Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/40

 32 THE LAND QUESTION.

Peasant proprietorship in continental Europe is a sur- vival. It exists only among populations which have not felt fully the breath of the new era. It continues to exist only by virtue of conditions which do not obtain in Ireland. The Irish peasant is not the French or Belgian peasant. He is in the habit of having very "long families," they very short ones. He has become familiar with the idea of emigrating ; they have not. He can hardly be expected to have acquired those habits of close economy and careful forethought for which they are so remarkable ; and there are various agencies, among which are to be counted the national schools and the reaction from America, that have roused in him aspirations and ambitions which would prevent him from continuing to water his little patch with his sweat, as do the French and Belgian peasant proprietors, when he could sell it for enough to emigrate. Peasant proprietorship, like that of France and Belgium, might possibly have been instituted in Ireland some time ago, before the railroad and the telegraph and the national schools and the establishment of the steam bridge across the Atlantic. But to do it now to any extent, and with any permanency, seems to me about as practicable as to go back to hand-loom weaving in Manchester. Much more in accordance with modern tendencies is the notice I have recently seen of the formation of a company to buy up land in Southern Ireland, and cultivate it on a large scale; for to production on a large scale modern processes more and more strongly tend. It is not merely the steam-plow and harvesting machinery that make the cultivation of the large field more profitable than that of the small one ; it is the railroad, the telegraph, the mani- fold inventions of all sorts. Even butter and cheese are now made and chickens hatched and fattened in factories. But the fatal defect of all these schemes as remedial measures is, that they do not go to the cause of the disease.

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