The same phenomenon is noticeable in America, and still more conspicuously. The Government does everything in its power to form and maintain small properties; it distributes land to the emigrants by lots of 160 acres, forbidding them to sell it under five years. As soon as the five years are over the emigrants hasten to sell their lands, which are never seriously cultivated until twenty or forty lots are united in the same hands. Every American economist observes this tendency; it is universal. Wherever the laws do not intervene large estates are rapidly absorbing the smaller ones, because the small ones cannot compete with the large, and if the laws intervene they are only efficacious in diminishing production. Except in a few privileged countries small farms must therefore disappear. Can Ireland boast of being one of the fortunate exceptions? Most evidently not! Then why create small farms in Ireland? or rather, since they already exist with all their drawbacks, why endeavour to maintain them by founding small estates, as the Land League is trying to do? It is aiming at impossibilities, for they can only succeed by destroying steamers, railways, and agricultural machinery all over the world.
We will now resume the discussion at the point where we left it. I said that only two systems of agriculture are known--the small and the great. Facility of transport and the perfection we have reached in agricultural tools have rendered small cultivation impossible nearly everywhere. Only the great remains. Let us now see under what conditions it is working. It requires great capital; besides, it evidently, like every other industry, has more chance of success when it is directed by competent men. Now the most competent men not being always those who have the most capital, the countries where agriculture would flourish best would be those, of course if all other things were equal, where a combination had been discovered which placed large capital at the disposal of the most competent men--those, to use a modern expression, where agricultural credit would be the best organised.
This question has attracted great attention. It is very difficult to solve, because no combination can be discovered which ensures that the capital directed into agricultural channels would find sufficient securities and interest. But the real reason is that agriculture is already burdened with a first mortgage, for from time immemorial it has had recourse to credit, and if it has been able to struggle on until these latter times in spite of all the charges which crush it in countries belonging to the old civilisation, it is because there is an institution which has provided it with capital in such abundance and at such low rates of interest, that naturally no other organisation of agricultural credit can live by making needless repetition of its arrangements; this institution is rent. If it has so many detractors in the present day, it is because the people believe it to be of feudal origin, and above all because they do not consider the conditions under which it is working, nor the fate of agriculturists in countries where renting land is little or never practised.