Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 325.: THE CONDITION OF IRELAND [17] MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 NOV., 1846, P. 4 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III

Return to Title Page for The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

325.: THE CONDITION OF IRELAND [17] MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 NOV., 1846, P. 4 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III [1835]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


325.

THE CONDITION OF IRELAND [17]

MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 NOV., 1846, P. 4

For the context, see No. 306. This unheaded first leader is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A seventeenth leading article on Irish affairs, in the Morning Chronicle of 9th Nov. 1846”

(MacMinn, p. 63).

the report of the commission of inquiry into the condition of the Irish poor, presided over by Archbishop Whately in 1836,1 recommended an interference with landed property, for the purpose of improvement, quite as large and decided as that which we suggested in last Friday’s Chronicle.2

The recommendation was supported by what is always extremely potent with the English public, an English precedent. “Having,” said the commissioners, “improvements in the lands of Ireland immediately in contemplation, it appears to us that the laws which form the constitution of the Bedford Level Corporation in England afford principles of legislation directly suited to our purpose. They enforce improvements in property at the expense of the property improved.”3 Accordingly the commissioners advised that a board should be appointed for Ireland, with powers similar to those of the Bedford Level Corporation, that is, among other things, with compulsory powers of drainage and other improvements. From the nature of the tract of low fenny country called the Bedford Level, it was impossible to drain any part of it except by an operation including the whole, and it would have been the extreme of injustice, if wrong-headed or miserly owners of a portion of the district had either been allowed to frustrate by their opposition a plan required by the wishes and interests of the remainder, or to escape from their share of the expense of a measure by which, in common with the others, they were to profit. We go further, and say that if not a minority of the proprietors, but every individual proprietor of the level had refused his assent to the proposition, if it had been simply a measure of public good, a great national improvement, which these persons had attempted to defeat by withholding their co-operation, it would have been equally the duty of the Legislature to persevere. Rights of property are conferred to promote the public good, not that they may be used as obstacles to it.

The Commissioners proposed that the “Board of Improvement,” which they desired to constitute, should be authorized, from time to time, “to make a survey, valuation, and partition of any waste lands in Ireland.”4 And though the idea does not seem to have occurred to them of making those lands instrumental to effecting a beneficial change in the present pernicious system of Irish tenancy, it is worth while to adduce their evidence to the great benefit which might be expected, in a merely agricultural point of view, from the extension of industry over this hitherto neglected source of food and employment. “Upon these lands [Mr. Arthur Young observed nearly sixty years ago] is to be practised the most profitable husbandry in the King’s dominions. The Commissioners appointed to inquire into the state of the bogs of Ireland, in 1809, reported to the like effect; and committee after committee of the House of Commons have done the same thing.”5 From the report of one of these committees, that of 1830, the Commissioners make extracts, of which the following are a part:

There are three millions of Irish acres of waste land, equal to five millions of English acres, which are considered to be almost all reclaimable. . . . It is in evidence that, by an expense of somewhat about £7 an acre, land in the county of Sligo has been reclaimed, and rendered worth a rent of 30s.; or, if preserved in the hands of the proprietor, that it is made capable of repaying all expenses by three years’ produce, leaving all subsequent returns clear gain.6

General Bourke “states that he is proprietor of bogs in different places, and has tried the experiment of improving them; that bog on which turf has been cut, and which was in a wild and uncultivated state, had been, at an expense of £7 an acre, raised from 10s. to the value of 30s. acreable rent.”7 All this, without the aid of those great scientific operations by which large tracts of country are drained at once, and which (at all times the most economical mode of accomplishing the object) might be considered at the present time to cost nothing, since the sums they would cost are at any rate to be expended, if only for the immediate relief of the people.

The report last cited contains a passage from which it might almost be inferred, that a glimmering of the desirableness of giving to the occupiers of the soil some greater hold upon it than that of cottiers or conacre-men, had dawned upon a committee of the House of Commons as early as 1830. “If this work,” said the committee,

can be accomplished, not only would it afford a transitory but a permanent demand for productive labour, accompanied by a corresponding rise of wages and improvement in the condition of the poor; opportunities would also be afforded for the settlement of the peasantry, now super-abundant in particular districts, on waste lands which at present scarcely produce the means of sustenance, or are suited for human habitations. This change would be alike advantageous to the lands from whence the settlers are taken, and to those on which they may hereafter be fixed, and may facilitate the means of introducing a comfortable yeomanry and an improved agriculture in the more fertile districts. The severe pressure of the system of clearing farms and ejecting subtenants may thus be mitigated, and the general state of the peasantry improved.8

