, the immigrant laborers from Europe in the North, and the colored people at the South tend to crowd into the cities, where their labor is least needed and the conditions of life for them must be at the hardest; true, in America if a man has it in him the way is open for him to mount to the topmost round of the social ladder; true, too, the operatives in manufactures and the agricultural laborers here live on a far higher plane than in Europe; but the elements of degradation as well as of elevation are present in our land, and "easy in the descent" to the infernal regions. Let us be warned in time.