The debate on Lord Stanley’s motion with respect to India 
commenced on the 23d, continued on the 24th, and adjourned to 
the 27th inst., has not been brought to a close. When that shall at 
length have arrived, I intend to resume my observations on the 
India question. 

As the Coalition Ministry depends on the support of the Irish 
party, and as all the other parties composing the House of 
Commons so nicely balance each other that the Irish may at any 
moment turn the scales which way they please, some concessions 
are at last about to be made to the Irish tenants. The “Leasing 
Powers (Ireland) Bill,” which passed the House of Commons on 
Friday last, contains a provision that for the improvements made 
on the soil and separable from the soil, the tenant shall have at the 
termination of his lease, a compensation in money, the incoming 
tenant being at liberty to take them at the valuation, while with 
respect to improvements in the soil, compensation for them shall 
be arranged by contract between the landlord and the tenant.'” 

A tenant having incorporated his capital, in one form or 
another, in the land, and having thus effected an improvement of 
the soil, either directly by irrigation, drainage, manure, or 
indirectly by construction of buildings for agricultural purposes, in 
steps the landlord with demand for increased rent. If the tenant 
concede, he has to pay the interest for his own money to the 
landlord. If he resist, he will be very unceremoniously ejected, 
and supplanted by a new tenant, the latter being enabled to pay a 
higher rent by the very expenses incurred by his predecessors, 
until he also, in his turn, has become an improver of the land, and 

is replaced in the same way, or put on worse terms. In this easy 
way a Class of absentee landlords has been enabled to pocket, not 
merely the labor, but also the capital, of whole generations, each 
generation of Irish peasants sinking a grade lower in the social 
scale, exactly in proportion to the exertions and sacrifices made 
for the raising of their condition and that of their families. If the 
tenant was industrious and enterprising, he became taxed in 
consequence of his very industry and enterprise. If, on the 
contrary, he grew inert and negligent, he was reproached with the 
“aboriginal faults of the Celtic race.” He had, accordingly, no 
other alternative left but to become a pauper—to pauperise 
himself by industry, or to pauperise by negligence. In order to 
oppose this state of things, “Tenant Right” was proclaimed in 
Ireland—a right of the tenant, not in the soil but in the 
improvements of the soil effected at his cost and charges. Let us 
see in what manner The Times, in its Saturday’s leader, attempts to 
break down this Irish “Tenant Right:” 

“There are two general systems of farm occupation. Either a tenant may take a 
lease of the land for a fixed number of years, or his holding may be terminable at 
any time upon certain notice. In the first of these events, it would be obviously his 
course to adjust and apportion his outlay so that all, or nearly all, the benefit would 
find its way to him before the expiration of his term. In the second case it seems 

equally obvious that he should not run the risk of the investment without a proper 
assurance of return.” * 

Where the landlords have to deal with a class of large capitalists 
who may, as they please, invest their stock in commerce, in 
manufactures or in farming, there can be no doubt but that these 
capitalist farmers, whether they take long leases or no time leases 
at all, know how to secure the “proper” return of their outlays. But 
with regard to Ireland the supposition is quite fictitious. On the one 
side you have there a small class of land monopolists, on the other, a 
very large class of tenants with very petty fortunes, which they have 
no chance to invest in different ways, no other field of production 
opening to them, except the soil. They are, therefore, forced to 
become tenants-at-will.'°° Being once tenants-at-will, they naturally 
run the risk of losing their revenue, provided they do not invest their 
small capital. Investing it, in order to secure their revenue, they run 
the risk of losing their capital, also. 

“Perhaps,” continues The Times, “it may be said, that in any case a tenantry 
could hardly expire without something being left upon the ground, in some shape 

“ The Times, No. 21464, June 25, 1853.— Ed. 

