DOLMAN'S MAGAZINE. No. I. MARCH 1, 1845. VOL. I. CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SIR ROBERT PEEL AND MR. BESTE, ON IRISH AGRARIAN OUTRAGES. We believe it is usual to state, in the first number of every new publication, the principles on which it is to be conducted. We must beg to decline complying with this custom. We had much rather that our readers should be content to take us as they find us. We had much rather that the whole of this number should be considered as our letter of introduction,-we hope we may say of recommendation. We request the reader to collect from it what are our principles-public, private, and religious. Perhaps he will say that we have no principles at all: he will err if he does. Time will show that this is not an unprincipled Magazine. The short correspondence which has been placed in our hands, and which we are happy to publish here, might not have been deemed sufficiently weighty for an opening article, were it not for the mighty interests to which it refers, and which are daily increasing in importance. The poor-law in Ireland is still, we trust, only an experiment. The little success which has attended its introduction, does not stamp it as a settled institution of the country. It is mixed up with, it is dependent upon wants which are, as yet, barely understood: upon difficulties weighing upon the labouring population of England as well as that of Ireland-difficulties which charity, whether legal or private, can but slightly alleviate, and which daily call for the attention of the legislature in a louder and yet a louder voice. VOL. I. B 66 Who, indeed, can look upon poor-laws as a panacea for the evils of Ireland or of England, while the public mind is agitated by questions involving the very right of one class to minister to the wants of another class?-aye, for it is futile to talk of poorlaws while the very right of the landowner to those possessions which supply the relief, is contested. We have heard that welltaught paupers have said, "If the land will not maintain the poor, let the poor take the land and maintain themselves!" And to what does all the outcry against landowners, which has been so industriously got up for some months past, tend, but to the promulgation of such a creed? "Property has its duties as well as its rights:" "Holders of property are but the stewards of God for the poor." Granted, gentlemen, granted: but methinks these are doctrines better suited to the pulpit than to schools of political economy; better inculcated by the ministers of religion, than by the daily newspapers or by political agitators. Fixity of tenure" is not the only doctrine lately broached which directly strikes at the rights of all possession in England as well as in Ireland. An outcry has been raised against English landowners, not only for maintaining the duties on foreign corn, but also for the amount of rent they receive for their land; for the wretched state of the cottages they provide for their labourers; for the waste of corn occasioned by their game preserves; and for the unimproved cultivation of their estates. What are all these complaints, except the first, but direct attacks upon the rights of property? We except the first complaint, because we hold that no body of men in the state has a right to drive any other body of men from the free exercise of their industry. But the remainder of the black catalogue of landowners' sins, is drawn up by those who are either ignorant of the first principles of political economy (or, if that word be objected to, of common sense) or who else seek to curry popular favour by swelling an unmeaning cry, that they may hereafter turn it to what they believe to be a good purpose. Can all these writers and speakers forget that the matters which arouse their indignation are matters of simple contract between man and man? The land is too highly rented: then why does the tenant take it?-He cannot find any other mode of investing his capital. That is a totally different question: that is not the fault of the landlord-at least not of the individual in his commercial character, as the seller of the use of his lands. The tenant knows to what laws the produce of that land is subjected: he makes his calculations, or, if he does not make them, it is his own fault. In real fact, a farmer takes the land because he knows that, if he does not, some one else will; and because he knows that, high as the rent may appear to be to those who know nothing of the cultivation of land, he will be enabled to spend fifty per cent interest upon his capital, where the manufacturer only realizes fifteen. The state of the cottages inhabited by the agricultural labourers is, we freely admit, wretched: we admit that they are, in general, so damp and ill-built as to promote disease; so small as to promote indecency and immorality; and many, very many thanks are due to Mr. Sheridan for having directed the attention of his Dorsetshire neighbours to the subject, and, through them, the attention of the whole country. Still, let us not be carried away by a vain feeling of philanthropy, which, hurrying us on to imaginary cures, leads us astray from the real one. The plain question is, could those who inhabit these wretched tenements afford to pay for better? It is easy to exclaim against the badness of cottages: but in every neighbourhood, there are dwellings of different sizes: which do the poor most readily rent, the cheaper or the dearer houses? We presume it will hardly be contended that landowners ought to build large cottages and to let them for the same rent they receive for small ones. "Oh, but some are so old and dilapidated that they are not fit for the habitation of human beings." What remedy would you propose? "Pull them down," you answer with the glibness of a gentleman living in a parlour lodging, who never asked himself why he did not rent the whole house? Pull them down forsooth! and turn their poor inmates into the lane? for this must be their lot, unless we are able to build a new house for them, and to let it to them at the same rent as they pay for the old one. No, no; as a matter of charity, every owner of land or of houses will do all he can to alleviate the sufferings of the poor around him;-will make their homes comfortable; will let them at low rents, or will give them rent free;-but he who wishes practically and permanently to improve the condition of