TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE. LAND POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT.
THAT it is desirable from every point of view, moral, physical, and social, to encourage men to live and make their living in the country is a proposition which hardly needs defence. Possibly the evils of town life have been exaggerated, and possibly, if we follow the excellent example which is being set by the Garden City, and also if we clear our urban atmosphere from coal-smoke, we may do a great deal to mitigate the evils, we might almost say horrors, of life in the poorer parts of our great towns. When, however, all is said and done, the need of preventing the diminution of the rural population is a very real one, and one which deserves most serious and anxious consideration, not by one party in the State or by one section of the community, but by the whole British people. It is a problem of immense difficulty, and will never be solved unless the entire community can be interested in the attempt to solve it. We do not mean that therefore it is wrong for one party in the State to take the lead in reform. On the contrary, as we pointed out a fortnight ago in regard to the question of universal training, unless matters of importance are taken up by one or other party in the State, and thus brought into the region of practical politics, they are in this country very apt to be neglected altogether. All we contend is that in a matter of such vital importance as bringing people back to the land, or, what is far more practical and important, keeping people on the land, the question, though specially taken up by one of our political parties, should not be treated in a manner hostile and aggressive to the other party, but should be handled, as is perfectly possible, so as to cause the minimum, and not the maximum, of party contention.
We see, then, no objection to the Liberal Party desiring to devote themselves specially to the land question. On the contrary, we are delighted that they should resolve to give a lead and to waken public opinion thereon. Most unfortunately, however, they seem determined not merely to claim praise for dealing with so large a problem, but to use that problem in order to defame and punish their political opponents. Instead of endeavouring to enlist the aid of the less aggressive sections of the other party, they are apparently intent on using the land question as a convenient stick with which to belabour their rivals. For example, no secret is made of the fact that the official Liberals regard the raising of the land question at the present moment as a most adroit tactical move in the struggle with the Peers. Many defenders of the Government policy seem, indeed, to care little about the merits of their scheme, but dwell chiefly upon the fact that they have at last found a way of bringing the Lords to their knees. Others, again, indulge in shrill paeans over their proposed land legislation because it will humble the pride of the haughty landowner, and deprive him of what are alleged to be his ill-gotten gains, and of those powers over the villager which he is supposed to use with the unscrupulousness of the " boss " of an American Trust coupled with all the ruthless tyrannyof a robber Baron of the Middle Ages. The wicked landlord is to be torn to pieces, and every one is to be satisfied in the process, from the old-fashioned individualist village Hampden to the modern Socialist who desires that all property should be vested in the hands of the State.
No doubt a certain amount of this rhetorical "tall talk" can be regarded as merely the babble of the political auction-room. We must never forget, however, that land- owners are timid people, and, what is more, are people who have been rendered pessimistic by a long period of loss and depression. They are therefore always inclined to fear the worst, and to magnify the results of any proposal which seems likely to injure them. A man whose land thirty years ago was producing £4,000 a year gross, and whose gross income from the same land is now only £2,500, and who, in addition, has had all the outgoings of the estate very considerably increased, is not likely to feel cheerful or'to hope for the best when be is told that he is a bloated capitalist who for the past generation has been battening in hateful luxury on the spoils of the poor,
and whose unjust and injurious profits may be rightly diminished by.. giving him a " fair " price for his land. Such a man, in face of such talk, naturally takes a gloomy view, and being lethargic in matters of business as well as obstinate—lethargy and obstinacy in all parts of the world seem to go with unprofitable landowning—ia almost certain to turn mulish and to say :—" Well, if the State means to rob me, I cannot help it ; but at any rate I will not facilitate the work. Instead of going quietly, I can at least insist on being dragged to the place of execution." If this sort of spirit once takes possession of the land- owner, he will be able to exercise an amount of drag-power upon any scheme for increasing the number of small cultivators which will probably surprise the advocates of rural reform.
