LAND SYSTEMS

&c.

INTRODUCTION.

ALONG with a republication of several essays in deference to many suggestions, this volume contains additional articles on the Land Systems of Ireland and England, and on the industrial economy of La Creuse, Westphalia and the Ruhr Basin, and Belgium, founded on later study and local inquiry.

It appears to the author that the Land Systems of England and Ireland are best studied together. The two systems react in many ways on each other; their results present some striking resemblances, and where they differ most, the differences are instructive. They have a common origin and foundation. The first sentence in Mr. Furlong's standard treatise on the Law of Landlord and Tenant in Ireland is: The common law regulating the enjoyment of real property

• Marked with an asterisk in the table of contents.

B

both in England and in Ireland is founded upon and governed by the principles of the feudal system.' Their similarity of structure is the main cause why the Irish land system has remained intact down to the introduction of the Land Bill now before Parliament. This is so, not only because the landowners of England have been reluctant to permit interference with powers similar to their own, but also through the influence of the structure of the English land system on the ideas of other classes. Had there been in England a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants' improvements, an open registration of title and transfer, a considerable number of peasant properties, the rural economy of England would long since have created unanswerable objections to the Irish land system in the public mind.

On the other hand, there are striking differences in the results of the two systems, which throw much light on both. The Land System of Ireland, for example, tends to suppress the existence of towns; that of England, on the contrary, to give to large towns undue predominance in our industrial and social economy. The English agricultural labourer, again, answers to the Irish small tenant-at-will. And emigration is the movement in the case of Ireland corresponding with immigration into large towns in England. The latter movement is moreover swollen by immigrant

poverty from Ireland; and there is a reflux of its own poverty into that island.

Both Irish emigration and English immigration into towns contrast curiously with an immigration from the country into the towns of France, arising from a very different cause, the economic and political effects of which are among the subjects discussed in the two articles on La Creuse.

Although the author has described effects of the Land Systems of France, Germany, and Belgium, he has, in doing so, simply recorded facts which have come under his own observation, and the genuine impressions made on his mind by careful inquiry on the spot. He has endeavoured also to indicate the influences of geological and other physical conditions on the industrial economy of the Continental localities of which a description is given in the volume. Without reference to such conditions, to history, and to positive institutions, the author believes it impossible for the economist to arrive at a true theory of the causes which govern the production and distribution of wealth.

It is right to acknowledge the obligations the author is under to the extensive and profound learning of his friend Mr. Francis S. Reilly for information and suggestion on many, but especially legal, subjects; although he ought to add that Mr. Reilly is in no way responsible for his conclusions.

Without the hospitable aid and instruction which he has received from M. Léonce de Lavergne during visits to La Creuse, it is improbable that he would have attempted a description of that singular departmentthe history of which, isolated as it is, has been strangely interwoven with the political and social history of France for more than two hundred

years.

2 STONE BUILDINGS, LINCOLN'S INN: February 21, 1870.

5

THE STATE OF IRELAND,* 1867.

6

STUDENTS of Irish history know how from time to time in its troubled course, after some overwhelming disaster, there has come a pause in misfortune, a tranquil interval, when statesmen, beholding the capabilities of the country and its people, and mistaking the signs of exhaustion for those of a new life of peace and prosperity, congratulated themselves upon the regeneration of Ireland in their own days. In the first nine years of King James,' wrote Sir John Davis, after three rebellions in the reign of Elizabeth, there hath been more done in the reformation of the kingdom than in the 440 years since the Conquest.' A still profounder statesman, Bacon, four years afterwards congratulated a Chief Justice of Ireland on his appointment at a time when that kingdom, which within these twenty years wise men were wont to doubt whether they should wish it to be a pool, is like now to become a garden, and younger sister to Great Britain.' A generation had not passed before these words were followed by

• Reprinted from Macmillan's Magazine' for February 1867. In the reprint of this and other essays in the volume, a passage here and there has been omitted. In other respects hardly any change has been made. But as the situation of things has changed in succeeding years, changes in the author's views may occasionally appear, owing to that cause, or to further inquiry and reflection.