TOPICS OF THE DAY.
onNSFLELD IN THE CITY. LORD BEACONSFIELD, in "--..epting one of those many gold
boxes containing the certificat,, .4 his honorary member- ship of City Companies with which his u,
-,sitories must be crowded, remarked the other day that though lib -me obliged to decline all other public dinners, he still reserved to ).A..„velf the right to dine with the Lord Mayor, and on these Occasion. to address his fellow-countrymen through his City audience. The emphasis with which he said this, rather prepared the public for a considerable effort on the next of these auspicious occasions; but this occasion occurred last Wednesday, and we are disappointed. Lord Beaconsfield dined at the Mansion House, indeed, and spoke at the Mansion House, but he was hardly himself. He thought it necessary to address himself to Lord Hartington's land speech, and the "dismal science" is not his forte. With all his talent, Lord Beaconsfield never yet knew anything of any subject that requires dry, hard study. Probably he shares Mr. Carlyle's contempt for political economy. The mere prospect of delivering a lecture thereon, though in his younger days it would have been a fresh stimulus to him to feel that he was im- posing on his audience with a semblance of learning on a subject on which he was ignorant, appears to have depressed him on Wednesday. He did not bury himself in the deep clay of the land-question, with the sublime courage and bland urbanity with which he is accustomed to dilate in Buckingham- shire on succulent root-crops, on the typical cottage—with its porch, its oven, and its tank—or on the sublime secret of" cross- ing your Downs with Cotswolds." He hesitated as he approached the subject of rent. He was aware, we suspect, that it was a thorny subject, on which it is hardly safe to take words in the significance they bear in ordinary life ; that Ricardo probably did not mean exactly the same things by rent and rental. And yet he well knew, what he has always known, that politicians speak to a public opinion not more, but less well informed than their own even when their own is as little informed as Lord Beaconsfield's is on a subject touching scientific political economy. Altogether, there is perceptible a wavering touch in his reply to Lord Hartington' and his purpose of making a reply to Lord Hartington probably dimmed the splendour of the early part of his speech. He took credit for the "scientific frontier," for the Berlin Treaty, for the new position given to Turkey, with much less of his peculiar skill than Lord Salisbury had shown in dealing with the same subjects at Hatfield, on the day but one previous. Indeed, the Prime Minister was even absurd when he claimed for our doings in South Africa evidence of "energy," and " quick and ample re- source." To take six months about retrieving a dis- aster inflicted by a savage tribe on a British army already deemed strong enough for purposes of invasion, is clearly no evidence of " energy " and "quick and ample resource," though it may be extenuated and explained away. And in his remarks on the commercial depression, Lord Beaconsfield, though tolerably lively in his delineation of the sanguine temperament of prosperous commerce, was hardly himself when he encouraged his audience to hope that "if the signs of amelioration are supported by the ample harvests of the world generally, we may have seen the darkest hour." The "harvests of the world generally" cannot now by any possibility be "ample,"—and therefore, we suppose, they can hardly "sup- port the signs of amelioration," though we can only guess dimly at the probable nature of that somewhat obscurely indicated process. It is far better, and, we should have sup- posed, would have been far more like Lord Beaconsfield, to face trouble boldly, than to suggest consolations which the speaker knows to be unreal.
However, Lord Beaconsfield well knew that all this was purely preliminary. He was getting to his subject, and that subject was Lord Hartington's intimation that instead of ransacking the repositories of Protectionists for a remedy for agricultural distress, the bold and manly plan was to amend the Land-laws, to put the actual cultivator of the soil in the best possible position for either acquiring land, if he liked, or securing the full return of his own capital from the soil, if he did not like, without the various and needless obstructions of our laws of settlement, laws of entail, laws of distress, game laws, and conveyancing laws. In the course of the speech in which Lord Hartington gave this intimation, he dropped the very wise and true remark that if Mr. Chaplin and his Agricultural Commission could prove
their assertion that land was likely to go out of cultivation under the present system, it would only show that "the land system of this country, under existing conditions, bad broken down." But this, he went on to say, would not imply that the land must eventually go out of cultivation, but only at most that the land would not continue to support "as it has hitherto supported, the three classes of farmer, landlord, and agricultural labourer." It was on this point that Lord Beacons- field fastened. This hint had, he evidently thought, a dan- gerous and rather popular ring in it. It seemed to Lord b•aconsfield that it might touch the tenant-farmer to the quick, that it might alienate his sympathies from the Tories, ale? interest him deeply in a leader who ap- peared to thita, that the farmer's difficulties arose from the artificial system 01 rent. In view of a possibly approaching general election, Lord meaconsfield held that he must apply an antidote to this political poison. So he plunged into the sub- ject with the view, as he said, of proving that "there is no tenure of land which can be devised, except on• the condition. that it shall furnish three incomes from the soil." And certainly, his demonstration was most remarkable. He assumed the system of peasant-proprietorship, and pointed out that if a peasant buys his own homestead, he relies on earning out of the soil, first, interest on his outlay,—which is the equivalent for rent ;—next, profit on his floating capital, which is the equivalent of the farmer's profit ; and finally, remuneration for his labour, which is the equivalent of wages, q. e. cl. "I wish it," said Lord Beaconsfield, "to be impressed on the sense of this nation that the three incomes which the land must, under any circumstances produce, are in England distributed amongst three classes, and on the land where peasant-proprietorship prevails, they are devoted to only one class ;" but all the three incomes were still got out of the soil, none the less. Three incomes ! Why, Lord Beaconsfield might analyse it into. almost any number of incomes he liked. The peasant may divide what he gets out of the land into the wages of labour, the wages. of superintending