HOW TO RUIN AGRICULTURE.
EVERYONE would like to see the position of the agri- cultural labourer improved. Everyone would like to see him receiving higher wages, and paying less rent for a better cottage. Everyone would like to see a larger number of small holdings—holdings so graded as to act as stepping stones by which the ablest and most industrious of the labourers could climb to economic prosperity as substantial farmers. Everyone would like to see the supply of cottages so adequate and so well disposed that no rural labourer would have to walk more than half a mile to his work. The essential question, the only question, is, How are these benefits to be obtained ? The problem is a very difficult one, and is, of course, only part of the greater problem of how to get better remuneration and better conditions generally for the whole body of workers throughout the country. There is no special land question which can be dealt with on different lines from the rest of our industrial and economic problems.
We confess frankly that we have no panacea to recommend, no patent medicine with the label: "One bottle will cure in a year ; two bottles in six months." All we can say is that no remedy will ever be found on Mr. Lloyd. George's lines, the lines of personal abuse, class hatred, fantastic statistics, and malignant exaggeration, of unjust charges against one section of the community and of enervating flattery and cajolery of another section. Equally futile are incitements based on ignorance and recklessness and intended to make the rural labourers here imagine that they are worse housed, worse fed, and worse paid than labourers on the Continent—when exactly the reverse is the case—and that the readiest way by which to reach the Continental ideal is to injure or destroy the property of some class other than their own. There is nothing more certain in economics than that you can never get more property for A, B, C, and D by destroying the property of E and F. Quite apart from moral con- siderations, the eternal laws of exchange forbid such a result. You will never increase wealth by destroying it. The only way to improve men's material condition is to increase the supply of the things they want. The bene- factor of mankind, as Swift realized, is, in the last resort, he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. But that will never be accomplished by the methods of Mr. Lloyd George's speech or of the report of his Land Inquiry Committee published on Wednesday. Yet you may very easily make one blade grow where two grew before by following their recommendations, and by leading people to suppose that the State can by a decree raise people's wages or increase wealth by hampering free exchange in any commodity, from land to labour. Exchangeability is the sole source of wealth, and you can never impair or destroy exchangeability without prevent- ing the increase of wealth, without, that is, decreasing that of which you want more—wages, houses, and cultiva- tion. You may try and drive out exchangeability with the bayonet of the law, you may kill it, or seem to kill it, but it will track you down wherever you may go and wherever you may hide, and in the end exact its full revenge. We can only take to-day one point from the speech of Mr. Lloyd George and the report of his committee to illustrate what we mean. That point is the proposal which he made in regard to a minimum wage for the agricultural labourer. The specific proposals, as set forth in the report of the Land Inquiry Committee, are as follows :— " (1) That in order to secure to the labourer a sufficient wage it is necessary to provide for the fixing of a leg-al minimum wage, by means of some form of wage tribunal.
(3) That it should be an instruction to such wage tribunal that immediately, or within a short and defined period, the wage should be fixed at least at such a sum as will enable the labourer to keep himself and an average family in a state of physical efficiency, and to pay a commercial rent for his cottage.
(3) That it should be laid down as an essential feature of any legislation dealing with the minimum wage, that a farmer who is able to prove that the rise in wages has put upon him an increased burden should have the right to apply to a judicial body such as a Land Court for a readjustment of his rent.'
