“An Irishman never emigrates except through compulsion or force. A ruined man will take a farm at any price, knowing perfectly well that it will be impossible for him to pay for it, but also knowing that the landlord will give him credit for the first year or two’s rent, and that he will thus postpone the day when he must seek work in England or America as long as possible.
“Under these circumstances the law of supply and demand is evidently vitiated, and it is by looking at the question from this point, that we can maintain that the work of the Land League has done good. Without our intervention the landlords would have depopulated one-half of Ireland, for agriculture is in such a distressed state that it is naturally impossible for farmers to pay their rent in the present state of the division of land; the only remedy for this situation is the formation of small holdings, which have so much enriched France.”
Here I stopped them. “But,” said I, “the agricultural crisis is not confined to your country. It exists all over Europe. We, Frenchmen, are suffering so much from it that in my department of the Aisne, one of the richest in France, one-tenth of the land is abandoned, because it is found that at present prices the sale of produce does not cover the expenses of cultivation. The peasant proprietors of whom you speak are absolutely ruined now, because their land has lost all its value. Now, allow me to say, without offending you, that our land and our climate are far better than yours.
“This state of things, which prevails all over Europe and which is the result of facility of transport, can only have two solutions: emigration or protection. Up till now you have had recourse to emigration, and you have managed comparatively well since the failure in the potato harvest, which led to the famine in 1847, when you had nine million inhabitants. In 1877 it only caused less misery because there were four or five million less mouths. It appears that now you do not wish for any further emigration, unluckily, protection is almost impossible. We can apply it at home. We have already done so, and shall do it again. It is possible because we are a very homogeneous people, where all industries work side by side. When we ask the blacksmith to pay a little more for his bread in order that his neighbour, the farmer, may live, he easily understands that if the farmer is ruined he will no longer have horses to be shod. Besides, the farmer is his neighbour, perhaps his relation. With you everything is different. You only produce meat and butter, and only English workmen can possibly buy them. You require their custom, _they do not need yours_, and, more than this, you loudly proclaim that you do not belong to the same race, that between you and them there is war to the knife, that you wish to be as completely separated as possible, compatible with your own interests without paying the least attention to theirs. How can you hope to succeed when you act in this way?”