Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Chapters and Speeches on the Irish Land Question
The general system, however, of English cultivation, afi'ording no experience to render the nature and operation of peasant properties familiar, and Englishmen being in general profoundly ignorant of the agricultural economy of other countries, the very idea of peasant proprietors is strange to the English mind, and does not easily find access to it. Even the forms of language stand in the way: the familiar designation for owners of land being landlords, a term to which tenants is always understood as a correlative. When, at the time of the famine, the suggestion of peasant proper ties as a means of Irish improvement found its way into parliamen tary and newspaper discussions, there were writers of pretension to whom the word proprietor was so far from conveying any dis tinct idea, that they mistook the small holdings of Irish cottier tenants for peasant properties. The subject being so little under stood, I think it important, before entering into the theory of it, to do something towards showing how the case stands as to matter of fact; by exhibiting, at greater length than would otherwise be ad missible, some of the testimony which exists respecting the state of cultivation, and the comfort and happiness of the cultivators, in those countries and parts of countries, in which the greater part of the land has neither landlord nor farmer, other than the labourer who tills the soil.
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