As comparisons have been drawn between the systems of government in
Ireland and in Poland, let us consider for a moment the condition of the
Polish rural population under German rule. It must be noted that the
recent promises of Polish autonomy made by Germany--obviously for
military and temporary reasons--refer only to those portions of Polish
territory held by other States. No change is to be made in the position
of Prussian Poland. Here, for many years, it has been, and still is, the
avowed object of the Prussian Government either to extirpate or forcibly
Teutonise this Slavonic population, and to replant the country with
German colonists. The German Chancellor in 1900, Prince von Buelow,
defended this anti-Polish policy in the cynical saying that "rabbits
breed faster than hares," and the meaner animal, the Pole, must
therefore be drastically kept down in favour of the German. Between 1886
and 1906 the Prussian Government was spending over a million sterling a
year in buying out Polish landowners, great and small, and planting
Germans in their stead. The measure proved futile; the "rabbits" still
multiplied, for the Poles bought land from German owners faster than the
Government did from them. In 1904, in order to check the development of
Polish agriculture and land-settlement, the Government took the extreme
step of forbidding Poles to build new farmhouses without a licence. A
still more oppressive measure came in 1908, when, in clear defiance of
the German Constitution, the Prussian Government actually took powers
and were voted funds--from taxation paid by Poles and Germans alike--for
the compulsory expropriation of Polish owners against whom nothing
whatever could be alleged except their non-German nationality. These
powers have been put into operation, and every Pole in Prussia now holds
his patrimony on his own soil on the sufferance of a Government which
regards his very existence as a nuisance, because he occupies a place
which a German might otherwise fill.
During precisely the same period the British Government in Ireland has
been bending the wealth and credit of the United Kingdom to objects
precisely the reverse. Ireland, owing to the wars and confiscations of
the seventeenth century, had come to have a land-owning aristocracy
mainly of English descent with a Celtic peasantry holding their farms as
yearly tenants. The object of British land-legislation has been to
expropriate the landlords, so far as their tenanted land is concerned,
and to establish the Irish peasant, as absolute owner of the land he
tills. The Irish tenant is now subject only to rents fixed by law; he
can at any time sell the interest in his farm, which he has, therefore,
a direct interest in improving; he is also assisted by a great scheme of
land-purchase to become owner of his land on paying the price by
terminable instalments, which are usually some 20 per cent. less than
the amount he formerly paid as rent. Under this scheme about two-thirds
of the Irish tenantry have already become owners of their farms, while
the remainder enjoy a tenure which is almost as easy and secure as
ownership itself. It is not surprising, then, that a German economist
who has made a special study of this subject should declare that "the
Irish tenants have had conditions assured to them more favourable than
any other tenantry in the world enjoy"; adding the dry comment that in
Ireland the "magic of property" appears to consist in the fact that it
is cheaper to acquire it than not.[*] That magic has been worked for
Ireland by the British Legislature and by British credit. As in Prussia,
compulsory powers (limited by certain conditions and to certain
districts) stand behind the schemes of the Government; but the
compulsion is exercised not against the Irishman in favour of the
English settler, but against the (usually) English landlord in favour of
the Irish tenant. The State is now pledged to about 130,000,000 pounds
for the furtherance of this scheme, the instalments and sinking fund to
the amount of about 5,000,000 pounds a year being paid with exemplary
regularity by the farmers who have taken advantage of it.
[Footnote *: Professor M. Bonn, of Munich University. "Modern Ireland
and her Agrarian Problem," pp. 151, 162, translated from "Die irische
Agrarfrage." _Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaft_; Mohr, Tuebingen.]