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interwoven, and it is a misfortune in this as in many other cases that a description in words cannot place things in their true relative position at once under the eye. As they can be presented only in succession, it is natural to glance first at the state of the country, which comes first in the natural order of development, and goes far to determine the state of the town; although it must be subsequently shown that it is by no means only by its effects on the rural population and on agriculture that the land system militates against the prosperity of other employments and classes. Not only is the town dependent on its rural neighbourhood for a local market, and for cheap supplies of materials and food, and is straitened accordingly if the population and cultivation around it decline, but security and freedom of action are even more necessary to its prosperity and its very existence. Town industry is a more delicate plant and of slower growth than the industry of the country. It is the creation of man-nature does nothing for it directly. The country cannot disappear under any land system, and will produce something, at least in these islands under any. Crops will rise and ripen even under a notice to quit; grass will grow over a soil so fertile as Ireland's without even an effort on the part of the husbandman. But the town draws no nutriment from the ground on which it stands, nor from the air around; rains do not refresh it, suns do not bring it to maturity, its harvests need much costlier sowing and labour, and much longer abstinence. Whatever evils then follow in the case of the country from insecurity and restraints on industrial energy must be tenfold greater in the case of the town. The effects of the Irish Land System on agriculture deserve attention accordingly, not only for their own sake, or for their immediate bearing on other industries, but also as examples of influences operating with far greater force on the latter; although for that very reason their effects may be to a great extent indiscernible. Towns and villages that are falling to decay may be seen, those which have altogether disappeared, and those which have been prevented from coming into existence, are invisible.

And looking even at the agricultural side of the island, one may see such evidence of the effects of a land system essentially anti-industrial (if the expression may be allowed) in its structure and principles, because essentially feudal, that the chief mark of its influence on the life and business of towns might almost be expected to be an entire absence of towns. It is not indeed a feudal land system in the sense of securing the defence of the State; but it is so in aiming at the concentration of territory and power in a few families and in the feudal line, by regulations and restrictions absolutely hostile to all commercial policy and industrial progress.

One observation relating to both country and town should be borne in mind throughout; namely, that there ought to have been in the case of both continuous and rapid improvement in the last twenty years; the period selected on all sides as a test of the working of the system under which the island is placed. That period includes the sudden removal of an enormous mass of pauperism; the effects of national education; an extensive system of drainage effected by public works and loans; a general advance throughout the world in the industrial arts; and an immense improvement in the commercial position of the island by means of roads, railways, and steam navigation, with a consequent augmentation of the value of Irish commodities which official statistics by no means sufficiently indicate. An illustration of the impetus which the combination of new methods of locomotion ought naturally to have given to agriculture is afforded in the instance of roads alone; with an excellent system of which the undervalued public works, executed during the famine, furnished the island. Describing in 1845 the importance of means of internal transportation for the development of the industrial resources of Ireland, Sir Robert Kane observed : The consequence of not having roads is illustrated by the evidence of Mr. Fetherstone, who, describing some of his important improvements to a Committee of the House of Commons, says, "The oats these lands grow is so very fine, and of such a rich gold colour, that if we can possibly get it down to the lowlands, we sell it for seed oats; but the roads being so bad, we put it to the purpose of illicit distillation. It is a great deal cheaper to distil it than bring it to market, for we could only bring a sack at a time. There are no roads. The oats are beautiful, and an enormous crop; but what is the good of it? you cannot send it to market."" Add to roads railways, such as they ought to be, or even such as they are; to both

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add rapid conveyance to the chief English ports, and the consequent leap in the prices of Irish produce, and what ought not to have been the gains of Irish producers and the improvement in the methods of production? The following table of comparative prices was given in evidence before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1867:

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Even this comparison (probably furnished from some principal town on the eastern coast) falls considerably short of showing the real rise in the prices of many İrish commodities throughout the greater part of the island in the last twenty years; for in numerous inland and western localities the prices of meat and butter were doubled-those of poultry much more than doubled-immediately by railways.

Markets,'

says M. de Lavergne, in his work on the Rural Economy of England and Ireland, referring, it is well to observe, to the aptitude of some countries for small farms, 'this is the greatest and most pressing requirement of agriculture. There is only one law which admits of no exception, and which everywhere produces the same results the law of markets.' But

* The following prices are given in 'Reports from Poor-Law Inspectors on Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Ireland, 1870,' p. 26:

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M. de Lavergne had first laid it down that the natural consequences of markets is the introduction of leases; just as Adam Smith traces the origin of long leases on the decline of feudalism to the new markets opened by commerce for the produce of agriculture and the necessity of increased security for its improvement. Rising prices in themselves and unaccompanied by security, only imperil the position of the tenantfarmer, by tempting the proprietor to sudden changes in the terms of the tenure, or in the tenancy itself. And in Ireland the actual accompaniment of markets was additional insecurity. Mere tenure-at-will became commoner than before the Devon Commission condemned it as 'a pressing grievance to all classes of tenants, paralysing all exertions, and placing a fatal impediment in the way of improvement.' The natural consequence has been that system of husbandry which so experienced a judge as Mr. Caird lately described as everywhere meeting his eye, save in Ulster and the eastern seaboard of the country: 'What the ground will yield from year to year at the least cost of time, labour, and money is taken from it.' The description might stand for an economic definition of tenure from year to year. On the very border of commerce with England, under better conditions of tenure than elsewhere prevalent, and under landowners more generally resident, a considerable change for the better in Irish husbandry has taken place on the whole; although there are indications that the progress even of that favoured side of the island has come to a stand-still, and that the Ulster farmer has been made to feel that,

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