The Consequences of Land Monopoly
on the Irish People
Henry George
[Chapter XI, "Dumping Garbage" from Social
Problems (1883)]
This gulf-stream of humanity that is setting on our shores with
increasing volume is in all respects worthy of more attention than we
give it. In many ways one of the most important phenomena of our time,
it is one which forcibly brings to the mind the fact that we are
living under conditions which must soon begin to change rapidly. But
there is one part of the immigration coming to us this year which is
specially suggestive. A number of large steamers of the trans-Atlantic
lines are calling, under contract with the British government, at
small ports on the west coast of Ireland, filing up with men, women
and children, whose passages are paid by their government, and then,
ferrying them across the ocean, are dumping them on the wharves of New
York and Boston with a few dollars apiece in their pockets to begin
life in the New World.
The strength of a nation is in its men. It is its people that make a
country great and strong, produce its wealth, and give it rank among
other countries. Yet, here is a civilized and Christian government, or
one that passes for such, shipping off its people, to be dumped upon
another continent, as garbage is shipped off from New York to be
dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. Nor are these people undesirable
material for the making of a nation. Whatever they may sometimes
become here, when cooped up in tenement-houses and exposed to the
corruption of our politics, and to the temptation of a life greatly
differing from that to which they have been accustomed, they are in
their own country, as any one who has been among them there can
testify, a peaceable, industrious, and, in some important respects, a
peculiarly moral people, who lack intellectual and political
education, and the robust virtues that personal independence alone can
give, simply because of the poverty to which they are condemned. Mr.
Trevelyan, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, has declared in the House
of Commons that they are physically and morally healthy, well capable
of making a living, and yet the government of which he is a member is
shipping them away at public expense as New York ships its garbage!
These people are well capable of making a living, Mr. Trevelyan says,
yet if they remain at home they will be able to make only the poorest
of poor livings in the best of times, and when seasons are not of the
best, taxes must be raised and aims begged to keep them alive; and so
as the cheapest way of getting rid of them, they are shipped away at
public expense.
What is the reason of this I Why is it that people, in themselves
well capable of making a living, cannot make a living for themselves
in their own country? Simply that the natural, equal, and unalienable
rights of man, with which, as asserted by our Declaration of
Independence, these human beings have been endowed by their Creator,
are denied them. The famine, the pauperism, the misgovernment and
turbulence of Ireland, the bitter wrongs which keep aglow the fire of
Irish "sedition," and the difficulties with regard to
Ireland which perplex English statesmen, all spring from what the
National Assembly of France, in 1789, declared to be the cause of all
public misfortunes and corruptions of government-the contempt of human
rights. The Irish peasant is forced to starve, to beg, or to emigrate;
he becomes in the eyes of those who rule him mere human garbage, to be
shipped off and dumped anywhere, because, like the English peasant,
who, after a slave's life, dies a pauper's death, his natural rights
in his native soil are denied him; because his unalienable right to
procure wealth by his own exertions and to retain it for his own uses
is refused him.
The country from which these people are shipped -- and the government
-- aided emigration is as nothing compared to the voluntary
emigration-is abundantly capable of maintaining in comfort a very much
larger population than it has ever had. There is no natural reason why
in it people themselves capable of making a living should suffer want
and starvation. The reason that they do is simply that they are denied
natural opportunities for the employment of their labor, and that the
laws permit others to extort from them the proceeds of such labor as
they are permitted to do. Of these people who are now being sent
across the Atlantic by the English government, and dumped on our
wharves with a few dollars in their pockets, there are probably none
of mature years who have not by their labor produced wealth enough not
only to have supported them hitherto in a much higher degree of
comfort than that in which they have lived, but to have enabled them
to pay their own passage across the Atlantic, if they wanted to come,
and to have given them on landing here a capital sufficient for a
comfortable start. They are penniless only because they have been
systematically robbed from the day of their birth to the day they left
their native shores.
