Is there, then, no way of reconciling the apparent antagonism between the development of man's industrial powers, and his higher interests as a rational and accountable being? Are we to conclude that the roads that lead to wealth, to happiness, and to virtue, are necessarily divergent? and that national advancement in any one of these paths implies a departure from the others? No; not necessarily so. Such is not the doctrine taught by Sismondi, and by those who, with him, impugn the title of political economy to be considered as the great paramount rule of social existence. All that they maintain is, that there is no necessary agreement between these three great springs of human action; that though the law of morality may, and obviously often does, concur with the maxims of happiness, and those again with the rules of political economy, there are nevertheless many questions on which we are at a loss to reconcile them. The learned Archbishop of Dublin has an elaborate argument in his Introductory Lectures, to show, on a priori grounds, that the condition most favourable to the exercise of man's productive energies must also be favourable, not only to the highest development of his intellectual faculties, but also to his advancement in moral purity. Now, we venture to think that no such argument, however ingeniously conducted, can be satisfactory, simply because IT IS a priori. Reason and experience are at variance; and no a priori deduction will help us out of the practical difficulty. We, no doubt, all naturally desire and hope—nay, believe—that at some future time, and in some way at present unknown, the perplexing contradiction will be explained. Reason affirms unhesitatingly, that the same Providence which placed so bounteous a store of the physical materials of wealth at our disposal, can never have designed that their cultivation should embitter the lives of those who labour, still less that it should endanger their moral wellbeing; and we look forward, therefore, with firm faith to a period when these paths, which to our present sight seem to lead in directions so opposite, shall all be seen to reunite and terminate in one common end. But, in the present state of our powers, that insight is yet far from being attained, and the great problem yet remains to be solved.—What do we see around us? In this country—whose physical character and the spirit of whose people seem to destine her for the very home and centre of production—are there no discordant elements in our condition? While wealth has increased among us with a rapidity unexampled in the history of the world, and the struggling energies of all men have been strained to the uttermost in the race of industry—while, under the sway of commercial Ministries, legislation has been specially, almost exclusively, directed to stimulating manufactures in every way, and removing every obstacle that could be supposed, however indirectly, to hinder their extension—can we venture to assert that the condition of the great mass of the people has improved in proportion to our riches? Are the relations of employers and the employed on so satisfactory a footing as to give no grounds for anxiety? Has the labourer, by whose toil all those vast accumulations of capital are created, enjoyed an equitable share of them? Have his means of domestic comfort increased in the same ratio as the wealth of his master? Is not the rate of his remuneration diminishing with every step in our progress? Has not crime, during the last half century, increased fully ten times as fast as the numbers of our population? Who can look at these, and a hundred other similar indications that readily suggest themselves, and say that all is well; that, as far as the experience of Britain goes, the road to national wealth has also conducted us to greater happiness and moral wellbeing? Alas! the evidence is but too convincing that, if there be any way of reconciling these ends, we at least have not yet found it. But we repeat that the contrariety between them is not a necessary or universal one. The conditions of great advancement in commerce and the industrial arts, are not all or invariably unfavourable to the innocent enjoyments of life among the labouring people, or hostile to their higher interests. It is not asserted that wealth is necessarily, or in itself, injurious; but only the means which we have hitherto discovered of acquiring it. The Archbishop imputes the converse of this doctrine to those who venture to deny the supreme importance of the objects of political economy, and then proceeds to demolish it by reducing it to absurd consequences. If, says he, it be true that the riches and civilisation of a community always lead to their moral degradation, if you really consider national wealth to be an evil, why do you not set about diminishing it; and, following out the counsels of Mandeville, burn your fleets, destroy your manufactories, and betake yourselves to a life of frugal and rustic simplicity? Such a challenge, we presume to think, has no bearing on the position we have been supporting; and it would be just as fair an argument on our side of the question, if we were to turn round and insist that his Grace should testify to the truth and consistency of the opinions he maintains by turning our churches into cotton factories, and the University of Dublin into a Mechanics' Institute. We go no further than to affirm that, in the experience of our own and the other most civilised nations of Europe, the rapid augmentation of wealth has not been attended with a corresponding increase of rational enjoyment, or of moral improvement, in the mass of the community. Further, we hold that a legislator must recognise these three objects not only as distinct, but as subordinate, one to the other: that is to say, the government of a country is not justified in fostering the interests of the capitalist in such a way as to trench upon the enjoyments of the common people, nor in promoting these to the neglect of their moral and religious instruction. He is not, for example, justified in allowing the employer to demand from his operatives the utmost amount of daily toil that he can extract from them, so as to leave them no time for bodily rest or intellectual culture. All policy that overlooks or contemns this natural subordination in the ends of human existence, must terminate in disaster and misery.
We have been partly led into these reflections through the consideration of a subject which occupies a prominent place in Mr Laing's Observations, and seems, in some respects, to illustrate—
"How wide the limits stand
Between a splendid and a happy land."
