172 My Little Farm 



was such a clever man, and so ready to take 

 advantage of others. He had a farm that might 

 afford a living for a gentleman, and he let his 

 horses die of hunger in the fields, but he had his 

 farm for 2s. 6d. an acre. While an excessively 

 clever man can have an excess of good land for 

 2s. 6d. an acre, what need for character, work or 

 any other of the industrial virtues ? I can hardly 

 imagine anything that could do more for our 

 agriculture and its agrarian character than a 

 graduated land tax, in inverse ratio to the 

 efficiency of the farmer, so that the biggest sloven 

 would have to pay the biggest sum, and be the 

 first to relieve us of his presence on the soil. If 

 the resulting revenue made an average of i for 

 every tenant farmer in Ireland, that would be more 

 than enough to finance the Department, and set 

 a large sum of money free every year for other 

 purposes. 



I could enlarge my emergencies indefinitely, but 

 we need only a few typical cases to show how the 

 head and the hand, mind and muscle, are at cross 

 purposes in our chief industry ; the head trying 

 to live without work, the hand trying to work 

 without the head, the whole dragging along in a 

 blind survival, protected from sheer chaos by 

 organised violence and its fruit in fixed charges at 

 a small fraction of the economic value. What 

 must happen to this cult of incompetence and its 

 helpless millions should they find themselves forced 

 by the necessities of taxation to hand back under 

 their own laws all that they have forced from the 