A year ago I traveled through that part of Ireland from which these
government-aided emigrants come. What surprises an American at first,
even in Connaught, is the apparent sparseness of population, and he
wonders if this can indeed be that overpopulated Ireland of which he
has heard so much. There is plenty of good land, but on it are only
fat beasts, and sheep so clean and white that you at first think that
they must be washed and combed every morning. Once this soil was
tilled and was populous, but now you will find only traces of ruined
hamlets, and here and there the miserable hut of a herd, who lives in
a way no Tierra del Fuegan could envy. For the "owners" of
this land, who live in London and Paris, many of them never having
seen their estates, find cattle more profitable than men, and so the
men have been driven off. It is only when you reach the bog and the
rocks, in the mountains and by the sea-shore, that you find a dense
population. Here they are crowded together on land on which Nature
never intended men to live. It is too poor for grazing, so the people
who have been driven from the better land are allowed to live upon
it-as long as they pay their rent. If it were not too pathetic, the
patches they call fields would make you laugh. Originally the surface
of the ground must have been about as susceptible of cultivation as
the surface of Broadway. But at the cost of enormous labor the small
stones have been picked off and piled up, though the great boulders
remain, so that it is impossible to use a plow; and the surface of the
bog has been cut away, and manured by seaweed brought from the shore
on the backs of men and women, till it can be made to grow something.
For such patches of rock and bog -- soil it could not be called, save
by courtesy-which have been made to produce anything only by their
unremitting toil -- these people are compelled to pay their absentee
landlords rents varying from £1 to £4 per acre, and then
they must pay another rent for the seaweed, which the surf of the wild
Atlantic throws upon the shore, before they are permitted to take it
for manure, and another rent still for the bog from which they cut
their turf. As a matter of fact, these people have to pay more for the
land than they can get out of the land. They are really forced to pay
not merely for the use of the land and for the use of the ocean, but
for the use of the air. Their rents are made up, and they manage to
live in good times, by the few shillings earned by the women, who knit
socks as they carry their creels to and from the market or sea-shore
by the earnings of the men, who go over to England every year to work
as harvesters; or by remittances sent home by husbands or children who
have managed to get to America. In spite of their painful industry the
poverty of these people is appalling. In good times they just manage
to keep above the starvation line. In bad times, when a blight strikes
their potatoes, they must eat seaweed, or beg relief from the
poor-rates, or from the charitable contributions of the world. When so
rich as to have a few chickens or a pig, they no more think of eating
them than Vanderbilt thinks of eating his $50,000 trotters. They are
sold to help pay the rent. In the loughs you may see fat salmon
swimming in from the sea; but, if every one of them were marked by
nature with the inscription, "Lord So-and-So, London, with the
compliments of God Almighty," they could not be more out of the
reach of these people. The best shops to be found in the villages will
have for stock a few pounds of sugar and tea weighed out into ounce
and half-ounce papers, a little flour, two or three red petticoats, a
little coarse cloth, a few yards of flannel, and a few of cotton, some
buttons and thread, a little pigtail tobacco, and, perhaps, a bottle
or two of "the native" hid away in the ground some distance
from the cabin, so that if the police do capture it the shopkeeper
cannot be put in jail. For the Queen must live and the army must be
supported, and the great distillers of Dublin and Belfast and Cork,
who find such a comfortable monopoly in the excise, have churches to
build and cathedrals to renovate. So poor are these people, so little
is there in their miserable cabins, that a sub-sheriff who, last year,
superintended the eviction of near one hundred families m one place,
declared that the effects of the whole lot were not worth £3.
But the landlords -- ah! the landlords! -- they live differently.
Every now and again in traveling through this country you come across
some landlord's palatial home mansion, its magnificent grounds
inclosed with high walls. Pass inside these walls and it is almost
like entering another world -- wide stretches of rich velvety lawn,
beds of bright flowers, noble avenues of arching trees, and a spacious
mansion rich with every appointment of luxury, with its great stables,
kennels, and appurtenances of every kind. But though they may have
these luxurious home places, the large landlords, with few exceptions,
live in London or Paris, or pass part of the year in the great cities
and the rest in Switzerland or Italy or along the shores of the
Mediterranean; and occasionally one of them takes a trip over here to
see our new country, with its magnificent opportunities for investing
in wild lands which will soon be as valuable as English or Irish
estates. They do not have to work; their incomes come without work on
their part -- all they have to do is to spend. Some collect galleries
of the most valuable paintings; some are fanciers of old books, and
give fabulous prices for rare editions. Some of them gamble, some keep
studs of racers and costly yachts, and some get rid of their money in
ways worse than these. Even their agents, whose business it is to
extort the rent from the Irishmen who do work, live luxuriously. But
it all comes out of the earnings of just such people as are now being
dumped on our wharves -- out of their earnings, or out of what is sent
them by relatives in America, or by charitable contributions.
