ECONOMICS FOR IRISHMEN.*
THREE is a tradition among reviewers that only big books deserve careful reviews ; but any one who will take the troUble to read " Pat's " Economics for Irishmen will be forced to the conclusion that the book is a serious contribution to the • Zcoaostas for irugusda. By Pat. Dublin z 3faunsal awl Co. nett • discussion of many Irish questions, although it is issued in paper covers at one shilling net. The writer is a young Irish- man who obtained experience as a journalist in England, and then returned to the Irish farm on which he was born to try and lift his family out of the bog. His farming has been so successful that people come even from other counties to look at his bit of land—and go back to their homes to persist in their own old ruts. It is in order to ask why Irishmen so persist in preferring inefficiency to progress that "Pat" has written his book. Few of his own countrymen will be pleased with his conclusions, for, with the ruthless honesty of an acute and logical mind, he tears off the tinsel from the images on which Irishmen love to feast their eyes. The book, however, is by no means purely destructive. It is the work of a man who has a clear insight into the root-principles of sound economics, and who possesses a happy knack of expressing those principles in racy phrases that are far more effective than the ponderous elaborations of the academic professor.
The main thesis of the book is that Ireland's failure is directly traceable to Irish faults. Such a doctrine is not likely to be popular in a country which has lived for genera- tions in the belief that all its troubles are due to other people's crimes. On this comfortable belief "Pat" pours undiluted scorn. He is contemptuous about the manner in which his countrymen are always harking back to events of the eighteenth or earlier centuries in order to justify their own laziness, or worse, at the present day. He is equally contemptuous of the pauperising expedients by which England has, with childish faith in the power of Acts of Parliament, attempted to make good her alleged lathes in past generations. Himself a worker with hand and brain, " Pat" has the sense to see that national progress is impossible unless the individuals who compose the nation themselves put their own shoulders to the wheel.
In the forefront of the faults from which Irishmen suffer their candid countryman puts the vice of envy. "If there be one vice which stands out notably in the Irish character, as compared with other people's, it is the vice of envy ; and economic reflection shows us that on the whole we gain instead of losing by our neighbour's prosperity, our own being facilitated by it." If " Pat " had followed the Fiscal con- troversy as closely as some of us have been obliged to do, he would have known that there are a good many English Pro- tectionists who share this vice of Irish peasants, and are still unable to perceive that the prosperity of France and Germany and America means a wider outlet for British trade. In Ireland the vice of envy has this direct result, that it induces men to struggle over the division of the wealth which exists instead of devoting their energies to creating a larger total for the benefit of all. "Pat" calculates from his own experience that the present gross annual yield of an average holding let at £10 a year is not more than £35, and that this miserable sum could without additional labour, but by the exercise of more intelligence, be increased to £100. Yet the tenant, instead of working to obtain such an increase in the yield of his farm, which would benefit not himself only, but the whole Irish nation, prefers to agitate for a reduction in his rent. "An enlightened neighbour of mine pays 37s. a year rent, and thinks that a reduction of 4s. in the £ would mean prosperity to him."
Doubtless this Irish reluctance to make improvements has been to a considerable extent encouraged by the defects of the law, which permitted the landlord to pocket the value of the improvements his tenant had made. That tradition still survived even after the Act of 1881, and the Land Commis- sioners made it a practice to reduce the judicial rents on badly cultivated farms, while leaving the rents untouched, or even raising them, on farms which have been improved by the tenants' energy. This does not, however, dispose of the matter. English tenants have always been liable to have their rents raised on their own improvements. Yet that risk does not in general deter them from making, within the limits of their capacity, the best use of the land for their own benefit, even though the landlord may benefit also. The point here raised is fundamental, and may be com- mended to the consideration of some English Trade-Unionists of the less educated type. All the useful work we do must benefit others as well as ourselves ; but if we are so permeated with the spirit of envy that other people's profit fa pain- and gall- to us, -then we musk sit still with our
arms folded, growing poorer and poorer, while our minds become ever blacker with bitterness.
