The Sun.
London, England, 1844-11-28 00:00:00

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.tI
PROM THE DAILY PAPERS OP YESTERDAY.
TIMES.—The question of allotments is now going
the round of the counties. Its discussion appears to
ease the conscience of the landowner, and cast a gleam
of hope over the condition of the labourer. While
there is talk, there is some promise of doing. Mean-
while the labourer is speaking, not in meetings, not
in speeches and pamphlets, not in distinct plans of
any kind, but occasionally in blind and desperate
revenges, oftener more silently and solemnly by
famine, sickness, and death. To judge from the un-
impassioned tone of " landowners, clergy, and tenant-
farmers," one might suppose the world standing still
while the labourer's cause was heard and nature had
agreed to suspend all her changeful operations. But,
like the ship-load of ice which melted, while the
Custom-house officer was ascertaining its place in the
tariff, the labourer minishes continually, and is be-
coming a very small man indeed. We who see him
already half melted, can scarcely picture him in the
fair proportions he once enjoyed, or at least could
once attain to. The full-grown cottager, the man
who, after a youth of in-door 'service, could invest
his little savings in a little stock, and with a little
land, or a little right of pasture, was a little farmer,
as like a great one as a sapling oak is to the monarch
of the woods, is extinct. 'The croft, the orchard, the
common, the cow or two, and its lesser accompani-
ments, have all passed away. The labourer is now a
labourer indeed, and nothing more. He is plucked
of his once decent plumage, and is the biped implume
of the philosopher. And he continues to waste. The
present generation is a hopeless case. We may al-
most give it up for dead. But what is to be
done with the next ? Of the unborn there is hope.
That there should be any discussion at all on the
subject is hopeful. It cannot be supposed that the
myriads who for their slender pittance of beans and
onions toiled and perished at the Pyramids would
have oontinued their fruitless labour, if there had
been the smallest variety of sentiment as to the value
of those structures and the necessity of their own
case. But at present the discussion on the case of the
English labourer does not proceed in the most profit-
able form. There is no attempt to elicit, gather, and
reconcile facts. The labourer, his cottage, his wages,
his employment, the value of his produce, his propor-
tion thereof, and all the circumstances of his condi-
tion, are not put into the crucible of inquiry, and left
to show their own results, whatever they may happen
to be. The investigation is of a much less searching
character. It is limited to the benefits of certain defi-
nite proposals. Is it advisable to go about persuading
or forcing the collective landowner to let certain small
portions of land to the labourers ? There could
hardly be imagined a more conventional way of con-
aidering the popular distress. Use, however, there
is in all inquiries. The man who looks for silver
- may find lead, and the alchemists discovered how to
purify metals when they were thinking of nothing
but transmutation. So is there use in all social
researches and expedients. A proposition to enlarge
or rebuild the labourer's cottage, to provide him with
a better description of household furniture, with a
clock, with more frequent change of linen, or a decent
hat and pair of shoes, or maintenance for an ass or a
cat, or a pianoforte, or any other accession to his
comforts, would not fail to elicit his hardships and
• difficulties ; and would be profitable in that way, if
not otherwise. The allotment scheme is of so artifi •
• cial a character as to be really unintelligible without
reference to some remarkable peculiarities of our so-
cial state. It is a proposition to let land to la-
bourers. What hinders the letting? Cannot they
pay rent ? or will they not ? On the contrary, the
labourer will generally pay much more rent than the
farmer. When the Coryptimue of economists declined
to let land for sd. a lug when he could get Bd. fer
it, he was not speaking with reference to the general
demand for land ; he could not get his Bd. a lug from
farmers ; his supposed customers were a small genera-
tion of men who reckon land by lugs instead of acres,
to whom it is the greatest of boons to get the smallest
bit to call their own, but whom it is, unhappily, the
apparent interest of the farmer and landowner to deprive
of that small boon. His Lordship committed the
singular inconsistency of speaking the language of
political economy on an artificial supposition.
Descending from the open market of nations, he
applied its principles to the close market of a parish.
He addressed himself to the forced and unnatural
• demand of a crowd of parochial serfs, who would
outbid one another to the very gates of death,
because they hal always been rigorously excluded
• from it at any price, as-if it were a natural correla-
tive to the intrinsic value of that land, and resulted
freely and simply from the public competition.