the poor in this respect as well as in others, will enable them to earn such wages as will empower them to command comfortable cottages. But talk not of CHARITY to the poor, while you withhold from them their RIGHTS. Their wages will be increased by increasing their employment: make that employment profitable, and individual enterprise will supply it: enable them to pay the rent of good houses, and individual enterprise will build good houses for them. As we have mentioned the preservation of game as one of the crimes it is just now the fashion to charge upon landowners, we must say a few words on the accusation, and those few will be more than it deserves. We are not writing here on the policy of the game laws, of those laws which inflict heavier punishments for an interference with our amusements than for the commission of serious felonies; we allude only to the charge of ruining tenants by keeping game that eats up their crops. But this is a simple matter of barter between landlord and tenant; the tenant knows to what injury he is liable when he takes the land, and he pays a proportionably less rent. The outcry against landlords on this score is as insensate as that which the member for Knaresborough attempted to raise against the mill-owners, for manufacturing inferior pieces of cotton goods for those who could not afford to purchase the best. In neither case, is the bargain a forced one. The inferior cultivation of their lands is, however, the fashionable charge against the lords of the soil: and the admissions of ignorance on the part of agriculturists, made by the Agricultural Societies themselves, seem to make it impossible to refute this accusation, still less to maintain a right in landowners" to do what they please with their own." "Their own!" exclaims the modern Gracchus; "property has its duties as well as its rights." Aye; and you are the expounder of those duties and of those rights, to boot. The Duke of So-and-so has so many hundred acres of moorland; make him drain and improve them, and they will become productive pastures. He has so many scores of acres in his park; make him plough them up, and the park will be as fine an arable farm as any in the county. He has so many roods of pleasure grounds; make him divide it into allotments for the poor. He has dozens of flower-pots in his green-house; what bushels of potatoes might be grown in them, did he only understand the duties of property as well as its rights! What, indeed, is the poor-law in England; what has it been from its introduction by Elizabeth, but a measure of police? Owing to the ruin of their employers (the monks) masses of people are thrown out of work: laws are enacted to compel the rich to maintain them; gradually the rich substitute a compliance with a legal obligation for the exercise of those charities ordained of God; gradually the poor lose all sense of self-dependence and prefer an idle life, at the cost of the parish, to a provident one supported by their own industry; gradually it becomes impossible to ascertain who are the willing idlers and who are the really indigent; and the workhouse test is applied to distinguish the one from the other. Such has been the case in England; but different, very different has been the state of the agricultural poor in Ireland. No one has ever questioned their willingness to work, evinced by their weary journeys amongst a hostile population (for such the competing English labouring classes have been to them) in search of employment. No one has ever questioned their willingness to expend their strength in their own country, to obtain such wages as would not be deemed sufficient to keep an English peasant from starving. No workhouse could, therefore, be wanted in Ireland, to test the reality of their distress or their willingness to labour. A workhouse did not remove the cause of their suffering; its originators did not even look to that cause. That origin was plain enough to be seen. It needed no commissioners to find out that the Irish peasant was in a state of starvation, because no one employed him, because daily pay was not to be had in the country in exchange for daily labour. We say not that, under such circumstances, a poor-law without the workhouse test was the proper remedy for the disease; on the contrary, we hold that, were all restrictions removed from the employment of capital throughout the world, labour would soon be at a premium in the market, while the natural feelings of charity would not be blunted by forced contributions; while domestic ties and affections would not be interfered with; while the young would not be made independent of the love of the old, nor the old of the gratitude of the young. Property has, indeed, its duties as well as its rights. God forbid that we should attempt to lessen to the mind of the least holder of property a sense of the responsibility which the possession entails upon him. But those duties are duties of charity, of good will, of forbearance, of mercy; the duty of self-abnegation, instead of laws upheld for his own benefit and to the injury of the poor; the exercise of those kindly feelings implanted by the great God of nature in the heart of man, and to the sympathy of which that same great God has committed the lot of his poorer creatures. But the feelings that would prompt such charities between the rich and the poor are, in no way, connected with matters of barter, with questions of political economy. And the very confused notions which exist at the present day on these subjects, have made it necessary for us thus shortly to recur to first principles, before we laid before our readers any arguments on Irish poor-laws or Irish agrarian outrages. The great fund of natural good feeling towards the poor is now working in the public mind more strongly than it has done for the last three centuries. Only let it not confuse questions of commerce with questions of charity; let it not offer the poor eleemosinary assistance instead of those rights which might enable them to do without it. It is true, woefully true, that poverty and distress exist in England and in Ireland to an unprecedented extent; that the condition of the labouring classes has deteriorated, while immense masses of wealth have accumulated in the hands of a few. This is not the place to seek out the causes of such things. Our business is with the remedies proposed-to show the injustice as |
