THE LIBERAL REMEDY FOR AGRICULTURAL DISTRESS.
IT is positively distressing to read a debate like that of Wednesday on farm tenures. The Liberals seem to. us to be wandering so far out of the true path in dealing with agricultural distress. We have always admitted the existence of that distress in the fullest and frankest way. In spite of the continued comfort in some districts, and of the almost inexplicable success of individuals in making their farms pay—a success which, as we have reason to know, puzzles country bankers as much as it does observers from the towns—it is certain that agriculture is an unprosperous trade. In East Anglia in particular it may be broadly stated that, always allowing for local and individual exceptions, land is cultivated at a loss, or that farmers are making less than they would make if they withdrew their capital and sat idle. Under these circumstances, it is only wonderful that so few schemes for reinvigorating the trade are brought up in Parliament ; and the fact testifies to great endurance and pluck, as well as to some hopelessness, on the part of those engaged in it. Still, two kinds of schemes, which we may call the Tory and Liberal schemes, are pretty often brought forward ; and we hardly know which of them affords the lesser hope. The Tory idea, expressed usually through Mr. Chaplin or Colonel Howard Vincent, is always some sort of Protection, protection for wheat, pro- tection for barley, or protection for meat ; and it is hardly worth discussing. The people simply will not have it. They have thought the matter out, and they will not allow food to be artificially raised in price. We hold them right, we need not say, in their decision, but whether they are right or wrong there is not a statesman in England who does not admit that they are determined, and that for the present, at all events, discussion of Protection is but breath thrown away. The Liberal idea, on the other hand, usually expressed through Mr. Lambert or Mr. Gardner, is more plausible, but it will, we fear, be soon discovered to be just as baseless. The notion on this side is that if the farmer were made more " secure "—that is, more nearly a copyholder or freeholder with a rent- charge, he would prosper ; but where is the reasonable- ness of that? The farm is declared to be unprofitable, owing to the fall in prices, and therefore it is to be secured to the farmer ! He is losing his money in it, and therefore is to be invited to put in more money yet. The method of realising this paradoxical ideal of a man tied to an unprosperous concern, in order to make him prosperous, is almost as odd as the idea itself. The Liberals do not venture to propose the Irish tenure, and so in fact give the tenant a freehold while he pays his rent, but they propose that he should be rendered unevictable by giving him rights of compensa- tion for " improvement." If he improves the land even by simple " good farming," which he is bound by his contract to do, he is, if disturbed, to be paid by his landlord compensation for that " improvement." If he puts up byres which are too good for the farm, be is to be paid for them. If he believes in drainage and drains, he is to be paid for that, even if the drainage, as sometimes happens, fails entirely to improve the yielding quality of the land. He is even under the Bill of Wednesday allowed to lay down arable land in permanent pasture without the land- lord's consent, and on disturbance is to be paid the expenses of the process, although the cost may have been nearly equal to the value of the farm. Of course the landlord will and must resist such demands, and the practical effect of Bills of this kind is that a tenant is to be encouraged in tilling a profitless farm to the best advantage, by being invested with a right to bring most difficult law-suits This is the boon which is to make tenants rejoice, and for which we are to upset the system of contract, and materially to impair the value of land as property.
For be it observed, while so much power is taken from the landlord, nothing is given him in return. He is invested, it is true, with the right to sue the tenant who spoils the farm, for compensation, but what is the value of that ? The men who spoil farms are the men without capital ; and the right of suing them is a right to waste money and time in law-suits against paui g rs, that is, a right to throw good money after bad. The tLndlord is not rendered one whit more secure; indeed, lie is rendered less so, for his power of distraint is abolished, his power of eviction is limited by the compensations, and his right to raise his rent practically disappears. If be does anything so atrocious as that, the tenant threatens to go, and at the same t me makes his demand for manifold compensations. The pleasure of owning land, which is in fact the pleasure of administration, is taken away from him, the dignity of owning land is materially lessened, the security of owning land is reduced by additional liability to law-suits, and the profit of owning land is in no way increased. The result must necessarily be a reduction in the wish to hold land, and therefore a reduction in its saleable value. The landlord is subjected to partial confiscation, without, as it seems to us, any particular good to the tenant, who, be it observed, is to-day not the oppressed but the oppressor. So difficult is it in the distressed districts to get good tenants, that the man who will take a vacant farm, and can give good evidence of solvency, practically fixes his own terms, settles his own rent, and if he pays that rent punctually, can, within certain limits recognised on all sides as just, follow his own devices as freely as if he owned the soil. Indeed, the tenant is injured ; for the landlord, thus hampered and coerced, and, so to speak, bullied by the law, must of necessity exact all dues rigidly, must refuse any consideration for bad seasons, must treat the tenants of his farms as he treats the tenants of his city houses, as people who are his debtors, excellent people it may be, but people with whom he has no connection beyond a cash contract. Can it be wise to upset the present system, which in many ways still tempts the wealthy to own land, to obtain so poor a result ?
Be it observed, we are not raising the usual Tory objections to this kind of legislation. We say nothing of the injustice done to the landlord, or the want of right in the tenant, who is to be invested with privileges he did not contract for. We entirely admit that in the present condition of agriculture, unusual remedies may be re- quired, and only ask whether these are the remedies which will succeed. We are to upset a system which, being one of simple contract, at least seems just; we are to treat the owners of the soil, whose right is based on the legislation of centuries, in a way they think oppressive; we are to multiply occasions of litigation ; and when we have done it all, we are still uncertain whether either of the two objects we all have at heart will be secured, whether, that is, the large body of tenants will be happier, or whether the soil of the country will be better cultivated. In Ireland, we had at least one excuse for revolutionising ancient arrangements ; that the whole body of cultivators were passionately desirous that they should be revolutionised ; that eviction was to them the summum malum ; that they had no hope of happiness on earth except through the quiet possession of a holding. Does that state of things exist here ? Will the farmers, to take a brutal test, turn out all Tory candidates because they are on the whole, and as a party, indisposed to tenant-right ? Even in Ireland it is very doubtful whether we have or have not made a big blunder, whether we should not have created freeholds by State-aided pur- chase, instead of creating a queer kind of copyhold which involves landlords and tenants at every step in legal ex- penses. We are told, on authority we believe, that the aggregate sum paid to lawyers under the Land Acts—all of which, remember, we supported in this journal—con- stitutes a perceptible portion of the value of the land, and that the new feuds about valuations almost equal in bitterness the old feuds about rent. Those are not reasons for going back in Ireland, where, in fact, we must go for- ward till we again touch the firm ground of freehold; but they are reasons for hesitating to introduce the same complicated and artificial system of farm tenure into this country. The logical conclusion of Mr. Lam- bert's proposals, which were endorsed in principle by the House of Commons, is a strong Tenant-right Law, with rents fixed by the Courts, official valuations, and all the rest of the semi-Socialist system now in force in. the sister-country. Is that really the way out of their distress in which English farmers put their trust ? We cannot believe it; for we believe that their need is more profit, and cannot see how tenant-right is to give them even an additional half-crown an acre. They know their own business as well as any men, though citizens will not believe it, and the one boon for which they are sincerely grateful is reduction in rent. If they have little to pay, they can at least wait in a faint hope of better times ; but an increased right of bringing actions when they are dispossessed, will not yield them even that. Is there a shopkeeper in the world who believes that he can make a declining business pay because the Legislature in its mercy has invested him with a new right of
quarrelling with his landlord ? Farmers are no stupider than shopkeepers, though the Legislature appears de- termined to believe they are.
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