SCOTCH LANDLORDS AND LAND-TENANCY LAWS.
WHEN the Irish Land Bill was passing through Parlia- ment, it was frequently urged in objection to its prin- ciples and provisions that it was a measure of exceptional legislation. As such it was to be condemned, we were told, because it was altogether unjust that the law should bestow upon Irish agriculturists, at the expense of their landlords, privileges and advantages refused to the English and the Scotch. And it would be impossible to continue to do so. Ere long, when the pressure of competition became strong, the latter would ask from Parliament what their Irish fellow-sub- jects had obtained, and with what justice, on principles of fair and equal dealing, could it then be withheld. ? The opponents of the Irish Land Bill were quite right. It is impossible in this country to make permanent exceptional legislation for any class. The time will come when whatever is right and reasonable in it will be seen to be of general application. And already that time is coming, if it has not already come, in regard to the exceptional land legislation of two years ago. It is beginning to be asked why tenant-right should be confined to Ireland, why security for the capital and property of tenants should be only found there, what English and Scotch cultivators have done that they should be excluded from the like benefits? It begins to be felt and to be openly said that the landlord has no fair and just claim to the improvements effected through the industry and by means of the money of the tenant. Why should he be permitted to "confiscate "- to employ Mr. Disraeli's term—property that does not belong to him, merely because by the necessities of the case it is in or on his land Both in England and Scotland buildings erected by the farmer are appropriated by the landlord, who does not require to give one shilling of compensation in return. And though the farmer may have poured wealth into the soil in the shape of costly manures, doubling and trebling its fertility, when he leaves he may have to go without the slightest recompense for very much of his labour and expendi-
ture. It is true that in Scotland a system of leases prevails by which the tenant has at least temporary security of tenure and assurance of a partial return for his money in the heavier crops he will take from the land. But the competition for farms is so great that if he insisted as conditions
of his lease upon having full security for compensation for improvements, unexhausted manures, &c., when his time for leaving came, it is pretty certain he never would have the chance of entering.
Though these questions and other provisions of the tenancy laws, equally oppressive, have been the subject of remark in Scotland for some little time, and among not a few there has sprung up a conviction that they ought to be placed by the law on a level with the Irish farmer, it might have been long before the subject would have been seriously agitated by the farmers. As a rule, they are a long-suffering and much-enduring race. If allowed to be decently comfortable they will, though perhaps grumbling not a little, submit to considerable injustice. But the Scotch farmer, as a man of sturdy independence, fires out wrathfully against any case of manifest oppression. He will go on bearing many hardships so long as they are distributed over a wide area. But let them be exemplified in a single concrete in- stance before him and his deepest feelings are stirred. It is then he will put his hand to the plough, resolved never to turn back till his work is accomplished. His Scotch pride and "dourness" and class-feeling come to the aid of his determination, and we would back him to persevere against all the landlords of the country. It is sufficiently foolish for a landlord to stir up such feelings and resolutions. In Scotland he ought to know what the tenantry are capable of when their blood is fairly up, and they have once with full purpose entered on a struggle for what they know to be justice. But the Scotch landlords, whatever their other virtues—and we admit they have many—have not hitherto been wise in their generation in dealing with their tenantry. They—or at all events the larger proprietors who own the greater part of the soil—have not known them enough or been sufficiently familiar with their ways of thought and feeling. Mostly educated in Eng- land, belonging to what in Scotland is accounted an alien Church, and being as a class without community of political principle and sentiment with the tenant-farmers, the two are prone to be mutually suspicious of each other. Accordingly, the landlord who does not understand the signs of the times is apt to be exacting and inclined to insist rigidly upon all his assumed rights and privileges. Only when this is borne in mind can the action of the Eight Hon. Mr. Nisbet Hamilton, of East Lothian, in giving notice to Mr. George Hope, of Fentonbarns, that his lease will not be renewed, be understood. If that gentleman, who is not, we believe, destitute of common sense, had reflected upon what his factor's notice to quit was likely to accomplish, he would hardly have ventured upon the step he has just taken. Mr. Hope is an agriculturist of world-wide reputation, a man universally known and esteemed, not in Scotland alone, but throughout Great Britain, a man of intelligence, education, and independence, of whom any land- lord might well be proud. But not only is he a decided Liberal, while Mr. Nisbet Hamilton is a keen Tory, but he has ventured to comment upon the changes of tenants which the East Lothian landlords have of late been making rather frequent on their estates. For such daring defiance of the class-feeling of the landed proprietors he must be made to suffer. Accordingly, the term of his lease being near expiry, he is told he must leave the farm on which he and his have been for nearly a century. And the injustice is that he must go without receiving,—at least, as of right, though of course his landlord may and very probably will pay him for unexhausted improvements,—a penny of compensation for the capital he has put into and upon the land beyond what he has obtained from his own cropping of the soil. As he has spent,
according to the testimony of Mr. Caird in the Tinzes, large
sums on manures and improvements, and as in consequence of that the farm has been enormously enriched, it would only be fair that his interest in it should be valued, and that his landlord should pay over to him the amount in hard cash. But nothing of this kind, which would be done in Ireland, is re- quired by the law in Scotland. Neither for disturbance, nor for drainage, nor for unexhausted manures and improvements, nor for reclamation, nor for anything else can Mr. Hope legally
claim a farthing. Will it be astonishing if the result should be such an agitation for the amendment of the land-tenancy laws as must compel the attention of the Legislature at an early period?
