Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/34

 create county votes to leaven the franchise with a Liberal element. The method was borrowed from the practice of building societies long in existence. In addition to the reduced price, it greatly quickened the power of action. If a man wanted to build a house which would cost £200, and could only save £10 a year from his income for this purpose, it would take him nearly twenty years to accumulate the necessary funds. But if twenty men in this condition agree to club their annual saving one of them could build a house every year. The same principle that regulates the dealings of those twenty members applies equally to any greater number, up to thousands and tens of thousands. If there be forty members, for example, instead of twenty, there will be two houses built every year instead of one; if there be eighty, there will be four houses built; if two hundred and forty, a house will be built every month; if a thousand, a house will be built almost at the rate of one in every week. The more members the quicker the operations of the society, and the greater each man's chance of getting what he wants soon.

Another principle was that it is cheaper to buy a thing right out than to hire it. The annual subscription necessary to be paid for about a dozen years to enable a member to acquire a house of his own was found to be no larger than the rent he would pay during the same time for the bare hire of a house of similar quality.

These principles apply equally to the purchase of land; and the English Freehold Land Societies had applied them with great success. By clubbing together their savings, many thousand members became owners of small freeholds, and purchased the land in most cases at a less sum than the rent of it for ten or twelve years would have amounted to.

My proposal was to apply these principles to the creation of an independent and prosperous Yeomanry in Ireland. Such a system would check the fatal drain of men from the country by procuring for the Irish farmers at home that complete ownership of the soil for ever which was the chief inducement to emigration among the best class of emigrants.

I explained in detail the financial part of the system, on which it is not necessary to dwell here; but I had been all my life a thinker and writer, not a man skilled in practical