540 REPORT — 1887. 



tliese respective grains were used to fix, or rather to measure, the rent, 

 denoted the varying capacity of the farms for the growth of the respec- 

 tive crops. I observe that Lord ToUemachc, always an earnest searcher 

 after practical truths and methods, has recently introduced a somewhat 

 similar method of dealing with his rents. But the excessive rates for 

 grain which prevailed during and after the Crimean War induced tenants 

 in Scotland to revolt against a system which forced up rents far above 

 their normal and just amount; and a system which had commended itself 

 for its justice was abandoned on account of the admitted injustice it 

 involved.' 



Now the pendulum has swung to the other extremity ; prices have 

 fallen to an unprecedented extent, and there is now a demand for the re- 

 adoption of the system of rent in kind, so general thirty or forty years 

 ago. With the glib confidence of crass ignorance, newspaper correspon- 

 dents with agricultural proclivities urge the arithmetical axiom that 

 produce having fallen 50 per cent., rent must fall in the same proportion, 

 and that the rent, representing the landlord's share of the produce, must 

 fluctuate directly with the value of that produce itself. 



This is urged no doubt mainlj- in the unceasing conflict on Irish land. 

 Within the neutral precincts of this room, and in its calm philosophic 

 atmosphere, one can utter these burning words without the fear of creat- 

 ing a cyclone ; but having uttered them, the economist has only to 

 confess that the problem of Irish land is beyond his ken and reach. He 

 deals with a condition of matters in which the ordinary motives of 

 human conduct prevail and have free scope. In this country and in most 

 other countries cultivators work for profit : the ordinary motives and causes 

 of human action produce their ordinary eff'ect, and the task of the econo- 

 mist is to note and to describe these causes and their efiects, and to 

 formulate the laws they denote. But in Ireland land in the generic sense 

 is cultivated not for profit but for existence ; and that existence is not 

 the mere minimum of subsistence, but an existence brightened by many 

 pleasures, from which, however, those elements of progress, advance, 

 profit, and gain, in our Saxon sense of the terms, are eliminated. The 

 Irish peasant desires to live his Irish life, drawing from the soil the meagre 

 return which sufiices not only for his subsistence but for his simple 

 pleasures, practising a penuriousness which is not frugality, and indulging 

 in parsimony as a pastime, combined with a delicious freedom from care 

 which is purchased by the sacrifice of much that the labourer of this 

 country deems indispensable. The chemist would be ba.filed in a world 

 where the laws of aflBnity were suspended, and the physicist would be 

 powerless where attraction and gravitation had no force ; so economists 

 must retire from seeking to solve problems where the ordinary laws and 

 methods fail to operate. 



But let us return to countries where they do operate. 



Why was the injustice of the excessive rent, fixed for any length of 

 time by rent in kind, intolerable when prices were excessively high ? Why 

 is a rent fixed, also for a long period, by the rent in kind when prices are 



' The price or value of the produce is one only of several elements in ascertaining- 

 the return from a farm. It not infrequently happened that just when prices, and 

 therefore rents, were highest there was a poor crop. Wages, too, rose when prices 

 rose ; the rinderjoest came when prices were highest, and grain, while it remained in 

 these older leases the sole measure of the rent, became less and less the sole test of 

 the value of the farm. 