The action of Mr. Nisbet Hamilton may well seem short- sighted in the extreme. But in truth he has only fur- nished another, though a striking, exemplification of the disposition of the Scotch Tory landlords. We remember another case not many years ago which was almost equally noteworthy with this of Fentonbarns. The landlord was the late Marquis of Lothian, a man of cultivation and of more than ordinary liberality of feeling and breadth of thought. In his early years at Oxford, indeed, he had given promise of future intellectual distinction. That he did not realise the pro- mise was doubtless due to the accident that made him a helpless invalid for life. But though forced to live thenceforth in privacy and seclusion, it might have been supposed the native sagacity and sense of justice of the late Marquis would
have saved him from such an act as this of Mr. Nisbet Hamilton's. It did not, however. The Marquis was a
thoughtful and conscientious Conservative, and was opposed on conviction to Mr. Gladstone's Irish-Church policy. He, too, had on his estate an agriculturist of reputation, Mr. Scott, tenant of Timpendean (if we do not mistake), in Roxburghshire. Mr. Scott was a Liberal, and although not of the independent cha- racter of Mr. Hope, he was, on account of his politics, distaste- ful to his landlord. Therefore, when his lease expired some time near the last general election, he was informed that it would not be renewed. Lord Lothian was defended by the Tory papers on grounds that assumed him incapable of being influenced by political motives to do anything of the
kind alleged, but to the disgust and confusion of his cham- pions the Marquis had the frankness to write a letter —which was printed by the Scotstnan—avowing openly that Mr. Scott's notice to quit was due to political considerations. He even went the length of maintaining the theory that a
landlord was entitled to make political considerations an element in coming to a decision to whom he should let his farms. Other things being equal, the Marquis argued, the fact that one applicant was of his own and another of oppos- ing politics justified him in giving a preference to the former.
The further step from this to turning out a tenant of long- standing from his farm who was a Liberal, in order to replace him by a Conservative, was, of course, easily taken.
We recall this case of the Marquis of Lothian in order to illustrate, as it surely does when taken in connection with that of Fentonbarns, what manner of spirit even the best of the Scotch Tory landlords are of. It is notorious—and many other instances could be given—that political motives are allowed to have large influence in the Scotch counties in this way, which would not perhaps be remarkable were it not the case that in Scotland the relations of landlord and tenant are of a strictly commercial character, farms being almost invari- ably let to the highest bidder. How far the Ballot will mend mat- tors is at least doubtful. If the Scotch Conservatives are allowed, as was proposed last year, to multiply polling-places in the counties, so that the tenants shall poll in or near their landlords' domain, then we conceive the Ballot will be of little or no avail. It is necessary, then, that further checks should be imposed upon the landowners. And we believe, if only the demands of the tenants, which are in themselves otherwise fair and just, were granted, there would be the most effective check upon such practices. If landlords were aware that they must compensate the tenantry for all outlay on the soil beyond what they might be proved to have received a fair return for in the course of their leases, then a proprietor would "think twice, or even thrice," before getting rid of an old, enterprising, skilled, and generous cultivator only because of his individual opinions, to which he has quite as much right as his landlord to his. And this is a matter which in truth is of direct public in- terest and importance. It is of national concern that the limited quantity of land in the United Kingdom available for the growth of corn and the rearing of stock should be cultivated and utilised to the uttermost. Much has been done of late years, but even yet, after all that high farming has accomplished, the land of the country does not, as Lord Derby lately said, yield one-half of what it might be made to do. By the skilful application of energy and capital, if unimpeded by arbitrary and unjust regulations, we believe the increase of stock and produce might be more than even an additional hundred per cent. But if only a tenth of that rate could be attained, there would be an increase of wealth to the country from the growth of the soil alone of, it is calculated, by some forty millions a year! The whole nation, then, is deeply interested in whatever would conduce to such a great result. But capital is sensitive.
In order to allow of the possibility of such a result, those able and willing to employ their capital on increasing the fertility of the soil must not be placed by short-sighted laws at an economical disadvantage. That they are so now is only too evident. "They [the laws] leave," says a recent vigorous writer on the subject, "the investment insecure as to tenure, liable to expulsion on the shortest notice ; they make it artificially intransferable ; they subject it to exceptional priorities for landlords' claims, to absolute denials of justice in the courts of law ; they punish it in every direc- tion, sanction its being eaten up or trodden down by the undue multiplication of wild animals for sport, even confiscate it altogether if the tenant puts it into the shape of buildings, or drains, or lasting enrichments of the soil, and then are sur- prised that capital so treated comes sparingly in proportion to the needs of profitable improvement and culture." This must no longer be. It is the interest of the whole nation, and mainly of the teeming millions of the population, that it shall cease as soon as possible. We thank the Right Hon. Mr. Nisbet Hamilton, in the name of these millions, for directing attention so forcibly to the subject. We shall be surprised if the result do not prove different from what he desired or expected, or from what will be acceptable to the proprietors of either England or Scotland, though in the long ran the landlords themselves, as has been the case in regard to free trade, may reap the greatest benefit from the change.
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