Chapter X: Rural Physiology

We have glanced at a few facts presenting symptoms of the Irish disease, which were taken as chance guided us, in a ride through a south-western county. Similar symptoms are everywhere to be found through the island. To appreciate them at their right value, as even to comprehend them, it is essentially requisite to know, at least in its broader outlines, the physiology of landed property in this entirely agricultural country.

Vast landed property and parcelled-out culture. This is the epitome of such a physiology. At the base of the social edifice we find the tenant, generally a Catholic and of indigenous race, occupying and cultivating after his own fashion the thousandth or ten thousandth part of a property ranging over an area of some hundred thousand acres. At the summit we find the landlord, almost invariably of English and Protestant race, ruling by right of primogeniture over this immense space.

Does this right rest at its origin on confiscation and spoliation, as is averred by the Irish? That is of little importance from a legal point of view, for prescription has covered the spoliation by an occupation of two to eight centuries. It is of far greater importance from a moral point of view, because that grievance, ill or well founded, serves as a handle for all agrarian recriminations.

In three out of five cases (so it has been shown by recent statistics) the landlord is an _absentee_, that is to say, he does not reside on his property, nor even in the kingdom, and spends abroad the money he raises on his lands. His income, from that source alone, is sometimes enormous—£10,000 a year—(Lord Greville, Westmeath; Lord Carisford, Wicklow; Mr. Wandesford, Kilkenny; Mr. King, Longford; Lord Inchiquin, Clare); £16,000 a year—(Lord Claremont, Louth; Mr. Naper, Meath; Lord Leconfield, Clare; Lord Ventry, Kerry); £26,000 and £32,000 a year—(Duke of Abercorn, Tyrone; Marquis of Clanricarde, Galway; Lord Kenmare, Kerry); £40,000, £80,000, and even £120,000 a year—(Mr. MacDonnell, Kildare; Marquis of Coningham, Cavan, Clare, and Donegal; Marquis of Londonderry, Down; Marquis of Downshire, &c.). Rent rolls of £4,000, £3,000, and £2,000 a year too plentiful to be mentioned.

Three-fifths at least of those sums are lost every year for Ireland, and they go out of the island without having in any way helped to increase her capital in agricultural machinery, live stock, and general improvements of the land. As a natural consequence, the soil is ill-cultivated, ill-manured, insufficiently covered with cattle. For centuries its energies have suffered a constant draining, and nothing has been done to repair its losses.

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That soil has a tendency to subdivision in the hands of the tenants, who cultivate it by truly pre-historic methods. The figures are given in round numbers as follows:—

Against 24,000 holdings of a value of above £500 a year there are in Ireland 85,000 holdings producing from £25 to £500 a year; 49,000 from £12 to £29 a year; 77,000 from £8 to £12 a year; 196,000 from £4 to £8 a year; lastly, 218,000 holdings of a revenue of _under £4 a year_.

That is to say, out of six or seven hundred thousand families, living exclusively upon the product of the soil, more than two-thirds must get their sustenance from a wretched bit of ground, estimated by the owner himself at a value of £4 to £8 a year!

To state such an economical paradox is to denounce it. Where there is nothing, the landlord, like the king, loses his rights. The situation, then, would already be strangely anomalous, even if the respective titles of landlord and tenant were of the clearest and most transparent kind. But it is complicated in Ireland by the most curious conceptions and customs in matters of landed property.

To understand those conceptions and customs, a Frenchman must begin by putting aside all his Latin ideas. With us, since the Convention, one can always know by the Survey-Rolls to whom belongs absolutely such or such a piece of land. He who owns it is free to sell it, to give it, to let it as he pleases. His right is absolute; it is the right of “use and abuse,” according to the forcible expression of the Roman code. It passes with this absolute character to sons, grandsons, or legatees.

In Ireland it is feudal law that obtains still; an estate is not a property, it is a fief. The lord of that estate is not the proprietor of it, he is an usufructuary, as it were, a life-tenant on it. He has only a limited right to his own land. He cannot sell it without the written consent of his substitute in the entail, and the authorization of the persons, often countless in numbers, that have some hereditary right on his property at the same time with him; most of the estates are encumbered with perpetual rents, served out either to the younger branches of the family, to old servants, or to creditors. All the titulary is free to alienate is his life interest, through some insurance combination with transfer of income.

If we add that the said titulary is generally absent from his property, that he does not manage it personally, and that in many cases he does not even exactly know where it is to be found, we must own that it is no wonder he is considered as a stranger.

