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One zealous Bonder started up in passionate parliamentary eloquence; but after a sentence or two broke down; one, and then another, and still another, and remained all three staring in open-mouthed silence there! The peasant-proprietors accepted the phenomenon as ludicrous, perhaps partly as miraculous withal, and consented to baptism this time.
Fowl and egg farming is one of the most successful, perhaps the most successful point with the French peasant-proprietors. To make birdfarming successful the proper plan is to keep a moderate number of as many birds as possible fowls, "galeenies," ducks, geese, turkeys, large pigeons and to go in for eggs as well as fowls.
Of the Gracchi there remained nothing but the forty thousand peasant-proprietors settled on the public lands; the jury law, which could not be at once repealed for fear of the equites; the corn grants, and the mob attracted by the bounty, which could be managed by improved manipulation; and the law protecting the lives of Roman citizens, which survived in the statute-book, although the Senate still claimed the right to set it aside when they held the State to be in danger.
In any case, there seems good hope that a race of Hindoo peasant-proprietors will spring up in the colony, whose voluntary labour will be available at crop-time; and who will teach the Negro thrift and industry, not only by their example, but by competing against him in the till lately understocked labour-market.
The whole thing would have to be begun over again, with increased difficulties. The same holds true of industry. Take the converse case: instead of turning the agricultural labourers into peasant-proprietors, make over the factories to those who work in them.
Under his sway her material resources have been marvellously augmented; her commerce has been placed by the treaty with England on sounder foundations, and is daily exhibiting richer life; her agriculture had made a prodigious advance wherever it has allowed room for capitalists, and escaped from the curse of petty allotments and peasant-proprietors, a curse which would have ruined any country less blessed by Nature; turbulent factions have been quelled; internal order maintained; the external prestige of France, up at least to the date of the Mexican war, increased to an extent that might satisfy even a Frenchman's amour propre; and her advance in civilization has been manifested by the rapid creation of a naval power which should put even England on her mettle.
The foregoing arguments will be equally valid if, instead of making the tenants peasant-proprietors, it were thought desirable that the Irish State should be the proprietor and the tenants be the holders of the land at perpetual rents and subject to fixed conditions. Again, it might be possible to pay the landlords by annual sums instead of capital sums.
The Conservative says, "Leave everything to its natural course, and let us have no Government interference. If the peasant-proprietor really can maintain himself while paying as high a rent as the ordinary farmer, we shall soon have plenty of them." Or, the Conservative has no objection to a philanthropist starting a few picked peasant-proprietors as an experiment.
He had heard peasant-proprietors described as a pig-headed lot; had heard young Mont call his father a pig-headed Morning Poster disrespectful young devil. Well, there were worse things than being pig-headed or reading The Morning Post. There was Profond and his tribe, and all these Labour chaps, and loud-mouthed politicians, and "wild, wild women"! A lot of worse things!
Mr Davitt, who was an earnest disciple of Henry George's ideal of Land Nationalisation, naturally enough found nothing to like in the proposals for land purchase, which would set up a race of peasant-proprietors who would never consent to surrender their ownership to the State and would consequently make the application of the principles of Land Nationalisation for ever impossible in Ireland.
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