The Indian Question 159 

or another, representing the tenant’s own property, and that for this compensation 
should be forthcoming. There is some truth in the remark, but the demand thus 
created [...] ought, under proper conditions of society, to be easily adjusted 
between landlord and tenant, as it might, at any rate, be provided for in the 
original contract. We say that the conditions of society should regulate these 
arrangements, because we believe that no Parliamentary enactment can be 
effectually substituted for such an agency.” : 

bf 

Indeed, under “proper conditions of society,” we should want 
no more Parliamentary interference with the Irish land-tenant, as 
we should not want, under “proper conditions of society,” the 
interference of the soldier, of the policeman, and of the hangman. 
Legislature, magistracy, and armed force, are all of them but the 
offspring of improper conditions of society, preventing those 
arrangements among men which would make useless the compul- 
sory intervention of a third supreme power. Has, perhaps, The 
Times been converted into a social revolutionist? Does it want a 
social revolution, reorganizing the “conditions of society,” and the 
“arrangements” emanating from them, instead of “Parliamentary 
enactments?” England has subverted the conditions of Irish 
society. At first it confiscated the land, then it suppressed the 
industry by “Parliamentary enactments,”’*! and lastly, it broke the 
active energy by armed force. And thus England created those 
abominable ‘conditions of society” which enable a small caste of 
rapacious lordlings to dictate to the Irish people the terms on 
which they shall be allowed to hold the land and to live upon it. 
Too weak yet for revolutionizing those “social conditions,” the 
people appeal to Parliament, demanding at least their mitigation 
and regulation. But “No,” says The Times; if you don’t live under 
proper conditions of society, Parliament can’t mend that. And if 
the Irish people, on the advice of The Times, tried to-morrow to 
mend their conditions of society, The Times would be the first to 
appeal to bayonets, and to pour out sanguinary denunciations of 
“the aboriginal faults of the Celtic race,” wanting the Anglo-Saxon 
taste for pacific progress and legal amelioration. 

“Tf a landlord,” says The Times, “deliberately injures one tenant, he will find it 
so much the harder to get another, and whereas his occupation consists in Jetting 
land, he will find his land all the more difficult to let.” 

The case stands rather differently in Ireland. The more a 
landlord injures one tenant, the easier he will find it to oppress 
another. The tenant who comes in, is the means of injuring the 
ejected one, and the ejected one is the means of keeping down the 
new occupant. That, in due course of time, the landlord, beside 

injuring the tenant, will injure himself and ruin himself, is not 
only a probability, but the very fact, in Ireland—a fact affording, 
however, a very precarious source of comfort to the ruined tenant. 

“The relations between the landlord and tenant are those between two traders,” 
says The Times. 

This is precisely the petitio principit which pervades the whole 
leader of The Times. The needy Irish tenant belongs to the soil, 
while the soil belongs to the English Lord. As well you might call 
the relation between the robber who presents his pistol, and the 
traveler who presents his purse, a relation between two traders. 

“But,” says The Times, ‘in point of fact, the relation between Irish landlords 
and tenants will soon be reformed by an agency more potent than that of 
legislation. [...] The property of Ireland is fast passing into new hands, and, if the 
present rate of emigration continues, its cultivation must undergo the same 
transfer.” 

Here, at least, The Times has the truth. British Parliament does 
not interfere at a moment when the worked-out old system is 
terminating in the common ruin, both of the thrifty landlord and 
the needy tenant, the former being knocked down by the hammer 
of the Encumbered Estates Commission, and the latter expelled by 
compulsory emigration. This reminds us of the old Sultan of 
Morocco. Whenever there was a case pending between two parties, 
he knew of no more “potent agency” for settling their controversy, 
than by killing both parties. 

“Nothing could tend,” concludes The Times with regard to Tenant Right, “to 
greater confusion than such a communistic distribution of ownership. [...] The only 
person with any right in the land, is the landlord.” 

