THE FARMERS AND THE LAND-LAWS.
THE effect of adversity upon the tenant-farmers of Berk- shire was seen last week at the Town Hall of Reading. They had asked Mr. Shaw Lefevre to give them an address. Agricultural depression has this disadvantage for Conservative speakers, that they can only lament it, and hope that it will pass away. An out-and-out Tory may talk of returning to Protection, but though the words sound sweetly in the farmers' ears, they know that they are mere sound, and nothing more. A sensible Conservative does not like to talk nonsense, even when it is pleasant to those who listen to him, so that this resource is denied him. Nor can he be expected to dwell with much insistance upon the altered relations between landlord and tenant which seem likely to grow out of .the agricultural depression. He is probably a landlord himself, and as such he must necessarily dislike the new meaning which coercion pro- mises to wear in some agricultural counties. To all appearance, the time is coming when seven landlords will take hold of one tenant, and outbid one another for the high privilege of grant- ing him a favourable lease. Why should not a tenant of pro- nounced political views make it a condition of accepting a farm that the landlord shall vote straight I It will be an in- teresting inversion of the familiar order, if landlords should ultimately cling to the ballot, as the one means by which they can vote according to their conscience without injuring their pocket. But jests of this sort would be clearly out of place in the mouth of a Conservative, unless his humour was of a strangely brutal kind. Least of all, however, can he talk about the reform of the land-laws. He may not be op- posed to such reform in his own person ; on the con- trary, he may secretly long for some retrospective re- laxation of entails and settlements. But the leaders of the party go the other way, and whatever other sins a Conservative may commit, he has usually an honourable dislike to embarrass his chiefs. Consequently, there is nothing left for him to tell the farmers, except that they are in a very bad way, and that he hopes they will soon be better, A Liberal has, in this respect, a great advantage over him. Re- form of the land-laws is, in one shape or another, a safe plank in the next Liberal programme. It is not yet certain what the reform will embrace, so that the speaker can touch gently
upon points as to which the farmers are still at issue with him ; but when all proper precaution has been taken, there is enough as to which they are agreed with him to fill any ordinary speech. The farmer who has been led to think about the land-laws by agricultural depression, soon finds that there is no reason why he should wish them kept as they are. He knows that entail and settlements are occasionally mentioned among the reasons which prevent his landlord from doing this or that, but he can recall no instance in which he has been better off by reason of some provision made by a former landlord in derogation of the liberty of the landlord that now is. Con- sequently, when a Liberal speaker offers to show him certain specific benefits that will accrue to him from a change in the land-laws, he is already willing, and will soon be eager, to listen to him. He knows, if he is a man of sense, that the Americans are not likely to cease to grow corn. He knows that they will hardly be such fools as to levy prohibitive prices for the carriage of corn. He knows that corn grown for England will never again be kept out by a Protectionist tariff. He is in no danger, therefore, of underrating the extent and duration of his difficulties; and to be free from that temp- tation is to be well placed for looking kindly at suggestions which, if he were less clear-sighted, he might put aside as too radical to be entertained.
Mr. Shaw Lefevre is not a pessimist as regards agricultural depression. With the better harvests that are now fairly due to us, and with rising prices in America, he thinks that the farmers may have seen the worst. But though the depression in future years may be much less than it has been in 1879, it will, compared with the past, be depression still. There is no need for despair, but there is abundant need for energetic action,— action that shall "make the conditions of cultivation such that changes may be most rapidly adopted, that capital may come to the land as readily as possible, and that the cultivator may have the best possible security that he will reap the full benefit of his improvements." English agriculture has to beat unequalled natural advantages, and unequalled natural advantages can only be beaten by skill and capital. The best land system for us is the system that gives most in- ducement alike to landlord and tenant to spend money wisely on the land. It is by this rule that in the long-run all land legislation will be judged. It is by this rule, for example, that the Agricultural Holdings Act is condemned. Parliament first decided that tenants are entitled to certain compensations, in the event of the termination of their tenancy by the act of the landlord ; and then added a provision that landlords might render the Act inoperative by simply giving notice to the tenant that he did not mean to be bound by it. Mr. Shaw Lefevre is not a fanatic upon this question. He does not wish to "lay down a complicated rule of compen- sation, which shall over-ride every agreement and every custom in the country." But he wishes Parliament to say that in:every tenancy, there shall be some method of esti- mating what improvements have been effected by the tenant. If such a method is provided by agreement, that will be sufficient ; if it is not, then it is the business of Parliament to provide it. In so far as a measure of this kind would inter- fere with freedom of contract, it would only do so by way of compensation for interferences in other directions. If land- lords were universally free to consult their own interests and had been free for a period long enough to create a custom in favour of consulting their own interests, the need of an Agricul- tural Holdings Act would be far less evident than it is now. But, in many instances, landlords are not thus free. They have no money to spend upon improving their property, and conse- quently they are not willing that the tenant should improve it for himself, if it is to follow as a necessary consequence that they cannot get rid of him without repaying him. The owner of a heavily encumbered estate would feel that he might as well as ceased to be owner, if he could not afford to turn out a tenant because of the difficulty of finding the ready money to compensate him for unexhausted improvements. When some- thing has been done to meet this state of things, it will be time enough to talk of freedom of contract as regards com- pensation to tenants. Even Mr. Ferrer, who, in the new number of the Fortnightly Review, expresses a scientific objec- tion of the utmost strength to anything that endangers freedom of contract, admits that, so long as landlords are ham- pered as they are by entails and settlements, they are often not free to consult the interest either of their tenants or of the public. Legislation, which compels them to consult these interests, does but step in to redress a balance which has
already been dangerously disturbed, not to disturb one which is at present perfect. Mr. Shaw Lefevre just touches upon a part of the subject which has hitherto received but little attention. Is the reform of the land-laws to be retrospective I If it is, the difficulty of drawing and passing the Bill will be enormously increased. It will partake of the nature of a disestablishing Bill, and will have to contain all manner of provisions for compensat- ing vested interests. If, on the other hand, it is not retro- spective, it will "not free land from its present shackles for many years to come." That it will have to be retrospective to some extent cannot, we think, be doubted ; but whether it should be by making the Act itself retrospective, or by esta- blishing an Encumbered Estates Court is another question. The latter form would probably be the easiest to carry through Parliament.
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