IMPROVING AWAY LANDLORDS.
THE disposition to resort to piecemeal legislation which is so marked in the new House of Commons is an unavoidable result of the conditions under which it has been elected. The House represents what is probably the high-water mark of Liberal reaction, and in this reaction the Labour, Party has played a prominent part. Men who have just won so conspicuous a victory are naturally eager to reap the fruits of it. Older Parliamentary hands would know that the multiplication of measures is not the shortest road to useful legislation. They would urge the more ardent spirits to wait for the Government proposals, with the view of amending them in Committee, in preference to bringing forward their own. But in a tifne like the present to offer counsel of this dilatory order is to waste words. Every new Member has his psalm or his doctrine, his song of victory over defeated foes or his pet measure by which their overthrow is to be made perpetual. He thinks in his heart probably that lie is a much better legislator than the occupants of the Front Bench. They talk about comprehension, about carrying the party with them, about taking large views of a subject. He knows where the shoe pinches, and can put his finger on the exact place where it must be stretched or have a new piece let in. His Bill will therefore go straight to the mark. It will single out a particular hard case, and found on it a new law. That the very nature of its origin will make that law a bad one does not occur to him ; or if it does, the very faults of his legislative offspring may seem virtues to his paternal eye, What has been said has a special application to the land question. The importance and urgency of land reform are not denied by any serious politician. The flow of population into the towns, and the consequent difficulty of keeping labour where it is wanted, are facts which meet us at every turn. They enter into the housina question, into the physical deterioration question, into the agri- cultural question. The economist and the social reformer are constantly coming up against them, and finding all progress blocked by the impossibility, without large legislative changes, of getting over or round them. The problem first stated by Lord Beaconsfield, Can the land of' England go on supporting three people, the landlord, the farmer, and the labourer ? is still unsolved. We know that it supports some of them very badly now ; that poverished landlords, insolvent tenants, and labourers who can barely earn a living wage are familiar objects in every county. But the nature of the solution we are awaiting is still unknown. Will the way out of the difficulty lie through the elimination of one at least of the three classes, and if so, which of them is to be excluded ? Or are there. expedients by which all three may be retained at no greater cost than a careful readjustment of their several claims ? In answering these questions two things have to be kept in view. The first is that the subject must be approached from all three sides at once. It is useless to attempt to legis-• late for landlords if you exclude the farmer from considera- tion, or for farmers if you take no account of the scarcity of labour, or for labourers if your Bill says nothing about either of the classes from which the demand for labour comes. And the second point, to remember is that leaisla- tion of this comprehensive kind must be the work of the Cabinet. The private Member can seldom have the- breadth of views of the Government, and never the variety of information which is within their reach, and without these he will probably leave the question a little • more confused than he found it. This, however, is one of those features in the game which are ordinarily more visible to the bystander than to the player. Certainly it was quite hid from Mr. Agar-Robartes when he introduced " a Bill to amend the law relating to the tenure of land."
The object of the Bill is to deal with one only of the aspects of the laud question,—the protection of the tenant farmer. But it deals imperfectly even with this one aspect. The preamble shows this. " Whereas," it says, " it is expedient in the interest of good husbandry that better security should be made for the capital and -labour invested by tenants in the cultivation of the soil." Nothing is said about the other side of the picture,—the cases in which, the tenant stays to the end of his term, and then leaves having invested neither capital nor labour,_ having, in fact, taken everything lie could out of the soil and replaced nothing. The whole conception of the, relation of landlord and tenant as it is understood in , England and Scotland rests- upon the idea of partner- ship. The landlord supplies capital in the form of permanent improvements, the tenant supplies it in the form of labour and cultivation, and both add such knowledge and judgment as they possess in the form of suggestion and advice. The perfectness of this relation demands, no doubt, a combination of qualities in the parties which is seldom found in this workaday world. But this combination will not become more frequent if the legislator starts from the assumption that the landlord must be treated as a useless member of the partnership,—left in, indeed, because of the difficulty of openly getting rid of him, but deprived of any tight of interference in the management of the land. Mr. Agar-Robartes's Bill gives • the outgoing tenant a right to obtain a far larger amount of compensation from his landlord in respect of im- provements made on his holding than he is entitled to under the. existing Acts. That is perfectly fair so long as the landlord equally with the tenant regards:: them as improvements. But supposing that he is of , the contrary opinion ; supposing that what the tenant regards as improvements wear quite another appearance in the eyes of the landlord ; supposing that they alter the character of the holding, and alter it, in the landlord's judgment, decidedly for the worse. The recognition of , an unqualified claim to compensation makes the tenant the judge of what is good farming, and saddles the . landlord with the cost of changes which, if he had the power to stop them, would never have been made. Tenants . are not always wise, nor are they always right in their estimate of the economical future. It is wholly conceivable that a farmer may have a wrong opinion of the gain that he is to reap from turning arable land into permanent pasture, or from substituting fruit or garden produce for thecrops that have hitherto been grown on his laud. The expected market maynever be opened up ; and when his tenancy comes to an end, and his experiments have proved ruinous, this Bill will allow him to call them improvements and to recover their "unexhausted" value from the landlord. The seventh clause expressly provides that neither notice to, nor the consent of, the landlord shall be required when a tenant lays down permanent pasture, or plants orchards, or fruit-bushes, or strawberries, or asparagus, or rhubarb. A man may have made calculations as to the demand there is likely to arise in the neighbourhood for fruit or for asparagus, only to discover in the end that his neighbours grow their own produce, or if they do not, have not the money with which to buy his. But the expense of this misreading of the local needs will not fall on him. It will come upon the landlord in the shape of compensation.
It may happen that the landlord, having watched on these experiments on the part of the tenant and founded on them a very decided opinion as to his capacity for the business of farming, seizes the first opportunity of putting an end to his tenancy. In that case, he may have under the fifth clause to pay not only any compensation due for improvements, but also compensation for disturbance. The fruit-farming tenant may turn out a veritable Old Man of the Sea. The landlord can neither make his voice heard as regards the cultivation of his own land, nor replace the tenant at the end of his tenancy by a successor more to his mind. He must not refuse to renew the lease, or guard against a repetition of the changes he dislikes by making more stringent conditions. Either of these acts will constitute "unreasonable disturbance," and he will have to go before an arbitrator to determine whether his view of what is best for the land or the tenant's view is to be accepted as the right one. It would be far better to enact that every farmer who wishes to become the owner of his holding shall be armed as against his landlord with power of compulsory purchase. Change of ownership might lead to improved cultivation of the land, but that end will never be attained by turning the landlord into a sleeping partner with no voice in the conduct of the business. The idea of this Bill has been derived from our Irish legislation of the last quarter of a century, and its authors would do well to consider what has been the effect of the Land Act of 1881 upon the prosperity of Ireland. That ill-starred measure could at least plead that it only replaced one bad system by another, that it set up dual ownership in the place of an ownership to the duties and expenses of which the landlord as a rule contributed nothing. Is that a fair description of the English land system
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