labour, interest on purchase-money, interest on floating capital, profit on floating capital, and surplus over and above all these, if he likes. What can it matter to any- body into how many subdivisions the peasant, or the farmer, or any one else chooses to analyse his, total gain ? What Lord Hartington said was something very different in drift indeed, something that concerned not the artifical classification that might be made of the yield of the land, but the question of the propor- tion of that yield which the landlord would take, as compared with the proportion of that yield which the real cultivators, the farmer and the labourer, would take. As far as we can judge, Lord Beaconsfield either holds, or is anxious to suggest, that under all conceivable changes of our agricultural system, there must always be, for every acre, as much of the yield left for the landlord, — whoever he may happen to be, whether he be the actual tiller of the soil, or whether he be the mere receiver of rent, as he is now,—as there now is ; and a more absurd or more ignorant assertion craz hardly be imagined. Lord Beaconsfield either does not know, or affects not to know, that the proportion of the yield of any one acre of land which, under a perfectly elastic system—a system not rendered uniform by leases—the landlord would get, changes greatly from year to year, as well as from acre to. acre. The " rent" in this sense is simply the surplus produce, after paying the labourer and the farmer their normal wages and profit, if it will pay as much. There is sometimes no surplus produce at all on the poorest land ; sometimes there is little, and sometimes much. The rental of a farm, in the popular sense, is an average got from estimating what the most probable surplus produce of the whole acreage year by year will be ; and of this acres will contribute nothing at all, while a few of the best will contribute, perhaps, almost the whole. What Lord Hartington meant, of course, was that if agriculture is now profitless, it is because, by virtue of leases, a great deal too- much of what used to be surplus produce in former years, and what therefore in those years rightly went to the landlord, still goes to the landlord, though it is not now surplus produce at all, but is needed to make up what is deficient in the wages of the labourer, and the profit of the tenant. In other words, under a better system of agriculture, he said, either the old productive powers of the land would be restored, or if not, why, then the landlord must give up a great proportion of his surplus produce, and so enable the farm to pay the tenant and the labourer again, at his cost. And this is common-sense, to which Lord Beacons- field's absurd reply, that even peasant-proprietors may divide their yield into three parts, and call one part wages, one part profit, and one part rent, is absolutely irrelevant. Of course they may. But in such years as we are having now, the part which is genuine surplus, over and above the part which re- munerates labour and yields the profit on stock, will be very small indeed. Indeed, this, so far as it goes, is the advantage of the system which leaves the land all in one hand,—that even if the surplus is very small indeed, or even if it vanishes alto- gether, and leaves only enough to remunerate labour and replace the capital with average interest, land need not go out of cultivation. The man who himself receives the two latter shares can afford for a time to go without any surplus ; but a landlord who is living and educating his children and main- taining all his establishment out of that surplus, is wholly lost, if that surplus suddenly ceases to exist.
Lord Beaconsfield really seems to believe that because a man buys a piece of land, expecting it to give him such and such an interest on his purchase-money, the land is bound by some law of nature to produce that rate of interest on his purchase-money, and will produce it.. The peasant proprietor unfortunately knows too well that his expectations in this respect are by no means always verified. He thinks himself lucky if he can always produce enough to remunerate the labour and return the capital put into the soil with a profit ; and occasionally, in good years, to give him a surplus,—a bonus, he almost thinks it,—such as under our system of land tenure, the landlord expects in every year. We are by no means prepared to say that the system of peasant pro- prietorship is in every way either better than, or so good as, our own. On the contrary, the fact that, in a very great number of cases, the land belongs to rich men who can afford to regard it as they would regard diamonds,— that is, as a valuable possession from which they do not look for any annual return at all,—is one which often tells greatly in favour of the existing system, for such landlords can improve in a way which really brings the largest net produce out of the soil. But then this advantage does not exist at all in the case of poor landlords, who not only look to the rent as their sole income, but are gravely embarrassed by any diminution of that rent. They are really in the position in which the peasant proprietor finds himself when the land does not return enough even to pay the wages of labour and the profits of stock. They have nothing else to rely on. They had counted absolutely on the surplus produce, as if there were sure to be a surplus, and so they are like shareholders, without any other source of in- come, in a railway which declares no dividend. But if Lord Beaconsfield's answer to Lord Hartington had any meaning, there would be no such landowners, and no such shareholders, —because, whatever is earned, you might always divide it into three parts, interest on outlay, profit on capital, and wages of labour. Certainly you could, but how, if after paying the last two items, the figure appended to the first were 0? The railway would still go on, so long as the returns were enough to pay the labourers, and give a profit on the yearly capital expended. The farm would still go on, so long as the yield was enough to pay the labour and return a profit on the capital put into it. But it would not be essential, in either the one case or the other, that the original shareholder, or the original landowner, should obtain a surplus out of it.
Lord Beaconsfield juggles with language till he forgets that nature does not supply wealth merely because you have provided a heading under which to return it in your accounts. Parliament, under his management, is very apt to do this; but then Parliament still has unlimited credit, and can borrow for the purpose. Nature does not conform to these political ex- pediencies. If she has no surplus, she says so, even though the " third " class remonstrates loudly, and insists that its legal expectations have been disappointed.
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