A stranger he is besides, in race, by habits, by religion, by language. And yet this stranger,—precisely because his fief, practically inalienable, as it is immovable in its limits, has always been transmitted from father to eldest son in the family,—this stranger, of whom often nothing is known beyond his name, has a story, true or legendary, attached to him and to his title. It matters little that the revenue of the estate was scattered over five hundred heads, in the course of ten generations; the estate remains, and weighs on him with all its weight. We do not speak here of a mere geographical expression, of an area a hundred times parcelled out, altered, disfigured, in less than a century, but of land that for a thousand years, maybe, has changed neither form nor aspect.

At night, by the fireside, old people will recall how in former days this land was the collective property of the clan; how they were defrauded by a political chief that treacherously gave it up to the English, in order to receive investiture from their hands; how, following the fortunes of twenty successive rebellions and repressions, it was confiscated, sequestered, given anew, till it came to the actual landlords. A special literature, ballads, popular imagery, little books, and penny papers constantly harp on that ancient spoliation. It is the only history studied under thatched roofs. The peasant breathes it in the atmosphere, imbibes it by all his pores.

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Convinced that he has a hereditary right to the domain in general, the Irish peasant besides attributes to himself a special and prescriptive right to the plot of ground that he, like the landlord, occupies from father to son, though on a precarious tenure. This right is not purely imaginary; it was consecrated in the year 1860 by a special Act of Parliament, due to the initiative of Mr. Gladstone. Recognised from immemorial times in Ulster, it has always been claimed in all the other parts of Ireland; it is the _tenant right_, what in our own Picardy is called the _droit de marché_.

It is well known in what consist this ancient prerogative of the Picardy farmer (Troplong in the Preface to his _Traité du Louage_, and Lefort in his _Histoire des contrats de location perpétuelle_, have treated it exhaustively): it is simply the privilege of preserving in perpetuity for him and for his heirs, the use of the ground for which he pays rent regularly.

Not only is this privilege not denied to him, but he can transfer it to a third person, for a premium that goes by the name of _intrade_. The amount of that premium is often a third or even a half of the intrinsic value of the soil. Formerly this “_droit de marché_” applied to everything that can be let or hired; the labourers, the threshers, the shepherds of a domain, each claimed it in his own province as a hereditary monopoly. In modern days it is strictly limited to the hiring of servants, in the few districts where it survived the French revolution (in Péronne for instance).

The thing that is only a curious exception in France has remained the rule in Ireland, where _tenant right_ has been in force for the last twenty-seven years. And what, after all, can be better founded than such a right? Has not the tenant, in the majority of cases, made his plot of ground what it is? Has he not tilled it, improved it, manured it, drained it according to his better knowledge; in a word, has he not _created_ it in its actual form?

“Let us,” says the peasant, “admit the rights of the landlord. How could he deny me mine? Are they not legibly written in the furrow I have traced upon this earth, in the fruits I have made her bear?... The land is not a simple material, unreducible like a piece of gold. It is a chemical product, a conglomerate that is valuable especially by reason of all the substances I have mixed up with it during an occupation of ten, twenty, thirty years, or even more.... Who shall dare to deny the share I have brought into this company of which I am the acting manager, and deny that this share belongs to me?”

Such a theory would doubtless appear sheer lunacy to the French proprietor who has paid for his land £400 per hectare, and who has let it for a fixed period at a fixed price, with the understanding that at the end of the contract he shall find it in good condition and shall then do what he pleases with it. That theory, however, is so well suited to Ireland, where custom has the force of law, that the landlord does not even think, practically, of disputing the _tenant’s right_.

As a rule he is only too glad to let his land to the farmers who have traditionally occupied it, on condition that they pay the usual rent.

But in practice, the Land Act of 1860, apparently so much in favour of the tenant, has produced disastrous effects. In the first place, by consecrating the right of the tenant only on improvements and enlargements made _with the landlord’s consent_. Thence the consequence that not only is the landlord never willing to spend a farthing on the improvements of the land, but also that he systematically opposes them, for fear he should have to pay for them in the end. Besides many landlords have signed their new leases only after the farmer has given them a formal renunciation to the tenant right; or else they have taken advantage of the pretext that offered itself, and raised the rent by way of compensation against all risks. Lastly, in many a place where this right has become positive, the rural usurers alone have profited by it by discounting it to the peasantry.

The consequence is that the tenant right is often reduced practically to the implicit acknowledgment of the right of the farmer to occupy the land, so long as he pays his rent. It even happens not unfrequently that there is no lease and the occupancy goes on indefinitely without title. Doubtless this gives it only more value in the eyes of the peasant, naturally inclined to associate this absence of scrivening with the acknowledgment of his traditional rights.

