If an Irish landlord wishes to improve his property, he finds that he cannot venture to lay out capital upon it, without increasing the size of the holdings. He cannot erect farm-buildings on plots of a few acres ; the construction and repair of farm-buildings by the landlord implies the existence of large farms, and a respectable tenantry. A landlord has no hold on a cottier tenantry: they are not responsible persons, nor can they be trusted with valuable property. In Ireland, the difficulty of living by wages makes every man look to the land for a maintenance: hence arises the practice of tenants dividing their land among their children, and erecting a mud hovel for each new-married couple. As a man cannot hope to maintain himself by his own labour, he always looks to the principle of inheritance for support; and thus the father is induced to divide among his children whatever he has any power over.

"It is impossible (says Mr. Furlong, the agent of the Earl of Devon's estate in the county of Limerick) to prevent the subdivision of land among the sons; for whether there is a lease or not, they deal with their ground in the same manner. They often make wills, even when they have no lease, and they even give leases when they have none themselves *."

With this constant and irresistible tendency to subdivide land, it often happens that the landlord, at the expiration of a lease, finds thirty or forty tenants, and as many mud cabins, instead of the one tenant to whom the farm was originally let. What is a landlord under these circumstances to do? Either he must surrender

to the evil, which will inevitably go on increasing; or he must set about clearing his estate, in order to con

*Report of Irish Poor Commission, Appendix A., p. 691.

solidate the holdings. Now there are only two ways in which a landlord can set about clearing an estate; he may buy out the tenants, and furnish them with the means of emigration, an expense which few persons are able to incur; or he may forcibly eject them, and throw down their cabins, and thus produce the mischief already explained.

The consequence of this crossing of interests is, that the system is at a dead lock; no individual can by his unassisted energy hope to extricate himself from its shackles and the evil is constantly progressive, enlarging itself by its own action, and creating the necessity for its own continuance. There seems no hope that the society will, by its spontaneous efforts, work out a cure; so far from it, that the rapid and inevitable tendency is from bad to worse. The law alone can furnish a remedy; by its assistance alone can the transition of the peasantry from the cottier to the labourer state be effected. What is wanted is to give the peasant some third alternative besides land and starvation, by which he may be induced to relax that desperate grasp with which he clings to his potatoground. This alternative (as it seems to me) can alone be furnished by a LEGAL PROVISION FOR THE

POOR.

We are quite ready to admit the force of all the objections which, within the last thirty-five years, have been urged against the principle of giving one man a right to be maintained out of another man's property. There is no doubt that it is far better to prevent poverty than to cure it; and that a cure, which produces more disease than it relieves, is a bad one. There is no doubt that if men are guaranteed against the conse

Y

quences of their vice, laziness, and improvidence, it may be expected that they will become vicious, lazy, and improvident. There is no doubt that the duties of family and neighbourhood will be neglected, if the parish undertakes to pay for their discharge; and that frauds will be committed by all classes of employers, if they find that they can pay their workmen with their neighbours' money.

Yet, while we admit to the full all these fundamental objections to the principle of supporting the poor from the property of others, we are not to fix our eyes exclusively on the evil effects of compulsory alms-giving. For instance, if the legal right to relief produces improvidence, insolence, and shamelessness, it also produces a feeling of security for the future, and the absence of fraud and servility in order to gain relief. It may be bad to feel no uneasiness about the future, but it is worse to feel so little secure, as to be tempted to intimidate, burn, beat and murder, in order to avert the apprehended evil. It may be bad to approach the parish pay-table with an unabashed or a menacing countenance; but it is worse to employ the various contrivances for raising money to which the mendicant is forced to have recourse. Nor does it follow that because a particular system of poor-laws, administered in a particular manner, is bad, therefore the absence of all legal relief is good. The reverse of wrong is not always right. The natural system may, in a diseased state, produce the same results as the abuses of the artificial system. If the English poorlaws have had their Swing fires and their riots, the Irish voluntary system has had its Whiteboyism.

However, admitting, as we do, the full force of the

arguments against legal relief, which have been urged by Mr. Malthus, Dr. Chalmers, and Mr. Senior*, it yet seems to me that there are peculiar circumstances in the present condition of Ireland which nullify all these reasonings. All legislative theories are founded on a certain supposed simple state of things, from which all extraordinary and disturbing forces are abstracted. Hence, in applying theory to practice, it is always necessary to add those facts which exist in the given case, and to consider, first, whether any of the existing facts are different from the data assumed by the theorist; and, secondly, whether those additional facts which exist in reality are sufficient to counterbalance the conclusion indicated by the naked theory. It is this latter process in which consists the main difficulty in the application of scientific knowledge; for it may happen that the theory may be correct (that is, it may be logically deduced from true premises), and yet there may, in the individual case, be other circumstances existing, together with those supposed in the theory, which destroy its validity. Thus a scheme for a machine, made on the hypothesis of the absence of friction, would probably fail, if tried with materials whose surfaces acted on one another. In like manner

* The principle of the chief objection to compulsory relief is well stated by Tacitus, in relating the refusal of Tiberius to follow the example of Augustus, in bestowing money on a spendthrift nobleman named Hortalus. "Dedit tibi, Hortale, Divus Augustus pecuniam (Tiberius is made to say), sed non compellatus, nec ea lege ut semper daretur; languescet alioqui industria, intendetur socordia, si nullus ex se metus aut spes; et securi omnes aliena subsidia expectabunt, sibi ignavi, nobis graves." Ann. ii. 38. Tiberius speaks as the representative of the state, and therefore says "nobis graves."

Those who talk of "true in theory and false in practice" have probably some obscure perception of this truth.

it is scarcely possible to conceive any legislative theory which shall be applicable in all possible combinations of circumstances. The advocates of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy have been for more than two thousand years respectively attempting to prove that each form of government is the best, but without satisfying mankind that different forms of government are not suited to different states of society. Free trade is on the whole beneficial, but a scarcity might justify a prohibition to export corn. Free circulation of persons is beneficial, but the existence of a pestilential disease might justify the stoppage of intercourse.

Now there are (as it seems to me), in the present state of Ireland, peculiar circumstances sufficient to outweigh the general arguments against compulsory relief; there is an object of paramount importance to be attained by this means, which no other measure will reach. Poor-laws are (in my opinion) imperatively needed in Ireland, not in order merely to relieve the sick, the aged, and the infirm; not merely to provide for widows, deserted children, and orphans; not in order to prevent Protestant landlords ejecting their Catholic tenants for electioneering purposes; not in order to stop the immigration of the Irish into Great Britain; not in order to raise the price of corn, and to diminish the exportation of Irish agricultural produce; but in order to give the Irish peasant an alternative besides the possession of land and starvation, and this for the sake of facilitating the transition from small to large farms, from the rude to the systematic mode of cultivation.

The facilities which a legal system of relief would offer for the effecting of this transition, and for the con