The allotment discussion, therefore, involves inquiry
in this remarkable fact, that while the labourer is
willing to give a good rent for land he cannot
get it, but must be backed by a public agitation in
his demand. Whole counties are summoned with
the charit able intention of allowing labourers to give
enormous rents for miserable patches of soil. If the
two Gracchi were shaking the empire to its basis
for an agrarian law to parcel our dukeries amongst
our surplus population, there could not be more
fuss, more extravagance of hope, more rigour of
opposition, more earnestness of debate, than we now
witness on the simple question whether they who till
the soil may be allowed to rent not near a hundredth
part of it for their own special use. The fight, the
eloquence, the economical caution, the self-interested
demur, the legislative wisdom, are—for what?—for
ten acres, may be, out of two thousand. At the next
county or district meeting on this subject, we wish
some inquisitive gentleman would just ask what
makes the importance of this question. How comes
it that the distrigrution of ten acres out of two thou-
sand has become an affair to convoke counties and
harass the Legislature ? Why is the whole press of
the country to be moved, and the abstrusest theories
to be waked from the depths of intellect, before a
ploughman is to be suffered to pay 20s. yearly for his
quarter acre of potatoes and cabbages ? What would
be thought of such a controversy in the neighbouring
nations ? In France, the Reforme observes, that an
idea may be formed of the number of fractional parts
into which property is divided by the following facts :
—There are in France 5,205,411 properties on which
the land-tax is rated at sums not exceeding 5f.,
5,242,84 G at from sf. to 100 f., and, in fine, there are
445,271 which exceed 100 f. Who would think of
an allotment agitation there, where a man can get
any quantity of land to his taste as readily as he can
buy so many pounds of bread or ounces of coffee and
sugar ?

11'il
lIERALD.—As the year draws to its close, as
(I.e-
Cabinet Councils begin to assemble weekly, and as
• Tonethe period for the actual meeting of Parliament must
rFy soon be fixed, the attention of the public Ix gins to
&ono •
be drawn to the question which usually follows :
tIiNYI And what will Parliament do when it meets ?"
,wift 'Under a weak and incapable Government this ques•
.s.),a:iion is generally asked with some degree of anxiety.
" squeezable Administration" may look forward
with tolerable certainty to the application of " pres-
-tx•
. sure from without," and both its friends and its
-enemies must naturally regard with some disquietud..7
*the probable result of the squer:zing process. It is
a `one proof of the more firm and stable character of
err the present Government, that the one point to which
1" `men's minds seem just now to he directed, is, " What
T:IVIL taxes ara likely to be taken off People have lefr
1. I, 66 talking of " organic charges;„ the Chartists are
•; almost extinct ; the " suffrage movement moves not ;
even the League is content to " look to the regis-
' tration," and to anticipate great things from the
Revising Barristers' Courts of October, 1845 ; no-
u. thing, in short, is now heard of, in the way of
politics, but questions of finance and trade—Bra-
zilian sugar, the New Zealand Company, or the
Lerman Zollverein. And, as to Parliament, as we
have already observed, the chief thing people seem tO
expect or desire at its hands, is, the passing of a good
many railway Bills and the remission of a few of the
taxes. Now, on the latter point, we are not going to
dispute any proposition so entirely self-evident as that
all taxes, in themselves, are " atrocious," " abomin-
able," and, above all, exceedingly unpleasant. But
while all this is undeniable, the Government, be it
Whig or Tory, may safely plead in its own excuse
that it is called to administer the affairs of a nation
which has undertaken in various ways to pay about
fifty millions per annum ; and that one of its first
duties evidently is, to see that means are found to
meet this great annual liability. Hence it follows,
that as the revenue, only lately recovered froM the
effects of Whig quackery, exhibits but a certain
moderate surplus, that remission of taxation for which
people are so eagerly looking can take place only
within the limits so marked out. Do men gene-
rally desire the termination of the property-tax ?
if they do, then are they not acting irrationally
in assembling together in great numbers, to call
for the remission of the duty on cotton, upon tea,
and upon various other things now talked of?
So much so, that we cannot help considering a
meeting called to petition for the remission of this or
that duty, to be, in effect, a mating for the con-
tinuance of the property-tax. We do not for an in •
stant question the desirableness of the remission of the
duty on raw cotton, on malt, or on tea. Nor can it
be denied that the duty on insurances is one of a most
objectionable character. Of all the various modes of
internal taxation, this, perhaps, is the very worst.
Now, we have no manner of doubt, that it would give
oz. the greatest satisfaction to the Government, as well as
widely extend their popularity, were it in their power
to propose the extinri. of,mor a large reduction in,
all these duties. But they
.thuestwirlho.t, and they will
not, follow in.. the steps o
by reducing
revenuentil the proves
engagements
duties for popularity's sakep,tli
inadequate to meet the ub
gradual but constant increase is obliged toV' and
a
the nation's debt. What we desire, then, nto'aduerge
in
upon all petitioners for, ,and all talkers about, these
expected reductions of various duties, is, first to settle
what they would have done with the property-tax.
If they mean to expect its entire extinction, then it is
perfectly unreasonable to look for anything beyond