Having been able in certain cases to sell or hire his “interest,” he feels the more inclined to think himself entitled to divide it between his children. That division has become the rule, and what was once a farm of thirty to fifty acres turns out, at the third generation, parcelled in ten or twelve scraps of three to five acres. The landlord might have interfered in the beginning; he might have prevented such a division; he did not do it. Beside, that division of the land is recorded nowhere, has been the occasion of no formal deed; one member of the family answers for all the others, if necessary. How is one to unravel those private arrangements? And, after all, what does it matter, so long as the rents come in?

They come in during ten, during twenty years. Then the harvest is bad, or the sub-dividing of the soil has arrived at the last limit compatible with the needs of those that cultivate it. The rent is no longer paid, and then the difficulties begin. How is one to appraise the improvements introduced in the land by the actual possessor, or by his forefathers? How can one find out what is due to him, even with the best intentions? Is the landlord to give him an indemnity before he evicts him? But then it means ruin to the landlord, who will have to pay precisely because he has not been paid himself. It is the squaring of the circle. When only very small holdings are in question, the difficulty is generally met by remaining in _statu quo_. But supposing the debt to be more important, or to have been transferred to a third person, which is often the case, the question becomes insoluble.

Let us repeat that we must not consider these things from a French point of view. With us the idea of individual property is always of the clearest and simplest. The frequent sales and buying of land contribute still to make this idea of more actual and definite meaning to us. An hectare of grass or vine is, like any other goods, a merchandise that passes from hand to hand, and remains with the highest bidder. In Ireland the sales are rare, and in no case is it a question of absolute ownership; it is only a question about the respective and contradictory rights, some for life, some perpetual, some positive, others customary, of several persons over the same space of land, a space not to be transferred, not to be seized, and not to be fractionised. Is it any wonder that such contradictory pretensions should give rise to constant conflicts?

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Everything concurs to shut in that rural world in a vicious circle. Not only does the peasant lack capital to improve his farming, but, assured of seeing his rent raised if he ventured on the least improvement, he is careful to make none. On his side the landlord, for dread of annoying contestations, opposes as much as lies in his power any amendment susceptible of being turned into a title for his tenant.

Is there a succession of relatively good harvests? He immediately raises the rent. Are the following years bad? He refuses to return to the old rate, in principle at least, because he finds it inconvenient to curtail a revenue to which he has accustomed himself, because he does not like to appear to bow before the League, and also because, being liable to expropriation, he is unwilling to depreciate beforehand the value of his property, which is always valued according to its rent.

Lastly, the holdings, being too often mere plots of ground, are hardly sufficient to keep the peasant and his family occupied, and do not always give him a sufficiency of food. And just because it is so, the unlucky wretch does not find work outside sufficient for the equilibrium of his poor finances. The class of agricultural labourers can hardly be said to exist in numerous districts, because everyone is a small farmer. The tenant then becomes completely sunk in his inaction; he becomes apathetic, and from a sluggard too often turns into a drunkard. His wife is ignorant and careless. She can neither sew, nor is she able to give a palatable taste to his monotonous fare. His children are pallid and dirty. Everything is sad, everything is unlovely around him; and, like a dagger festering in the wound, the thought that all his misery is due to the English usurper ever makes his heart bleed.

To all these causes of poverty and despair must be added the general difficulties that weigh on agriculture in all countries of Europe, the lowered prices of transport, the clearings of land in America and Australia, the awful transatlantic competition, the disease of potatoes.... The picture being finished, one thing only surprises—it is to find one single Irish farmer left in the country.

These explanations, with many others, were given me by a person that it is time I should introduce to the reader; for he is the incarnation of one of the essential wheels in the machinery of Irish landed property—Captain Pembroke Stockton, _land agent_.

The captain is a small fair man, of slim figure, of military aspect, who received me this morning at an office where he employs half a dozen clerks. The room was lined with green-backed ledgers, or, to speak more exactly, with rows of tin boxes, of a chocolate colour. To-night he receives me in a pleasant villa, where he takes me in his phaeton, drawn by two magnificent horses. He may be about fifty-three years old. His calm, regular-featured countenance owes its peculiar character to the line that cuts his forehead transversely, and divides it into two parts, one white, the other bronzed by the sun; a mark left by the English forage-cap, which is like a small muffin, and is worn on one side of the head. The captain has seen service in India; he fought against Nana-Sahib, and even hung with his own hand a certain number of rebels, as he not unfrequently relates after dinner. He sold out when about thirty-five years of age, at a period when selling out still existed (in 1869), and got for his commission £3200, which, besides a small personal competency, allowed him to marry a charming girl, dowerless, according to the excellent English habit; children came: means became too straitened, and, to enlarge them, he resolved to become a _land agent_.