It is to maintain such a system of robbery as this that Ireland is
filed with policemen and troops and spies and informers, and a people
who might be an integral part of the British nation are made to that
nation a difficulty, a weakness and a danger. Economically, the Irish
landlords are of no more use than so many great, ravenous, destructive
beasts-packs of wolves, herds of wild elephants, or such dragons as
St. George is reported to have killed. They produce nothing; they only
consume and destroy. And what they destroy is more even than what they
consume. For, not merely is Ireland turned into a camp of military
police and red-coated soldiery to hold down the people while they are
robbed; but the wealth producers, stripped of capital by this robbery
of their earnings, and condemned by it to poverty and ignorance, are
unable to produce the wealth which they could and would produce did
labor get its full earnings, and were wealth left to those who make
it. Surely true statesmanship would suggest that if any one is to be
shoveled out of a country it should be those who merely consume and
destroy; not those who produce wealth.
But English statesmen think otherwise, and these surplus Irish men
and women; these garbage Irish men and women and little children --
surplus and garbage because the landlords of Ireland have no use for
them, are shoveled out of their own country and dumped on our
wharves. They have reached "the land of the free and the home of
the brave" just in time for the Fourth of July, when they may
hear the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing assertion of
unalienable rights, read again in our annual national celebration.
Have they, then, escaped from the system which in their own country
made them serfs and human garbage? Not at all. They have not even
escaped the power of their old landlords to take from them the
proceeds of their toil.
For we are not merely getting these surplus tenants of English,
Scotch and Irish landlords -- we are getting the landlords, too.
Simultaneously with this emigration is going on a movement which is
making the landlords and monopolists of Great Britain owners of vast
tracts of American soil. There is even now scarcely a large
land-owning family in Great Britain that does not own even larger
American estates, and American land is becoming with them a more and
more favorite investment. These American estates of "their graces"
and "my lords" are not as yet as valuable as their home
estates, but the natural increase in our population, augmented by
emigration, will soon make them so.
Every "surplus" Irishman, Englishman or Scotsman sent over
here assists directly in sending up the value of land and the rent of
land. The stimulation of emigration from the Old Country to this is a
bright idea on the part of these landlords of two continents. They get
rid of people whom, at home, in hard times, they might have to support
in some sort of fashion, and lessen, as they think, the forces of
disaffection, while at the same time they augment the value of their
American estates.
It is not improbable that some of these evicted tenants may find
themselves over here paying rent to the very same landlords to swell
whose incomes they have so long toiled in their old country; but
whether this be so or not, their mere coming here, by its effect in
increasing the demand for land, helps to enable those landlords to
compel some others of the people of the United States to give up to
them a portion of their earnings in return for the privilege of living
upon American soil. It is merely with this view, and for this purpose,
that the landlords of the Old World are buying so much land in the
New. They do not want it to live upon; they prefer to live in London
or Paris, as many of the privileged classes of America are now
learning to prefer to live. They do not want to work it; they do not
propose to work at all. All they want with it is the power, which, as
soon as our population increases a little, its ownership will give, of
demanding the earnings of other people. And under present conditions
it is a matter, not of a generation or two, but of only a few years,
before they will be able to draw from their American estates sums even
greater than from their Irish estates. That is to say, they will
virtually own more Americans than they now own Irishmen.
So far from these Irish immigrants having escaped from the system
that has impoverished and pauperized the masses of the Irish people
for the benefit of a few of their number7 that system has really more
unrestricted sway here than in Ireland. In spite of the fact that we
read the Declaration of Independence every Fourth of July, make a
great noise and have a great jubilation, that first of the unalienable
rights with which every man is endowed by his Creator -- the equal
right to the use of the natural elements without which wealth cannot
be produced, nor even life maintained -- is no better acknowledged
with us than it is in Ireland.
