THE WELSH LAND QUESTION.
WE have no parti pris on the Welsh Land Question,— unless a general belief that two and two make four and not any more, and that the best way to prevent men making improvident bargains, and so injuring both them- selves and the State, is for them to feel, while in the act of bargaining, that if they are not very careful they will be severely punished, can be called part/ pris. Subject to this feeling, and the sense that the enforcement of contracts by law is primarily the support of the poor and weak against those of thestrong hand and the strong purse, we are willing not only to listen most carefully to Welsh grievances, but if those grievances can be established, to run a good deal of risk in trying to put them right. If, as is alleged, the Welsh landlords do not, like other holders of property, try to sell in the best market ; but instead use their position as landlords to "revel in the luxury of oppression ;" if they are vindic- tive persecutors of certain religious beliefs first, and letters of land afterwards ; if they habitually break up the happy homes of prosperous tenants, not because the tenant cannot pay his rent, but because he is not attentive enough to the behests of the landlord's gamekeepers, or because he attends chapel instead of church, or because ho votes for Liberal candidates,—.then we admit that something drastic ought to be done to prevent the misuse of their property. The question is—Do they do it P This question thoWelek Land Commission has been trying to answer, and at its sittings immense masses of wild and washy talk have been produced to support the theory that there has been a habitual and intolerable misuse of the landlords' powers. As far, however, as the proceedings have yet gone, there has been no evidence worthy of the name to show that the Welsh landlords oppress their tenants, or act towards them otherwise than do English landlords towards their tenants. They get the best rents they can, and realise about 2 per cent. on the money invested by them or their predecessors in purchasing the soil, and incur in addition to this not ex- cessive return on their capital, an amount of odium such ma falls on the Jew usurer in Russia or Germany. Of course, there may be mad, or bad, or desperate landlords who de foolish and harsh things in Wales ; but as far as the normal condition of things goes, what we have stated seems the position of the average Welsh landowner_ He does not, no doubt, greatly love the chapel elder, or bard, or vernacular journalist who, in the name of Non- conformity, declares in tones of thunder that his land ought to be confiscated, and he treated. as a robber ; and when he dares, he probably tries to hit back—who would not ?—but to speak of him as an Alva in a Norfolk jacket is quite absurd. The wonder really is, considering the connection between the Nonconformist party in Wales and the land agitation, that there is so little attempt to show favouritism to the Churchmen. If the Baptists in Chicago made it a rule to fight rents, how long would it be before the public were " notified." " No Baptists need apply " That the Welsh hindlords have not attempted reprisals is, however, very much to their credit, and shows how little of the old Adam is to be found in them. It will be said, however, " This is all very well, but how do you explain the fact that a Land question does exist in Wales, and that the agitation has on several occasions gone very near to showing features like those with which we are familiar in Ireland ? There can be no smoke without fire ; and the circumstance that an agitation does exist, precludes the notion that there is nothing to trouble about." But we by no means say that there is nothing to trouble about. We think, indeed, that there is a great deal of cause for anxiety. All we deny is that the cause is " the ghastly nature" of the land- lords. We, take it that the real cause of the Welsh agita- tion is threefold :—(1), the agricultural depression from which the whole world is suffering ; (2), the instinctive hatred of every Celtic race for the system of landlord and tenant developed by English law, custom, and usage; (3), the existence of a political and religious and national party anxious to exploit the Land question for their own purposes,—anxious, that is, as Mr. Finton Lalor said of the Irish National movement, to treat the Land question as an engine, and to make it draw after it a whole series of political measures. The first of these causes need. demand little attention here,—bad seasons, the fall of prices, foreign competition, and the imperfect farming bred of the good old times, when the British consumer had to buy whatever the farmer offered him, or starve, are operating through the whole of England. The second cause is special, and on it, in reality, pivots the whole question. The Welsh instinctively loathe the English land system of fixed rents and settled contracts. To begin with, they suffer from the genuine land-hunger,—the fierce desire to get possession of a piece of the earth's surface, and to live on it, and to pass on the possession to their descendants. The Celt, when he wants a piece of land, wants it beyond all reason, and to get it will enter into bargains of suicidal improvidence. It is of no use to tell him not to be such a fool as to offer a rent he cannot make, andtoexpect that if he loses the land because some one else