The Times seems to have been the sleeping Epimenides of the 
past half century, and never to have heard of the hot controversy 
going on during all that time upon the claims of the landlord, not 
among social reformers and Communists, but among the very 
political economists of the British middle-class. Ricardo, the 
creator of modern political economy in Great Britain, did not 
controvert the “right” of the landlords, as he was quite convinced 
that their claims were based upon fact, and not on right, and that 
political economy in general had nothing to do with questions of 
right; but he attacked the land-monopoly in a more unassuming, 
yet more scientific, and therefore more dangerous manner. He 
proved that private proprietorship in land, as distinguished from 
the respective claims of the laborer, and of the farmer, was a 

The Indian Question 161 

relation quite superfluous in, and incoherent with the whole 
frame-work of modern production; that the economical expression 
of that relationship, the rent of land, might, with great advantage, 
be appropriated by the State; and finally that the interest of the 
landlord was opposed to the interest of all other classes of modern 
society. It would be tedious to enumerate all the conclusions 
drawn from these premises by the Ricardo School against the 
landed monopoly. For my end, it will suffice to quote three of the 
most recent economical authorities of Great Britain. 

The London Economist, whose chief editor, Mr. J. Wilson, is not 
only a Free Trade oracle, but a Whig one, too, and not only a Whig, 
but also an inevitable Treasury-appendage in every Whig or 
composite ministry, has contended in different articles that exactly 
speaking there can exist no title authorizing any individual, or any 
number of individuals, to claim the exclusive proprietorship in the 
soil of a nation. 

Mr. Newman, in his Lectures on Political Economy, London, 1851, 
professedly written for the purpose of refuting Socialism, tells us: 

“No man has, or can have, a natural right to land, except so long as he occupies 
it in person. His right is to the use, and to the use only. All other right is the 
creation of artificial law (or parliamentary enactments as The Times would call 
it).... If, at any time, land becomes needed to live upon, the right of private 
possessors to withhold it comes to an end.” [Pp. 137, 141.] 

This is exactly the case in Ireland, and Mr. Newman expressly 
confirms the claims of the Irish tenantry, and in lectures held 
before the most select audiences of the British aristocracy. 

In conclusion let me quote some passages from Mr. Herbert 
Spencer’s work, Social Statics, London, 1851, also, purporting to be 
a complete refutation of Communism, and acknowledged as the 
most elaborate development of the Free Trade doctrines of 
modern England. 

“No one [...] may use the earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from 
similarly using it. [...] Equity, therefore, does not permit property in land, or the 
rest would live on the earth by sufferance only. The landless men might equitably 
be expelled from the earth altogether.... It can never be pretended, that the 
existing titles to such property are legitimate. Should any one think so let him look 
in the Chronicles. [...] The original deeds were written with the sword, rather than 
with the pen. Not lawyers but soldiers were the conveyancers: blows were the 
current coin given in payment; and for seals blood was used in preference to wax. 
Could valid claims be thus constituted? Hardly. And if not, what becomes of the 
pretensions of all subsequent holders of estates so obtained? Does sale or bequest 
generate a right where it did not previously exist?... If one act of transfer can give 
no title, can many?... At what rate per annum do invalid claims become valid?... 
The right of mankind at large to the earth’s surface is still valid, all deeds, customs 

“i 
Ww 
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= 
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162 Kar] Marx 

and laws notwithstanding. [...] It is impossible to discover any mode in which land 
can become private property.... We daily deny landlordism by our legislation. Is a 
canal, a railway, or a turnpike road to be made? We do not scruple to seize just as 
many acres as may be requisite. [...J We do not wait for consent.... The change 
required would simply be a change of landlords.... Instead of being in the 
possession of individuals, the country would be held by the great corporate 
body— society. Instead of leasing his acres from an isolated proprietor, the farmer 
would lease them from the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir 
John, or His Grace, he will pay to an agent, or deputy-agent of the community. 
Stewards would be public officials, instead of private ones, and tenantry the only 
land tenure.... Pushed to its ultimate consequences, a claim to exclusive possession 
of the soi involves land-owning despotism.” [Pp. 114-16, 122-23, 125.]! 

Thus, from the very point of view of modern English political 
economists, it is not the usurping English landlord, but the Irish 
tenants and laborers, who have the only right in the soil of their 
native country, and The Times, in opposing the demands of the 
Irish people, places itself into direct antagonism to British 
middle-class science.