others), who cannot give a lease of sufficient length to tempt builders. A part of this very suburb, in which perpetual interests could be purchased, has been renovated like the rest of the town, and is the site of one of its principal enterprises. We may thus dismiss to the final receptacle of what have been called sophismes économiques the theory that the rise in the price of labour proves and measures the benefit of emigration to Ireland. A much more rational criterion has been suggested by a judicious writer who distinguishes between the first flight of the famine-stricken victims of the potato disease, and the emigration in steamers of later years. Admitting the soundness of the distinction, we, however, include in one economic category of wasteful depopulation the whole exodus caused by obstacles to the development of the industrial resources of the island. The whole stream of emigration which flows from that sourcefrom imprisoned natural wealth, from the legal insecurity of industrial enterprise and improvement is a current of decline, not of progress; and it is among the grave mischiefs of the doctrines so sedulously diffused respecting the advantage of emigration, that it misleads. the mind of the public and of the Irish proprietors to look for a cure of the evils of Ireland in one of the results of their perpetuation. If the natural resources of Ireland had been made as accessible as those of America, in a cosmopolitan sense (though not necessarily in reference to the interests of Ireland or the United Kingdom even in that case), whatever emigration might have taken place, might be pronounced : natural and beneficial. But so long as Ireland has natural resources undeveloped, and capital unemployed, through the state of the law, the departure of the flower of the population must be laid to the charge of the legislature as a calamity resulting from its neglect. The law is the same in England,' a legislator answers. The law of tenure is not the same, as a legislator ought to know; still less are the customs the same upon which the law in both islands is based. And it is upon a country with the calamitous history of Ireland that a legal system has been imposed, of which the results even in England are to be seen in the faces of its crowded city population, and of its degraded agricultural labourers. At the beginning of this article reference was made to the frequent confusion under a common name of different and even opposite phenomena, of industrial energy with the love of idle power under the name of private interest, or the desire of wealth, of the most unequal means of payment and unequal wages, under the denomination of an aggregate wages fund, of demands which are not supplied along with demands which are, under the formula of demand and supply. We believe that candid readers of these pages will pronounce not only that the history of Ireland has been one long profligate waste of national resources of every kind, but that one of the most monstrous episodes in that history is the waste of industrial power, and of national strength which takes the name of emigration, along with that widely different movement of industrial enterprise and colonising vigour which peoples and reclaims the waste places of the earth. On April 1, 1845 the population of Ireland was not far short of eight millions and a half; on April 1, 1868 it was little above five millions and a half; on April 1, 1871, there is reason to believe it will scarcely exceed the population of Belgium on little more than a third of the space. So much the better, we have heard it said; Ireland ought to be a sheepfarm for England. And why not England a sheep-farm for France? as it perhaps might have become before now but for its over populated cities, and the mines in which its people can be packed under ground. What must be the feeling of the exiled peasantry of Ireland at the other side of the Atlantic, when a grave American professor, in a treatise on the principles of political economy, speaks as follows of Irish emigration? The policy of English landlords is to depopulate their estates, to make the peasantry give place to flocks and herds as in the north of Scotland, or to compel them to emigrate to foreign lands as in Ireland. Thus they imitate the system which has been practised for centuries in the Roman Campagna, which reduced the fields of Italy in the age of Pliny to a desert, and subsequently surrendered them to the northern barbarians because there were not men enough to defend them.' The political instinct must be absent from the present generation, if it does not see the wrong which is being done to the next one-a wrong in the strictest economic sense as regards the loss of security as well as of industrial power. Audiet pugnas vitio parentum POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE TENURE OF LAND.* THE proposal of the Government to give the tenantry of Ireland some legal security for improvements has been encountered by an objection, claiming to possess the authority of an economic maxim, and seeking to stifle in limine all legislation in favour of tenants, on the ground that it is a settled principle of political economy that the management of private property should be left to private interest; and that the relation of landlord and tenant being one of contract, the sole duty of the State is to enforce the performance of contracts. At first sight, this might appear to derive strong confirmation froin the general tendency of the jurisprudence of societies, as they advance in civilisation to extend the sphere of free contract, and to curtail that of control on the part of the State. Mr. Maine, in his philosophical comparison of modern with ancient law, observes, The society of our day is mainly distinguished from that of preceding generations by the largeness of the sphere which is occupied in it by contract. The science of political economy would fail to correspond with the facts of life, if it were not true that imperative law had abandoned the largest Reprinted from the 'Fortnightly Review, June 1, 1866. part of the field which it once occupied. The bias, indeed, of most persons trained in political economy, is to consider the general truth as entitled to become universal; and when they apply this science as an art, their efforts are ordinarily directed to enlarging the province of contract, and to curtailing that of imperative law, except so far as law is necessary to enforce the performance of contracts.'* But it is very remarkable that as regards the relation of landlord and tenant, the tendency, both of the jurisprudence of our Courts and of the direct legislation of Parliament, has been steadily in the opposite direction to that described by Mr. Maine; step after step has been taken to give tenants by law a security and encouragement for improvements which their own contracts fail to afford. The question arises whether these interpositions of the law are really violations of the policy of non-interference, except to secure the protection of property and the performance of contracts? I shall endeavour to show that such interferences not only are based on the very principle of economical policy on account of which the State does interfere to protect property and enforce contracts, but fall far short of affording the degree of security which the position of tenants and the interests of the public, especially in Ireland, require. It was not until the last century that the Courts, exercising, as they have often beneficially done, their power of indirect legislation in opposition to the old common law, decided that buildings and other fixtures * 'Ancient Law,' chap. ix. |