A yeomanry! That was the ancient English appellation for a peasant proprietary, or at least for farmers who held their land on fixed conditions, and by custom (if not by law) could not be dispossessed so long as those conditions were fulfilled. What the committee meant by a yeomanry we do not exactly understand; but we cannot imagine that they could mean cottier tenants. There is much in a name. The term peasant proprietor, or small landed proprietor, suggests no associations to most Englishmen. It speaks to them of something which they do not know from experience, which they have not even heard much about, and which may be good or bad for the countries that have it, but which at any rate is not English. But England is wont to boast of her yeomanry; to regard them as one of her points of historical pre-eminence over the nations of the continent; and even, by some unaccountable illusion, to flatter herself that she still possesses them. The yeomanry of England, as a general feature of English life, were ruined and blotted out of the country early in the Tudor period, in a manner very clearly narrated by Mr. Thornton;9 and England has since passed into an agricultural system altogether different, though never hitherto equally favourable to the physical comfort, not to mention the independence and dignity, of the cultivators of the soil.

But there is a corner of England which still possesses a yeomanry in the antique sense; peasant farmers who own the land they till, paying nothing for it except some customary dues to the lord of the manor. They occupy a considerable portion of Westmoreland and Cumberland, and are known by the local name of Estatesmen, or Statesmen. Those who knew not of this class have often wondered where—among the care-worn, down-trampled agricultural labourers of England—Wordsworth found the originals of the peasantry delineated in his poems. Those acquainted with the counties bear testimony to the fidelity of the likeness. The same celebrated poet, in his little descriptive work on the scenery of the lakes, describes the state of society which existed for centuries in the upper part of the dales as

a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturists, proprietors, for the most part, of the lands which they occupied and cultivated. . . . Among whom the plough of each man was confined to the maintenance of his own family, or to the occasional accommodation of his neighbour. Two or three cows furnished each family with milk and cheese. The chapel was the only edifice that presided over these dwellings, the supreme head of this pure commonwealth; the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society, or an organized community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it. Neither high-born nobleman, knight, nor esquire was here; but many of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land which they walked over and tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood. . . . Corn was grown in these vales sufficient upon each estate to furnish bread for each family, no more. The storms and moisture of the climate induced them to sprinkle their upland property with outhouses of native stone, as places of shelter for their sheep, where, in tempestuous weather, food was distributed to them. Every family spun from its own flock the wool with which it was clothed; a weaver was here and there found among them, and the rest of their wants was supplied by the produce of the yarn, which they carded and spun in their own houses, and carried to market either under their arms, or more frequently on pack-horses, a small train taking their way weekly down the valley, or over the mountains, to the most commodious town.10

Notwithstanding the changes in the economy of modern society, from the progress of commerce and manufactures, the more migratory habits produced by improved modes of communication, and especially the encroachments of the great landholders, who have long seized every opportunity which accidentally offered of enlarging their domains by buying up the little estates, a considerable number of these happy and independent peasant-proprietors still exists; and if an example is wanted of the admirable results of a state of agricultural economy in which the occupation of land and the property of it are vested in the same hands, all that we have seen, heard, or read of these people unites to assure us that the Statesmen of the Cumberland valleys are such an example.

[1 ]“Third Report,” PP, 1836, XXX, 1-34.

[2 ]In No. 324.

[3 ]“Third Report,” p. 17. The Bedford Level Corporation was formed by letters patent in 1631 between Charles I and the Earl of Bedford. The Corporation was given legislative force and definition by 15 Charles II, c. 17 (1663), subsequently amended by several Acts dealing with specific issues.

[4 ]“Third Report,” p. 18.

[5 ]Ibid., quoting from A Tour in Ireland, 2 pts. (London: Cadell, and Dodsley, 1780), Pt. II, p. 48, by Arthur Young (1741-1820), experimental farmer and traveller, secretary under Pitt of the Board of Agriculture in 1793. The reference is to the “First Report of the Commissioners to Enquire into the Nature and Extent of the Several Bogs in Ireland,” PP, 1810, X, 395.

[6 ]“Third Report,” p. 18, quoting “Report of Select Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland,” PP, 1830, VII, 44, which in turn quotes (in the first sentence) from the evidence of Alexander Nimmo before the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom (PP, 1826-27, V, 551).

[7 ]Sir Richard Bourke (1777-1855), Irish landowner and soldier, whose public offices included that of Governor of New South Wales, 1831-37, gave this evidence before the Committee of 1830, ibid., p. 679, quoted in “Third Report” of 1836, p. 18.

[8 ]Report of 1830, p. 45, quoted in “Third Report” of 1836, p. 18.

[9 ]Thornton, Over-Population, Chap. v, esp. pp. 191-4.

[10 ]William Wordsworth, A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1810), 3rd ed. (London: Longman, et al., 1822); Mill makes a pastiche of passages on pp. 63, 53, 63-5, and 51-2.