There is much said of "Irish landlordism," as though it
were a peculiar kind of landlordism, or a peculiarly bad kind of
landlordism. This is not so. Irish landlordism is in nothing worse
than English landlordism, or Scotch landlordism, or American
landlordism, nor are the Irish landlords harder than any similar
class. Being generally men of education and culture, accustomed to an
easy life they are, as a whole, less grasping toward their tenants
than the farmers who rent of them are to the laborers te whom they
sub-let. They regard the land as their own, that is all, and expect to
get an income from it; and the agent who sends them the best income
they naturally regard as the best agent.
Such popular Irish leaders as Mr. Parnell and Mr. Sullivan, when they
come over here and make speeches, have a good deal to say about the "feudal
landlordism" of Ireland. This is all humbug -- an attempt to
convey the impression that Irish landlordism is something different
from American landlordism, so that American landowners will not take
offense, while Irish landowners are denounced. There is in Ireland
nothing that can be called feudal landlordism. All the power which the
Irish landlord has, all the tyranny which he exercises, springs from
his ownership of the soil, from the legal recognition that it is his
property. If landlordism in Ireland seems more hateful than in
England, it is only because the industrial organization is more
primitive, and there are fewer intermediaries between the man who is
robbed and the man who gets the plunder. And if either Irish or
English landlordism seems more hateful than the same system in
America, it is only because this is a new country, not yet quite
fenced in. But, as a matter of law, these "my lords" and "your
graces," who are now getting themselves far greater estates in
the United States than they have in their own country, have more power
as landlords here than there.
In Ireland, especially, the tendency of legislation for a series of
years has been to restrain the power of the land-lord in dealing with
the tenant. In the United States he has in all its fullness the
unrestricted power of doing as he pleases with his own. Rack-renting
is with us the common, almost the exclusive, form of renting. There is
no long process to be gone through with to secure an eviction, no
serving notice upon the relieving officer of the district. The tenant
whom the landlord wants to get rid of can be evicted with the minimum
of cost and expense.
Says the Tribune's "Broadway Lounger" incidentally
in his chatter:
Judge Gedney tells me that on the first of this month he
signed no less than two hundred and fifty warrants of dispossession
against poor tenants. His district includes many blocks of the most
squalid variety of tenement-houses, and he has fully as much
unpleasant work of this kind as any of his judicial brethren. The
first of May is, of course, the heaviest field-day of the year for
such business, but there are generally at the beginning of every
month at least one hundred warrants granted. And to those who fret
about the minor miseries of life, no more wholesome cure could be
administered than an enforced attendance in a district court on such
occasions. The lowest depths of misery are sounded. Judge Gedney
says, too, that in the worst cases the suffering is more generally
caused by misfortune than by idleness or dissipation. A man gets a
felon on his hand, which keeps him at home until his savings are
gone and all Ms effects are in the pawnshop, and then his children
fall sick or his wife dies, and the agent of the house, under
instructions from the owner, who is perhaps in Europe enjoying
himself, won't wait for the rent, and serves him with a summons.
Awhile ago, when it was bitter cold, I read in the papers an item
telling how, in the city of Wilkesbarre, Pa., a woman and her three
children were found one night huddled in a hogshead on a vacant lot,
famished and almost frozen. The story was a simple one. The man, out
of work, had tried to steal, and been sent to prison. Their rent
unpaid, their landlord had evicted them, and as the only shelter they
knew of, they had gone to the hogshead. In Ireland, bad as it is, the
relieving officer would have had to be by to have offered them at
least the shelter of the almshouse.
These Irish men and women who are being dumped on our wharves with
two or three dollars in their pockets, do they find access to nature
any freer here than there I Far out in the West, if they know where to
go, and can get there, they may, for a little while yet; but though
they may see even around New York plenty of unused land, they will
find that it all belongs to somebody. Let them go to work at what they
will, they must, here as there, give up some of their earnings for the
privilege of working, and pay some other human creature for the
privilege of living. On the whole their chances will be better here
than there, for this is yet a new country, and a century ago our
settlements only fringed the eastern seaboard of a vast continent. But
from the Atlantic to the Pacific we already have our human garbage,
the volume of which some of this Irish human garbage will certainly go
to swell. Wherever you go throughout the country the "tramp"
is known; and in this metropolitan city there are already, it is
stated by the Charity Organization Society, a quarter of a million
people who live on alms! What, in a few years more, are we to do for a
dumping-ground? Will it make our difficulty the less that our human
garbage can vote!
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