THE TENANT-RIGHT AGITATION.
THERE is cause for the fury of the Times about the Tenant- right Bill, unreasonable as may be the mode in which that fury is expressed. Unless we unconsciously exaggerate the importance of the information which reaches us from all sides, Mr. Disraeli, and his adlatus the Duke of Richmond have once more let the waters loose, and brought in a measure the consequences of which may yet prove incalculable. The tenant-farmers, who now hold the county representation in their hands, are stirred as they have not been stirred for a generation, and the landlords are asking in startled wonder whether they really are to fall into the position of political powerlessness occupied by the Scotch lairds, and to find their tenants electing representatives because the landlords do not like them. The Tenant-right Bill seems in many places to have acted- like a match on a haystack, a little fire which suddenly produces a great sheet of flame. The tenant-farmers, as we pointed out years ago, have almost for a generation been discontented with their new position, with its dependence, and with its insecurity. They want to be like tenants of houses, responsible for the safety of the property they hire, and re- sponsible for the rent, but in all other respects totally inde- pendent of the men who profit by their payments. Their posi- tion has been greatly changed since the repeal of the laws which guaranteed them a market. They are called on to learn and to spend, to work and to think, as they never were before, and have less security than ever that their learning and spending, their care and their experiments, will bring them any personal gain. The landlords have become auctioneers of land, willing to accept the highest bids. The tenant manures, and a competitor gets the improved farm. He reclaims, and the squire's heir takes the full value of the new land. He " stubs Thornaby wafiste," and a death brings the result of his toil to the auction-room, where, wanting his capital for cultivation, he cannot hope to compete. The farmers have been boiling with discontent, but hitherto it has been hopeless, and therefore inactive ; but hope has come down to them at last in the Duke of Richmond's Bill. The head of the Government has sanctioned a Bill the central idea of which is that the farmers are right and the landlords wrong ; that more security is required by justice, that improvements worth years of tenancy may at present be confiscated at
will. The Government admits they ought to be paid for, in meal or malt, in money or length of occupation, and would Government—this Government, a Government of peers and squires—say that, if compensation were not fair ? It is fair, say the tenants ; and the mocking contract clauses which destroy the Bill seem to them mere cynicisms,—open refusals of an acknowledged right. Everywhere, in Cheshire, in Lancashire, in Devonshire, in Gloucestershire, in Leicestershire, the Bill is rejected, and the Chambers of Agriculture declare that it is better there should be no Bill than that the Bill with tho con- tract clauses should be accepted by their representatives. The gentry have exerted themselves to the utmost, but even in Cheshire, where pedigree, popularity, and mental culture are exceptionally in their favour, where the richest Duke in England went to the meeting himself, and landowning M.P.'s
mustered like bees, they have been hoplessly beaten. Gros venors, Egertons, Leighs are amazed at the stubborn resolution with which their own tenants vote against them, and hal believe the Times is right and " a revolution" at hand. " have never seen the farmers so stirred," writes to us a grea proprietor in the South, and as the reports from the Chambers of Agriculture come pouring in, it becomes evident that the feel ing is universal, that the County Members cannot resist it, and that they would be only too glad if the Bill died a quiet death. Not a county seat will be safe if it does not, and a good many of those who hold them begin to doubt if mere retreat is suffi- cient, and if they must not make some large concession while there is yet time. The private remonstrances of con- stituents are not likely to be less vigorous than the public utterances of the farmers who, in the rapidly spreading Cham- bers of Agriculture, have found the courage and the habit of debate, who are learning to act together, and who are beginning to express opinions right in their owners' faces with a dour decision hitherto seen only North of the Tweed. Long before the Recess arrives, there will be as many landowners cursing Mr. Disraeli as ever cursed Sir Robert Peel, and perhaps a landlord opinion growing in favour of household suffrage in the counties, as the only way of averting a political uprising of the farmers like that which only a few months ago swept Cambridgeshire in one day's fight out of the proprietors' hands. For—and this the Times, we suspect, sees clearly, when it pathetically asks the Farmers if they really desire a revolution— this Tenure Bill, if the fight begins, will be nothing in itself but a standard round which to fight a much more serious cam- paign. The farmers are the middle-class of rural England ; they, in their own belief, produce all its prosperity ; they cer- tainly do most of its work, and they have literally only one political privilege. They have got the vote, but that is all. They are debarred from the magistracy, and therefore from every trace of local authority, except a partial control of the highways and the right to do all the disagreeable work of the Boards