LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE THREE F.'s. .
fro THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:] Si,—Sir Stafford Northcote told the people at Brecon that he did not know what the three F.'s were, but that he guessed they meant fraud, force, and folly. It would have been nearer the mark to say that they meant fairness, friendliness, and foresight. They do, in fact, indicate the principles on which— with whatever varieties of form and method—all sensible land- lords, including Sir Stafford Northcote himself, aim at main- taining their relations with their tenants. And if Mr. Forster puts those principles into a Bill in the shape in which they can be best adapted and applied to the special conditions in Ireland, and this is enacted, after its rough edges and corners have been duly smoothed and rounded by Parliamentary debate, the result will be neither more nor less than a law to compel bad, and enable small, landlords to do what good and large landlords now do of their own accord.
First F.—Fair rent. It does not need benevolence, but only foresight and prudence, to make a landlord aim at demanding only a fair rent, a rent, that is to say, which can be paid with- out exhausting either the capital of the tenant or the inherent resources of the soil. This is equally true, whether the tenant's capital is large enough to stand as a balance at his banker's, or is only the labour of himself and his family. If the Irish tenant is half-starved because the rent exacted does not leave him enough food to eat, he cannot do physical justice to the land he tills ; and if he is as lazy and improvident as his severest censors say, this is the inevitable result of the undue exhaustion of his moral capital by the same undue demand upon it. The landlord who is prudent enough to desire the largest possible return that his land can give him, year after year, does not demand a rent which neither the capacities of the land nor of the tenant can permanently yield. He looks for a " fair " rent. He knows that what this should be is not to be ascertained by the competition of peasants reck- less from hunger, but by a skilled examination of each case. If he is a great landlord, he has his own staff of agents, valuers, and arbitrators, to assess the rent for him. If he is a small landlord, unable to command such help for himself, can it be anything but gain to him if the State will provide him with the like help from its own resources ?
Second F.—Fixity of tenure. In Scotland, fixity of tenure takes the form of leases ; in England, more commonly that of customary rents, which are only readjusted at long intervals. It is as essential to the tenant at one time, as it is fair to the landlord at another, that there should be this periodical adjust- ments cf the rent. But every rational landlord knows that without such "fixity of tenure," no tenant will or can apply himself to such a regular and continuous cultivation of his land as will develop its resources fully. Fixity of tenure is as essential as a fair rent to the landlord's interest ; the precise form which it should take in Ireland is only a question of adapting means to an end.
Third F.—Free sale. While secure occupancy at fair rent is the necessary condition of a tenant developing the land to the utmost, and giving the owner his full share of the proceeds year after year, provision has to be made for the occasions when the tenancy has to be transferred from the old occupier to a new one. Justice requires that on such occasions the tenant should restore the land, with all its inherent resources, in the state in which he took it; and should himself retain, or be compensated for, all that he has added to the land, by his expenditure of capital and industry upon it during his occupation. A great Scotch landlord has maintained that the amount of this com- pensation is provided for in Scotch leases, by the rent being assessed at a less rate than would otherwise be reasonably exacted, so that the tenant on going out may be fairly required to leave all his improvements as the balance of unpaid rent. The English Agricultural Holdings Act schedules a list of tenants' improvements for which compensation may reasonably be demanded, at specified rates. There are ancient unwritten cus- toms, differing in different counties, for effecting the him end. And in modern farm-agreements it is usual to provide that, on a change of tenancy, the out-going and in-coming tenants shall agree by an arbitration -what the latter is to pay the former, on taking over all his remaining interest in the farm. The
Irish Land Act of 1870 has specific provisions for the same object. In all cases, and by whatever modes of procedure, that object is the same. Its interest for the landlord is that a change- of tenants should not involve any break of continuity in the. cultivation of his land, nor in the rental which he derives from it. The specific mode of procedure now proposed for Ireland under the name of "Free sale," by which the tenant finds his successor, and makes his own bargain with him, only subject to certain rights of the landlord, though foreign to English and. Scotch notions and habits, has been found to work well in Ulster, appears to be suited to the special circumstances of Irish, tenancies, and only raises the question of what is the best mode of applying to Ireland a principle which is itself not questioned I repeat, that the great landlord can, and if he is a man of ordinary good judgment does, in his own way carry out the principles of the 'three F.'s, in his relations with his tenants ; and the small landlord, who has not the great landlord's appliances for doing the like, will, if he only understands the case, be only too glad to have the help of the State in establishing and. maintaining the like relations with his tenants.
There is a fourth F,—Free transfer of land, to be made' possible, not compulsory, by getting rid of those complicated. rigmaroles which now hinder its sale and purchase, by those who would otherwise gladly deal with each other.—I am, Sir, &c.,.
EDWARD STRACHEY.
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