bids too high, he will be reasonable and satisfied, and think with chastened satisfaction that the man who has taken the farm, has been "jolly well let-in." Not a bit of it. Either he will insist on plunging into an improvident con- tract, and will then curse the harshness and inhumanity of the landlord who exacts so large a rent—forgetting entirely that there must be two sides to every contract for the hiring of land—or else he will, though preserved from a rash bargain by his shrewdness and love. of money, feel a burning sense of wrong and injury at being, again owing to the wickedness and rapacity of the landlord, kept out of the farm. Again, when he is in a farm, and has mieforeausee--or- a- large family, or other expenses, he thinks the landlord a fiend. in human shape if he does not make things easy. He does not want to pay nothing; but he also does not want to be " ground down to the strict letter of the law," or to pay a pedantic homage to the sanctity of contract. He wants sentiment to enter into the matter, and not to be checked and worried by the pro- visions of the written agreement. Again, be does not regard a farm as a place of business,—an opportunity for making a certain number of pounds per annum by agriculture, a place to be given tp like a " public " or a shop if it does not pay, or if the landlord proves unreasonable. It is primarily his home, his shelter from the world—a refuge for which he will struggle with all his energies. What makes this laud-hunger the more acute in Wales is the fact that the Welsh are a thrifty and saving people, and that there are, therefore, always a great number of men under the temptation to enter into improvident bargains. Fortu- nately, this tendency is not often taken advantage of, at any rate by the big landlords. Instead, the Welsh squires seem, as a general rule, to keep fixed. rents, or to let at a rent based upon an estimate made by an expert as to the amount which a farmer could be reasonably expected to pay. This practice, however, does not by any means prevent the growth of grievances, but rather encourages them. If the landlord lets to the highest bidder, an external power decides who shall be tenant of the " Home farm." If, however, he offers the farm at a certain rent, and has several offers, he chooses his own man. But the exercise of this choice makes frightful animosities among a people mad with land-hunger, and naturally suspicious and jealous. The man to whom the handkerchief is thrown becomes an enemy ; and each man who does not get the coveted contract to cultivate in accordance with the best systems of husbandry, and to pay rent at Lady-day and Michaelmas, feels certain that he was rejected because he is a Nonconformist or a Liberal, or because his son was suspected of poaching in his last tenancy. His explanation is probably perfectly wrong ; but he nurses it so diligently that it soon becomes " more real than if it were true." To increase the sense of wrong comes the Celtic habit of never forgetting. The fancied wrong done by Squire Jones is fed by the traditional wrong done to the tenant's father by Squire Smith—who, it is believed, evicted twenty tenants for voting against the Blues in the election of 1880. National and religious animosities are also called in to help keep up the fire, till at last the tenant's general discontent with not being a freeholder—for that is what, in fact, it is— becomes a grievous sense of injury and oppression.
The third cause of the Welsh Land question is hardly less important. The discontent of the Welsh with a system of land let by the year might have smouldered on, as things smoulder on among the Celtic races, without ever bursting into flame, had it not happened that the forward section of the Nonconformists were anxious for Disestablish- ment, and that there had also grown up a National Party in imitation of the Irish National Party. They, as we have said, are treating the Land question as the engine re- quired. to draw their train ; and are getting-up steam in it by the natural process of lighting a fire. What can be done to put out the fire and to make the engine useless for the purposes of Particularist traction P That is the question. Very little, we fear,.at once ; but a good deal, if time is allowed. The example of the Irish Land question shows that the " three F's ' and Land Courts offer no remedy. What is wanted is freehold farms. We ought, then, to do everything to encourage the purchasing of freeholds. A good deal might be done by a system of land transfer by registration. Still more—the scheme is Lord Thring's—by allowing landlords to pay succession- duty in land, and by the Treasury putting the land thus acquired up to auction. Possibly, too, some plan of lending approved tenants a fourth of the purchase-money at 4 per cent. for forty years might be an advantage ; but the diffi- culty here is finding a good reason for treating Wales separately. Till these remedies can be applied, we have just got to endure the worry of Welsh agrarian discontent as best we can. It will not become virulent, as in Ire- land, and therefore there is no necessity for actual alarm. After all, every State at every period of its history has had problems, and, as a rule, has found it impossible to solve them. This generation has no right to imagine that it can find a short cut to the millennium.
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