of Guardians, and whenever patronage is in question be outvoted even upon those Boards by the " ex-officios." Landlords govern the counties, tax the counties, spend the rates of the counties, and assert on every possible occasion a social superiority in the counties which, though once fully justified by the facts, is now becoming inexpressibly galling. So bitter is the resentment caused by their pretensions, which they of course from old habit think perfectly natural and innocent, that in Highway Boards, where the two classes meet for work, the caste quarrel sometimes breaks out openly, and the elected Members refuse to proceed to business unless the ex-officio Members will retire. The farmers ask why they should not govern the counties through their re- presentatives for themselves. They are told that the owners really pay the rates, for if rates were abolished rents would rise to the same amount, but they ask in return whether it is the householders who pay Income-tax, and under Mr. Disraeli's suffrage where is the reasonable reply ? If the householders can be trusted to raise and to spend the direct taxes which they do not pay, the farmers can be trusted to raise and spend the rates, even if it be true that they do not pay them. At the bottom of this tenure question, brought up, we must not forget, by Mr. Disraeli in his Buckinghamshire speech, and of this local-taxation question, brought up by Sir Massey Lopes, a large Tory landowner, there lies the far larger question of the claim of the county middle-class to equal power at least, in county matters, with the county aristocracy. Of course, as money is involved in the Tenant-right Bill, and as landlords and farmers are alike Englishmen, and prefer disputing about concrete things, the fight will rage round that Bill, but the issue at stake is not merely com- pensation for marling or manure, but the ultimate power of controlling county affairs. Local self-government in rural England means, at present, government by landowners ; and it is the question whether that is to continue—whether, in short, local government, like national government, is to be aristocratic or democratic—which, if the farmers revolt from the landlords, will at once be at issue. If the tone visible everywhere about this Bill is really the tone of the whole farm- ng class, as well as of its mouthpieces in the Chambers, the Times is right in its fury, for the end of the system it approves is close at hand.
Whether the revolution will be beneficial or not is quite another matter. It is not settled yet that the Farmers are better qualified than the Squires to govern. The real popula- tion, the "men," will certainly not be as safe in their hands, and they will be, when they enter, as is inevitable, on the eclesiastical domain, the narrowest censors the Church ever
had. They will be, too, at first without good leaders, for we do not imagine that they will change their colours, or accept the guidance of the Liberal party, at least while under its pre- sent leadership. They have learnt for forty-two years to re- gard the Liberals as the men of cities. We fear their tendency will be to follow the Cambridgeshire example, to revolt against the landlords and the Liberals alike, and to send up either men of their own order, who will not be all Clare Reades, or men who, like Mr. Rodwell, exaggerate their most distinctive views. That will not improve the composition of Parliament at all, but the contrary, though in the end the introduction of any new couche sociale into political life always benefits a country, but that is not the subject of discussion just now. What we want to point out to-day is that the Duke of Richmond's Tenant-right Bill, with its concessions in prin- ciples and retrocessions in fact, appears to have been just too much for the farmers, and that they are revolting in a style which threatens to break up the political influence of the landlords altogether. That Bill is to go, to begin with, and why should they stop there ? They can, if they like, compel their Members to strike out the clauses retaining freedom of contract, and they show every disposition to do it, and to modify besides those clauses about cultivation to which we pointed some weeks' since, as the second blot on the Bill. As Mr. Fawcett, in his speech of Tuesday, on freedom of culti- vation, pointed out so strongly, the provisions against the dete- rioration of farms make the landlord the ultimate judge of good farming ; and though many landlords can be trusted not to interfere vexatiously with their tenants, still landlords' agents cannot; half of them have pet crotchets ; power is dear to the human heart, and the " Rules " on many estates are mere arsenals, from which the land agents can draw at will weapons for annoyance or petty dictation. We shall, we believe, if the Bill is persisted in as it stands, see both sets of provisions struck out, and then for the first time the tenant-farmers will realise that they, and not the landlords, are masters of the situation. The Tenant-right Bill, small as it looks, and carefully as it has been worded, may yet prove as effective in altering the dis- tribution of political power as the Suffrage Bill of 1867, and both will be due to Cabinets whose raison d'être is to keep things permanently very much as they were. Mr. Disraeli has dished the Whigs and blown up the bourgeoisie, and it may be his destiny yet to fire a mine under the feet of the land- lords. There is often an ironical completeness about a man's career.
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