We have in Mr. Lloyd George's speech a pretty plain hint as to what the minimum wage is to be. He tells us that it is impossible to keep even a pauper on less than £1 Os. 6d. a week. Let us suppose a general enactment as to the minimum rural wage—obviously it would be impossible to confine the wage to agriculture—forbidding the pay- ment of wages of less than ..t1 a week, and see what would be the consequences. The first result must be that the farmer would have to come to the determination that he could only tolerate on his farm the best class of labour. He would not be able in future to put up with inefficient labour. The man who received X1 a week must be capable of doing £1 worth of work every week. This decision must result in the weeding-out of the old and the inefficient and so, taking the whole country over, in a very great reduction of the number of rural labourers. Next the farmer would have to review his farm very carefully to make sure that all the ground he was cultivating was worth cultivating at the new rate of wages. We are con- vinced that a good number of farms on which the land is of a poor quality would be thrown up altogether, and that in most farms a certain number of acres would be rejected as not worth tilling. In fine, there would be a concentra- tion in agriculture upon a higher type of labour and a better type of land. The result of this double pressure must be to throw an enormous number of men out of work. Meantime the demand for labour generally would be greatly reduced. No doubt the efficient people would be better off when they could get a job, but the weak would go to the wall and a good many of the efficient would fail to get employment. We can conceive the pure economist declaring that this might in the end be an advantage. Taking the analogy of the farm stable, he might say that nothing was worse economically than to have a lot of under-fed horses, and that it was a very bad policy for a farmer to keep on inefficient labour, and much better to use only efficient labour. That view might be a tenable one if there were no such thing as the call of humanity, and if men could be got rid of as weak and superfluous horses are got rid of. But, thank heaven, no one dare propose any such methods as the starving off of the old and in- efficient. If a sudden rise in wages and a sudden shrinkage of the cultivable area, even though they might theoretically make agriculture healthier, would mean that the labourers rejected are not worth .21 a week, they would have to be kept by the community in some way or other. They could not be eliminated or destroyed like the weak and superfluous horse because they were no longer wanted. But what does being a charge on the community mean ? It means that every taxpayer would have to pay his share towards keeping them in idleness. This means a derogation from the higher wages paid to the labourer. You would give him the minimum wage with one hand and take it away with the other in the shape of increased rates and taxes. The fact is that since humanity forbids with horror the thought of eliminating the weak and superfluous worker, it is far better that such workers should do something to earn their keep, and to increase the wealth of the world, than that they should become a sheer burden on the community. We shall be told, of course, that we are suggesting that the inefficient labourer should be allowed to keep down the wages of the better worker, but as a matter of fact be will not do that. The better worker, as it is, is always tending to drive the weaker worker to the wall, and farmers and others discover that it will really pay them better to have two efficient men at, say, 25s. a week each than three less efficient workers at 17s. each. If we leave the tendency alone the process is, however, gradual. If we stimulate it by posi- tive enactment we bring a much more rapid ruin upon the weaker worker, and give him no chance of gradually increasing his efficiency. At the same time, by a violent increase in the burden on the community, we tax down the wages of the efficient.
The giving with one hand and taking away with the other involved in the enactment of a minimum wage of .C1 a week seems to be quite a favourite device with the land reformers. We are told that the labourers are in future to pay economic rents for their cottages, which means, of course, some five or six per cent, on the cost of the cottage. But under the land revolution no land- lord is going to build cottages. They will have to be built by the local authority. But no local authority has ever built a really cheap cottage or ever will. We are inclined to believe that the economic rent of a cottage provided by a public authority will never be less than 5s.
a week. But it may well be that the man who has to pay 5s. a week rent, even if he is getting .21 a week in wages, will be not better but worse off than he is now when a landlord or a farmer is letting him a so-called tied cottage at 2s. or is. 6d. a week.
This criticism, it will be urged, is vitiated by the pro- found recommendation of the Land Committee that the farmer who has to pay the minimum wage is to take it out of the rental of his farm. The Land Court will make him a proportionate reduction in his rent. We venture to say to the wiseacres who have made this suggestion that, do what they will, the law of supply and demand will in the end beat them. No doubt you may cut down the rent in the case of the existing tenant, but the moment the farm comes to be let again, the rent then settled on will be governed by the law of supply and demand. It will depend not upon the minimum wage, but on the number of people who want to take farms and upon the supply of farms in the market. But have the amiable gentle- men who form the Committee of Inquiry never heard of farms going out of cultivation ? That does not happen to be the mood of the moment in agriculture, but it has been before and will be again. If the landlord's rent is reduced below a certain rate by the Land Court which apparently is to be set up, it may well be that it will not be worth his while to go on letting it. He may prefer to let the land lie derelict. "But, ali," it will be said, "that is provided for by the security of tenure which is to be given to the tenant. The landlord will no longer be able to say to a tenant : do not care to let my land at the rent the Land Court has fixed, but shall farm it myself.' The tenant will have the power to say : ' You have not only got to take the rent fixed. by the Court, but you have got to have me for a tenant.'" At first sight it may seem as if the landowner were caught fast, but remember that if the tenant is given complete security of tenure, i.e., a life tenure, he will have to do his own repairs. It would obviously be impossible to force a landlord to spend the sums which he now spends in repairs of all sorts—on farmhouses, farm buildings, labourers' cottages, dykes, walls, and in many cases fences and gates. In the last resort he spends large sums every year on repairs because he knows that otherwise he will not be able to get and keep a tenant. But the tenant to whom security of tenure at a lower rent has been given will not want to go. Therefore the landlord will treat him like a leaseholder with a thirty years' term, and tell him to do his own repairs. The fact is that if the attempt is made to inter- fere with the principles of free exchange as applied to land, there can only be one result—a diminution of the cultivated area, and so a huge injury to agriculture. You can very easily ruin agriculture by Act of Parliament. You will never improve it or make it more remunerative by putting it in chains.
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