We must remember also that if such a struggle is provoked by wild talk and unjust accusations, the land- owner, though he perhaps does not realise it now, will get the support of a very large section of the community . which voted Liberal at the last Election because at that moment Liberalism was championing the cause of conservatism and moderation. Though the Government may find it convenient to forget it, the victory at the last Election was essentially a conservative—or let us say a moderate—victory. It was won for the Liberals by the " Left Centre" men,—that is, by the men of moderation and of conservative instincts, who in constituency after con- stituency turned the scale by the transfer of their votes. It was the men who were determined that the fiscal system which bad proved so great a benefit to us should not be made the subject of a violent revolution who gave the present Government their huge majority. The General Election of 1906 proved, in fact, that whenever it comes to a tussle, the "Left Centre " element is the strongest one in the community. If the Liberals are determined to attack our landed system in a revolutionary spirit, they will see this fact illustrated with quite as unpleasant distinctness as Mr. Chamberlain and his friends did in 1906.
We have not yet, of course, seen the &tails of the Government proposals ; but if the citation of the Scotch Bill, and the wild, and often minatory, rhetoric of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Winston Churchill at the meetings of the Land Reformers on Saturday last, are to be taken as trustworthy indications, we feel con- vinced that little good will come out of the new land agita- tion. Is it too late to ask the Government to remember that they are Free-traders, and that Free-trade is not a doctrine which applies only to commercial exchanges? Interference with free competition (an interference which the Liberals profess to condemn so heartily in the case of the tariff) will do exactly the same harm in the case of landed property that it accomplishes in wholesale and retail trade. If the land question is to be settled on Free-trade lines, it will be necessary to abandon all this highly seasoned talk about unearned increment, and about the community having the right to confiscate the extra value which has been attached to land owing to the growing prosperity of the State. Unearned increment has no reality outside tho predatory rhetoric of the Socialists, or, if it has, it is some- thing which attaches to every form of property. .There is no greater example of unearned increment than that which is to be found in a large portion of the public Debt. Take, again, the unearned increment in objects of art. There are plenty of people whose great-grandfathers paid Romney or Gainsborough or Sir Joshua or Raeburn from £50 to £100 to paint their wives and daughters who could now sell those pictures for twenty or thirty times the original price. Till the State finds some means of checking the growth of prosperity, as no doubt the Socialist State soon would, an unearned increment is certain to attach to many forms of property. And remember also that an unearned decrement attaches to land in a very marked degree. There are plenty of men whose ancestors bought land in England a hundred years ago in counties like Essex or Suffolk or Norfolk where the property has suffered a decrement of from forty to fifty per cent. Surely if the unearned increment is to be seized by the State, the
State should also deal with unearned decrement. '
We cannot on this occasion set forth what we consider should be the right Free-trade lines for dealing with the land question. We should, however, like to make one practical suggestion. In our opinion, the proper raw material out of which peasant-proprietors should be created is not private property, but the ager publicus, using the word in the widest sense,—the sense of all land dedicated to public uses. The Government have made a very good start in determining that they will create on the Crown estates as many small holdings as possible. We should like to see this principle carried much further, and all land held in mortraain employed in the creation of small holdings. That is, we would make the laud belonging to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, to the Universities, to all schools, hospitals, and corporate charities, under proper guarantees against pecuniary spoliation, the raw material out of which to create small holdings. There is no objection to applying compulsion in such cases. It is, indeed, a benefit to transfer land from the dead to the living hand. And to these we would add all glebe- lands, subject to the condition, of course, that the income of the incumbent should not suffer. To take a practical example. In almost every rural parish in England there is some glebe-land or charity-land. On the first occasion on'which such land became vacant we would empower a specially constituted Government Department to consider applications in regard to it, and if it were in any way suitable to the creation of small holdings, we would expropriate it and create holdings of from three to ten acres, the Government lending the money for the necessary buildings,—provided, of course, that the said Department had first ascertained that the demand for small holdings in the parish in question was a genuine one, and that the small holdings when created would be occupied. On the small holdings thus called into existence the Government might create a tenure somewhat in the nature of copyhold,—that is, the holding should not be allowed to be subdivided or amalgamated with others. When a tenant desired to vacate his holding he might be allowed to nominate his successor under a system of tenant-right. In this way without friction or difficulty a very large number of small holdings might be created throughout England. If the experiment were an economic success, we feel sure that the example given would be voluntarily followed by a very large number of landlords,—for we repudiate altogether the notion that the English landlord is a man who does not wish to make the best he can economically out of his patrimonial acres, but prefers to see game rather than men upon the land. If the Government can make the creation of small holdings pay on land in mortmaiu, they will have plenty of imitators. The landlords have only preferred shooting tenants to farming tenants because the former have proved more advantageous from the economic point of view.
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