Another Irish vice to which " Pat " has the candour to call the attention of his countrymen is sheer laziness. Here are two pictures from his own observation
" On a fine working day last winter I walked fourteen statute miles in a congested district in Mayo—from Swinford to Bally- hannis—to observe the better at my walking pace how the people might happen to be occupied for the day, and in the whole journey I sew 'at work' only one man, who had his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders humped against the wind. He was looking among his sheep, and so I call it work, he being hn. Irish farmer."
In the rich county of Meath, summer after summer, during the hay harvest, numbers of able-bodied men refuse good wages, and prop themselves on the sunny side of the wall, while their wives take in washing to support the children, and sometimes take contracts more objectionable than washing. ' In Raven I have seen those men week after week refusing 4s. a day, waiting till sunset to hold a horse for 6d., and ready at any hour to hold a discussion on foreign politics. One of these used to tell me Russia's plans for invading India, and how the Irish question would be affected by it."
This laziness is not merely manual, it is mental as well, and manifests itself disastrously in a general reluctance to take the trouble to direct intelligently the labour of others, with the result that farming on a large scale, as practised in England and Scotland, is almost unknown in Ireland. Small holdings are all very well as a "side-show"—if the phrase may be used—but to attempt to carry on the whole agriculture of a nation on a basis of small holdings is to neglect the enormous advantages which accrue to production from an intelligent use of capital. Yet so-called land reformers, who would never dream of going back to the hand-loom, talk as if the salvation of mankind were to be found in small holdings and spade husbandry. Our young Irish economist has little sympathy with such reactionary ideals. He sees under his own eyes the persisting evil of small holdings, and be points out that this evil has actually been intensified by the Land Purchase Act of 1903. The men who have now been endowed with the freehold of their farms, at the expense of the British and Irish taxpayer, had given no previous proof of their capacity to make the beat use of the land. They had only proved their capacity to conduct a political agitation. They were previously indifferent to what should have been the real work of their lives ; they remain indifferent still, and perhaps even more indifferent than before, because deluded with the idea that, as they have become landlords, they need no longer work.
From his criticism of the Irish people "Pat" passes to a criticism of the Irish priest. This is the one unpardonable sin in Ireland, and already, if we mistake not, the writer has been made to pay for his audacity. He is a Roman Catholic, which makes his crime the more serious. As a Roman Catholic he asks that the priests should confine themselves to spiritual work, and not interfere with the liberty of their flocks in secular matters. That restriction of his power the Irish priest will not tolerate:— " The priest will neither leave lay matters to laymen, nor allow them to apply lay canons to him when he interferes. We give up our judgment to him in theology, and he must have it so in butter and bacon as well. Very often the layman who would lead the creamery or the butter factory to success is exactly the one whom tho priest dislikes, and lest that layman should succeed the enterprise must fail; to have the priest at the top, Ireland must go down; industry must decay lest a layman should lead in butter."
These lay attacks on the Irish clergy have been increasingly common in Ireland within the last few years, and are an encouraging sign of a growing independence of judgment, So far, however, victory rests with the clergy. If they cannot silence their critics, they can at any rate boycott them.
So much has been said, or indicated, above in recognition of the economic insight displayed by this young writer, that it is desirable to call attention to an important economic fallacy to which he—perhaps through an oversight—commits himself. In connexion with an argument, which is not altogether con- vincing, in favour of increasing the tillage area of Ireland at the expense of the grass land, he lays down the proposition that "we can consume nothing without employing somebody in some degree somewhere." This proposition would be true enough if the word " produce" were substituted for "con- sume." As the statement stands it is merely the iteration of a very old PrOteCtiouist fallaCy. To mistime is 'to aistroy,
and mere destruction gives employment to nobody. The fallacy arises because in the normal course of life the con- sumption of commodities involves payment for them. It was for the sake of this payment that the commodities were pro- duced, and the fact of the payment leads to fresh production to replace the articles consumed. Payments are made out of existing wealth, and the more we increase wealth the more there is to pay with. In this sense it is literally true that we can produce nothing (valuable) without employing somebody in some degree somewhere. If only the "ca'-ninny" workman could be got to understand this proposition, and to act upon it, there would be very little unemployment left.
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