The land agent has no equivalent in France, except for house property. He is neither a notary, nor a steward, and yet he partakes of both, being the intermediary between landlord and tenant. It is he that draws up the leases and settlements; he who receives the rents, who sends out summons, who signs every six months the cheque impatiently expected by the landlord; he who represents him at law, he who negotiates his loans, mortgages, cessions of income, and all other banking operations. In a word, he is the landlord’s prime minister, the person who takes on his shoulders all the management of his affairs, and reduces his profession to the agreeable function of spending money. The land agent naturally resides as a rule in the vicinity of the estate. Therefore he knows everybody by name; knows all about the incumbrances, the resources of every tenant, the length and breadth of every field, the price of produce, the probable value of the harvest; all the threads are in his hands; the landlord counts upon him, approves everything he does, upholds his rigours, and submits to his tolerance. Is he not himself at his mercy? The agent keeps all his deeds of property; has personally written out every one of them; knows, in fact, a great deal more than himself about it.

Let us premise that very considerable interests are in question, and that the rents are ciphered by thousands of pounds sterling. It is easy to understand that the agent must be not only a man of honour, a clever man, a business man, but above all a man presenting the most serious guarantees from a financial point of view.

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That is sufficient to imply that they are not counted by dozens in every district; and that a land agent provided with all the necessary qualifications must before long govern all the principal estates in a county. From his office, situated in the principal county-town, he rules over ten, twenty, or thirty, square miles of land, cultivated by five or six thousand farmers, under some twenty landlords.

Thence the natural consequence that the same policy generally prevails in all the administration of the landed property in one district. The personal character of the landlord may, indeed, influence it in some ways, but the character of the agent is of far greater importance. And thence this other consequence, not less serious for the farmer, and which gives the key to many an act of agrarian violence,—that in case of open war, in case of eviction especially, it is not only an affair between the landlord and the tenant, but also between the tenant and all the landlords in his county, through their one representative.

Has he been evicted? It will be well-nigh impossible for him to get another farm in this county, where he was born, where his relations are living, where he has all his habits, all his roots, as it were. And no work to be had outside agricultural work.... Emigration only is open to him,—which is equivalent to saying that eviction must necessarily be followed by transportation.

Let us imagine all the owners of houses in Paris, bound together in association, to be in the hands of a single agent; let us suppose that a dweller in one of those houses is turned out of it for quarrelling with his _concierge_ or for any other reason, and unable to find a house to live in; we shall then have an idea of the state of mind in which eviction places the Irish peasant. Let us add that this peasant has generally built with his own hand the hut that is taken from him; let us add that for him it is not only a question of knowing whether he shall have a roof over his head, but a question of being able to live by the only trade he has learnt.

For many other reasons, the question of agencies on a large scale still contributes to make the problem more intricate.

In all affairs personal intercourse brings an element the importance of which must not be overlooked. A man will display the greatest inflexibility in writing, who will hesitate to do so face to face with his opponent. If the landlord knew his tenants, if he lived among them, if he entered into their life and saw their misery, very often, may be, he would recoil before barbarous rigours, while the agent, by his very profession is obliged to act with the precision of a guillotine. The influence of women, so gentle and conciliatory, is absent from the system. Pity, sympathy, human contact, have no part in it. Can we wonder if harmony be destroyed?

Examples are not wanting to show that a different system, a policy of gentleness, of direct and mutual concessions, and well directed efforts, bear very different results. I shall quote as an instance the case of an English lady, Miss Sherman Crawford, who bought, some twenty years ago, at a legal sale, a small half-ruined estate in Ireland. She went to live on it, and began by giving her ten or twelve tenants a written promise that they would get the benefit of all their improvements without having cause to fear that the rent should be raised. Then she made it a rule that everyone should come directly to her in case of difficulties, and not to an agent.

She built a few sheds, repaired two or three cottages, on occasions lent a five pound note to facilitate the buying of a cow or pig. That was enough. In spite of the difference in race, religion, and language, she and her peasantry are on perfect terms with each other; her property of Timoleague thrives in the midst of general poverty and wretchedness; not an inch of ground lies uncultivated; the soil is well manured, well drained, well used; the people are happy and contented. To perform that miracle, all that was wanted was a little willingness, a little good management and gentleness.

But then Miss Crawford’s property is neither too large nor too small. She brings there the capital needed, and allows it to circulate in the place. She sees everything with her own eyes, not with the eyes of an agent. She is not the titulary of an entailed estate, and has not given up its income to usurers. Her farms are large enough to allow her tenants to find their sustenance on them, for themselves and their families. In a word, her property is in everything the reverse of what is seen in all other parts of the island.

And in truth, if delirious legislators had proposed to themselves the task of inventing a system of landed property that would give neither security to the owner nor peace to the tenant, where could they have succeeded better than with the Irish system? It is at once stupid and ferocious, absurd and monstrous. How true, alas! that human genius, so well able sometimes to profit by natural forces, excels also in sterilizing them, in making them homicides!