The national advantages of small estates, as compared with the scale of properties most common in this country, have been most fully and systematically discussed by M. Passy, as well as by Mr Thornton, Mr Ramsay, and Mr Mill, among our own writers. But Mr Laing has had the credit of attracting attention to the subject by his extensive personal inquiries as to the actual results of the Continental plan, and by showing (what many English readers are slow to believe) that the "petite culture," as pursued in north and central Germany, and in Belgium, so far from being incompatible with the profitable use of the land, is, in fact, more productive than the opposite system of large holdings. These views were strongly expressed in his Notes of a Traveller; and his evidence in favour of peasant proprietorship is greatly founded on by Mr Mill, in the able defence of that system which forms part of his work on political economy. The book now before us takes a more enlarged, and in some respects a different view of the question, presenting it in all its bearings, favourable and unfavourable; and thus furnishing the inquirer with all the materials on which he is left to build his own conclusions.
One who looks at the subject for the first time, and whose beau-ideal of agricultural perfection is formed on the pattern of Norfolk or Haddington, finds some difficulty in believing that a country cut up into small "laird-ships" of from five to twenty acres, can be advantageously cultivated at all. He naturally takes it for granted that, as regards efficiency of labour and quantity of produce, the large scale must always have the advantage of the smaller; and that the spade and the flail can, in the long run, have no more chance in competition with the Tweeddale plough and Crosskill's steam thrashing-machine, than a dray-horse with Flying Dutchman. And in England, or any country similarly circumstanced, his conclusion would no doubt be perfectly correct; and yet a visit to Flanders, Holstein, or the Palatinate, will convince him that the boorish-looking owners of the patches of farms he finds there, with the clumsiest implements, and, to his eyes, most uncouth ways of working, do somehow contrive to raise crops which he, with all his costly engines, and the last new wrinkle from Baldoon or Tiptree Hall, cannot pretend to match. Their superiority as to the cereal grains is perhaps questionable; but, looking to the quantity of produce generally, no impartial observer can doubt that, after making every allowance for difference of soil and climate, a given area of land in Belgium yields more food than the same extent in England. How is this to be accounted for? Let us hear Mr Laing's explanation.
"The clean state of the crops here (in Flanders)—not a weed in a mile of country, for they are all hand-weeded out of the land, and applied for fodder or manure—the careful digging of every corner which the plough cannot reach; the headlands and ditch-slopes, down to the water-edge, and even the circle round single trees close up to the stem, being all dug, and under crop of some kind—show that the stock of people, to do all this minute handwork, must be very much greater than the land employs with us. The rent-paying farmer, on a nineteen years' lease, could not afford eighteen-pence or two shillings a-day of wages for doing such work, because it never could make him any adequate return. But to the owner of the soil it is worth doing such work by his own and his family's labour at odd hours; because it is adding to the perpetual fertility and value of his own property.... His piece of land to him is his savings-bank, in which the value of his labour is hoarded up, to be repaid him at a future day, and secured to his family after him."[29]
This is the secret of the marvellous industry that has converted even the barren sands and marshes of these districts into one continuous garden. It has been accomplished by what, for want of a better expression, we may call spontaneous, in opposition to hired labour. The labourer is himself the owner of the soil, and to one so circumstanced work assumes quite a different aspect; the spade goes deeper, the scythe takes a wider sweep, and the muscles lift a heavier burden. No agricultural chemistry is so potent as the sense of property. The incentive to his daily toil is not the dismal vision of a parish workhouse in the background, but an ever-fresh hope for the days that are before him. His fare may be hard, his clothing coarse, and indulgences rarely procurable; but his abstinence is voluntary—"et saltem pauperies abest."
There can be no doubt that a much larger proportion of the population will find employment and subsistence from the land under this system than under ours. Mr Laing illustrates this by supposing the case of an estate in Scotland of 1600 arable acres divided into eight farms of 200 acres each; and he assumes that the labour employed on each of these farms, taking one season with another, is equivalent to that of ten people all the year round—an estimate which is not far from the truth on a well-managed farm.[30] Such an estate of 1600 acres will thus afford constant employment to eighty labourers.
"Now take under your eye a space of land here, in Flanders, that you judge to be about 1600 acres. Walk over it, examine it. Every foot of the land is cultivated—dug with the spade or hoe where horse and plough cannot work; and all is in crop, or in preparation for crop. In our best farmed districts there are corners and patches in every field lying waste and uncultivated, because the large rent-paying farmers cannot afford labour, superintendence, and manure, for such minute portions of land and garden-like work as the owner of a small piece of land can bestow on every corner and spot of his own property. Here the whole 1600 acres must be in garden-farms of five or six acres; and it is evident that in the amount of produce from the land, in the crops of rye, wheat, barley, rape, clover, lucern, and flax for clothing material, which are the usual crops, the 1600 acres under such garden-culture surpass the 1600 acres under large-farm cultivation, as much as a kitchen-garden surpasses in productiveness a common field. On the 1600 acres here in Flanders or Belgium, instead of the eight farmers with their eighty farm-servants, there will be from three hundred to three hundred and twenty families, or from fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred individuals, each family working its own piece of land; and with some property in cows, sheep, pigs, utensils, and other stock in proportion to their land, and with constant employment, and secure subsistence on their own little estates."[31]